Good News Stories
There is something very powerful about sharing a good news story, so here we are.
18 months ago I was on the ground after the major incident that was Storm Desmond’s flooding here in Keswick, Cumbria. I was asked to make an assessment of the local businesses affected by the floods. It was a heck of a week, that grew into a heck of a few months as the scale of the problems started to arise. I wrote about it back then, about how inspired, amazed and proud I was of the fortitude and resilience of the business people I met.
18 months later, here is the good news story. Derwent Pencil Museum, the home of the world’s largest coloured pencil finally re-opened! They have spent 18 months of painstaking rebuild, finding new exhibits where old ones had been washed away, redesigning the old building and making it modern and flood proof.
I was delighted to have been invited along and even more delighted that voice of my youth, John Craven did the honours of cutting the tape.
As John recounted the recent history, the emotion in the air was almost palpable. There were employees of Derwent from years ago and from today (the pencil factory is still located in Cumbria), and the reminder of where this museum had come from, what the people had been through and how much teamwork, leadership and darned hard work had gone into getting where it is today was quite something.
It reminded me of how important it is to celebrate our good news. Yes it took 18 months. Yes it was a big job and yes there was plenty else that these employees could have been doing that day. But the smiles were real. The joy at a job well done was clear. The pleasure of seeing and hearing how much it meant to others? Priceless.
We spend so much time focusing on our weaknesses, on what we need to do better, sometimes we forget to celebrate what we are doing well. Lets spend some time making each other feel better, not worse.
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