Hi Friend,
Wow what a week! We finally were able to take new photos for the website refresh. It was literally our fourth or fifth try. Between COVID, ice and sickness we’ve had to postpone it several times. Thankfully it was a beautiful day and all went well.
We also produced a virtual conference this week in Dallas. We got to use the Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters practice facility in Frisco, called The Star. It is absolutely spectacular. We were upstairs in the Cowboy Club looking down on the indoor field – which was being converted for a gymnastics tournament. Our client was hosting their client event. We did the same event in Tallahassee last year. (This was better). 🙂
Sarah, Monica and I drove down Wednesday morning and set up Wednesday afternoon. Around 5:30pm we were talking about when we’d show up the next morning. The conference went live at 8am, so I said I would be there at 6:45am to get everything turned on and ready to go. We all agreed that would work.
When we shared this with our facility liaison, she informed us the building doesn’t open until 8am and absolutely no one would be there before that time to let us in. I tend to find these opportunities to persuade someone a fun challenge. Unfortunately, I was exhausted and just not up for my usual compelling verbal dance of helping her see it our way.
We accepted reality and brainstormed alternatives.
Thank.the.Lord! There is a turf football field in front of the facility. After figuring out if Whova and our Zoom Webinar could go live from there and transfer inside, we were off. They rushed to BestBuy to get a shotgun mic for my phone and all the accessories to make it work. We retooled the schedule a bit and decided to spend the first 45 minutes of the conference outside!
Without a doubt, it was the best 45 minutes of any virtual conference we have produced previously! It was sooooooo fun. We ended up playing a game of 3-on-3 touch football thatthe audience watched, rooted-for and wagered who would win. The CEO spoke, we interviewed our breakfast sponsor and I went over the usual opening information. Then I ran upstairs – still live on camera – to the room we’d worked so hard to set up the day before and transferred to our in-studio cameras.
We all wished we could have stayed outside for the entire event!
How often do things not go as planned?
How frequently is there a last minute change that messes everything up?
How many times have you been frustrated when all your hard work was abandoned?
I love obstacles! (really). I like the challenge of realigningunexpected external forces to the vision I’m trying to accomplish.
Accepting reality is hard for me.
I’ve been alive too long to know that things aren’t just one way. Often times “reality” is simply standard operating procedures that actually can be altered with a little imagination and persistence. However, in this scenario, applying creativity AFTER accepting reality was what generated amazingly beautiful results!
Instigating Ideas…
1. How would others describe your first response, when things don’t go as planned?
2. How do you keep others positive when they’re frustrated about changes?
3. Tell someone the story of a better outcome.
What if we practiced having an attitude that shifted to Always-Expecting-Better, when plans change last minute? Again, it’s not easy because we’ve put so much work into setting up the original plan. What if the same energy we put into frustration, anger and disappointment we channeled to excitement, expectation and imagination?
In all our best ideas, we didn’t consider shooting live from the field, until we were forced to think differently. Is it possible your best ideas really aren’t, unless they’ve been filtered through tremendous obstacles?