Leadership programs will help you SOAR in 2018

One word. If you have one word to describe your life in 2018, what would that word be?
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Our team recently read the book One Word That Will Change Your Life by Jon Gordon, Jimmy Page and Dan Britton. The concept is simple – choose one word to focus on for the year that will help you be your best self.

Each of us chose our own word and then shared it with the team so that our colleagues, the people we spend the most time with each day, can help us stay focused on our word throughout the year.

Our annual Leadership Series also has a theme word each year. The word is used throughout the year to help our participants stay focused as they aspire to become better leaders and create change. The word chosen for 2018 is Soar.

Think about that word for a minute. Soar. What does it mean to soar? It means to rise to a higher or more exalted level. To not just fly, but to soar above all expectations.

And that’s what we want to help you do in 2018. At the Ames Chamber of Commerce, we pride ourselves in providing quality leadership programs to our members and the greater community.

We believe everyone should have access to world-class leadership and motivational speakers. It’s simply not feasible for everyone to travel to a national conference to learn from inspirational speakers. Small business owners find it hard to shut down the office for a day to attend a regional event. And some people simply don’t have peer groups of which to convene with.

So, we bring the inspiration to you. On March 28 we are launching our 2018 Leadership Series Soar with a phenomenal speaker and entrepreneur. Jess Ekstrom started her company, Headbands of Hope, as a junior in college. Although her company is successful now, she faced great adversity along her journey. In fact, she says that failure is a part of success – that to succeed you must follow your passion and keep getting up when you are knocked down.

We are so excited to bring a speaker of this caliber to kick off our 2018 series. She will inspire and motivate us to reach for the stars and follow our passion. In May we will host Leadercast, a day-long broadcast event featuring incredible leaders who have defied the odds to get where they are today. Past leaders include Olympic athletes, military heroes, Fortune 500 CEOs and leaders of social change. I can’t wait to announce this year’s incredible lineup.

Later this summer we will host a panel of local leaders who will share their stories of adversity and failure that led to their moments of soaring. This panel will certainly be a great opportunity to learn from some of Ames’ finest leaders. And later this fall we will host our Leadership Series Capstone Event, another fantastic event that will bring an exciting leader to the stage to help us continue to Soar as we close out the year.

As you can see, we are bringing world-class leadership and motivational speakers to Ames throughout the year. We invite you to join us at one or all of the events. We believe that by working towards a common goal, in this case a common word, we can raise ourselves to a new level. And to quote Walt Disney and a certain lovable elephant, “Don’t just fly, soar.”

-Dan Culhane, President & CEO