My First Month: "Challenge Yourself"

My goal in this post is for you to understand the reason why the title is "Challenge Yourself" or in spanish will be "Desafiate a ti Mismo"

Hi Everyone,

I was waiting to see some clear understanding of the unexpected changes on the team, my role, my responsibilities,etc before writing this post, sorry if you were waiting to hear from me but here goes my first month experience...

In my first day of training I got the news that my manager was leaving the company and it was unknown who will be taking his position. Just to give you a little bit of background about the team, it is a Global Team and with the manager resignation, it will be only one person (my buddy) the only one located in North America; the rest of the team was located in different parts of the world.

In this first month, I didn't have a clear understanding of the team's expectation and my responsibilities. However, I decided to approach this situation as an opportunity to use my initiative and creativity to find projects/work that could help me to maximize my learning experience from this internship.

I learned that where there is ambiguity in the work environment, I need to seek for direction, I asked questions but some were not answer so I challenged myself to find it myself. I decided to think that no matter how small is the task I found, I will take it with enthusiasm, I will be taking it seriously showing my skills of positive attitude, dependability, diligent and accurate in my work. Also, I will take the initiative to acquire new skills and exhibit a "can do" attitude.

Currently one of my favorite phrases is "I will google it" , so when I had an opportunity to do a small project, I will put in my mind that I can make it big, so I will search for all the tools/learning through the web or also contacting people who can guide me on it.

So far, thanks to this attitude I got better in excel doing amazing things with it, learn a lot about all the process of plastics and the global market,contacting people from different parts of the world introducing myself and collecting data, researching about bio resins in a way that I even dream about it (due to a 7 hours non stop work in a saturday afternoon/night), putting together a presentation for my manager who forward this to his director who hopefully will be forwarding this to his boss for a critical decisions and also being able to be present on a negotiations week with top suppliers.

Here is where challenge yourself is a key, because in the beginning of this internship I had two options, one was to seat in my desk passively and wait for the new manager to assume the new position and tell me what to do or the other one, to push myself out of my comfort zone. I chose the second one, which one would you choose?

I am going to leave you with this question, think about it...

Eva G.

P.S My new manager is located in Holland with a 6 hours difference from US, our communication is through emails and phone calls (interesting ah?), I am happy that I was able to meet him and meet all the global team members in person during the week of negotiation meeting with the suppliers.