KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. -- Everything is awesome.
While to most people that statement just sounds like a line from a children’s movie, it’s something that brings a little more meaning to me and encourages me to be a better mentor for my Airmen.
Every year there is new leadership arriving to units all across the military. It’s usually pretty predictable what the dynamics will be like once that new leader arrives but not all leaders are created the same.
When Lt. Col. Daniels, 81st Training Wing Public Affairs chief, arrived at Keesler none of us were ready for him.
Anyone who knows him will say he is a firecracker and easily one of the most caffeinated officers in the Air Force. He’s probably one of the hardest workers that I’ve met in the military so when he arrived at Keesler I think he quickly saw the mess he was walking into and started putting the work in to make things better.
He came into an office that had barely any morale, overly worked personnel and people who had no motivation and we found out quick that the state we were in was not high in the Daniels Awesome Scale.
I looked at him one day and said “I’ve been trying for a long time to help this office get better and nothing works.” He stood there in the door of his office, held on to his coffee mug and just gave me his normal smile that he now gives me when he’s about to do something unexpected.
Within a few months he was rearranging our processes, making sure everyone went home on time, lowing our workload, upgrading our equipment and even pushing through requests to have upgrades done in our building.
Now you can sit there and think “Oh any leader can come in a fix the things he did.” You’re right. Any leader can send an email or delete meetings from the calendar but what makes an effective leader stand out from the rest is the awesome factor.
He took our unmotivated office and made us better through mentoring. Mentoring to not only make us better Airmen and public affairs professionals but also better humans.
He showed us the proper ways of being communicators and taught us to take risks within our craft. He encouraged us to think outside the box and not limit ourselves based off of what we were told to do in the past.
He showed us that just because we are in the military that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun . . . even if that means listening to “Everything is Awesome” while drinking the third mug of coffee for the day.
I would go to him with questions and instead of just handing me the answer he would say “Maybe you can find the answer in this document.” or “I don’t know. What do you think the solution is?”
While that was annoying at first, I quickly learned he was doing it to help me grow.
I think sometimes we take this for granted and don’t realize the power that being a good mentor has on people around us.
It’s easy to come to work, do the bare minimum that is asked of us and then go home. It’s easy to come in, do really good things to better only yourself and not pass that knowledge onto those around you.
We use the things he’s taught us to not only make us better Airmen but also better people.
Although there have been some rough days through deployments, COVID-19 and all the normal craziness he keeps pushing through.
Be a mentor. If you see someone who isn’t motivated, help them get motivated. If you see someone who is stuck, figure out why and show them the way through it.
Even when everything is going crazy, be like Daniels and make everything awesome through mentoring.