Wednesday Wisdom: Stretch Your Geographic Reach

The air was humid and clean. It wrapped around you in a subtle style each time you immersed yourself in it. Friendly people walked by with their mid-western dialect always sharing a hello. Around a conference table for five days were passionate individuals creating a stronger global organization with team members from England, Austria, Australia and the United States. It was the dawn of new international relationships for a great cause.

Sometimes we create our businesses or lives centered on a local base. It makes perfect sense to live, work and play in our own backyard. Eventually we branch out to new destinations because our lifestyle, family or work demands it and we then stay in that space for awhile until the next growth stage. The next time we might expand across this great land of ours or the globe.

If you followed my social media posts this week you observed me in a couple photos in Minneapolis, Minnesota – a place I have only visited on television watching the Minnesota Vikings football games. Invited there by the new CEO of 261Fearless.org, I joined in on a five day planning retreat to share my ideas on how they could expand their brand around the United States and globe. The five day meetings stretched my vocabulary, thinking and operations of business from a center to around the world.

I felt like I was back in college learning new things about people, cultures and ways to conduct business. We worked on flow of duties, multi-lingual communication, one world brand attention and fundraising. It was wonderful to stretch my mind beyond my average daily work duties. The conversations were passionate and like minded. I was enlightened intellectually and culturally.

Today’s Wednesday Wisdom is to encourage you to consider getting involved a national or international organization or unique opportunity this year that opens your mind to a new way of thinking and conducting business. If it has been a number of years working the same way with the same mindset, consider expanding your horizons to working or volunteering with a national or global organization where you can expand your brain, connections and cultures. Just because we have created a safe, successful work environment for ourselves locally, doesn’t mean we can’t also have an international experience to help enhance our lives.