The author recharging after a typical workday.
So, I’ve been away from the office for the past three weeks. As a leader I’m rarely blessed with the opportunity to take that much vacation all at once, but through a series of professional development opportunities I’ve been able to spend some time focused in a different direction compared to my day to day and the results were surprising.
On July 12th I traveled up to Emmitsburg, MD, home of the National Emergency Training Center and the Emergency Management Institute (EMI), for a four-day class on Integrated Emergency Management for planned events. I’ve managed planned events for a significant portion of my career, so much of what I was hoping to get out of this time was engaging and learning from peers and colleagues around the country, and I have to say I wasn’t disappointed.
The next week I traveled to New York to facilitate a exercise around engaging Event Based Volunteers, an important priority for my organization, and an opportunity for me to assist colleagues in another part of the country, while nurturing my passion for innovation, training and exercises. I returned from New York on Sunday and turned around heading back to EMI for another four-day course focused on Exercise Evaluation and Improvement Planning. Again, nearly a week out of the office learning, not only from a panel of talented instructors, but from colleagues around the country.
Three weeks later I’m back in the office, and surprisingly refreshed. The opportunity to take that time and point my primary focus to professional development left me recharged and able to hit the ground running again the same way I often can coming back from vacation.
So, I offer all this as a recommendation, yet another reason to look at professional development opportunities not as a chore or a box to be checked on an annual to-do list, but as a way to spend a few days, or a few weeks, separated from the day-to-day, recharging, refreshing and refocusing our energies on what originally drew each of us to the fields in which we, as leaders, have chosen to invest so much of our time and energy.
-Scott Wollek serves as the Senior Disaster Program Manager for the American Red Cross in the National Capital Region. Mr. Wollek is a graduate of the MPA program at George Mason University where he concentrated in Homeland Security and Emergency Management.