Remember the joy as a kid when you’d hike along and find a pretty stone? It was a treasure to discover and you would quickly pocket it and take it home to your collection of other beautiful stones.
Fast forward to today.
Starting now, we are no longer just individuals on a photo tour together. We are officially a TEAM. Our team’s mission is to find joy in what we do—Joy in capturing images, seeing nature, enjoying a meal, having a chat, or anything else that fills your soul. Joy is something you have to seek out and discover. Much like pretty stones, we must collect joy and fill our team’s bucket by the end of the week, one beautiful stone at a time.
This team must encourage one another, educate one another, and help one another learn to discover beautiful stones.
This team must support and share with one another when our fellow team members haven’t yet found any beautiful stones. But none of us should accept more help than we share throughout the week.
To find our stones (A.k.a. Joy) We must share in the glory, share in the frustrations, share our collective vision, knowledge, and share the wealth.
Each member of the TEAM contributes strengths and brings their shortcomings. We must learn to use those strengths and overcome those shortcomings to help the team fill the bucket and meet our goal.
To be a truly great team, we must be a sum that is greater than our individual parts—and contributions.
It is each team member’s responsibility to provide the team with our best support, attitude, behavior, skills, and respect. It may sometimes mean your needs come second to those of the group.
It isn’t up to nature, weather, our cameras, wildlife or even your leaders to deliver a powerful, positive week together and fill our team’s bucket. It is up to this entire team to make the most of all of the opportunities we are given…and to help your team discover the hidden beauty in stones when there appears to be none at all.
After all, the most beautiful stones are rarely found sitting on the surface.
Filling the team’s bucket is rarely about luck. Rather, it’s an accumulation of daily decisions each of us make to discover new ways of seeing stones we perceive to be beautiful. It may require reframing our thoughts, habits, perceptions and reactions to the world around us.
Filling our team’s bucket with beautiful stones requires careful observation, conscious thought-- and sometimes a little serendipity. It’s a skill—one that takes daily practice and commitment to the task in order to master it.
Each moment of joy you help your team discover is like tossing a beautiful stone into our team’s bucket. The greater the effort, the greater the reward.
Negativity is like a thief who steals the beauty from the team’s bucket. Stone by stone.
So team, remember…we only have a week to fill the bucket!
The final question I have for you is…. how big do you want your bucket?
--Lisa Langell