UNCHARTED: Why Relationships Are Crucial To Success

Starting the conversation:

Challenge is part of the journey. Each lived experience helps prepare for the work you are meant to do — and your initial idea may not look anything like what you actually launch. Sarah Dale, Founder at Project 1490, talks about the importance of real relationships and how they relate to our success.

The lasting bonds that come from connecting with a core group of people who provide you with support (and vice versa) makes it possible to navigate the ups and downs of your journey with confidence. It’s in discomfort that discovering and unlocking your real potential occurs. Know what makes your heart full and keeps your bucket filled, and then use it as a guide to keep moving forward and growing.

In this program, you will hear how to leverage your energy, about personal growth bringing new challenges, and letting what is most important to you be your guide. Jess Dewell talks with Sarah Dale, Founder at Project 1490, about being BOLD and connecting deeply with others.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: Sarah Dale

What You Will Hear:

2:30 How to approach deep work sessions for maximum results.

• Leveraging how to manage your energy, as it is a limited resource.
• You are responsible for carrying the torch for your vision.
• There is power in doing deep work in a small group.

8:40 Sarah Dale’s biggest learnings about the skills you need as a founder.

• I couldn’t do it by myself.
• I must do the role I am responsible for well.
• How to facilitate a group discussion.

10:30 Getting out of your comfort zone.

• Uncomfortable is where growth happens.
• There is a tipping point in growth that is important to recognize when it arrives.
• Embrace it all and remember your “why.”

14:15 The first idea is unlikely to be the launched idea

• Sarah Dale’s journey prepared her for this work.
• Saw a common theme: We all want to be bad-asses.
• Reflection about knowing if you are still on the right career path for yourselfs

17:00 How to know what is important to you and use it to guide your effort.

• What makes you feel good?
• What are you passionate about?
• What does it look and sound like in my life when I’m doing meaningful work?

28:15 The importance of real relationships.

• Learn about ourselves: Where are we vulnerable?
• Remove layers to get to our real selves.
• We need people who support us.

34:15 It is BOLD to connect deeply with others.

Transcript

Jess Dewell 00:00
Better question to ask, which is what was I missing so that this could be the right thing at the right time?

Sarah Dale 00:06
Need other people who are ride or die for you. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Jess Dewell 00:10
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by. At the Bold Business Podcast, we are normalizing important conversations. Yes. There are tips. Yes. There are ways to solve problems. More importantly, are gonna be what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training, and the programs that you are already using. This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind, and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out. Maybe you’re ready to scale. Maybe you’re going through a reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages. So hang around, see what’s going on, and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 01:00
You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast. Okay. Where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 01:14
What you are going to hear in this program today with Sarah Dale is leveraging how to use your energy because it is not an infinite resource. And you’re going to hear about, hey, There is a tipping point between sure, let’s do that and actually doing it, and how do you find it? You’re also going to hear about how to use the driving factors of you, what’s important to you, and bring it to your work and to the time that you spend on things for fulfillment. This is only the tip of the iceberg when we talk about self-empowerment and self-confidence. And when I say we, I must introduce you now to Sarah Dale. She created Project 1490. Leadership, living in Montana, city experiences, combining them all together after 30 years in in advertising has been a dream of hers. She’s worked at great brands like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune. She’s also led big teams and managed revenue streams in the millions. Her experiences and her desire to be useful, having a connection to people, specifically women, who are on their own journeys, achievers, ambitious, wanting to make change. Those are the kinds of people that she wants to bring together to learn from, to grow with, to help have other experiences so they can tap into the deepest part of themselves. Project 1490 provides the opportunity for women to have unique outdoor experiences that help them go beyond who they are and the skills that they have today to become who they need to be to reach their biggest dreams. You know somebody like this? Pass this show along. I can’t wait for you to meet Sarah. And I’m gonna start with you. When you are working on Project 1490, it takes design, thought, deep work. What do you have to do to prepare to do that kind of deep work when you were starting and then now today, right, to keep it going and be strategic about what’s happening and what you are bringing the women who participate?

Sarah Dale 03:39
What a great question. I think that there’s a a number of things that come in at different times of that process because I think that there does need to be real attention and the freedom to have ideas, be creative, and then think them through practice all of that. And so there’s an alone time, you might say. And then what I have found is then I need some people, because if I stay in that place for too long, I run out of energy.

