Stupendous Squishies

Squishies are CY's term for the uncomfortable feeling in your stomach you get when you try a new thing. Today our training room was filled with those squishies. But getting to that place made it the best day of training so far.
We had our first PT today! It was not as rigorous as I expected, which was awesome, and in fact it was a lot more just getting us all energized. And it was extremely effective. (Along with the cup of coffee I consumed.) By the end, even though my face was sweaty and my hair was a mess, I was shouting "I'm fired up!" at the very top of my lungs. There are a lot of things to memorize for call and response, but everyone is so enthusiastic that my awful memory is not too intimidated.
Our day was scattered with many breaks and tons of walking around. The senior corps all listened to our requests and really changed up the day to help us make everything better and easier for us.
The topic for the day was mainly about diversity and inclusion. They hung up posters all along the walls and had social classifications written on each poster. We then had everyone write stereotypes on the posters. It was super interesting to see what everyone had to write, and an interesting observations was that the groups that were the majority- white and Christian, had more slurs written on them, then the groups who were the minority had minimum slurs and most slurs were not offensive.
It felt like we had confronted a ton of squishies, but we were not totally comfortable.
We practiced charismatic listening, which is basically listening where we aren't thinking of our response and just totally and completely listen, and then ask follow up questions. That is easy to do one on one for me, but hard when I'm in a big group.
Then we played a game called walk across the room, this was where the PM made a statement and then we had to cross the room if the statement applied to us. It was very powerful stuff, we did economic class, religion, race, sexuality and just it was so impressive to see everyone being so comfortable, and people shared some things that had before been not said to anyone else.
I was so happy by the end of training and it was a fantastic day. I am trying to hold onto this feeling of happiness and closeness with the corps, for my future not so positive days that I might encounter during my ten months.
After training 802 hit the gym and trained with Kenny. We did half an hour of these exercises where we didn't need weights that still was a work out and did half an hour of cardio- I love me the bike- and then stretched it out. Stretching is definitely the best part of working out in my book!

Daily hero: All my brave fellow corp members who remain so positive even after facing such adversity. They all channel their negative experience into renewed energy for helping others and I am truly inspired.