Final Reflection

I am very happy with the podcasts I was able to create. I was able to cultivate a series to release to the public with new and very useful information on leadership that anyone, no matter what age, can learn from. When brainstorming this project, there was not much more I wanted to include than what I did besides the guests I interviewed. On my initial list of guests, there were a lot of big names that I did not end up being able to talk to them, but the people I did talk to were really amazing. They all have different backgrounds, but they still think about leadership every day and have their ideas of what leaders are. I was engaged until the last few days because I always had interviews, and I wanted to make sure they went well, and I knew what I was talking about, but towards the end, it was just me editing the podcasts the whole time. I interviewed six people, although there might be a few more interviews once the project is over. I originally wanted to interview eight people, but I did not get as many responses to my emails as I hoped. If I could have done anything differently, it would have been to create more deadlines for myself towards the end as to when I wanted the podcasts finished and add some other tasks other than editing to vary what I had to do. I learned a lot about leadership from my interviews. My main takeaways were, self-awareness (knowing your values and making decisions based off of them), servant to others (people are trusting you to lead them, you must do what is best for them not yourself), committed to learning (you are always striving to be the best you can be and learning from mistakes), and resilience (you are going to have many hardships and will take a lot of heat as a leader, you need to be able to grow and bounce back from them). My advice for anyone else doing a capstone for their Hawken Project is to be okay with figuring things out on the go as long as you can make something happen. Some of my interviews were last minute, but I knew I had to get interviews, so I made sure to get it done. Going into each week, my calendar was never set, and I was always adding new things, but I knew I had enough things to do to fill my time. I am proud I was able to create cover art that fits my podcast well and edit multiple podcasts, one of which needed a lot of audio editing, but I was able to fix it. I am grateful for the help from my mentor, Dan Moulthrop, who has a lot of experience with podcasts, so it was great to get feedback and advice from someone very knowledgeable. I had an amazing experience with my Hawken Project being able to have real-world experiences and learn from them. Some days were a little difficult, but I learned much more than I thought I would, and it will help me and hopefully others become better leaders.