Never Miss An Opportunity To Think Outside The Box

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While I am here in the social distancing world, I ran across a picture that reminded me of all this. The picture was of me on a screen that a friend of mine texted me from his SnapChat account. If you didn’t know the story behind it, it would look like a person on a regular Zoom call speaking to a group of people. Nothing out of the ordinary.

This was no ordinary speaking engagement with a group of people.

The story begins with a business education group reaching out to have me speak about growing interest in taking business courses at the high school level. I was to speak to a group of business educators for an hour and do a question / answer session after. This was about two months out until the speaking engagement. A friend and colleague of mine invited me to take a trip with about a dozen students to travel from Chicago to Kansas City on a trip to have the students learn about sports teams. The scheduled trip was to take the group of kids to The University of Missouri for a tour then on the Kansas City Chiefs stadium for an exclusive tour by one of our high school’s alum. It would be a long overnight trip and we would take a 15 passenger bus. I jumped at the chance to go.

About a week before the trip, I realized I had double booked.

I felt terrible. I am a very organized person. How could I let this happen?! I am also stubborn and wanted my cake and eat it too! Was there a way to do both? That’s when the light went off in my head of an idea. I contacted the person in charge of the session and let them know my idea for presenting. I would connect via FaceTime while on the bus to Missouri and present from my phone. They went for it.

It was one of the most interesting presentations I have ever done.

There is no better way to present to people while you are actually doing one of your strategies in your presentation. In this case, I was speaking about growing student interest in business classes in high school. I was giving a presentation while I was taking high school students on an overnight trip to learn about sports marketing from a professional football team! I had students available to talk about the trip right behind me on the bus. The fact that we were in the middle of an event created not only to help grow our students’ knowledge of marketing, we were in the middle of an event that was helping us grow our business department.

I learned that day that there are more ways than one to present, learn, and really do anything by not being afraid to think outside the box. There may be huge opportunities out there!

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