Mr. Bollinger...

1. Learn as much as you can
2. Support the leader, you can't undermine them
3. Head coach has to trust you by what you do
4. Put people in a position of leadership, empower them
5. Know your place in the hierarchy, you may have it upside down
6. Serve others
7. Stay focused on the "important" as much as the "urgent"
8. You are the glue between the leader and the followers

Choose a point that you think is the most important and why.

The point to me that is most important about leading from the middle is that you have to be the glue between the leader and the followers. I think this is the most important because of personal experience. I have been in both the following and leadership position and I understand how hard it is for the two to connect sometimes. When you are a follower, you sometimes feel like you can't approach the leader because "they might not accept my ideas" or "they won't even take my thoughts into consideration". This is not always the case, but it does happen this way. There is something missing. When you are the leader, sometimes you are afraid that you will say something to your followers that could change their mind about their trust in you, or you don't want to make them feel like they are obliged to do exactly what you want. Again, something is missing. You need a person who can be the go-between, someone that will be there to be the relay between the followers and the leader. The leaders need someone to bounce ideas off of, and the followers need that person that they can talk to, relate to, and give their real opinion to.

Pick a point that you are best at and give an example explaining why.

The point that I believe I am best at is supporting the leader and not undermining them. One example that proves this is that during one of my volleyball seasons a few years ago, I had a coach who was frustrating a lot of the players and none of us really seemed to want to follow the coach. When the girls would come complain to me, I tried to focus on the positives when I was talking about the coach with them, and I eventually proved to them that our coach was taking the right actions that we needed in order to succeed. They didn't always agree with what our coach taught, but they finally realized that that person was doing their job to the best of their abilities, and that they were succeeding in teaching us what we needed to know. All because we took the action of focusing on the positive things, many perspectives changed and we were able to support our coach instead of put them down.

Pick your weakest and pick 3 concrete ways you can improve at it.

I would have to say that my weakest is staying focused on the "important" as much as the "urgent". I am not always the one who can solve long term problems before the short term problems, and I think that can be a negative trait to have. The long term issues also tend to be more important and could have a larger affect. 3 concrete ways that I can work at improving this include: 1. Making a list of short term goals that I can accomplish that I have to do fairly quickly. 2. Take any long term goals that I have and turn them into short term goals, for example; Going to college is a long term goal of mine. I can turn this into short term goals by deciding what colleges I would like to go to, scheduling college tours, start getting applications together, etc. 3. Lastly, I can make a list of all the things I am trying to accomplish in my life right now and I can, rank them by importance, not necessarily long-term or short-term, and try to accomplish them from there.