Illuminate x Durham-- Leadership in Todays Youth

Hi everyone! My name is Gabriella and I am a grade 10 student at Dunbarton Highschool. Today, I attended the Illuminate x Durham conference meeting. During this meeting, I had the honor of listen and speaking to Alina Huang, the CEO of Illuminate. One thing that I learned from her was about leadership, and how it cannot be taught, but can only be acted on and is within you. I learned that everyone's perspectives, definitions and actions about leadership are all different. Alina also taught me how there are two ways of people thinking. Those two ways are called sage, which is a positive way to look at problems and conquer them, and saboteur, which is a negative way to look at new problems that come your way. She taught me that there are ways to get out of the saboteur mindset and to think more in the sage mindset. One enjoyable thing that happened during this conference was the group exercise. During this exercise, we had to choose between two options that displayed two sets of pictures. Within these groups, we those one of the sets of photos and we created a business idea and presented it to the group. It was very enjoyable listening to all the groups ideas. It was a great activity to practice working with new people. I think that these lessons could help me greatly in the future by building my leadership skills and learning how to use a sage mindset and have a positive attitude and behavior towards problems that come my way. I will definitely put these new skills towards problems and future activities!