Learnings from the Heart of a Warrior Advance

I had an excellent weekend at the Heart of a Warrior Advance at the end of September. The weekend included some great speakers, but my two key learnings came during the athletic competitions.

The first activity that I competed in was archery. When all the people who had signed up for archery arrived at the target area, no one had shown up to organize our competition. For some reason, all of the participants were looking at me to coordinate it. So I decided to take action and organize an archery competition that included three rounds for the nine participants. I was successful! From that experience, I felt, "Wow! I am a leader."

The other learning took place during a game of pickup football. Now, I was neither the youngest person nor the fastest person on the team. When my team was on offense, I was being covered for a while -- until the other team realized that passes were not coming my way. Then they stopped covering me. At that point, the quarterback huddled us together and said, "What are you seeing out there?"

"Well, obviously, they're not covering me," I replied.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes," I said.

During the next play, I ran down to the one yard line. I was open, he passed to me, and I scored a touchdown! From that I learned, "I have what it takes."

Incidentally, the theme for the Heart of a Warrior Advance was "Are you ready?" I surely am.