For those of you who don’t know what EO is, it’s the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. EO consists of nearly 200 people in the New York City chapter. Those 200 are broken into small groups called forums.
I joined EO New York about a year and a half ago. About six months later, I was placed in an EO forum group with five other people and talk once a month about business, family and personal goals and accomplishments.
This past weekend, my forum group and I went on a retreat to Captiva Island off Fort Meyers, Florida. We flew JetBlue and had an opportunity to chat with each other and get better acquainted. When we arrived, a van picked us up and drove us 45 minutes to the resort.
The first night was uneventful. We basically had dinner and went to bed. (It’s always a lot to travel….)
The next day, we hired an EO facilitator from South Florida focus on accountability and goal setting. We each identified three important words that we live our lives by — mine were honesty, dedication and respect for others. Next, we identified a circle of words and wrote the current situation and then with yellow stickies, we wrote our goals for each item.
Gino, our facilitator, then told us to go off in pairs and identify three goals for the next year. I decided that my goals were to:
- run a 5K non-stop by April 2010
- double the size of my business
- and…. the last one was tough… so I decided to leave it blank and just think about it…
Everyone else wrote down their goals too. One of the guys in our group told us that his sister had suggested that he do the same exercise about two years ago and he did. As a result, he met his future wife…
That evening, we went on a sunset cruise that wasn’t as pleasant as I had hoped. It was really windy and the boat didn’t stop shaking. To be honest, I was glad to get off the boat when the sun went down.
The next day, we each went around the room and shared photos and stories of our past. Each story was better than the next, like a good book…
After that, we went for a 10 mile bicycle ride around the island. That was pleasant until the end when I felt like my legs no longer worked and I couldn’t ride any longer…
All in all, the three day trip was a great experience. I learned a lot about myself and set real concrete goals for the next several months… But the best part of the retreat, was that I spent a weekend with really “cool” people and had lots of laughs…
