Busy week

I left for the Gold Coast (again) on the 23rd March for my week long conference. Nicci and I decided to fly up on the Friday so we could make a weekend of it.

Friday night we stayed with Nicci's friend Luke near Brisbane and enjoyed a great dinner and a few nice wines and dinner in the garden with his family.

Luke kindly gave us a lift the next day to Wet n' Wild where Nicci and spent most of the day at Calypso Beach floating around on a rubber ring!

We arrived at our conference venue on the Sunday at about 11:00am - Nicci had to be there early as she was facilitating and had to attend a session. I spent the afternoon in the huge lagoon swimming! What was to be the only relaxing time of the following week.

The Hyatt at Sanctuary Cove

Up early Monday morning for a run and gym session before breakfast and then to our conference room for Day 1 activities. I had met some of my team the previous night at the welcome dinner but today was designed to make sure we worked as a team. Our task was a 'virtual safari' run by Peak Teams.

The next day the real work started. The whole point of the conference is to teach a strategic planning and thinking model and apply this to real business issues, skillfully facilitated by Michael Wilkinson from Leadership Strategies based in Atlanta, Georgia. Believe the hype, Michael is the most incredible facilitator I have ever witnessed and I was super proud to be voted by my team as the person who had contributed the most to our case study challenge and receive a copy of Michael's book.

We all were taken through the process using a common case study and by Thursday we were back in our teams to work on other case studies submitted as part of the application process. Luckily I knew quite a lot about my case study because I wrote it :) We started at 8am in the morning and finally finshed up at 9:30pm (this could have been worse had it not been a master-stoke to pause for dinner and drink wine!).

The Hyatt's fantastic fake beach and lagoon

The other focus of the week really is the networking, getting to know other people in our vast organisation and also presenting to a board of senior leaders on the Friday with the aim of getting some support for your case study.

All in all, it was a fantastic week which saw me go ten-pin bowling, surfing at Surfer's Paradise, stroke a real life white tiger, have dinner on a fake beach, sing karioke twice and present to over 70 people with a hangover! Great stuff.