Corralling My One Thing!

It took me a while to lasso that “One Thing” in my life – the one thing that, frankly, really got me out of bed every morning.

In the interim, my career as a TV News Correspondent had taken me into politics in Ottawa on Parliament Hill, and then after that to China as Beijing Bureau Chief for CTV and then NBC News.

In China, for the first time, I was in a position where the news didn’t come to me, I had to go and look for it. While most journalists really salivated over the next big story, I seemed to thrive in an environment where I had to go and find which story I wanted to tell.

As a result, I became a story machine, pumping out behind the scene features of China’s economic boom, and its social repercussions. Some of these reports pushed the limits of patience with China’s foreign ministry whose goal was to try to contain the foreign media.

On more than one occasion, my cameraman and I were taken in for some rather nasty interrogations. Still, I was able to forge into seemingly taboo subjects, such as, domestic violence, homosexuality, Aids and political dissidence, and I proudly sent my stories home, some of them international exclusives, every week to a North American audience.

While I eventually returned to Canada and spent another six years reporting nationally, and internationally, it occurred to me that I was a very different journalist then the one who left for Asia four years earlier. And what I discovered was that  I was becoming very clear about my “One Thing.”

In fact, like for most of us, our “One Thing” is the predominant theme running through our lives. Maybe you can already guess what mine is?

 

(NEXT TIME: How Former TV News Anchorman Lloyd Robertson finally helped me connect the dots?)

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