P1:Role Model Essay

P1: My Role Model

Christine Collins, my mother, was born on August 27, 1963 in Lafayette, Louisiana. She was the first born child to Edward and Lucy Williams. The Williams family moved to the Houston area around 1975 to create a stable home for their family. My mother married at the age of eighteen and had me when she was twenty-one. The role model qualities I found in my mother were based on observing her during my childhood years until the present.
Leaders can be established and distinguished in almost every aspect of life; they can emerge in school, the work place, or at home. But wherever they come into existence, it is pertinent that they are there. I got a chance to personally see how my mother was a leader in the work place and at home.

Leadership comes with the very important task of assuming responsibility for one’s own personal actions and the actions of those around them. My mother works for MHMRA, which is a state owned association geared towards the well-being and health of the mental retardation. As a Supervisor, my mother is responsible for a specific group of clients. She is responsible for making sure that the home of this specific group is up to the standards given by the state, buying groceries and other necessities the clients need, making and attending doctors appointments, and planning events that allow the clients to interact in the world outside of their normal boundary of the group home and workshop, which is where they work. Along with the list of duties a Supervisor is suppose to fulfill, she has to make sure that the employees working below her are doing their job. For example, she has to make sure they are taking proper care of the group home and the clients, which includes not mistreating the clients and giving them their medication. Her job not only comes with the responsibility of completing her job description, but being responsible for anything that goes wrong. Sometimes during the summer I would tag along for the day with my mom and go to the group home. It was like she was in charge of another household with three times as many individuals; she has her own office filled with file cabinets of important documents and strict guidelines that are to be followed for any possible situation that might arise. This is where she would carefully examine the files of each of the clients and make sure that the group home accommodated all of their needs and read about the certain medications they were required to take. There are huge binders of information about the medications, which she referred to when it came time to refill medications or when it was time to set up doctors appointments. Some of the clients have specific issues like slow mobility and phobias, which required her to carefully plan out the activities for the group as a whole. Also this is where she did her various paperwork; written reports were required for all incidents that occurred at the group home. For instance, if two of the clients got into an altercation and had to be refrained from each other, she had to write down everything in specific details just in case their was an injury or something else severe. Sometimes what she did not complete in her office, she would bring home and finish. My mother’s responsibility for her clients is twenty-four hours a day seven days a week; it does not stop at 4 o’clock when she would leave the group home. Our family could not go anywhere without her cell phone ringing with the voice of one of her employees on the other end calling in sick, which sometimes resulted in my mother having to go back to work later on that night if she could not find someone else to fill in, or the voice of one of her clients complaining how something was not going their way. My mother would get a little frustrated when one of her employees would call, but she loved to talk to her clients. After all, the main purpose of her job was to take care of her clients. Accepting responsibility for someone else’s life is a great task; since it isn’t the easiest job to do, leaders truly emerge in this area. Having responsibility allows you to step back from only thinking about yourself; it makes you unselfish and places others’ feelings before your own. Day after day my mother demonstrated this quality to me; along with being a Supervisor for MHMRA, she had a night job that also included working with mental retardation. Two jobs added some stress to my mother’s life and did not allow her to get much sleep. When it came time for the responsibility of a leader to come into play, she ignored her personal obstacles and assumed her role as a Supervisor.

At home, my mother’s responsibilities just about parallel those in the workplace. Being a parent and head of the household already comes with certain responsibilities like paying all bills, providing food for everyone, cleaning, and ensuring the well being of your children. Most parents, like my mother, teach certain responsibilities to their children, which in turn releases some burdens off of themselves. I learned how to clean and do other various tasks at a young age. Fortunately for my mother, having the responsibility of finding a babysitter was not a huge factor. Since there is a six year difference between my older and I and a nine year difference between my younger brother and I, the eldest in the house would assume the responsibility of being babysitter. The responsibility of taking care of others was instilled into my mother when she was young because she is the eldest of five children. Responsibility can be picked up at home or in the work place, but without it leadership can not be fully attained.
Whenever a leader is chosen, it is with the assumption that they will complete all tasks to the best of their ability. In order for that to happen, determination has to put into play; there has to be a certain drive in this particular individual to do whatever it takes to complete the goal. For some strange reason, a task or goal cannot be accomplished without some sort of obstacle; it is like part of the criteria of reaching a goal. You have to go through a dark tunnel before you see the light, which truly tests the determination in an individual. If they are willing to keep going, feeling their way through the dark, then they are determined and ready to do whatever it takes to reach their area of accomplishment. My mother, as stated previously, worked two jobs while running a household; she was determined to do everything in her power to ensure that her family would be taken care of, which made her spend more hours at work than at home. Growing up, I resented my mother for working so much; I was completely oblivious to the amount of money it takes to support a household for a single parent. When I got older, I understood exactly the sacrifices she made and determination that guided her everyday, which allowed my brothers and me to do some of the same activities as our friends. For me, it was cheerleading; I can remember dreading the days when we would receive the final calculations of how much we owed that year for camp and various other things. I know it put a strain on my mother but her determination for us to live a fairly decent childhood over rid her temporary feeling of agony. A very strong passion of mine at the present moment is to become more determined. Determination involves the concept of actually believing that you can accomplish your goal; this is the area I need the most work on. I am a very determined individual but sometimes I lose faith in myself. My mother is a real example of where determination can get you in life, and I look at her in order to build my determination.

The best quality a leader can have is the ability to help others or give back to others, the will to develop other leaders and not desire all of the attention. There has to be communication between a leader and everyone else; positive communication that makes everyone feels they are equal and not one person sitting on top of a throne in order to achieve a common goal. Even though my mother is the Supervisor, technically in charge of everyone, she has a certain bond with her employees. Importantly, they communicate outside of the work place; they will eat lunch occasionally, celebrate birthdays together, and sometimes visit each other’s homes interacting with their families. They have developed a friendly relationship; whenever her employees don’t understand something or have a personal problem, they will call and consult with my mother trying to find the best solution and vice versa. Even though this won’t happen in all working environments, there should be some sort of communication that involves everyone contributing in some way. Outside of the work place, she is a bid giver and helper. Being a single mother of three hardly ever left my mother with excessive finances but when she had extra money, it would usually go to others that she felt needed it more than herself; her favorites were the homeless. It did something to her spirit when she gave to others; I too experience this feeling whenever I give to others. Whether an individual helps others in environments where they are already established leaders or giving to others in society where they become an example of a leader, it is important to pass your wisdom and good fortune to others that are not fortunate to reach that level of leadership yet.

Christine Collins, my mother, is an average individual that we all walk next to on the street everyday not thinking how they have impacted some else’s life with their knowledge. The leadership qualities of responsibility, determination, and helpfulness are characteristics that can be possessed by a single mother from the south all the way up the President of United States.