This guest post is part of our ongoing Small Business Experts series, and is written by Bob Prentice, founder of www.mrattitudespeaks.com
Getting things accomplished as a team is so much more rewarding than working all by your self and struggling. Our family has worked on several projects over the years. Since we worked as a team we often experienced great success.
I’d like to share with you one thing that sticks out in my mind as an example of teamwork for our family. I am thinking back to a time almost 15 years ago when we sold everything we owned, packed everything remaining into a 1948 Greyhound bus we converted into a RV and set off to live an adventure of traveling all over the United States together as a family. Just getting ready for our great adventure required a tremendous amount of teamwork, with the moving sale, packing, converting the bus, etc.
Most of our friends thought we were crazy at the time; some were jealous. We just knew this is what we wanted to do and were willing to work to achieve our goals, which indeed required some major teamwork. For nearly three years, we traveled from business project to business project in our bus having the time of our lives discovering oceans, mountain ranges, deserts, and tons of RV parks, and making friends and memories everywhere we went. But all was not sunshine and roses. To be sure, there were many struggles, trials, breakdowns, blizzards and other difficulties that we faced along the journey, but we not only survived-we thrived. I believe that in part it was our attitude of working together as a family to overcome the challenges that allowed us to do what most people only dream about doing.
Teamwork was a part of our daily routine. Every time we pulled into an RV park we would work together to set up camp, taking out the grill, setting up the table, refreshing our holding tanks, hooking up to electricity, water and sewer, cooking dinner, cleaning up, and then later making up beds. On moving day, the set up chores were done in reverse and on days we were staying put, we had a series of other chores to do before we could go play. Whenever a storm would come up, everyone would work to batten down the hatches. Each of us knew our jobs and we just did them with the precision of clockwork.
Through the challenges we grew as a family. We laughed, we cried, we discovered and learned together. We also were blessed to have met an incredible number of people who were the nicest you could ever imagine. But, more than anything we prospered in our efforts because of our attitude of teamwork.
Of course, five people living in such tight quarters (8′ x 35′) our team well understood that there was plenty of opportunity for bad attitudes if we weren’t careful. So teamwork even came into play in a number of other ways, such as:
Respecting each others space;
Giving a little grace to one of the team when they were feeling grumpy and out of sorts;
Reminding each other often of our initial purpose for living life on the road (which by the way was just so we could all be together more!);
Encouraging each other to tough it out during the difficult times because good things were in store for us;
Making a game out of working through the difficulties.
Even if you never get to travel in a bus with your family like I did, remember that there are opportunities all along your life’s journey, and that you can achieve more in life working with others to get things done. Go ahead and team up with someone today. Watch what happens. I promise you will be totally amazed. Teamwork works!
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