Wood Badge Weekend One

I enrolled in Wood Badge, the top leadership training class for scout volunteers and leaders. It is a five day workshop that develops adults so they can help deliver the scouting program in the best way possible by teaching various project management, interpersonal, and team building skills. The course itself is pretty intense and covers an immense amount of information. It’s also designed to push your own boundaries and develop insights into your thinking and motivations. I am still digesting all I learned here.

The first weekend is three days long, with two nights spent camping. Training occurs at Camp Michael’s Eagle Lodge. For the first weekend you are Cub Scouts, all of the accommodations are handled by staff. There is one part coursework, Power Point presentations about leadership, and another part team exercises. I was teamed with five other people and honestly we couldn’t have been better matched. Three males, three females. Three Scoutmasters, three Cubmasters. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other and I definitely made some new friends as we challenged each other and collaborated throughout these three days.

The guiding principle of leadership is to lead from within. I’ve always been a fan of alignment and I am glad this is a focus of the course. Self-awareness is so difficult to attain but absolutely crucial on your life path. Perhaps we are slow to take this journey because we are afraid of what we’ll learn, or maybe we don’t feel safe enough to do so. Even now, in my middle age, I am learning new things about myself although at this point I’ve discovered and accepted my qualities and shortcomings, and try to balance each other out. We meet again in two weeks for our last weekend, where we’ve “graduated” to being Boy Scouts and will learn about the patrol method and dive even deeper into what it means to be a youth leader.