It has been a little while since I have hopped on here and shared my thoughts. Some might ask what I have been doing during this time. Well, let me give you some of my recent updates and a little bit of reflection on these past few months. Rest assured; the moment is coming when I can get back to my weekly posts imparting knowledge and lessons learned for the masses!
My most recent adventure involves my whole crew moving out to Washington, D.C., where I have accepted a new job at the National Guard Bureau. Since we are moving, we have been in the process of selling a house, buying a house, and getting ready for a moving crew to show up to get us out to Maryland from Illinois.
In addition to that, and right smack in the middle of the moving process, I have entered my final semester at Boise State University. As you probably know from my portfolio site that got you to this blog, I have been an M.S. Candidate at Boise State University since 2017 in the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) Program. Now as that time comes to an end, I have been getting my portfolio defense ready to present. While that has been going on, I have also been completing my work in my final course on Workplace Improvement.
To say I have been busy is an understatement. However, that hasn’t come without some time to reflect on where I was and where I am now. I have also been thinking a lot about the next steps in my professional and academic goals too!
I can confidently say that the OPWL program at Boise State University has refined who I am as a teacher with some excellent evidence-based practices to hang my hat on for the future. Before OPWL, almost everything I did as a teacher was based on “how it was taught to me.” While that isn’t always bad, I lacked a theoretical evidence-based backing for the “why” behind what I was doing. I discovered through OPWL that what my mentors were doing, and I myself, for that matter, were supported by the science and data of learning. What I have now is the knowledge to teach that to others.
Tomorrow, I will defend what I have learned in OPWL. In that defense, I have offered up six key takeaways I had with the program that I also want to share with you here:
1. Find the “so what” with your projects – before OPWL, I would find myself completing a
project because I was “told to do so” or I was “assigned the task.” However, I found out that through a good front-end analysis of your project, you can not only find value for yourself in completing the project but also for your client.
2. Support your client with evidence – don’t let your client take your word for it. Instead, prove to them that what you are providing is the best possible solution with the data that you give them.
3. Don’t be afraid to tell your client the truth – sometimes, the truth hurts. If they are dead set on only one possible solution, refer to takeaway number two and show them the path to success with the data you provide. Don’t be afraid to tell them what they may not want to hear.
4. Write what you learn and share that with the world – sharing is the tool we probably underutilize the most in human performance. If only we shared our thoughts and opinions more AND we accepted other people’s thoughts and views, we would be a better community of humans in doing so.
5. Read and Teach More – just like takeaway number four, we need to share. One of the best ways I have found to share is to teach and learn more through reading. My personal library is now full of new books (to me) on human performance. Authors like Rothwell, Hohne, King, Clark, Klein, and Kahneman are on my shelves now with great titles like Human Performance Improvement, Blink, Building Expertise, Sources of Power, and many others!
6. Never be afraid to learn more – I recently posted about this and stand by it today. The moment that you think you know everything, it is time to quit. You have nothing left to give if you have nothing left to learn. So, with that, always be willing to learn something new or different.
Looking back on where I came from and what I have learned, I am humbled to have taken this path. I am proud of those whom I have met along the way and the interactions that I have had with peers and professors alike.
The future for me is just as adventurous as the past has been, though. I will soon stare retirement
in the face with the US Air Force. After that, I plan to enter a doctoral program and see what life offers. I’ll keep up with this blog through that whole process and hopefully have a couple (hopefully more) of published articles by then. Most importantly, though, I have a ton of family time to catch up on and plan on doing that too.
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