Smoky Mountains Leadership
Published in
2 min readMar 28, 2024
Unexpected insights
I found an old draft about our Fall 2023 trip to the gorgeous Smoky Mountains. Long drives offer ample opportunities for self-reflection and deep thinking, and of course fun! Made me realize that our recent Puerto Rico trip also offered food for thought, aka Leadership Lab Lessons!
Insights:
- Keep your mind open to opportunities. There were fall colors that changed within 2 days dramatically.
- Don’t cram too much into your schedule or you will NOT have time to accommodate unexpected items that life throws on you! And life does that, a lot!
- Planning is critical. But so is #2.
- Companions are important. The best vacations were not the most exotic locales or resorts, but the people you made memories with! Build your team carefully!
- Take Vacations! Collect life stories. My 3 year old still gleefully recollects a crab digging its way out of sand at a local (rather ugly) beach and how she and her cousin chased it! She also loves remembering adventure of watching a real mama bear and two cubs walking majestically less than 6 feet from our car! Loading the kids to the car for daycare takes us 25mins — that day, it was under 47 seconds from the time someone yelled “Bear”! One mundane activity, one vacation spot — but…