A Vision For The Future

For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in Wisconsin, in a small city called Green Bay. You may have heard of us; we have a football team, and an amazing ex-quarterback who can’t really decide whether to retire or not. Even though the "Green Bay Metropolitan Area" has about 282,000 people, covering three counties, it still feels like a small town in many respects.

I’ve come to learn that Green Bay has a life cycle that you don’t find many other places. Kids who grow up in Green Bay most often hate it. I certainly did. I couldn’t wait to get out of there after high school, so I ran far, far away… to a small Lutheran College in the middle of farm country, aka Minnesota. Well, it seemed far to me at the time!

During college, I only got to go home and see my family every two months or so. The longest time I was away from my parents came during my junior year of college, when I went on an around-the-world abroad trip for five months. Eventually, my time away from Green Bay got longer once I started following my Navy Submariner boyfriend (now my husband) around the country.

I wanted to see new places and new people. I found Centerpoint in the process and I am forever grateful. I get to work at a place I believe in, helping other people in the same ways I’ve been helped, and doing it all with amazing coworkers whom I love.

In getting out of Green Bay, I laughed at the people who either stayed or who left for a while and later moved back to be closer to their families. It seems to me that so many Wisconsin people do move back, many more more than I’ve found anywhere else. I never thought I would do that, or even want to. And yet, I’ve been to 10 different countries, and lived on both coasts, and there’s only one place that feels like home to me. That one place is the Midwest: Wisconsin and Minnesota.

I’ve been thinking about my vision statement these days. It didn’t really have a location in it when I wrote the first draft or two a year and half ago. At that time, I was much more concerned about what I would be doing wherever I landed… because that was up to the Navy at the time. Now that my husband’s out of the Navy, and now that I have more choice about where I am, I think it might be time to take another look at my vision statement and see how to incorporate these new ideas into it.

All of us at Centerpoint are continually refining our vision statement, reexamining what is true, and what is no longer true, or just needs a tweak. Change is cyclical, a life-long process and I’m not done yet. I’ll keep you posted in the coming entries as to where this takes me.