Self

Calibrate the task just above where someone currently is. Too easy and they drift; too hard and they shut down.

• Stretch assignments for members who have mastered their current role — with the support said out loud.
• Break big tasks down for new members. Small wins are what build the base.
• Name specific growth in public: "I want everyone to know how that was handled this week — that was not easy, and it was excellent."

Members who feel they belong show up, contribute, and recruit. Members who do not quietly disappear.

• Learn every member's name and one specific thing about them within three meetings.
• Connect members to each other, not only to you: "Have you met — you two should talk about this."
• Make the mission concrete: name the ward, the event, the people reached. Specificity beats abstraction.
• Missing two consecutive meetings with no contact is a belonging signal, not an attendance one. Reach out personally within 48 hours.

• Not placing at a competition — "I'm just not talented" versus "what specifically can I work on before the next one?"
• When feedback stings — hearing "you're not good enough" versus hearing a specific path to better.
• When someone else succeeds — feeling threatened versus getting curious about how they got there.

• The Student Leadership Competencies Inventory is free, has a shortened youth version, and takes about twenty minutes.
• Results are not stored. Print or screenshot them before closing the page — you will need them in April.
• A separate free 360 evaluation measures the behaviour dimension — what others see you do. That one comes later.

Nothing, yet. The point of this card is the vocabulary. The next card picks two.

The eight clusters sit cleanly under BUILD, EMPOWER, ADVANCE and CONNECT. That gives every card in this Hub and every module in the Advisor Development Program a common language.

Take your top two types and read across.

• Investigative → Health Science events and the Academic Testing Center. You like finding out.
• Social → Health Professions and the Leadership category. You like people and helping.
• Realistic → Emergency Preparedness and the skills-based events. You like doing with your hands.
• Enterprising → Teamwork events and the advocacy-shaped Leadership events. You like persuading and organising.
• Artistic → Health Career Photography, Public Service Announcement, the presentation-heavy events.
• Conventional → the Academic Testing Center, Medical Terminology, the events with a defined body of knowledge.

Once you have a category, the Study Hub has a tool for every event DC HOSA offers. This card gets you to the right shelf. It does not prepare you for the test — that is the Study Hub’s job, and it stays there.

Positive thinking about the outcome on its own reduces the energy to pursue it. Naming the obstacle, right after picturing the outcome, is what produces the plan. The if-then is what makes the plan fire without deciding in the moment.

SMART produces well-formed goals. This produces executed ones. If the chapter has a SMART worksheet, replace it with this.

After a win, the So What is usually ‘what specifically made that work, so I can do it on purpose’. After a loss, the So What is usually ‘what was in my control’. The Now What is the same either way — one change, one date.

Every clinical role debriefs. Surgery does it after every case; emergency medicine after every shift. The habit you build here on a competition result is the one you will use on a patient outcome.

Each competency becomes a WOOP card — the obstacle line is what keeps it alive past October.

The free 360 evaluation. Two or three people who watched you all year score the behaviour dimension. Compare to September. That is the year’s development, in a number.

The Guide is a DC HOSA resource distributed through affiliate communications and the State Executive Council. Ask your advisor or the VP Public Relations for the current link.

• More types of participation went with greater academic motivation and engagement, better grades, higher career self-efficacy, and stronger college aspirations.
• Of the four elements, competition showed the most positive effects.
• And: the CTSO students in the study started the year ahead of the comparison group and gained less across it. This Hub does not cite the study as proof that HOSA causes achievement. It supports a breadth recommendation and nothing more.

A chapter that only competes loses the members who did not place. A chapter with all four quadrants gives every member a place to be good at something.

• What does an ordinary day actually look like?
• What did you not expect about this work?
• What would you tell a student who is choosing between this and something adjacent?
• What is the training path, really, and where do people get stuck?
• Who else should I talk to?
• Is there anything I could read or watch that would help me understand this better?

A thank-you, three sentences, naming one thing they said that changed how you see the field. That note is what makes the second conversation possible.

Which single resource, if added, would change the ratio most? Not three. One. The answer becomes the ask — to a department chair, to the SEC, to the State Advisor — and the Internal Advocacy Pack is how you make it.

If you want to name where the strain is, there are six: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values. Naming the dimension is the first step. It is not the fix — the fix is the resource.

Wherever possible the incoming officer sits beside the outgoing one for the last month — in meetings, watching decisions, asking in real time. Reconstructing context after the fact is what the packet is for; it is never as good as having been there.

The same format applied to the roles that persist — vendor relationships, OSSE contacts, form IDs, repositories, credentials, what is on autopilot and what is not. It is the affiliate’s largest continuity risk, and the one nobody writes down because the people holding it have not left yet.