Taylor Mularski: Leadership

    Hi everyone! My name is Taylor Mularski and I’m from lovely Spokane, Washington. Currently, I am a kinesiology major with a leadership studies minor partnered with a few concentrations that will prepare me to work with refugee populations in the future. I am on the golf team here at Gonzaga, and you can always find me diving into competition: volleyball, Spikeball, skiing, bowling, card games, trivia, bingo etc. Additionally, I enjoy anything that brings out people’s inner child, whether it is dancing, dressing up, running and playing games, or being silly with one another. If you see me on campus, I might have golf clubs poking out of my backpack or a hammock when the sun is out. I am probably speed walking from one thing to the next as a result of my chronic over-scheduling problem. Of course, I am also a Seton, which has made my sophomore year immensely better than I would have expected. 

    I like to refer to leadership as the forgotten pillar. Service and sisterhood are directly addressed in setons via several events and activities throughout the year. However, Setons focuses on leadership in the background every week as we build relationships at our meetings, go on Sister Dates, and live in community together. This semester, I have been in a service and leadership class that has shifted my focus on how I think of leadership. More than other leadership classes I have been a part of, this class has rewired my mind when thinking about serving others and being a leader in the community. The biggest takeaway that I wanted to share is that you truly can never judge a person for the circumstance that they are in. I am aware that this may sound like common sense, but truly analyzing this point allows us to be servant leaders to those around us. If we are in a leadership role, we inherently have power. Whether this power stems from good or bad is out of our control, but how we choose to act on this power is what defines our leadership. As servant leaders we should be advocates for our community and use our given power to foster real, needed change for good. The root of this change is knowledge that we truly cannot say that if we were in another person’s shoes that we would do anything different. Since everybody is raised by different people at a different time under thousands of different circumstances, we truly cannot say that we would act differently in any given situation. Understanding our privilege and creating empathy for the “other” is the way we will build a powerful and meaningful community among those around us. Community drives leadership, and our leadership should drive good.