Hopefully as you grow your business you are taking advantage of all the mistakes people who have come before you have made. I know I have made more than my share of them. Hopefully, you are also taking advantage of the successes they have experienced. Learning from others usually is a tremendous asset to any business. But the one question I have for you is “where do you look for these warnings and…

Today’s message brings me back to a time when I was 10 years old. If you asked me, or a great number of grown men how they managed to meet their first girlfriend, they would all share a similar story.

A young boy is introduced to his first girlfriend in the 5th grade at the age of ten. The reason I know this is because that's the age we realize that women exist. Until that point it was all about basketball, football and baseball. (I may be generalizing, but just a tad.)

  — Travel Research Online
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Mistakes get a bad rap.  Experience may be a rough teacher, but like the curriculum taught by Ms. Lambert (3d Grade, Knob Elementary, Princeton, West Virginia), you tend not to forget the lessons. Still she haunts my dreams.

My father consoled me with one of his aphorisms: "If you are not making mistakes, you are not trying hard enough."

When we make a mistake, we are taught to apologize.  Good advice.  If we are not smart enough to admit our mistakes and apologize for them, we implicitly  explain their origin all too clearly.  But simply apologizing for mistakes under-values their worth. The reason experience is valued as a life coach is precisely due to our propensity to err. To screw up is human.  If mistakes are such…

An expert in adventure and wildlife destinations worldwide, Jane Behrend started her own travel marketing company in 1989 after learning the business as an account executive in public relations and advertising sales. She started off as the Southeast USA sales rep for African Travel, Gametrackers Botswana, and 4th Dimension Tours before helping Volcanoes Safaris relaunch tourism to Rwanda and Uganda in the North American market.

In 2008, Jane re-branded her business as Emerging Destinations, a company that represents cool companies in cool places around the globe. She chose the name because her passion is working with areas where tourism is relatively new and still off the beaten…