Jess Dewell 04:16
Oh, fair.

Sarah Dale 04:17
And yeah. And I find that I need feedback. I need other people’s energy to come into play. And whether that’s just a sounding board, all of those are encouragement or tweaks to the ideas. Whatever it is, it’s I think that, fundamentally, it’s really about other people’s energy and that I need it.

Jess Dewell 04:40
We don’t always talk about energy management when we think about why we’re doing what we’re doing, the vision that we have, that we’ve have this torch for. And when so I wanna know when did you first find out that you that you had energy to manage? How’s that? Because most of us don’t even go, what does that mean, energy management? So we should probably start when did you notice, and what did you do about it to harness that?

Sarah Dale 05:08
That’s a tough question to answer. I don’t really know when that realization came to me exactly, but, certainly, it isn’t my own idea. But really noticing and paying attention and I guess the, they’re at somewhere along the line realizing that I am not a boundless energy machine, that there needs to be, the an inhale and an exhale. There needs to be, like, some outgoing and then some incoming, and that you can management is a good word because it’s really noticing when, when you’re spent. I think it’s largely what people are talking about when they talk about burnout. It’s like they’ve just exhausted all of the energy without getting some back, back in in whatever ways that that happens for people. It’s different for different people, whether it’s getting out into nature or it’s other people. All of those things can put some back in, and it’s also interesting that you they use the word torch because I do feel that way. When you have an idea that you really that lights you up, you do have a lot more energy towards it rather than job that you might be doing for different reasons. It does give you a bigger battery, let’s say. But at the end of the day, even that battery needs to get recharged.

Jess Dewell 06:35
It has to be more than 1% at some point. When did you become more than 1 person?

Sarah Dale 06:40
Pretty early on, I enlisted a wonderful friend and really by proxy a number of friends that, that have been wishing for me to pursue this for a long time. So I have a lot of wonderful people in my corner, so to speak, but direct involvement in the business came early for at least one person, one other person to be in it with me. And then and now I’d say that circle has grown to 4 or 5, not necessarily employees, but people who are regularly working on the business for me and with me and in in different ways. And, yeah, it’s very valuable. And then also because this idea happens to be a community, in some ways, all the members are working on it with me too because it’s, it’s something that we’re building together. You know, I get fantastic ideas from the membership itself. Oh, we should do this, and we could do this. And they’re thinking about it too, and some of the best ideas have come from them.

Jess Dewell 07:48
And these core people, are they the ones that you bring in to some of the deep work sessions that you do? You have your long time, and then when you bring it you said you brought in some people. Are they the people that participate with you in that?

Sarah Dale 07:59
Yeah. Very often. And when sometimes it’s also the energy from reaching out to new people and having new conversations about project 1490 and people who are interested in membership, it’s that’s very feeding to me, very energy making, was to talk about it and introduce it to people.

Jess Dewell 08:22
When you started this, there was this vision that you had and, and you’re taking action and you’re going. What were some of the early learnings that you were like, oh, as the founder, oh, as the creator, oh, as the leader, oh, as the torch bearer, what did you have to learn that you were unex was unexpected?

Sarah Dale 08:42
One was very early that I can’t do just do it all by myself all alone, and another is that there’s a certain role that that I’m playing in this community as the leader of it, and how to do that properly with the mission in mind and what I’m really shooting for. And that just that can require different things at different times. One of the more specific things too that I’m working on is I’ve been a executive leader for a long time in corporate, and I didn’t really I didn’t really appreciate how difficult it can be to facilitate a group discussion around a very specific topic and make sure that everyone is heard and make sure we stay on topic and all of that because I think the people that I’ve seen make it seem easy. It’s more like running a meeting. I can do this. It’s put me in roles that sometimes are out of my own comfort zone, which is great. It’s what it’s all about.

Jess Dewell 09:45
Do you look forward to those moments out of your comfort zone?

Sarah Dale 09:49
Yes and no. There’s definitely something physically that isn’t like the same feeling as when you’re really looking forward to something. You know, in terms of practicing what I’m preaching, it is where growth happens. So from that point of view, I do delight in those finding those things where I’m just like, oh, this is something I could get better at. Wanting to get better at it, that’s also sort of part and parcel because there are things that I certainly could see in my former roles. I really could get better at that. It was like, I don’t really want to. Wanting to and seeing it is totally different.

