January 2023 President’s Message

President Christina Crowe.

I’m going to start my first newsletter article with a confession: I’m a nerd.

I know we have a lot of weather geeks in the NWA but my nerdiness is more about a general love of learning. When looking at colleges, I was deciding between majoring in meteorology or music education. As a forecaster, I always loved helping develop local training for our office and helping grow our newest team members, and for the last five years training has been my full time job. One of my top CliftonStrengths traits is ‘Learner’ and is defined by Gallup as having “a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. The process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites [Learners].”  As a leader it also encourages me to admit I’m still learning and invite others to learn with me.

So, when it came to my duty as President of the NWA to determine the theme for 2023 and our Annual Meeting, it will probably come as no surprise that I’m leaning into that theme of learning. Since some of us in the NWA are in the early stages of our careers, some are enjoying the new freedoms of retirement, and many are somewhere in between, the following phrase kept coming to mind:

“You’re either green and growing or ripe and rotting.”

(Both Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald’s restaurant chain, and Frosty Westering, a college football coach, are credited with the quote. Simply because of his name, I’ll go with crediting Frosty!) No matter who said it, I love this visual reminder of the fact that when you decide to stop growing, you’ve resigned yourself to getting stale and rotting.

In my mind, this “Continual Growth & Development” theme isn’t JUST about continuing to learn and grow in our understanding of our atmospheric science. It’s about improving our ‘soft skills’ — our ability to communicate with each other, lead teams, and manage conflict. It’s about improving our understanding of the communities and partners we serve - learning more about challenges they face and how we can best support them. The same goes for learning more about the diverse perspectives WITHIN our NWA community and how we can be more welcoming and inclusive to more future members.

Over the course of the next year, I challenge YOU to join me in setting goals for yourself — lean into the “Continual Growth & Development” theme throughout the year, not just at the annual meeting. What I’ve outlined below might seem a little like a New Year’s Resolution, but hopefully using the SMART Goals framework will help us each be more successful than the average resolutions!

  • Pick three (3) things you’d like to learn more about or get better at this year.

  • Use a SMART Goals framework to write out what you’d like to work on and find another member who could be your accountability buddy.

  • Join me on the NWA Community Platform to share what goals you’re setting for yourself. You can find the thread by joining the 2023 Annual Meeting Group. (More information about Member Groups below.) I’ll post my three goals there, too! We can use those ideas for webinars during the year or events at the annual meeting.

  • While you’re there, help other members find resources to achieve their goals.

One of the biggest ways I want to incorporate this theme into the Annual Meeting is to include an afternoon of workshops where you can learn something to take back to your school or office. These workshops will be longer than a traditional 15-minute presentation session and allow us time to really dig into some topics in more depth. Stay tuned for future newsletter videos and articles where we will discuss more about the workshops and other ways this theme will play out in the Annual Meeting in September!

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