Sustainable Tourism in Agriculture
I am very deeply involved in sustainable tourism development. My career took a turn a few years ago, when I decided to leave the banking world, in particular financial services, and start three new ventures:
1) start my own business,
2) pursue my PhD in sustainable tourism for smaller businesses and
3) start my own family. While the first two are quite easy to link, I had never made a connection between my new found entrepreneurial spirit, sustainable tourism AND my family – until John Goosen came along.
I am blessed with two beautiful and bright red heads. While my daughter, now 8, is very creative, my son, now 6, is an inventor of note. I had never thought that I needed to channel that absolute flood of ideas and insights into something that would help turn them into highly successful entrepreneurs and business people. When I grew up, there was no other way than to do well in mathematics and science, so as to ensure that you get easy access to a good university, where you could study law, engineering, medicine, accounting or maybe geology. Everything I did was focused on preparing me to one day have a good professional career.
And I did not have to think much about it, as a good academic record (note not brilliant), ensured me easy access into university to become an engineer, easy access to an employer who were looking for women engineers at that stage, easy access to do an MBA and move into banking, where my engineering and MBA skills were highly desirable. Well, except, that I did not really feel connected to my career, I never felt I had any impact and I never saw any benefits to the economy, societies, the environment and of my projects. So I needed take 200 steps back, and re-assess my values and ask myself what I could do to make a difference.
Having traveled through South Africa and Europe extensively since my early 20’s, I knew that the two things I loved most in life was
1) the freedom of exploring new places and
2) my own country, with all its majesties. But, by now, I have had a career of 20 years, and suddenly, I wanted to become an entrepreneur. Did I battle….! I have done everything I am supposed to do. I am still learning every day. I make mistakes all the time. I have done deep research. I have met hundreds of very successful entrepreneurs. And I keep asking myself, why am I finding it so tough? Then I met John, a quiet man, not too vocal, that have been to every one of my workshops in Potchefstroom, and there has been plenty. In one sentence, he changed my whole perspective of what I do and how I do things – both professionally and with my children.
“We need to help our children to become entrepreneurs from the day they are born.” BAM!
Yes, he is right, that is what I need and what has been missing. The tools to help me take creative ideas and turn them into businesses, the familiarity of failure because I have learned what failure feels like, the tenacity to carry on regardless, the courage to step over boundaries, the confidence to talk to strange people, the boldness to take risks and the shrewdness to run business successfully. A family environment really provides a fantastically safe place to role play all of these and other aspects of becoming successful entrepreneurs. Moms and dads are the ones who have that one-one-one interaction with their kids, where they test their weird and wonderful ideas…”just imagine you could make a machine that could service your car, and you never had to take it to the garage…” or “dad, what would happen if you put food colouring in coffee..” or “mom, do you think I could sell these bean plants at school?”. Parents have the opportunity to capture these ideas, and coach through the steps of taking these ideas and making them work…or fail. Even if you know they will never work, experiencing failure in a safe environment is something that all of us deserve.
So, the question then is how. My next 3 blogs will be on how I believe we as parents could help our children and what opportunities there are in tourism to grow sustainable businesses by young entrepreneurs. I would, however like to invite readers to send some of your own ideas and let’s engage to see if we can create new collaborative or link help grow existing initiatives.