As Summer draws near, so does the wind down of most unit's program until school starts back up in the fall. However, your progress in the Journey to Excellence (JTE) benchmarks does not stop.

This is a great time of year to see where you are at and make adjustments, if needed, to hit the Gold Level achievements for your Unit's perspective JTE requirements. Most units will be sitting down during the summer months and plan out next year's calendar, events, and activities during its Annual Planning Conference. This is a great time to look at your JTE Scorecard and see how you are doing and in what areas you need to improve on to finish out the calendar year strong.

​What Journey to Excellence Brings to Your Unit

​A framework for planning the year.

• The Journey to Excellence standards are based on what successful units do to continually improve.
  
• If your unit plans to achieve gold or silver Journey to Excellence, you’ll have a strong and active program.
  

A method for evaluating your unit.

• Journey to Excellence provides tangible measurements based on things you are likely already tracking, such as how many campouts you have, how many youth are advancing, etc., and uses simple ways to calculate your performance.
  

Guidance in areas where you might do better.

• As you track your performance against the Journey to Excellence standards, you can easily see where you could do better.
  

Specific guidelines and standards of what is considered good performance.

• Journey to Excellence has specific, simple measures to help you. You can easily compare what you are doing against the standards.
  

Early warning of potential problem areas.

• You track any areas where your unit is not performing as you might like and have plenty of time to make corrections.
  

Recognition for good Scouting.

• You can proudly receive your bronze, silver, or gold recognition for your Scouting unit for the year.
  

Benchmarking to get ideas and tips from other good units.

• You can receive help and best practices in areas where other units have met the gold standard. • In the areas where you are doing well, you can give help and ideas to other units.

​Scouting’s Journey to Excellence is the BSA’s planning, performance, and recognition program designed to encourage and reward the success of our units, districts and councils. It is meant to encourage excellence in providing a quality program at all levels of the BSA.

Successes or Failures? What's your focus?

One's focus can determine ones direction, thus the ability to either succeed or fail in life. 

But what constitutes failure? What is success? What do they really look like? Have we gotten so "black and white" in our society that if success doesn't measure up to a certain standard or some invisible bar we have set, that it's automatically a failure? Have we become that shallow?

​Our society likes to celebrate winning and everything that comes along with it: money, status, power, privilege, and fame. Yet failure is often what helps us develop perseverance, wisdom, and maturity. We tend to learn and grow more from our mistakes and failures than through our successes.

It has been said that when inventor Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb, a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." Edison has also been noted for saying, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

What a perspective! How close have you been to reaching a goal or achieving something, just to give up right before a break through? How many of you would have pushed through if you could have had a glimpse into the future to see how close you really were? The very definition of persistence and perseverance (two words I wish were in the Scout Law); ...a continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition. Taking the "I Can't" out of the equation and replacing it with "I Can" or "I Will".

What prompted this post was what happened, or rather what was said last night during a local troop's Court of Honor. As the ceremony was coming to a close, the Senior Patrol Leader (SPL) came forward to offer his "SPL's Moment," kind of like a Scoutmaster's Minute, only coming from the SPL. The SPL said, "Well, this was our June Court of Honor. It wasn't that great. We are still a young troop and still need to work on things." That may not be verbatim, but does cover the gist of what was said. The SPL looks over at the Scoutmaster to indicate it is his turn to come up for his Scoutmaster's minute.

The Scoutmaster was looking at his iPad while the SPL was speaking, he was glancing over what he was going to say for his time in front of the boys and their families. As the SPL spoke, you could see the expression on the Scoutmaster's face change. He closed his iPad cover, and set the device down on the table behind him, and began to speak.

"I had an object lesson all planned, but hearing what [SPL] said changed my mind. He said, "the Court of Honor wasn't all that great," but I think it was awesome! Why? Because they did it! They planned it. They executed it, ranks, awards, and achievements were given out, and I think they did a fantastic job." The audience applauded the boys.

The Scoutmaster continued on encouraging the boys to look at their accomplishments as more than just pass or fail. Was the Court of Honor perfect, by no means. But we are human and not perfect either. This is what Scouting is about. Teaching, growing, and guiding our youth to be our future leaders through learning and developing life skills. Whether those skills are cooking, swimming, life saving, first-aid, planning projects, communication, public speaking, or conducting a Court of Honor, the idea is not to get it perfect on the first try, but learn and develop, and grow into productive citizens of society. He wrapped up his speech with, "It's ok to stumble, to make mistakes, even to fall. But you have to get up and keep going, keep pressing on, keep moving forward, and ensure you are heading in the right direction."

Winston's quote sounds a lot like the advice Solomon gave in the Bible:

When we stumble, when we fall, are we willing to quit or are willing to rise up and keep going? Are we willing to be steadfast in our resolve to keep moving forward? As Dory put it in Disney's Finding Nemo, are we going to "just keep swimming?"

Teachable moments come from time to time, and we must be diligent and aware of these opportunities that can be seized to instruct and encourage others....especially our Scouts. Anything worth having is worth striving for. We need to forget what is behind us and strain toward what lied ahead. Press toward the goal, to win the prize. Keep learning, keep growing, be purposeful, be persistent. . John Maxwell says that, “More than anything else, what keeps a person going in the midst of adversity is having a sense of purpose. It is the fuel that powers persistence.”