Being a part of YEE's office, I can honestly say that I am constantly subjected to new learning opportunities. These things can be useful not only for the place I am working at the moment, but also for some future professional and personal situations.

In order to learn and inspire each other, every year YEE organises its Learning Days, during which it gives space to the people in the office to offer the others a topic they all find interesting.

First, on 26 January, our Networking Coordinator, Roxana, held her one hour learning session about the topic of wellness. Specifically, she presented us with the concept of wellness that can be the root for a personal lifestyle change. According to this idea, by focusing on self-responsibility we can engage our whole person — body, mind, emotions, and spirit. For us in the office this was a refreshing take on the term 'wellness' and it made us think about how to achieve a balanced wellbeing. Roxana also prepared a small test that was designed to show us the 12 dimensions of wellness, and how strong and weak are we in every single one of them. More info about this topic can be found here.

The next Learning day was Gosia's on 15 February. Her session was about facilitation and its various techniques. Just a short and basic definition, to facilitate means to "make easy" or to create an environment where everyone has a voice and opportunity to express themselves and knows that the decision is made equally by all members of the meeting. All of the people in YEE's office already have experience with facilitating methods, some more, some less, but nevertheless, Gosia's interactive presentation brought many new things to the table. It also made us examine the techniques that we are already using and how we can improve them. During the learning, as an exercise, we also received a self-checking list which personally for me was a good way to see on paper what are my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to this topic. After this, we did some practice during which we were given a specific facilitating situation to work on and then hear other people's feedback.

To conclude, these two sessions were a good opportunity not only for learning new and useful things, but also for examining my existing ones. Furthermore, because I firmly believe that a person should always try to find a time and opportunity to learn, I am looking forward to the next Learning Day, which will be carried out by Judit.

Stay tuned,
Vladimir