Three Down

You know that feeling, after you’ve just run a marathon and realise you can take a minute to breath? Yeah me neither, but I can imagine it feels somewhat like this.

Though I really don’t have a good excuse for not writing in so long, an excuse I do have. Originally, we had planned to spread our five training sessions over three weeks. We had our first meeting on Monday, and announced the schedule to our new Board members. Well, apparently the dates we had planned for, particularly during the third week, simply did not work with their schedules. After re-juggling and considering everyone’s weeks, the agreed training sessions ended up looking like so: Monday, Wednesday Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. A little worrying, since Graham and I felt like we still had mountains to climb in order to finish the plan for the second training, let alone the third.

However, in hindsight, getting forced to figure it out with considerable time pressure was the best learning experience I could have asked for. Instead of procrastinating and waiting for other people to help me figure it out, I was thrown in with Graham, given about forty eight hours to plan seven hours’ worth of training material. Other than the rough work we had prepped while determining which topics to cover on each day, we had little to work with. It’s amazing what you can accomplish once you get pushed out of your comfort zone.

Rest assured, all the sessions turned out to be very successful – simultaneously the most relieving and rewarding feeling I have ever experienced. Two sessions packed with auditing, budgeting, goal setting and case work, all from scratch.  There were countless touching and eye-opening experiences. If and when the internet starts working again, I will post about all of them.