Building a website sometimes feels like doing a deep purge in your closets, or a very thorough spring cleaning. There are things you haven’t seen in…well, it seems like forever…that all of a sudden see the light of day once again. That old sweater that you just know is exactly what you’ll need for the next winter. The copy of your graduation photo. A high school yearbook.
A year doesn’t seem that long, but a lot can happen. That’s true at JADE. As we put together our new website and go back over the past year to gather content, all of a sudden we see the hidden gems (hidden by the passage of time) that helped define what JADE has meant to so many people.
The “Wow!” in the title of this blog entry comes from seeing the caliber of guest coaches JADE has had over the past year – that comment ignores the great guest coaches we have had over the past nearly five years too. We’ve added links on the Events page to each of the events that JADE has held this past year, with all the information shared in our emails to the members. Looking at the breadth of topics that we’ve covered would elicit a “wow”, but that “wow” is even more incredible when we looked at the biographies of each of our coaches.
JADE attracts the leading practitioners in their respective areas to guest coach – we won’t give a shout out in this blog to any single one, but we encourage you to do what we did on the Events page and let your jaw hit the ground, like it did with us. The other “wow” factor is that each guest coach is a volunteer. They give their time to write an educational piece, to write a role-play, to show up and share their knowledge with all of us – not because of our generous pay rates (yup…hugs are still free) – but because each of them believes in what JADE stands for, and each of them knows the importance of sharing. A common theme in our coaches’ feedback? They say they learned as much, or more, from the session as the coach, as they think they gave to the attendees. JADE is that proverbial two-way street.
It’s easy to become JADE-d when you are used to having such high quality coaches, month after month. It’s easy to take it for granted. Building our new website was a nice reminder of the treasures that we have tucked away in our closets.
The other treasure that we discovered in our website spring cleaning? Lots and lots of good memories. The role-plays that made us learn. The ones that made us cry. And nearly all of them made us laugh and smile. JADE is a series of wonderful memories of our members sitting around a table (or a Zoom call) and sharing in each other’s learning, and forming a supportive community.
If you’re a JADE member, you can share your comments on our Blog posts. What good memories do you have of a specific JADE coach or session? Which role-play or character made you laugh the most? Does anybody still remember Briggs the dog? We’d love to hear from you.