Train the Trainer Session focusing on The Best Self.

I am settling in nicely here in Nigeria. Today, November 3, 2023, l led a Train the Trainer Session focusing on The Best Self. The concept of Your Best Self is rooted in research that emerged from the branch of Leadership Studies known as Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS).  In POS we ask the key question: How do we create and sustain the practices, ecosystems and enabling environments where human beings flourish and thrive? This central question touches upon our individual lives as well as larger societal concerns. POS research reveals that bringing Your Best Self into every facet of your life fosters good will, individual and community well-being, resilience and peak performance.

The 2-hour session, involving appropriately 200 LCU student leaders, drawn from, inter alia, medicine, law, pharmacy, engineering, nursing and management, was highly interactive.  Working in small groups, for example, participants identified leaders, discussing the qualities of effective leaders (i.e., caring, discipline, commitment, focus, listening skills and integrity). Participants completed exercises identifying leadership characteristics and reflected upon their own lived experience. Then, they developed and shared a series of episodes in which they were at their best. In the end, participants prepared a Best Self Portrait that will serve as both a statement and standard for them to strive to meet. The Train the Trainer Session was so well- received that we have scheduled another session next Friday to deliver the River of Life Workshop. I am pleased that LCU’s leadership had the vision to organize this program as a Train the Trainer event because it has the multiplier effect as students from the various colleges, departments and programs share their newly-acquired skills with their classmates and friends.  I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to be of service to Africa’s young people.