Volunteer Journal #7: Conclusion and Reflection Coursework at GCU

Volunteer Journal #7: Conclusion and Reflection
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Volunteer Journal #7: Conclusion and Reflection
Day, Date, Time Period
Lessons from GCU
During my volunteer experience, I had to apply my critical thinking and communication skills on numerous occasions. These two skills gained from my coursework proved to be quintessential to significantly improving my volunteer experience. It was quite surprising to find out that most of what I needed to apply in my volunteer experience did not rely on my technical knowledge, but rather on my ability to think critically about problems as well as my ability to effectively communicate with other team members about these problems and their prospective solutions. I chose these two things because they stood out to me the most throughout my volunteer experience, particularly seeing as my technical knowledge as a dental hygienist was of minimal value to a mental health facility.
Reflection and Critical Thinking
During my volunteer experience, one of the issues that I am proudest of contributing towards is the development of clearer and more effective communication at the interprofessional and intraprofessional capacities. However, I must acknowledge that in order to suggest and help develop more effective means of communication between the working staff at the facility, I had to engage in a reflection session to understand why I faced some challenges integrating with the team of psychologists that I had been assigned to. Upon further critical analysis and thinking on the issue, I established that my inability to integrate seamlessly was caused by poor and ineffective communication within the group as well as between the group and other staff. From this point, I was able to suggest more effective methods of communication at the interprofessional and intraprofessional capacities that helped not only enrich my experience, but also solve the problem of poor communication at the facility.
Journal
In this week, a reflection on my volunteer experience has been highly insightful and beneficial towards helping augment my understanding of workplace communication and its connections to productivity and efficiency. Considering the fact that I took some time to deliberately reflect on my volunteer experiences and some of the challenges that I had faced and overcome, it proved to be quintessential towards helping me truly grasp the value that this volunteer experience has added onto my life. In this sense, my period of reflection ended up being arguably the most beneficial of the entire volunteer experience. This is because such reflection allowed me to actually comprehend and quantify what I had learned over the volunteer period, and this has improved my outlook on the professional workplace setting.
I found this deliberate reflection to be highly important to bolstering my understanding of what I had learned and how it had positively impacted my life. My renewed understanding and appreciation of soft skills, for instance, has also made me a better healthcare professional. I believe that this has provided me with a better comprehension of what it takes to build a collaborative team of workers and the kind of environment that allows such collaboration to thrive ...