What do you do to enrich your perspective?

July 2020

Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in a rut, like when you have a problem but you just keep coming up with the same tired ideas that don’t really resolve the issue?  You know you need to look at the issue with a fresh set of eyes, but it’s just not happening. Know what I mean?

What do you do in those cases?

While writing my leadership books over the past few years, I’ve gone out of my way to seek the perspectives of leaders from different industries and other walks of life, sometimes even from different countries. I’m always amazed at what I learn when I talk to new people with different backgrounds. Sometimes I simply come away thinking, “Yeah, I thought I knew that.” Occasionally I’m dumbfounded, especially when I have a preconceived notion about what I’ll hear. You really never know what you stand to learn if you keep an open mind.

I recently interviewed Meg Crofton, retired President of Walt Disney World Parks and Resorts Operations, U.S. & France. During our 2+ hours together I peppered her with questions, in preparation for writing my third book, Women on Top: What’s Keeping You from Executive Leadership? I could have kept the conversation going all day, I found her that interesting. So many relatable yet nuanced insights.

At one point she said, “Have you ever been on a trip somewhere–it theoretically had nothing to do with some problem you were dealing with–and a light bulb went off and you went, ‘Oh my goodness! That's a whole different way to look at my issue back home!’”

Yep, I do know what that’s like. That’s one reason I so love to travel. If it weren’t for the worldwide Covid-19 hullabaloo, I’d be in Europe right now (yes, another trip cancelled). My husband and I love to travel together to places we’ve never been before because we inevitably gain entirely new perspectives. Sometimes these experiences completely change the way I see things, things I thought I already knew and understood. But guess what. There’s always more to every story.

Whenever we travel, we spend much of our time exploring historical sights–like the Nazi  concentration camp at Dachau–or taking some kind of class–like a mom and pop home cooking lesson in hut in Thailand where we literally sat on the ground, crushing freshly picked herbs into fine spicy pastes, using an ancient stone mortar and pestle. Wherever we go, whatever we learn is always more than we expected to discover. Our perspectives are always enriched.

Now that we can’t go anywhere quite so exotic, due to current travel restrictions, we still try to keep the learning doors open and the “ah ha!” moments alive. Thinking about the kinds of learning adventures we might try closer to home reminded me of one of the most interesting, mind expanding programs we ever attended, one which happened to be right in our own home town. Maybe you’ve done this yourself, but if not, I highly recommend you do it. What is it you ask?

Citizen’s Police Academy.

Yep, my husband and I attended the Citizen’s Police Academy put on by our own local police department. Talk about seeing things from a whole new perspective. OMG! You will find, when you walk just a portion of a mile in their shoes, you’ll develop a whole new appreciation for what these highly trained professionals do. It’s way more than you might think.

The program we attended was 12 weeks long, with three-hour sessions every Wednesday night. To attend, you must have no felony convictions, outstanding warrants, or pending criminal cases and you’re required to submit to a criminal background check before acceptance.

Topics covered during the program included SWAT, the K9 program, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), narcotics, traffic law, detective investigations, firearms, and more. We even had target practice in the police shooting range, using both semi-automatic pistols and M4 semi-auto and full-automatic three-round burst rifles.

We met our Chief of Police, all the managers, supervisors, and patrol officers, detectives, dispatchers, the communications officer, and a bevy of other employees. Every one of them answered whatever questions we threw at them. We talked about real crimes and real people, and we did adrenalin-pumping role-plays, shoot/don’t shoot scenarios, that gave us a feel for the kind of split-second decisions cops can be faced with.

During my role-play, I had to talk a theoretical crazed drug dealer into coming out of his house so we could cuff him. He turned out to be armed but I didn’t know that until we arrested him.  The student in a different role play scenario right after mine made a split second decision to shoot the perpetrator. In his case, the perpetrator turned out to be unarmed, but it sure looked like he was pulling a gun out of his pocket. What an eye opener.    

While the program is in no way based on a traditional police academy, it certainly gave us a better understanding of police department operations and we developed a far greater appreciation for the many ways the police serve our communities.

If you’ve never attended a Citizen’s Police Academy but meet the qualifications, I highly recommend it.  It will enrich your perspective in more ways than you might imagine.

If nothing else, it will give you some pretty good stories to share afterward, and it just might help you solve some completely unrelated issue you’ve been struggling with. If you have such a program in your local community, I guarantee it will get you out of that stay-at-home rut you might be stuck in.

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