Re-cap of the Touchy Feely retreat

I got home from the Touchy Feely retreat yesterday afternoon and it was a great experience. I can’t give as much details as I usually would in this entry because of a confidentiality norm in my group, but I’ll try to give an overview.

Before starting with the overview, I’ll say a little more about how the class is set up. The learning in the course comes from two tools: an hour and forty-five minute class session on Tuesday and Friday and a 3-hour long “T-group” session during one evening during the week. T-groups are a learning environment where 12 GSB students team up with an outside facilitator and talk through issues, bring up communication goals, and give each other feedback. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier entry, Touchy Feely is so powerful because the content can immediately be tested in one’s day-to-day interactions.

The T-groups are usually characterized by contentious interactions at times where people “get real” with each other in ways that they normally wouldn’t. My group wasn’t like this because we all genuinely like each other, so I was skeptical going in about whether we’d be able to get into any real issues and generate any sort of growth. I was pleasantly surprised at the development that I had experienced over the first 7 T-group sessions before the retreat. A lot of that growth came from me internalizing a lot of the readings, but a huge portion of it came from the feedback that I got from my group members about how I present myself, the way that I interact, and the features of how I influence people. As I focused on using that feedback constructively, I could see the effects of it in my everyday interactions with my GF, friends, and classmates at the GSB and I’m really glad that I took this class seriously even though I was initially skeptical.

Despite the learning that I’d done, i was still skeptical about how much I’d get out of this weekend because I’d already had my major breakthroughs. Also, because my group members like each other so much, i knew that we wouldn’t have the conflicts and arguments that many alums and classmates who’ve taken the course told me are vital to the weekend retreat experience. During our two days at Pajaro Dunes (a beach community right outside Santa Cruz, CA), we had 6 separate T-group sessions that took about 16 hours in total. Also, we had broken into four support groups of 3 where we could rely on each other for guidance and help in evaluating and reaching our learning goals. I wish i could write a detailed tale about what went down out there because there were some tremendous barriers broken within the group and within individual group members themselves, but that daggone confidentiality norm is the real deal. What I can say is that, after a slow start on Friday night and Saturday morning and afternoon, the real progress starting being made on Saturday night. Emotions were high and folks in the group were drawn toward each other in many ways. We had already become friends over the course of the quarter, but, after this weekend, I can see many lifelong friendships being started. I know I won’t be able to keep in touch with all of my group members, but I’m definitely going to try.

One of my goals going in was to not cry and I was successful at that, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t come close to doing so. There’s something about seeing someone tap into some deep-seeded emotional issues and breaking through barriers they’d set up over the course of their lives that is overwhelming. I was especially affected by one of my group members making a heartfelt statement about how much he loved his fiancee and some of the issues he had. As he was talking, all I could do was think about my GF and I damn near lost it…thank goodness I was able to hold myself together 🙂 Anyways, I had a great time out there at Pajaro Dunes and I feel much closer to the members of my group than I ever thought I would. This is just one more reason that I’m going to have a hard time leaving this place.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you guys about the final exam that I took for my Competition and Strategy clss on Friday. Our class usually meets at 10am on Fridays, but my professor had booked himself to appear at a conference this past friday, so he moved our final up two weeks. He gave us the choice of either doing the exam at home and emailing our responses in to him or picking a hard copy up, handwriting it all in the library, and then handing it in to his assistant. He gave us 2 hours and 15 minutes to do it in both cases and, because I didn’t know if I’d have internet access over the weekend, I chose the option to do it in the library. Even though, i’d studied and teamed up with 3 classmates to write up summaries for each section, that exam was still a beast for me. I started out by flying through it pretty easily and then struggling with the last few questions, but felt confident as I walked over to turn it in. Then, i started reading through my answers for the first two sections of questions and realized that I might have thought about several of them incorrectly. Normally, I would have freaked out about it, but the facts that the GSB has a grade non-disclosure norm and that I’d already secured a GPA high enough to graduate made me feel at ease. I might not have knocked that exam out, but I know that it won’t keep me from graduating 🙂