Reflection #3

Hopes, Fears, Needs, and Expectations

September 1, 2023

 Directions

Divide a sheet of paper into four columns: Hopes, Fears, Needs, and Expectations. Fill in what- ever comes to mind under each category as it relates to the service-learning experience you are beginning. Then answer the following questions by completing a 7- to 10-minute “freewrite”:

• What steps can you next take to begin realizing your hopes?

• What are the sources of your fears? What can you do to minimize these fears?

• What do you need and how will you get it to accomplish your hopes?

• What are the sources of your expectations? Are these your own or someone else’s?

• Using this information as a guide, list three action steps you can take in the next week to create the service-learning experience you desire.

Please be ready to share in our next class meeting.

My Free Write

To start to realize my dreams, it's important that I make a plan. Having a pre-plan gives me a structure to follow. The steps I am taking now to realize those dreams are voicing my thoughts and ideas. I am not completely in control of this process so keeping my instructors and service learning community opinions in this process is important. The source of my fears comes from anxiety in the past of pushing myself too hard. I hate feeling like things are robotic. And having a busy schedule makes me feel that there isn't space for mess-ups because then everything will fall apart. I feel like in life, I am trying to give myself more space to make mistakes but when it comes to having so many external demands, it can often make me feel out of control and that I have to deny how I may feel about a situation and keep pushing through. So I don't want to go down that spiral. I do struggle with maintaining my expectations. Are these expectations mine or someone else's? That's always a difficult question to answer. But I think it's my own expectation. I often let my passion drive and then eventually, my expectations catch up, and that's when things can get tricky. As equally passionate I can become, creativity can work in the opposite direction and make things difficult emotionally. That's of course the worse case scenario. Three action steps I can take are reaching out to different  refugee and immigrant communities that I am interested in, secondly, I can keep up with reading and reflections, and lastly, I can keep being vocal about my ideas.