Task 2b- Reflective Writing

It has been a huge important week here at Warner Leisure Hotels Nidd Hall! Our first turkey and tinsel break! Now for those of you who dont know what this is, it is basically having an xmas eve, christmas day and a new years day when its not really xmas at all! I thought the premier of the week and eveyrthing I do during that whole week would be a great experience to look at the different ways of writing a journal. Going from the ideas in the handbook I decided to pick an activity I held or took part in this week and focus on that specific task in a different style of writing each time.....I initially used my filofax to jot everything down at the time and now I am collaborating them all together for this blog article.

Description- What/where and when?- description would be the way I usually go about writing a journal, I find this the simplest method.
Tonight was the premier of our brand new christmas show 'Warner Wonderland'. 5 minutes before we were due to go on stage, the mechanical stage that manouvers out onto the dance floor wasn't working. After a full day of rehersals on this show with the pullout working, it couldn't of happened at a worse time! I decided to take the decision to go ahead and trust that the team could work with each other to make this work. On we went and after the first dance number everyone seemed to have pulled it off! There was absolutely nothing to worry about. At the end of the show many guests congratulated us on the situation and said they didn't even know it wasn't supposed to be like that. 

Initial Reflection- Feelings/mood/thoughts
After the show mentioned above, an immediate feeling of relief spread over me, As a dance captain on the premier of a new show and a broken stage, panic initially struck me! What do I do?! Do I call off the show? Do we change and do a different show we are more confident with?Im glad I went ahead with it as the a great sense of pride was felt after it was all over. Working with such a friendly team that can make something like that work is rare to find. The night made me really appreciate working here. Thoughts were in the back of my mind about what is going to happen for the rest of the week, will any more surprises crop up that we don't want, but at that very time all I felt was gratitude for everyone I work with making my job a lot easier.

Evaluation- what went well/bad? what did I learn?
Today was the first time Nidd Hall hosted an activity called Piano Feet. Basically where the guests play christmas melodies on a huge floor piano. For the first ever time doing it, it worked really well to have a couple of the team hosting it rather than just one person, the guests appreciated the motivation from all of us rather than just one person.  Placing the pianos in a semi circle also ensured there was no-one that felt outcast. It also worked really well having an audience watching, this made the activity not only fun but quite hilarious from an audience's point of view when the guests went wrong and when I was looking an idiot waving around a conductor baton shouting loads of numbers. Its important in an activity like this to avoid being bossy as this takes the fun out of it. We recorded the experience on a smartphone to look back on and keep hold of the things that worked well. When teaching the older generation of guests that we mainly receive at Warner's it is also important to bear in mind they are not the same as a young mind. So when trying to get them to remember sequences of numbers you have to put yourself in their shoes - this can link to the style of writing } another view.

Another View- perspective of another person/object
As a dance captain one of my main responsibilities is teaching the new team members the shows that we perform. This week I was teaching a singer her last show as she has already learnt the other ones. When reflecting on the activity I put my focus on how she would of been feeling and wrote an extract as if I was her.....
'Today I had rehersals with Alice, having already learnt 3 out of the 4 shows here at Warner's as well as performing cabarets and learning song lyrics there was still more to learn. It's never ending. I struggle with dance much more as a vocalist and I was worried Alice may speed through it because she is a dancer. For the first hour nothing was going in, I just couldn't remember it at all, speaking up I told her she was going too fast and could she slow down, you could tell her patience was running low but she carried on encouraging me and by the end of the two hours together I felt so much more comfortable. '
After reflecting on how the singer felt at the end of rehersals it made me think How can I approach this better for next time? At the time I never really considered how much she actually had to learn adn that maybe I was going a little too fast. This particular style of journal writing I had never really considered but now I have I feel I will use it a lot more as it makes you consider others feelings and how this can help with your own reflections.

Graphs- diagrams and charts
I decided to use the whole turkey and tinsel break to use this style of refective writing, I am going to compare it to a usual normal midweek break. Using this website to create a free chart helped me visualise the comparisons. https://www.meta-chart.com/multi-bar 

 Evaluating from this helps show me that I enjoy the turkey and tinsel breaks more however they give me a lot more stress and I am certainly a lot busier during these breaks and there is less freedom to play around with the activities as they must be brand standard. A normal midweek break is still fun just not as much as the turkey and tinsel and this may be because its the same thing every time whereas turkey and tinsel is a lot different! Perhaps by the end of the T&T period I will do another graph and see if I find the fun and stress as high.

List- making lists of things you did/felt/saw
For me this was the hardest style of reflective writing.... The only time I feel I use lists is when I'm creating a shopping list or a list of things to do! I had never thought about writing a list of my day...
Things i did?- pretended it was new years eve, danced with a widowed guest, performed a show, made a rota...
By even starting this list I feel it doesn't help me reflect on the day enough in detail, only helps me remember things.

What if?- what would you love/hate to happen- use imagination.
For this style of writing I am going to use the Pantomime premier we performed on the last day of turkey and tinsel. 
After the bad start to the week with Warner Wonderland not going to plan we all hoped Jack and the Beanstalk would be fine. The panto involves putting together a very large heavy wooden set and the what if questions are never ending for the panto....
The what ifs: The set collapsed during the show, people forgot their lines, no audience turned up, no audience laughs at the jokes, audience walked out, bad feedback, the music or lighting failed to work, someone is poorly, we get a huge stand innovation, I get the biggest clap for being the smallest part, we get good feedback.
Again I dont particuarly find this style of writing helpful to me after an event has taken place because it makes me not focus on what did happen, however I can see how you could use it as a reflective took for before an event takes place and then look back and compare. 

As a whole task I found this very informative and learnt so much from just using 8 different ways of writing, some of which I had never come across before. 
Any comments of other questions you ask yourself during reflective writing le me know and I am more than happy to give it a go for my future journal entries! 

Thankyou for reading and apologies for the HUGE blog entry.