Dr. Jim Street

JIM’S JOURNEY IN A NUTSHELL
After 36 years in higher education as a leadership educator, I was ready for a change and a challenge. I loved working with college students and helping them to understand the leadership process and to develop their capacity to lead. I believe it matters. All the while, it had been some time since I felt scared, uncomfortable and challenged at work. What if I were to take my expertise and share it with people in the business world, where the stakes are much higher? Before jumping into that world, I decided I needed a restart.

So I searched to find an experience that would be challenging and uncomfortable - something that would require new ways of knowing, being and doing. So I decided to go on a walk on the Appalachian Trail. I wasn’t sure how long I would be on the trail, but I wanted to be there long enough to where life on the trail was the new norm. When Thoreau left society to live at Walden Pond, he said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Reflecting back on my experience, the Trail had so much to teach: about myself, about resilience, patience, self-reliance, simplicity, and self-authorship. I ended up walking 900 miles on the A.T., then added another 100 on trails in Scotland to make for a 1000 mile journey.

On to the next challenge - Ridgeline Leadership.