Explore Winners

With short days and cold weather, it can be hard to find the motivation to do anything during the winter, other than staying indoors next to a warm fire. So, we’re extra proud of our team for all of the ‘new things’ we went out and conquered over the last couple of months. As we previously highlighted, new experiences trigger the release of dopamine, which can provide motivation and energy and counteract feelings of stress. We started our 1st Annual Explore Contest on November 1, 2018, with the purpose of overcoming fear, stimulating creativity, and improving our health and happiness in order to work better together as a team, as well as better help our clients. To celebrate our accomplishments, we had an awards ceremony to honor the victors – and the other active participants, of course. Want to know the outcome?

As a team, we collectively visited 44 new places, participated in 62 new activities and enjoyed 32 new types of food and/or restaurants! We also made it a point to showcase all of these fun new things through pictures to help inspire and encourage one another. We have a lot of great photos of the RDF team doing some pretty impressive things, from ice fishing and archery, to eating haggis (look up the definition at your own risk!)

So, who were the individual winners?

First place – Michelle Thomas with 16 new places, 16 new activities, and 9 new types of food and/or restaurants

Second Place – Athena Proctor with 2 new places, 7 new activities, and 4 new types of food and/or restaurants (with extra points for getting friends and co-workers to tag along!)

Third Place – Liz Persons with 5 new places, 7 new activities, and 1 new types of food and/or restaurants

Highlights

Team members were presented with other fun and inspirational awards, such as the ‘Fearless Foodie’, ‘007’, and ‘Making a Difference’, which was presented to a couple of our folks for donating their time through volunteer work. Overall, we learned a lot about ourselves and each other and had fun in the process. We’re already looking forward to the next RDF challenge, whatever it might be, bringing more opportunities to grow and help others – stay tuned!