Jess Dewell 10:27
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.

Announcer 10:41
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number 1, know what work is necessary. Number 2, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at redirection.com.

Jess Dewell 11:11
Wanting it, doing it, but making the choice to go from wanting to doing is also an interesting is also an interesting place to be. When was the last time you did that? Getting out of your comfort zone going, I need to do that or maybe that would be helpful. And then can you point to the time that it was, yeah. I’m ready. I’m going.

Sarah Dale 11:33
Yeah. I think a lot of that happened for me. We just came off our first retreat with Project 1490, and I think that there was a lot of that. And it’s just stepping in to all the roles that you’re gonna need to play and just go for it and really remembering the reasons why you’re doing it. Right? So that is very helpful to me. And I have, for me, real deep reasons why I wanna do this. So [Why, Sarah?] It’s hard to describe because the sum is greater than its parts. But I have this idea a very long time ago to we talk about empowerment. My experience living in Montana being a city girl and a East Coast girl at that, and going out there and learning the things that I was able to learn, I found that to be incredibly empowering. It expanded all of who I thought I was or could be and the things that I could do. And the idea back then was, gosh, what if I could bring other city women out here and they didn’t have to move here? They could just be here for a week and I could show them when other women I knew out there, we could really teach them how to do things, not just show up at a dude ranch and get on a horse and go for a trail ride, but you go catch the horse. You saddle it. You ride it. You figure and shooting bows or whatever it was. And at that time, I was thinking of it like it’s an outward bound meets Oprah kind of thing, and I called it, Grace and Grit at the time. And I didn’t get to do that idea in its original form and perhaps because I didn’t have all the ingredients that I needed to really make it into something at the time, but I ended up moving back to New York. I’ve went back into my advertising career. I ran back up the ladder, and it was really from that corporate experience then putting that part of my life together with this other idea of saying, you know what? This is for corporate women. This is for women who are rising up the ladder or have climbed it and maybe are looking around going, is this it? Is this all there is? And really wishing to get something more either reaching their own potential within themselves or expanding who they think they are, and then bringing all of that confidence and what I call badassery into their workplace so that they actually cannot only just climb the ladder, make sure the ladder’s the right ladder for you. A lot of us get on the train early in our careers, and before we know it, the train is, like, going a 100 miles an hour. We’re like, wait. Did we get on the right train? Like, was this the train I was supposed to be on? There’s a lot of that in there, and then there, there’s a lot of lack, I think, in certainly in the corporate world of women having a real community where it’s not a bunch of pretense, and it’s real help, and it’s real camaraderie, and I wanna create that kind of culture.

Jess Dewell 14:48
How much time passed from that original idea to project 1490?

Sarah Dale 14:53
22 years.

Jess Dewell 14:55
Okay. I wanna point this out because it takes time to develop ideas. And I’m a big proponent of experiencing instant gratification when I have run out of toothpaste and I can just go to Amazon and be like, it’ll be here at 8 PM.

Sarah Dale 15:11
Same point from a different angle. I’ll tell you this to expand on it. I wanted to do that idea back then and really felt like I couldn’t for a, a lot of reasons. It always haunted me. It always stayed with me. And if only I could make that into something, and, and there were a lot of obstacles that I placed in my own way that, you know, seemed sounded really valid of why I couldn’t do it.

Jess Dewell 15:42
I’ll bet you in those moments, they actually were valid, and then they became invalid as time went by.

Sarah Dale 15:47
Yes. Some of them dissipated that way, and some of them had to be forced out.

Jess Dewell 15:52
I’m telling you. That’s right. You gotta dig them, don’t you?

