In this episode of AESNation, John Bowen interviews me on the topics of team building and finding experts to build your business.
| Date: | January 5, 2015 |
|---|---|
| Appearance: | Sally Colocho Reveals Team Building Tactics And Focuses Your Radar To Engage The Right Expert – Episode #58 |
| Outlet: | Accelerating Entrepreneurial Success |
| Format: | Podcast |
I’ve always enjoyed brainstorming. In school, it was hanging out in the honors lounge throwing out crazy ideas and having everyone build on top of that until we had something huge. I enjoyed the creativity and the energy that came from thinking outside of the box. Sometimes it felt as if we were using science to take the fiction out of science fiction, but mostly we were exploring the dreams and aspirations that were dancing in our brains freshly loaded with education. As I entered the corporate world, brainstorming was different and at first seemed pointless. I’d throw an idea up on the white board then a bunch of people would explain to me why it wouldn’t work. I thought everyone just had a bad attitude, I thought they had lost their sense of dreaming.
But I learned how to turn that energy around and use it, and it really turned me around as well. I learned to write up on the board each of the reasons they threw at me for things not working, all of the obstacles. Then when we had a good list of 6 or 8, I would go one by one and ask everyone how we could get around the obstacle, remove the obstacle, or just avoid it all together. It was amazing what would happen once a tangible obstacle was put in front of this group of engineers. Their creativity and innovation cells started generating new ideas, and before long we not only had a big idea, we had an excellent plan of how to get it implemented.
When I was six, my father decided we would grow a vegetable garden in our back yard. I was thrilled, but this was no small back yard endeavor. We lived on twenty acres and our new “back yard” project was at least an acre. It had never been planted before so my memory is of back breaking work to till the soil then build up the rows, then planting seedlings we had sprouted in our garage. We planted all sorts of vegetables that I didn’t like to eat, I knew that because they were exactly the same ones we bought at the grocery store. I remember thinking it was an awful lot of work for something we could just buy at the store to not eat. It did not escape me that this seemed like a lot of effort and expense for something that wasn’t very expensive or attractive to begin with. But that was my opinion. I know my dad surely had his reasons for planting a garden and those were surely fulfilled.
We did this for a couple of years, then we didn’t do it anymore and the St. Augustine grass took over the ground we had worked so hard to expose the seasons before. You would think I would never want to do this again, EVER. But I have kept a vegetable garden in my own yard for over 15 years. My vegetable garden is quite different from that first one, because it is mine, and because my garden intentions are probably very different than my father’s. I didn’t make my kids help me, but I think they appreciated my garden and still do. This is why my garden stays around.