Personal Narrative Analysis

I came as a counselor to National Youth Leadership Training expecting to teach kids to be the next generation of young leaders. I was dead wrong. Not only did I fail to build and form cohesive leaders, they taught me more than I could have ever taught them.

My first teacher was Brendan. In the middle of one of the lectures, I noticed that he wasn’t there. Preparing myself to face an endless barrage of tears, I walked back to the site. He was sitting behind his tent crying and begging to his mother to take him home. I walked over, sat right next to him, and listened to his mother yell at him why he had to stay. After the ensuing begging, crying, and screaming, he got off the phone and I started to talk to him. I began to try to convince him that it was worth it to stay. I began to tell him my story. I said that I showed up just the year before despising my father for dropping me off. But as the week progressed, I built such a great bond with my team that I worked better with them than anyone else I ever knew. He wouldn’t budge, all he would say was “I don’t care. I want to go home.” He finally started to participate on Wednesday. But only just barely, he always sat in the back and slept during

He was the “cool kid” of the group. Everyone else in the group looked to him for approval, and he abused the hell out of it. He crowned himself the de facto leader and made it so no one else could fill that role. It was my job to set him straight. I tried talking to Liam directly, pointing out that he had the natural abilities of a good leader, just used them for the wrong motives. That only enticed him, because now he knew that everyone saw him as the man in charge. At one point, I pulled him inside and try and call him out on his inappropriate behavior, but he just turned it against me and made it seem like I was the bad guy to the rest of the team. He caused my team to form around him, like a broken bone that was never set