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Section 3: Reflective Practice

1. Personal Development During my student life, I solely focused on

my studies and I was never fascinated with
the idea of interacting with other students. My
professors tried several time to get me
involved in activities that required team work,
however, I always found myself doing such
tasks alone. However, during my internship
program, we always conducted meeting prior
to commencing work. The meeting involved
team interactions which required us to
perform certain group task and set daily
targets and work collaboratively towards
accomplishment of the goals set. Furthermore,
since I was working in an Insurance company,
financial advisory sales was the major source
of income and required an employee to
establish a trustful relationship with the client
before presenting him with the necessary
recommendations. As such, my interpersonal
skills, confidence, self-esteem, and self-
awareness improved over the period. I could
confidently engage with clients and discuss
with colleagues in meetings. In my free time
around lunch time I could find myself around
workmates discussing issues not related to
work. The skills learnt enabled me to increase
sales for the company by effectively assessing
financial knowledge of the client and
experience to establish whether the clients
understands the potential risks of the products

2. Personal Motivation, Organization
and Time Management
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before purchasing the policies. Although the
internship program was short, I can
confidently ascertain that the skills learnt
could positively impact my career because I
can interact with people and work in team
towards achieving the goals of the company.
I was raised in an upper middle class family.
As such, I was granted the opportunity to
possess numerous things from a young age,
everything for me came easy. However, here I
was, working as an intern with no pay at all.
What could possibly motivate me to work an
average of 8hours daily with no pay, though
it’s not like I needed the money. Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs could not suffice me to
wake up early in the morning of dedicate
myself to work. The need for income to cater
for food or shelter could not propel me to
move forward. However, one day I realized
that my parents won’t be there for the rest of
my life to hand me anything that I required. I
felt the urge to grow my career and my
potential to prove myself that I am capable.
As such, I found myself working as hard as
possible developing my career and learning
the skill of time management something that I
was poor at. I realized that, if I want to
effectively succeed in my career, I would
require to strategize my everyday plan which
sets out my goals, assess priority of each task,
and organize myself and the tasks. This
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improved my career significantly as I became

more productive & efficient, improved my
work quality, reduced my stress levels,
meeting deadlines and improved my
professional reputation. My supervisor
provided my with the right model and advise
that enhanced and improved my abilities to
manage time and organize my tasks
effectively. This has provided me with great
opportunities to achieve my career goals.
3. Team Work In the field of Insurance, team work is
essential in achieving the goals of the
organization. However, as stated earlier, I was
used to performing tasks on my own and
never believed in teamwork. I always
perceived teamwork as a waste of time, I
wondered, why would I require several people
for me to accomplish a simple task since I
always consider myself smart than most
fellow classmates and I believed in my
abilities. Same notion I flagged during my
internship, we faced numerous setbacks in
team assignments and we could not
accomplish the set targets that we aimed to
accomplish. Our supervisors noticed our
weakness and during the initials meetings, he
focused on team building, through his
approach, we got to develop and discover our
potential and self-awareness then we got to
understand each team member and their
capability to effectively incorporate
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effectively the roles and responsibilities of

each member according to their abilities. In
addition, we created a conducive working
environment that encourages each member to
share their ideas while ensuring that each idea
is welcomed and appreciated. Improving our
skills to work as a group was essential to
allow us get the required outcomes and
improve our performance. Sometimes,
meeting regularly was difficult since each
individual has personal assignments that we
had to deliver, as such, created a group chat
where we could discus findings and share
ideas. I was named team leader and tasked
with assigning assessing and coordinating the
tasks and teams. Experienced acquired will
enable me to be an effective team leader who
will keep the team organized and focused in
achieving the set goals. Nonetheless, I will be
able to work efficiently in collaboration with
other employees by distributing the tasks
equally according to strengths of team
members as this will lead to greater
productivity.
4. Verbal Communication In classroom I learnt a lot about verbal
communication. The concept was introduced
in class, however, during that time, I could
not grasp the concept entirely because I used
to tell myself, this is just one of those units.
The lectured emphasized how verbal
communication is important and essential in
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assessing information from someone. I faced

numerous challenges during early days as an
intern, the insurance company required
customer knowledge assessment and
evaluation of the client’s financial status.
Since most interactions with clients utilizes
verbal communication, it was essential to
internalize the information fast and absorb it
for evaluations without the need to ask the
customer each time to repeat. Although it was
a challenge during early days, slowly I
mastered the art and developed the skills.
Furthermore, since we conducted meeting
every day, discussions, and presentations
were held verbally and required each worker
to utilize the information presented in their
tasks and activities to improve performance.
As such, the aspect of verbal communication
has shaped my interaction skills and improved
my interpersonal relationship which are
essential in my career.
5. Research and Analytical Skills