What’s In Your Toolbox?

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Tuesday. My counterpart is not here with me today, so you just get one girl bantering back and forth with herself and hopefully the audience. However, happy Tuesday. How is everyone doing today? I'm well. Thank you so much for asking. We weren't here last week. Did you notice that? We weren't here last week? We by no means were taking any time off. We were in the middle of hosting our very first pursue more week long summer camp experience, which is why we were not on our lives, as per the usual.

So thank you for all of you who sent us good vibes and prayed for us to have a successful camp because, holy cow, it was awesome. Jill and I had a heck of a time. Thanks, Alec. I'm glad you noticed our absence. Sorry we weren't here to fill our Tuesday spot. We were with, I think, 35 little pumpkins ranging from the ages of ten to 13 years old. And then we had a few youth volunteers and a few adult volunteers thrown in the mix as well. So we had an incredible time and we learned so much about ourselves and our efforts and getting outside of our comfort zone, because a little bit about our story is we started this company girls mentorship in August of 2020, and we came up with the idea to test out summer camps in February of 2021, which was a little late to get on the summer camp game.

So we took basically an entire year to figure out if it was something that we wanted to do. And we launched our very first set of summer camps last summer. So in June of 2022, and we did it bite sized. We did two half days. We did a Wednesday from nine to one and a Thursday from nine to one. That was the entire session. The feedback that we got was invaluable, and it was of that parents wanted more and more convenience. Right? It's not super convenient in the middle of the week and a half a day both days, which we totally understood, but we were wanting to test the theory.

We didn't want to bite off more than we could chew. So we tested it last year, and this year, y'all, we swung for the fences, which is entirely uncomfortable. It wasn't something that we knew we could do. It wasn't something that we had done before. We were left very exhausted in the best way. However, what I want to talk to you today on this toolbox Tuesday is the concept that you literally cannot please everyone. It's about going back to your systems, your processes, and your integrity to know where your heart is and what you're doing for the world and not being swayed by the thousands of different opinions that can tend to seep their way into what you're doing.

So what do I mean by that? Obviously, I just said that we hosted a summer camp this last week and we had about 35 little pumpkins, plus a few youth volunteers, plus a plethora of adult volunteers as well as speakers and then school administration that we were working with. So with all of those different people comes a ton of different opinions and feedback. And feedback. Feedback is integral to you being able to move forward as an individual as well as an organization. However, not all feedback is going to serve your mission.

Not all feedback is meant in love. In fact, I think a lot of feedback is said just to say something. So we put out a survey. We put out a feedback. We gave it to parents because we wanted to hear their opinions and thoughts on what we did. However, we had to make sure that we were taking everyone's thoughts and feedback with a grain of salt. Because if we're trying to implement everything that everyone else is suggesting that we do, we wind up losing sight of our overall mission and vision. Is feedback important for growth?

1000%. But does all feedback serve the purpose and the end goal? Absolutely not. And that's where you as an individual, get to delineate between what's serving the mission and what is not serving the mission. And for two women who have been in the work of personal growth and development for the better part of the last decade, it still takes Jill and I some time, some practice, and some major effort to understand the feedback that's for us versus the feedback that's just being said to be said. There's a lot of feedback that's just put out into the ether in order to fill this space.

We asked, I think, eight questions in our feedback form, and some of them were on a scale of one to ten. Others were open ended. So asking for specifics and you could tell when somebody thought about an answer to give to you that was going to be helpful and thoughtful. And you could also tell an answer that somebody really was just trying to fill this space with. And those are the answers that we can get caught up through thinking about over and over and over and over again, the answers that we lose sleep over, and the answers really that you need to learn to bless and release.

The saying bless and release for Jill and I have been, has been something that has really helped us take it, assess it, and move on. Because realistically, like I started this saying, you literally cannot please everyone. You could be the juiciest Georgia peach and there is going to be someone that like peaches. Now, with that said, you have to be able to check in with yourself, because if your systems are in place and you're providing the same customer experience for everyone that walks through the door and you know that your efforts went above and beyond based on market research, then you can come back to your integrity and you can say, I appreciate that feedback and I'm going to bless and release it because I know that, that we have streamlined this process for everyone to get a very similar customer experience.

And if it was feedback that was individual to them and their feelings, we can't take that to heart. We can't take that to heart because it means shifting the entire experience for everyone else. The 99% of people that had a great experience with us. Now, I'm not saying any feedback we received was bad or we did anything wrong. However, it can be really detrimental to who you are as a person to take it all in and try to make all the changes that everyone wants you to make. So at the end of the day, how are you receiving feedback and how are you implementing it?

And implementation doesn't necessarily mean that you have to make changes, but how are you assessing how you showed up for everyone that decided to buy into you? Because you could go down a rabbit hole thinking of all the different things that people have said to you along the way, and you could wind up sitting down on yourself and not taking any action because there's too much. It's analysis by paralysis. So I just. I'm in the heart of that. Jill and I are in the thick of that right this moment, reading people's feedback and deciphering what it means to us and what it means moving forward.

But at the end of the day, we know what we set out was, by and far above any other summer program that is in our area or doing the same thing that we're doing. So we have integrity in what our product is and what we offered to the marketplace. So make sure that you just have a filter in terms of who you're listening to, what you're taking in, and what you're deciding to totally bless and release, because it's important for you to be able to move forward. Jill and I's goal is to grow this thing beyond Scottsdale, Arizona.

We want to make sure that there are 35 girls in summer camps with our program across America. So, yes, is feedback important in order to do that? 1000%. But is it also important to say, that is not meant for me and that is going to keep me stuck and sitting down on myself or that is for me and going to keep me growing. So with that being said, thank you for holding space for us while we were gone. We appreciate any and all of you who followed along with the journey on our instagram. We have another week of summer camp coming up next week so our absence will be felt next week as well.

But we'll be back at the end of June to debrief and get back into a regularly scheduled program with our lives. And as always, I'll put something in the community feed along with this live to continue the conversation over there. We would love to know how you've received feedback in the past, what you have done to bless and release certain things that don't really necessarily fit the path that you're on. And until next time, we'll see you not next Tuesday, but we'll see you in two Tuesdays from today.

We hope you have a stellar weekend.