Since I was spending January getting all of my goals put together and organized, I decided to make the actual goal for the month pretty simple. My goal this month was to begin writing in a scout journal where I would record each week what happened in scouts, what was coming up, and what we could do better the next time we did a similar event.

This goal was actually born as part of a larger set of goals that I created during my time at Wood Badge – a premier training course for Scout leaders. You’ll see a handful of these crop up throughout the year.

So really, all in all, January is a pretty boring month to report on. I started writing the first week of January, and completed the goal the first week of June. Although it’s probably the most boring journal I’ve ever kept in my life, doing this taught me a lot about organization within our Scout Pack.

However, since it was a short month, I’ll go ahead and put a plug in here for Wood Badge. As anyone reading this should know, I’m rather partial to the Boy Scouts program, and I’m currently helping our church troop as the Cubmaster. Although I love working with the boys and the other leaders, it really is difficult to stay motivated every single week and every single month. Fortunately, BSA realizes that, and they offer some of the most amazing training programs to revitalize the enthusiasm!

One of these programs, Wood Badge, is for adults only. During the course of one week, (or two weekends depending on your local council) adults learn the ins and outs of working with the kids and what it takes to not only run a program, but to run an exceptional program that the kids can love. The final day of Wood Badge, attendees pledge to spend the next 18 months working on medium-to-large scale goals they’ve created to improve themselves and their local scouting units. This is called “Working your ticket” and it hails all the way back to Lord Robert Baden Powell, the father of the Scouting program. As 2017 started, I still had 4 of my 5 goals to complete, so you’ll see them around as I’m describing the next several months.