Doing Award Winning Work

Wow! The attention-grabbing headline: Southwest Institute of Healing Arts wins SIX out of eleven categories in the Arizona Private School Association’s annual Best Practices Awards. Among SWIHA’s awards was the top achievement; “School of the Year”. SWIHA is honored to win such recognition and blessed to be supported by such an inspired and committed team. We are proud of all the accomplishments of our school and honored to be a community center for learning and healing.

Nearly 70 schools hold APSA memberships. These schools include; Collins College, Cortiva Institute, Arizona School of Massage Therapy, PIHMA, I.T.T. Technical Institute, Conservatory of Recording Arts/Sciences, to name a few.

Below are the six categories won by SWIHA:

1. Best Retention/Completion Program
2. Best Teacher of the Year – WINNER~RICHARD SEAMAN
3. Best Recruiting Practice
4. Best Community Student Practice
5. Best Student Financial Services Practice
6. “School of the Year”

Winning awards is exciting news and very worthy of sharing. This is especially true when you have poured your heart and soul into a project, assignment, creation, businesses or other work. A lot of amazing work goes on at SWIHA and a lot of work did go into preparing the information to back up submissions for the entries in the APSA Awards. A number of SWIHA peers/fellow workers composed detailed and artfully written entries for each submission, which I would be happy to share if anyone would like to read them.

One I would particularly like to highlight is that for Teacher of the Year award-Richard Seaman. Richard is a Master Life Coach and instructor. Among his many accomplishments at SWIHA Richard:

• Developed a social networking site; SWIHA Connections

• Designed Advanced Life Coaching classes and Alternative Lifestyles and Diversity Class

• Organized students to volunteer weekly healing sessions and workshops at the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS

Congrats Richard! On the heels of these APSA award announcements came another; readers of Natural Awakenings magazine selected SWIHA as Preferred School for Holistic Health Education in its awards for outstanding practices in the Holistic Health Industry.

Initially it is common for great elation with winning an award. Being chosen for a prize usually means a judge or a panel made up of your professional peers or a group of independent qualified people appointed to carefully consider all of the applicants in a competition decides your entry is the best.

I’ve been blessed to have won some awards during my career in journalism including an Emmy, a Golden Mike Award, and 12 awards from the Associated Press. I can relate to how good it feels. The first response is appropriately congratulations and raising of glasses. There is nice plaque or trophy, sometimes a monetary award, an announcement, accolades from comrades and supporters and a feeling of accomplishment and recognition.  An additional layer of credibility is draped over the accumulation of all your efforts.  For an individual, awards look good on the resume, however they do not put bread on the table.  So then it is back to work.  What I really remember about the awards I have personally won is not the luncheon, dinner or ceremony. When I look at the list of stories I did in order to receive the awards, I remember the people in the stories, the experiences gained in putting them together and the honor of being able to share those stories with an interested audience.  My most prized trophies are not plaques or statuettes, but an antique cookie tin and a houseplant received from people who were truly grateful to have their stories told.

Not to digress from SWIHA’s awards,  it all sort of ties together with this wonderful and rightly-awarded recognition for SWIHA.

What happens when the award goes to a person or organization that tends to look deeper, seek the importance of such recognition? An entity that asks the question, “What does this award really mean?” Is it all about winning? Of course not.

The answer can be found in the philosophy of KC Miller, Founder and Director of Southwest Institute of Healing Arts; “It is not about winning the awards, but rather doing the work that would win the awards.” Therein lies the ‘ah-ha’.

The bottom line: winning awards is simply a testimony to the effort put forth to do the best job that you can and along with it, the work that is done within. For SWIHA, it is the amazing work going on inside the walls of the school and in and around the community by the staff, teachers and students of SWIHA.

-Merry L.