After two weeks of training, and six weeks with campers, our staff is coming back from a well-deserved day off. They’ve been doing amazing things, and we want them to keep improving, so tonight we did a bit more staff training. But it was very different than the training we did at the start, because they are very different people now. In the last six weeks each counselor has spent 144 hours as instructors, guides and coaches. That is three times the hours required for credit in a master’s level course. They are in the middle of being primary influencers in the lives of 1,451 campers and team members with 210 counselors. In short, they are now the experts, so staff training was a little different tonight.

We sat them by cabins and had them answer three questions. As a cabin,

1. What do you want to stop doing?

2. What do you want to start doing?

3. What do you want to keep doing?

We then sat them by activity staffs and asked the same questions before we reshuffled them again and had them share the best things they heard. Finally, we asked them to write their answer to one of the toughest leadership questions I know. “Knowing what you now know, what would I do differently?”

The point is that our counselors are now among the leading experts on leadership in a camp setting – they are really good at what they do – and they are really good at making each other even better. That is why I am so proud of the work they have done, and proud to introduce them to the campers coming tomorrow.

Adam Boyd