5How Are You at Your Best?Clarifying Your Version of Peak Performance
From Concert to Cellblock
His daughter's school concert was well under way when John Wetzel's smartphone lit up with an urgent text. There was a crisis at the jail where he was the warden. One inmate had taken another hostage. The officers on duty had done everything they could to resolve the situation peacefully, but the hostage-taking inmate was demanding to talk to the warden. Wetzel slipped out of the elementary school audience, got in his car, and headed back to work.
Thirty-six years old, Wetzel had been the warden for Pennsylvania's Franklin County jail for four years. During that time, he had turned the institution around with a strong emphasis on programs designed to promote a successful reentry into society when inmates left the system. Wetzel's strategy was all about the approaches and treatment that would lead to positive outcomes. As he walked down the main hallway of the jail back to the cells that night, he was thinking to himself, “Shit, man, you build up all this stuff, and here it all goes out the window tonight.”
As he approached the cellblock, Wetzel saw that a tactical team was ready to go and that the rest of his staff was looking at him with expressions that were silently ...
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