TKS Session 16: Global Community Session
This TKS session was a little different from all the other ones. This time, each kid and director all logged onto a call from the comfort of their home to take part in one large session where everyone from around the world could get to meet each other and participate in different activities (technically there were two sessions at different times to take into account different time zones). To put it in perspective, in the call I attended, there were 170 kids who logged on. It was so cool to know that there were so many people part of the same program as me, on the same call, from all around the world!
My intention for this session was to try and meet 1 new person that I got along with/had a good time with, even if it was only for one activity.
To kick off this session, we did a little workout to energize ourselves and get motivated, especially considering that most people, including me, were drained from the challenge that finished the night before.
After, actually starting off the session, Navid, co-founder of TKS, shared some of his thoughts on why he thought the TKS program was so special and so important for us. He thought the biggest strength of the TKS program was the community that everyone became a part of. Something that he pointed out was that the most successful people that came out of TKS all had one thing in common, they had a really good community that they surrounded themselves with. That community was one that was motivating, fun, held each other accountable, and pushed each other to do big things. That’s why they have the global session, to expose you to different people in TKS from all around the world and get to know your community better. Navid defined success in this session as leaving with one new friend that you really bonded with.
After his talk about the importance of this program and how it can really change our lives, we got into all the activities in this session, starting with creating our own lip-sync video. They put us into different breakout rooms with random people and we all had to choose one of the songs provided to create our video with. It was really fun to do this silly thing with some of the kids, even though our final video kind of failed! The song our group chose was Shut Up and Dance by WALK THE MOON. While doing this activity, I met 2 girls who were really nice and who I got along well with and then got their DM on Slack.
Then, we did a large trivia on facts about the TKS directors, which was actually really hard considering I really only know about my one director. But it was cool to learn about all the other directors. They encouraged us to reach out to all of them whenever we have questions or want opinions. They said to treat every TKS director as your own.
After that, we did another team activity which was to either create a meme deck with your group or record a podcast exploring one of the mindsets of the week we talked about this year. Our group chose to record a podcast about the mindset of high standards by tying it with the IKEA challenge. We discussed how you need to have high standards as a group in order to achieve high-standard results. We also looked at how you can achieve high standards, such as simply treating the project seriously and putting in your highest level of effort.
The directors then showed us the new tks.life platform that will be coming out in January. For those of you who don’t know, tks.life is a platform where TKS students can access different resources such as explore modules, playbooks, and their focus progress, as well as keep up with what other TKS students are doing and host/sign up for braindates.
The mindset of the week for this session was to celebrate others. To practice this, everyone sent out shoutouts to people we wanted to celebrate in our public TKS Slack channel for everyone to see. I gave a shoutout to Sophia and Arissai for being such amazing teammates in the challenge!
Lastly, everyone went into different breakout rooms, each with their own theme. The one I went into was on getting out of your comfort zone, which was hosted by my director, Azar.
In his breakout session, he gave us 3 activities to complete:
Send a video shout-out to someone you haven’t talked to in a while.
Send a commitment video in the public TKS Slack channel about one goal you have for your focus and one personal goal you have to complete by the end of the year.
Call a random person and see how long you can talk to them while also trying to get them to say the word cereal.
And then that was the end of the session. It was such an amazing thing to be on that call with everyone and get a feel for the rest of the TKS community!
There will not be a scheduled blog post next Saturday since there is no session, but I will be right back on schedule next Saturday, Jan 4th! Hopefully, by then, we will also find out the TKS challenge top 5 groups, which I’m really excited to hear about! Merry Christmas and enjoy the break, I know I will!