Sarah Dale 15:55
Yeah. That’s right. And you and that sometimes you even you need other people and you need help to do that sometimes because you need to see things from a different perspective. And I was very lucky when this idea was catching flame with me again, but I didn’t know what it looked like. I didn’t know how to manifest it. I didn’t know how to make a business out of it. And I met a few people that were really integral in in making it happen because I threw verbally threw up on them and went, I don’t know what this is, but this is what I’m wishing for. And part of that wish was to bring people into nature. Somebody said to me about a year and a half ago, start with 5 people. And that was such a freeing piece of advice because I think the other thing that we do to ourselves besides being like I want it now is I if I, for 1, as an ambitious overachieving sort of woman, if I could say that about myself, I I really was like, oh, I have to come up with something that’s gonna be like the next Airbnb. Like, I have to come up with something that’s gonna get a $100,000,000 in funding and those sorts of stupid metrics that we put on ourselves. And so the freedom of start with 5 people and what that turned into, I’ll just tell you the whole thing, it was I came home and my husband and I started a glamping mobile glamping business. And we started with 3 tens. And I thought, you know what? I can start by getting people out into their backyards. I’m like, how about that? And so we started that, and the reason project 1490 ended up happening was because I was looking at that business and saying, it’s really gotta be grow. It’s gotta get bigger than people’s backyards and or including people’s backyards, but we need to do bigger events. And I was thinking, we we need to do retreats. And I pitched it to a few companies, and I was like, this is gonna take too long. I’m just gonna make up my own retreat. And that’s where the old grace and grit idea came back in. And I’m telling that story in more detail because you just don’t know, even sometimes when you’re in the process, that you’re in a process. That one thing like, if I hadn’t started the glamping business, I would have never gone into Project 1490 because so you just don’t know one thing begets another. It’s you don’t know. So starting like, I talk to women now all the time who have dreams of leaving their day-to-day, what they’re doing, and starting something on their own. And it’s okay, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Can just start with an hour a day, start with 2 hours a day, whatever you can do. Start with a Saturday, and just start in any what small way that you can because you just don’t know where it’s gonna go.

Jess Dewell 19:13
How did you find out what to use to carry forward to help you in your decision-making, your deep work, your prioritization? Because this got prioritized amongst everything else, and this is what actually happened along the way, but so did each step that you were just describing do them. So I guess I’m interested in the how, and so maybe we need to start with what is your guiding factor, and how did you choose those?

Sarah Dale 19:40
That’s a part of the guiding factor is very much wanting to be useful and feeling to knock anybody who’s in advertising. But, that’s how I was spending my life was in advertising. And if you’re really passionate about it, then it’s can be really wonderful, but I wasn’t. I fell into it and, and thought, okay, this is the ladder I’m gonna climb. But I really wasn’t that passionate about it in part because I just didn’t feel like I was being you that useful. But there were spots of being useful, like when I was mentoring people or when I was leading teams or when I was changing culture. Those things were meaningful to me because it made a difference in people’s lives. People were happier, and people had a place to go and somebody to talk to about whatever it was. And I so I I think when you’re you sort of pull on these red threads that you have in your life, oh, I built culture at 2 different places, and I really liked it. I really enjoyed that. You get these other clues. Right? Every house I’ve ever or, or place I’ve ever been, one of the most important things to me was the guest room because I love hosting. I love when people come out. I love be having something to welcome them and all those kinds of things. Like, I love planning events. I was an intern at, like, a 100 years ago. I was in planning events, and I loved it. The response you get, like, nobody hugs you for selling them any advertising, but when people are, like, clutching you that you gave them an experience, it’s like a totally different ballgame. So it’s like picking up on the things that feed you, you know, and those were the things that were feeding me in my career and that’s what was feeding me in my personal life, and I just found a way to put them all together.

Jess Dewell 21:40
I’m your host, Jess Dewell. We’re getting down to business on the Bold Business podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success.

Announcer 21:56
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Jess Dewell 22:13
Project 1490, how you’re useful in the guiding principles that you were just talking about, which by the way I wrote down a question of maybe how we could do that listening to your story could be, let’s ask ourselves these questions. And once a day for a few weeks, maybe even just 5 days, ask yourself at the end of the day, what in my life gives meaning to the time I’m spending and the work I’m doing? That’s something I click away from what you said. And if we did that for 5 days, that might be very interesting to go, oh, here it is. And how can I lean into that more if I need to change my attitude or my situation or recognize what is that theme that maybe is have it an idea that I have had is I’m actually developing it, and I don’t even know yet, which is a cool part of your story too? The 20 years in the making of this. I don’t think we understand as much as we used to or we take for granted more the importance of relationship between people, between each other. And I understand that this is a deep theme that encompasses all of the work that you do, and it comes from you’d said earlier, women who whatever ladder they’re on, wherever they’re going, they’ve still at some point feel alone, and that this connectedness is missing for them. So how is what you’re doing with Project 1490 strengthening relationships and reminding us to not take for granted the importance of them?

