Before the summer, I wrote about my preparations (or lack of them) for a youth residential I lead on. It’s been about a month since I returned from that residential, so it’s time to reflect and think what I learned this year. Although I’ve been leading this kind of residential for over 20 years, you always discover new things about yourself, your team and the young people you work with. And about your relationship with God, obvs. So here are six things I learned this year.
1 No matter how many extra sleeping bags you take with you, you will always need more.
I went with two extra sleeping bags. I came back with five. And an extra duvet. The first two days were punctuated with trips to Tesco to buy more bedding. One person didn’t tell us that she didn’t have any bedding until at least the third or fourth night (I have no idea what she’d been using before then, the weather wasn’t that warm…).
2 People need more sleep than they’d like to let on.
For some in the team, the planning weekend and the actual residential are the only times when they see each other during the year. So, they like to stay up after the young people have gone to bed and chat, eat, play games… sometimes into the small hours. And while this is fine and you don’t want to be a killjoy, you need to remind your team that you’re all there to serve the young people, not to have your own holiday. As an overall leader, you need to act sensitively, balancing the desire of your team to enjoy themselves with their need to be awake enough to run the holiday, build relationships with the young people and fulfil their responsibilities. And that does mean being the killjoy once in a while.
3 No matter how many tubs of flying saucers you buy, you will always run out.
Same applies to strawberry pencils, skittles and Rio.
4 Young people never fail to surprise you.
We had quite a wide age range this year – from 11 to 17 – and 11-year-olds can be very different from 17-year-olds. However, the profound discussion from young people of all ages during small groups and evening meetings never ceased to surprise me. And the work produced in creative arts workshops was astonishingly good.
5 No matter how many times you say something, you will always need to say it again.
I’m not sure what the root cause is – brains full of the exciting things going on, people switching off because they’re on holiday, excess ear wax – but no matter how many times you say things, you will have to repeat yourself. Whether that’s something the team needs to know, lists the young people need to sign up on, times people need to be somewhere, there are always people who weren’t listening.
6 The team never fail to surprise you.
In my ‘preparations’ article, I talked about how we were seeking to develop the team and push them into more responsibility. Well, during the holiday, the team took to these new responsibilities amazingly. In fact, as overall leaders we’d almost done ourselves out of a job! It was exciting to see how people stepped up and, while not everything went quite as planned, each team member grew in their leadership skills.
These aren’t the only things I learned. Others include: always expect the site managers to do something unexpected, sometimes blagging it is OK, sometimes blagging it is not OK, you should always do something you don’t normally do and chocolate pizza is still a legendary foodstuff.
What do you learn during your summer events? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!