I joined at a really interesting time within Leadership Columbus. Like I mentioned last week, I was lucky enough to sit in on the closing ceremony for our Signature Program. We have our new Executive Director starting in a few weeks as well. And now this week was focused on getting all of our save the dates for our 50th Anniversary Celebration out the door, so at least that’s off the list now. I honestly didn’t realize how much work goes into sending out invitations to as many people as we did. Also this week, I got to witness one of the program days for our NxGen program. This program is more focused on emerging leaders who are relatively new to managing people and want to develop more skills to help them in those roles. By the end of this week, I have finally started to feel like I have settled in at Leadership Columbus. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be a very busy summer but I’m ready to take on whatever challenge comes my way.

I wanted to touch on a few things I learned by sitting in for a NxGen program day. My first experience being the closing ceremony for our largest program, I have to say that this second experience was especially contrasting as there are much less students and it was a normal program day. The focus of this day was all about personal growth and I would like to share a few things I learned with you because I found the information to be very insightful and rewarding. I had heard this first piece of information before but it was very remindful to hear it again, that growth is not linear. In fact, it is actually exponential which brings me to the concept of the S-curve. The three phases on the S-curve being your initial launch, your sweet spot and finally, achieving mastery.

I am telling you all of this because it really resonated with me. I was able to picture where I am on the S-curve for different places in my personal growth journey. The presentation was given by Aaron Fields, who specializes in helping leaders and professionals grow in life or in their work careers. For me, this presentation was truly eye opening. The following day, while sitting with my peers at the Columbus Foundation, we then learned about our “why”. You have to be able to ground yourself and figure out why you want to do what you do and what you want the purpose of your work to be. I mention this because I feel like the concept is closely associated with what I gained from Aaron’s presentation.

So, as I laid in my bed that night and had the regular “mid-life crisis” that happens frequently when you’re in college. I was trying to figure out my “why” in my professional career. Though I can’t tell you that for sure yet because it’s not something that’s just going to be an “AHA!” moment, I can at least share with you an analogy that I recently had a professor at OSU tell me. Dr. Larry Inks in the Fisher College of Business shared with us something that has stuck with me ever since. (Sorry if I butcher this professor but hopefully I got the gist of it.) When we look at how to grow and develop during an internship/fellowship, imagine yourself as a towel trying to soak up as much experience and knowledge you possibly can. While working, always be thinking, “what can I learn from this?” or “how can I improve?” By the end of it, you want to be able to wring as much as you can out of that towel and to have felt that you have personally grown or felt more developed than where you started.

So for me, during this fellowship, I guess I would say I’m feeling like a towel right now. May not be the answer most were expecting, but it’s an honest answer for me. I’m just trying to take the most I possibly can out of working with Leadership Columbus and Columbus Foundation this summer. At least by the end of it, I will able to truly say that I took the most out of it, and my hope is that it will help guide me down the right path of my professional journey.

See you next week,

Austin