Sarah Dale 23:45
The how of that is very it it’s been, been very interesting to me because I think that it was something it’s become something different than I thought it was going to be in that. I was like, I’m gonna teach women how to shoot a bow and jumpstart a car and lasso and tie knots and whatever. Like, all those things that we may not have been exposed to living in a city. And but what I’m finding is that the, all the activities, they’re wonderful, and they do have an impact on people and their confidence and just the, the way they see or feel about themselves. But it’s actually bigger than that. Those activities and they almost could be almost anything. But what happens is that it gets women into a place in themselves that’s a little bit more unknown, little bit more vulnerable. And when women see I find well, when when women see other women in that position, they do what women do, and they come to help. And I don’t know if that’s some sort of natural instinct in women or not, but that’s what I’ve seen. And so it has a couple of effects. One is people coming to these events are minus all the layers of pretense that we typically show up at networking events. Right? Like, in my experience is, like, you go to a networking event and you have to present yourself as some sort of impressive version of yourself. Right? Everything is just fine. Everything is I’ve got everything together. I know exactly what I’m doing. And most of that’s it’s posturing and pretense, and it’s very difficult to actually form a real relationship with somebody when you’re bouncing off each other of all those layers. And typically then it takes a long time to strip away those layers. If you get out of your comfort zone together and you start chasing some chickens around trying to herd them or whatever, you’re there. And so by the time we then either go to our €200 log cabin that we’re using or we go into a glamping tent for, like, in our lounge, and we have a real discussion about careers, people will get really real. And that is how the relationships are getting formed. To your point, I saw Sally Krawcheck of, Ellevest and formally, like, City and, you know, all the places that she worked. She’s has an incredible impressive career. And she said men have always played careers as a, a team sport, and women have played it as an individual sport. And to some degree because we’ve had to, but that, that really rang true for me and my, from my experience. And I thought we don’t have to do that anymore. We don’t have to do that anymore. We can have a team, and we can support each other because even from the very first question that you asked me, it’s like, we need other people. We just need other people, and you need other people who are ride or die for you. You need other people who are really supporting. And when you need help, they’re there. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Jess Dewell 27:14
I think it’s a skill that we have somewhat forgotten because while we can talk like this, you and I are in 2 different states. You cannot call me up and go, hey. When you go to the grocery store today, like, if it’s if we both dropped on the same day, can you pick up chicken for me? I can’t do that for you because I’m in another state. I could get online and I could order something, which is nice. So we’ll get that out of the way, but it’s different. I would never call you, Sarah, and say, can you pick up chicken when you’re at the store for me today? [Right.] Right? I would because it would not occur to me because we’re not physically close. So being able can we have a real relationship? Yes. Can we talk business? Yes. Can we connect about the path we’re on? Because maybe you’ve had journey a part of a journey I haven’t, and I’m at that place right now.

Sarah Dale 27:59
That’s right.

Jess Dewell 28:00
And, and vice-versa, and I think you’re right. That is something that we, we usually do through asking of help with each other or learning something together or coming together in a time of need, and you’re creating fun, cool experiences and skills that are doing the same thing to help us create this network. Of course, we still need our local safety net, but people who we really can rely on for supporting who we are in addition to making sure we keep existing.

Sarah Dale 28:30
Yeah. 100%.

Jess Dewell 28:32
There’s a lot of boldness in the conversation that we have been having. So I wanna know what makes it bold to do the work to relate deeply with others.

Sarah Dale 28:43
I think it what makes it bold is the vulnerability. You have to let yourself be a little vulnerable in order to create that kind of relationship. Going back to these activities, it’s that’s what they do. If you’ve never done something before, and again, it’s like could be knitting. It doesn’t have to be shooting bows or chopping wood. It could be anything that you just is outside of your comfort zone, then you’re in it. You’re already in that place. And then lots of different stuff can come in that ordinarily would just bounce off you.

Jess Dewell 29:19
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I wanna share with 25 people. I know when you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share. In the comments, I would like for you to engage with us. What is that thing that you wanna tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important. It’s important because, yeah, there are gonna be how-to’s. Yes, there are gonna be steps. Yes, you’re gonna be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down. I wish I wasn’t doing this and I could actually take action on that right now. But guess what? You’re not. So engage right now because that one thing you wanna share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 30:09
Jess hosts the Bold Business Podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance, and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host, Jess Dewell. Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com. Thank you for joining us, and special thanks to our postproduction team at the Scott treatment.