Gav's Blog

Over the weekend, I had an interesting realization about the challenges of staying motivated as an individual. I came to thinking about this when looking at how I geocache, but what I observed suggests that it applies to anything in life.

In some regards, this is a fairly obvious point to note, but like many things in life – they aren’t always as obvious as they should be.

In looking at the way I geocache, I find that I tend to fit into two distinct patterns. When caching with others, I will cache very hard, I am motivated, and I feed off and motivate others that I am caching with. However, I find it much harder to motivate myself to go caching by myself unless I am in just the right mood.

When I recognized this, it also became instantly apparent to me that this behavior was also present in other aspects of my professional and personal lives. This led me to ask two key questions:

1. How can I better motivate myself when others around me are not challenging and motivating me?

   I cannot expect or demand others to always be there to motivate me when I need it, hence I think as a means of general personal improvement, I need to find better ways of motivating myself to action. Of course, there are always the obvious means of goals and rewards, but I’m honestly looking for simpler tips and tricks that motivate me to action. I am spoilt for choice when it comes to caching and outdoor activities, and indeed other things in my life – the challenge is choosing what to do, and then having the mental fortitude to continue to motivate oneself until the activity is completed. Even with enjoyable activities and hobbies, you need a means of challenging oneself to action – such as processing photos after a good photography field trip.

2. How can I better challenge and motivate others around me?

   Whilst people respond differently to stimuli, I’m sure some of what I learn as to how I can motivate myself will also be able to be applied to others. So, I hope that over time I will be ale to learn what motivates me to action, and then be able to turn this around to motivate and challenge others to action.

Coming back to my original observation of hunting geocaches, I think that one of the reasons I am sometimes a little ‘slack’ caching by myself, is a result of trying to leave a buffer of unfound caches in Christchurch. In my mind, this means I am less likely to cache when traveling by myself. Why? I thought of it this way – if I had no buffer in Christchurch, and had found all nearby caches, then I would be forced to travel to find geocaches. I believe this is why a good friend of mine – Moneydork – is so driven to find caches, especially when traveling, because he doesn’t maintain a buffer at home, and this motivates the hell out of him to find as many caches as possible when he is away from home.

So, I think a good first step for me to motivate myself to more caching, is to work on finding all the of caches near home, so when considering a days caching, I haven’t got a fallback position to just ‘just doing a few around town’.

Decreasing the number of nearby unfound caches is likely to provide greater motivation for day trips caching, as well as ensure I drive past less caches when traveling as I do now.

It’s kind of a catch-22 really, my actions will probably lead to greater motivation, and greater motivation will definitely lead to more action. I guess there is a bit of wisdom tied up in the Nike slogan ‘Just do it!’ – only one way to find out…

I received an interesting attack on my professional credibility recently. I want to recount and discuss this here in broad terms, because it is part of a bigger issue that emergency managers sometimes have to deal with. In short, my ability to provide advice was questioned because I have never been involved in operational response for a disaster.

This of course, didn’t really bother me. As an emergency manager, I know that this is a good thing, after all, why would we want to have more disasters just so that people can gain more experience. Often times, experience with disasters comes down to who is unlucky enough to be there, or to be close enough to help out.

Historically, many emergency managers have come from a variety of different paths into their existing roles. A large number have come from operational roles in emergency services (police, fire, ambulance) or the military. More have come from other related roles such as natural hazards analysis at councils, or researchers into natural hazards. A number of us also come up through the volunteer ranks – we start as rescue volunteers, take a more serious interest, and turn it into a profession.

The thing is, none of these roles come with a guarantee of having previous experience in managing a disaster. The military and emergency services certainly have a fair amount of operational experience and training. Rescue volunteers have a fair amount of training. Hazards analysts and risk managers have the educational background.

This is where the Certified Emergency Manager program from the International Association of Emergency Managers comes into play. It is designed to try and create a common certification process designed around creating a common set of  requirements. These requirements are designed to try and support all the different careers paths that bring people into emergency management. These requirements include:

• Training – in both emergency management and general management
• Management Essay – to demonstrate knowledge, skills and abilities
• References
• Multi-choice Examination
• Experience – across all phases of emergency management
• Education
• Contributions to the Profession

To achieve the CEM, one has to put together a sizeable package to document these requirements, and these are then reviewed by your peers to determine if you should be certified.

Whilst I’m fairly comfortable with what I have done in emergency management over the past 12 years, I haven’t got much to be able to hold up and say, I’m experienced. As a consultant, it is potentially even more difficult as we tend not to work within an operational agency – you typically need to work within the public sector, or an NGO to get those opportunities.

This recent personal attack has been enough to spur me into action to start building my application pack and applying for my CEM. Then at least I’ll be able to demonstrate that I’ve manage to document my experience to my peers, and they agree that my experience meets the requirements laid down in the CEM Program.