About Colleen Jolly

Colleen Jolly, PPF.APMP, manages a global professional visual communications company – 24 Hour Company with offices in the US and UK. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, and is active in leadership roles and Board positions in arts-related non-profit as well as association organizations. Colleen is an award-winning artist and business professional—most recently she won the Association for Proposal Management (APMP) Insight Award in 2012 for her article on international business, was featured in Northern Virginia magazine's 'Top 10 Entrepreneurs Under 30' in 2010 and was a finalist for the Stevie Awards Creative Professional of the Year, 2009. Her company won entry into Inc. 5,000’s Fast Growing Companies in 2007, in 2011 and again in 2012. She has been published six times in a women’s entrepreneurial calendar. Her new blog -- An American (a)broad -- chronicles her experience as an international woman in business.

Connect with Colleen Jolly

Using Pole Dancing to Rekindle One’s Passion for Business

May 29, 2014 by

Pole-Dancing-Leadership-PassionPassion in a business setting is very individually experienced. Some call it drive or motivation that appears regularly to spur them on their way. While for others, passion is something that they do—a true calling or a “dream job”—where the content of their work is what keeps them going, not the daily activities. Regardless of how you define it, passion in your business can ebb and flow naturally, driven by changes in your personal life such as having a new baby or through external impacts like losing a big client. But when it’s missing, your life just isn’t the same without it.

With no real athleticism, I took my first pole dancing class three years ago during a time when my passion for my business and life in general was at an all time low. Pole dancing is a popular, alternative workout mixing cardiovascular dance movement and strength-based lifts, high in the air around a slim metal pole. (Shape Magazine named it one of the 15 hottest fitness trends)

I am a leader in my primary business, and serve as a leader for multiple non-profit organizations. Losing my “mojo” was not just bad for business—it was making me physically ill and emotionally depressed. A leader needs to always know where they are going, or at least be happy and positive trudging through the difficult jungles of economic uncertainty. I was neither happy nor positive and it was starting to show, affecting the morale of my team and our ability to provide true value to our customers. I had to do something to dramatically change my outlook. Pole dancing was completely out of my comfort zone but I was willing to try anything!

Roadblocks to Living a Passionate Life and Defining Success

The biggest roadblocks to living our business lives passionately everyday are expectations—paradigms we follow either provided to us by our upbringing or self-imposed from envious comparisons to our peers: “If everyone’s dream job is in finance, is that what I should do?” “My parents will only be proud of me if I get a ‘real job’ so I won’t become an artist.”

Pole dancing is salacious. Instant reactions almost immediately conjure up negative perceptions including the objectification of women or scandalous thoughts about nudity and sexuality. One of the first reactions to my new-found fitness hobby, was a hardy (and clearly nervous) laugh from a fellow board member who spent the remainder of our strategic planning meeting furtively glancing across the conference table at me in open shock, mentally trying to mesh the seemingly opposing concepts of “board president” and “pole dancer.”

Fear—of loss, of failure, of not living up to those paradigms and disappointing people whose opinions we value —can prevent us from living the life that is most fulfilling to us personally, our passionate life. Fear can lead us to shore up paradigms that we know don’t feel right, provide excuses for not breaking out of our comfort zone and mire us further in a downward spiral of negative thoughts and actions: “I can’t do this, I’m not good enough, I’ll never be happy.”

Not only am I not naturally athletic, I am also deathly afraid of heights. Of course an intense fitness activity that involved heights would propel me completely out of the “funk” I’d fallen into!

The first time I climbed to the very top of the pole I thought I would have a heart attack. I looked below, sweaty palms, white-knuckle-clenched to see the smiling faces of my fellow students and my supportive “pole mom” instructor cheering me on and I started to believe, for just a moment, that perhaps if I could conquer this, maybe I could conquer other my fears and worries about business and rediscover my passion. Maybe things weren’t really as bad as they seemed.

Since no one is born with a natural ability to shimmy up a slippery, chrome apparatus, the pole dance community is incredibly supportive of men and women of all shapes, sizes and abilities. Every small improvement, every tiny victory over previously insurmountable physical or emotional limitations are a cause for celebration. Each class, as I got a little stronger, a little more confident in my ability, slowly those feelings of empowerment started to translate to other parts of my life too and I began to walk, then run and now leap out of bed ready to face the challenges of the day. My passion was coming back!

It’s Up to You!

Today, even though market conditions haven’t gotten much rosier, my outlook has and my passion for providing excellent service wearing all my many professional “hats” has improved dramatically. I’m bothered less by the little things that used to easily derail my optimism and I’m not afraid of what others think about how I live my life and run my businesses. If I could swing my entire body upside down, I could do anything! Pole dancing may not be the panacea for all your business ails but try something totally different that engages you in a new way—you never know what you’ll discover. No one is ever too old, too young, too unfit, too uncoordinated or too any-excuse-you-can-muster to live a passionate life that is perfectly right for them.

The only one holding you back from living your passionate life is you. So what are you waiting for? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed Under: International Leadership Blogathon Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What can zombies teach us about Leadership?

March 17, 2013 by

What-can-zombies-teach-us-about-leadership-Colleen-JollyWe create monsters that represent and reflect our culture’s prevailing fears. We then vilify those monsters by celebrating their inhumanity (even though those monsters often are or were considered human) and destruction in order to repair the perceived or potential transgression away from “normal” society.  Edward Ingebretsen in his book, “At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture,” claims that “monsters serve as convenient tokens whose narratives contain trauma as well as solution; they provide easy answers to intractable problems.”

