A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw
This past Thursday a colleague and I decided to try out conducting a joint teleseminar. I have conducted teleseminars, but they were arranged and managed by a client corporation, and I know my colleague has done them as well. I wanted to gain experience managing the whole process so we agree that I would interview Tim, my colleague.
The teleseminar was basically the law of attraction in action. Virtually everything I had worried about, particularly with respect to technology, happened even though I thought we had taken adequate preventive actions. I wanted the teleseminar to be perfect, and it was far from it. In fact it felt very amateurish. Tim and I talked immediately after the teleseminar and agreed that we would both be in a better frame of mind to let 24 hours go by before talked more about the teleseminar and our next steps, if there were any. Then, I went out and took a long walk.
Time and the beauty of nature are gifts. Allowing more time to pass, and allowing myself to experience the trees, plants, birds, lagoons on my walk enabled me to let go of my feelings of disappointment. When Tim and I did talk some amazing things happened. We talked about our different styles and objectives, what we appreciated about those differences as well as how those differences did not serve us well in our first attempt at a joint teleseminar.
This conversation led us to a completely different line of thinking about next steps. We agreed to have a series of 30 minute conversations about communications – style differences, having impact when people are overwhelmed with communications already, how communication needs of the future will be different. We will structure the technology just as we would to conduct a teleseminar and we will tape the conversations, but there will be no audience. This will allow us to perfect our style, and delve deeper into the topic of communications in a way that will be much more valuable for our targeted audience. Then, we can make these conversations accessible on our websites and blogs for free. In the long run, our new approach feels better and I believe it will be far more valuable to others. And, most importantly, without our disappointing teleseminar, we would not have ended up here!
I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success. Jack Welch
Tags: disappointments, learning, mistakes, partnerships, resilience
