A Lost Journal Becomes a New Writing Opportunity

I’ve always wanted to be a leader. I chose to enlist in the Navy in August 2002 and was in boot camp only two months after high school graduation in 2003. At my first command, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), I began to experience the common joys of being a junior enlisted member of the military. How do we ex-military generally sum up this experience? Most of us say that especially (but not exclusively) at the very beginning of your tour, you’re a janitor. I don’t mean that the junior people were responsible for taking out the trash and such - we expected that - I mean that every day all day all we did was clean clean rooms and hallways. In your best sarcastic voice, “This was definitely the job we signed up for.”

As a part of my character and to avoid the deathly boredom I was told to expect from going into drydock, I requested and was denied a transfer to the USS George Washington (CVN-73), which was scheduled to deploy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It seems my ship’s leadership caught wind that my then boyfriend was serving on the Washington. I still have the request somewhere, with notes on the side from my officers that “this wasn’t a good idea.” Sure, I wanted to be closer to him, but I really wanted to experience the "real Navy."

Since I couldn’t deploy - my leadership needed me on the Roosevelt - I volunteered to be a member of the new and improved Ship’s Self Defense Force, which included two weeks of ship’s security training followed by one year of temporary assigned duty. It was there that I met a leader who, through hours of conversation while on watch, saw my internal desire to lead others. We had many conversations about successes and probably many more about failures of leadership in the Navy and sometimes in the entire military. When he found out that a Blue and Gold Officer was coming to Norfolk to speak to junior enlisted sailors that wanted to listen, he insisted that I go and arranged for me to get the day off to do it. Sure I was interested in college and being commissioned... but an hour’s lecture in Whites in the morning to get the rest of the day off? Sh'yeah!

After the admission criteria was presented to us and I realized there was a very good chance that I would get in, I applied. In the Spring of 2005, I received acceptance to the United States Naval Academy Class of 2010, after successful completion of one year’s studies at the United States Naval Academy Preparatory School. I was floored, ecstatic, shocked, and a little freaked out. I was going to be on my ship for another couple of months before summer training, and I decided to start collecting stories that I wanted to keep with me forever.

I bought a blank journal, carried it around with me, and started asking people to tell me things that they wanted me to remember when I was an officer. It was so important to me to learn and examine what I could while I was still hearing it from the perspective of a peer. I knew that once I was an officer, I would not likely hear the candor from the junior enlisted personnel that I was hearing then.

I remember it sometimes being more difficult than I expected it to be, to help my audience recall memories with a good moral to the story. Most of the input I got was from my peers, my fellow junior enlisted or junior petty officers. I also figured that at the Naval Academy I would have access to plenty of officer’s opinions, and that I needed to write down the opinions of my peers and the people I looked up to before I left the fleet for five years. It was much easier to record “things not to forget” from my enlisted buddies than the “leadership wins” I was looking for. I put a good number of stories and memories in that journal.

Despite all of this effort, it seems I have lost that journal. I’ve moved several times since I left the Navy in 2007, and I can’t find that journal anywhere. It pisses me off.

However, I will use this as an opportunity, this recognition of my anger and the remembrance of what I lost. This is the introductory post to a series of blogs titled “Leadership Wins.” I want to celebrate and record some of my first and second hand Leadership Wins for our mutual growth. I will learn more through the process of writing out the story of the Win, and I hope that you will take away and apply something from my experiences.

Of course, my ultimate vision is to be a part of a network of blogging Leaders, and there’s no reason you can’t start with me right now. (Did you just get excited?) Whether you start blogging about Leadership or not, I encourage you to keep a journal of successes to reference and draw strength from. It’s so easy to remember what you could have done better - give yourself some reinforcement and reminders about where and how you’ve succeeded already.

What’s the first “Leadership Win” story that just popped into your mind?