Travel and Adventures--Companions Over Time

For April 8, 2010
My fourth grade teacher had just returned from Spain and taught us Spanish while we learned the other fourth grade subjects.  I learned some French in a language-learning program offered at the university my mother attended for graduate school the next summer.  By the time I was ten I spoke a bit of both Spanish and French and began a life-long love of communicating in multiple languages.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, because I had just completed two years of high school Spanish, I was invited to visit Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic as part of President John F. Kennedy's "Sister City" program.   This was my first opportunity to put into practice what I had learned in Spanish class.

That first taste of travel began another life-long love of travel.  Along with the travel came the adventures.  I haven't often written about those adventures and it seems to be a good idea to get started.

What I do best---Reprise

Throughout this blog, I have mentioned what I do best in several posts.  Today I've been thinking about that.

What do I do best?  I make a positive difference in the world by helping people and organizations learn to  change to improve their quality of (business) life now and for the future.

I've been doing that since I began working 40+ years ago.

I do the work wherever I am in whatever job I take on--independently or for others.  It is an essential part of who I am and, over time, I have come to recognize it--as do the people who know me and who work with me.

I am very good at assimilating what is going on in context and channeling that context in ways that follow research-based best practices to come up with what needs to be learned to change to produce the improvements.  The good news for me is that I have learned to do that with children, adults, and organizations.  I've also learned to do it across cultures and languages.

In the course of doing what I do best, I have worked with people in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.  That's good because I enjoy meeting new people and cultures and practicing new languages.  I've provided these services in English, Spanish, Italian, and French and have picked-up some conversational fluency in other languages along the way if I've stayed in the country long enough.

I've worked for the federal government in the USA and Canada, public and private businesses, colleges and universities, K-12 school districts, and have owned my own businesses along the way.  I've worked with more than 100 organizations and more than 16 different industries and with thousands of people--children and adults.

I've grown and learned quite a bit along the way and enjoy sharing what I have learned and continue to learn with the people I work with day to day.

My challenge now is to tell this story in a multimedia format--probably starting with MicrosoftPowerPoint and moving on from there.  If you want to help, please let me know.