Hi! I am Siler Wooster, I'm currently pursuing a B.A. in Public Health with a minor in Biology. I want to go to medical school to hopefully one day become a pediatrician and open my own practice! I was born and raised in Austin, Texas.
I have two sisters (I'm the oldest), two cats, and a dog. When I'm not in school I hang out with my friends, vlog, read, and watch movies or Tik Toks! I also really enjoy taking photos and making photo dump videos, it's like me cataloguing my life.
Siler Wooster
ABOUT ME!
These are my pets! Jude (the dog), Cautious (the grayer cat), and Ghost (the black and orange cat).
This is my family!
The unseen aspects of leadership
A Reflection
One of the most important things my Leadership Prologue class has taught me is that while leadership is partially about outward factors - confidence (how you present yourself), communication, relationships with others, etc; it is more importantly about the things you can’t see. This is best shown in Agnes Scott College’s reflect, analyze, act model of leadership. True leadership lies in what happens before and after speaking up and taking action.
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Throughout this semester, I have had to write numerous essays and discussion posts about leadership. While at first I thought they were repetitive, I came to realize the importance of the repetition; reflection and analysis. Each of the essays had a slightly different prompt; the prompts being an essay about Clifton strengths, an analysis essay, and multiple reflections. From my strengths and weaknesses, to my personal definition of leadership. These different angles on the same topic allowed me to think through leadership, every new angle providing a different perspective. In addition to the essays and discussions, we have also explored many different types of leadership and narrative - exploring leadership shown through art, fiction, biographical retelling, poetry, speeches, and more. Having assignments relating to these diverse stories has allowed me to further inspect, reflect, and refine my definition of leadership. I didn’t realize how important reflection is on leadership and on one's own growth as both a person and a leader until the two major projects in my class - the first being our debate, and the second being the podcast.
The project that really made me realize the importance of reflection was the podcast project, which is in place of a final for this class. I originally chose my angle and questions based on my dad. He owns a business with his best friend from elementary school and the success of the business is largely based on the way he interacts with his personal and business relationships. He works in construction and remodeling, so communication is very important in making sure things get done the way the client wants. The way my dad acts around others has always intrigued me, in a way that it’s hard to put into words. When I was thinking of what I wanted to do this project on, he came to mind and I just went with it. Coming up with my questions made me think about him and his style of leadership in a way I hadn’t before.
Due to unforeseen circumstances over Thanksgiving break, I became unable to interview my dad as I had originally planned. I didn’t want to have to completely start over but I knew that was what needed to be done. I started thinking about my mom and everything she has done. My mother and my father are very different people with very different life philosophies who pursued extremely different careers. When I was writing the questions to ask my mom, they contrasted greatly with the questions originally written for my dad. Both of them are amazing leaders in their fields, despite their differences.
In a similar sense, the other project that made me think a lot about reflecting and analyzing was the debate. My group was debating the topic “does genre matter in testimony?” Our position was “yes, it does.” We defined genre as categories like poetry, speech, biography, etc. This project allowed me to deeply analyze works we read and studied in class, as well as outside resources. When we first got this topic, we had no clue how to start - how to formulate our points or even how to start researching. After asking for help from the library, we got a bit of an idea. This part of the process helped me realize the importance of asking for help, something that I’ve always struggled with.
When watching and participating in the debates, it was very interesting to see all the different perspectives - even within the same topic. Seeing this throughout the different projects has made me realize that my definition of leadership, as well as how I show I’m a leader, will constantly be changing. The strengths and weaknesses that I have identified for myself in the beginning of the year are already evolving. Being able to reflect on personal change is the most important aspect of leadership and without the projects I’ve done in this class I think it would’ve taken me a lot longer to realize that.
Podcast Transcript:
Siler: You’ve pursued multiple different aspects of health and wellness. Would you like to talk a little bit about the things that you’ve done? Including yoga, massage, your apothecary, etc.
Stacy: Sure, I began my career as a massage therapist. I actually wanted to be an acupuncturist but I didn’t have a school available where I lived but massage therapy was available so that was kind of my entry into the health and wellness arena. I later became a yoga teacher and yoga therapist. That was largely related to how I felt in my pregnancy with you because it made such an improvement to all aspects of my life and I wanted to share that too and it was a natural complement to massage therapy. And the apothecary piece came in first to develop my own creams, lotions, oils for my massage business and just be able to add some nutritious elements for my family but it was definitely part of the whole thing. I have also done retreats, I’ve done workshops, I set up a prenatal yoga school. It was the first one in Texas and in the entire south-central United States at the time.
Siler: Cool! What kind of leadership roles have you taken in this field? So, I know that you’ve done teacher trainings, your yoga classes, lucky star - that kind of stuff.
Stacy: Sure, teacher trainings with the prenatal yoga school that was my first time doing teacher training and I was actually looking for training myself. I wanted to get more, just more information, more skilled at what I was doing and there was nowhere that I could really go. I either had to go to the West coast, the East coast or to the Chicago area but there was nothing in the whole southern central chunk of the country. So instead of trying to fly everywhere to set this up, (because I already had two children, I was pregnant with my third), I decided to create a school myself so I wrote the curriculum while I was pregnant with my third child, got it registered with a national organization, and then began teaching it. So that was my entry into teacher training and since then my name became known in the area and so I was invited to do different trainings for different studios. I traveled with it - got out of state to travel for teacher trainings. And the retreat piece that was somebody again, word of mouth, had heard about some of the things that I’d been doing especially with the apothecary piece and the very first retreat - I was part of the very first retreat, it’s been going on ten years now - and because I had experience with workshops and teacher trainings and things like that, she would often come to me and say you know “what do you think I should do here?” So there was a lot of collaboration that went on to help get those things started.
Siler: Yeah, so you just talked about one of your personal relationships. I want to kind of touch on what challenges you’ve faced over the course of your career and how you’ve dealt with them. And that includes, because you know you’ve been working with people for the majority of it and that comes with difficulties so how have you dealt with that?
Stacy: Well I think one of the challenges that I faced is when you create things, there will be people that see that and either copy it or try to take your ideas. So there was a time where I had someone try and take my ideas - specifically with the prenatal school, there was an organization that was much larger than what I was doing. She had, as soon as I announced that I was doing this they started creating something and the way that I dealt with it was just realizing that I had something unique to offer. That they were going to be offering something different, it’s not bad to have competition it just means that you grow and you develop yourself if you’re in it, to do that. And so that’s how I dealt with it, I just kept going. And recognized that I had something that was special, so I had to work on myself.
Siler: Thank you. This was very insightful and I really appreciate you doing this, mom. Thank you.
Stacy: Yeah! You’re welcome.