We use monsters to declare our problems by using extreme caricatures that violate the boundaries of normal society. In fact, we use those monsters—those extremes—to clearly mark out the restrictions of what a society will accept as normal. These monsters can be the stuff of horror movies, or they can be men, women, and children who have done something monstrous and so transcended society’s levels of acceptance. We are terrified of these culturally agreed to and created monsters because they are the antithesis of our society. We also need them, however, because they remind us of the limits we have implicitly agreed to abide by in order to be a part of that society. Without monsters, we literally do not know what to fear nor do we know what the acceptable social limits are within our culture and society.

Zombies are not a new cultural phenomenon. Stories of formerly dead persons living again, either under the control of someone else or otherwise completely devoid of reason, are present in histories and even some religious beliefs throughout the world.  The specifics of each type of zombie, including how to become one and what happens after transforming into one, are relevant to those cultures and those time periods. Why, then, have zombies come “back to life” and reemerged into the pop culture limelight within the United States (US) and other western cultures—if not the entire world?

Modern, pop-culture zombies as seen in popular movies and television shows are driven by their basest instinct—food. Entering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (as published in “A Theory of Human Motivation”) at the bottom of the physiological rung within a typical human’s pyramid of needs, they have no other motivation other than to feed. Zombies do not possess a need for safety, belonging, or esteem; and, with the possible exception of the movie “Warm Bodies”, no zombie shows any reflection of self-actualization.

Zombies are what our parents warned us we’d become if we watched too much television, fell prey to peer pressure, or simply subscribed to a dangerous status quo. Today, are we actually worried about the dead rising and eating the brains of the living? Most of us are not, but what we are worried about is mindless homogeny. We are worried about the loss of drive and creativity, of self-actualization, and of the ability to actively participate in life as either a leader or an active and engaged follower. We are worried about the collapse of our society through the loss of our individuality, as well as the loss of our own culturally defined humanity which has significantly more layers, needs, and complex relationships then the zombie’s which is simply “to eat.”

As a global community united by mostly westernized pop culture, we are concerned about a generation of mindlessness—or perhaps the lack of mindfulness. 

We are worried about people standing by while atrocities happen, or as corporations and governments choose greed and self-interest while the multitudes suffer the negative repercussions. The fact that we currently see so many references to zombies in pop culture—often intricately related to the collapse of modern life, including the breakdown of communication, loss of safety, and scarcity of resources—means that we are very concerned about this issue. We need to wake up and shake off our zombie-like nature and be actively engaged in our lives, our businesses, and our communities.

We can no longer allow ourselves to be marginalized by our own willful ignorance, a contagion that is sweeping the world faster than any zombie-inducing virus. 

What zombies teach us about leadership is that we are in desperate need of leaders and of actively engaged followers. By their nature, zombies lack the self-actualization and creativity to lead, as well as the drive to be actively devoted to following a person, movement, or idea. These monsters point out our problems, but they also describe our solutions; and it is our current cultural fascination with them that is also our call to action. We must eradicate this “virus” of mindlessness, of zombification, and become leaders in our own lives whether that is from forging our own path or becoming an adherent, a follower, of a cause we believe in. Only then can we be free of this particular monster.

 We create monsters that represent and reflect our culture’s prevailing fears. ~Colleen Jolly Tweet this

Filed Under: International Leadership Blogathon Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Belief: The Underpants Gnomes Method of Leadership

March 4, 2012 by

Belief & LeadershipThe primary function of a leader in any organization is to believe. A leader is someone who must carry the torch in the darkness and light the path towards the desired end goal. They must have unwavering belief in their cause, their mission, their people and their ability to achieve what may at first appear impossible or in some cases outright ridiculous.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Emmy Award winning cartoon series “South Park,” which explores current events in an often satirical way, addresses the concept and philosophy of business several times, but none with such clarity and resonance with the business community as the 1998 episode “Gnomes.”

In “Gnomes,” one of the 4th graders claims his underpants are suspiciously disappearing. What he discovers is a race of gnomes are stealing his underpants as part of a business plan wherein “Phase 1” is simply “Collect Underpants” and “Phase 3” is “Profit.” The immediate question becomes, “What is Phase 2?”—which the gnomes cannot answer. This episode has been used to illustrate folly in both business and politics in the New York Times, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal …to name a few. However, I believe these periodicals are missing the point.

Leaders inspire their people, their countries and their organizations to do impossible things for extraordinary results, but they do not always have the details of how exactly those results are going to be achieved.

John F. Kennedy inspired a nation with his 1962 “We Choose the Moon” speech in which he said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

The “Underpants Gnome” version of his plan may have looked like this:

  • Phase 1: Make speech
  • Phase 2: ?
  • Phase 3: Beat Russians to the moon

Which does not inspire the most confidence, as at that very moment no one in the world knew how to successfully travel and land on the moon or if it was actually possible. There was a lot of theory and potential, but no road-map for “Phase 2.” JFK believed that the nation could achieve this incredible task and do it before the end of the 1960s. Without such extraordinary and unshakable belief, the US and Russia may have never achieved the scientific, environmental and financial gains of harnessing the power of space which continue to benefit the world now almost 50 years later.

There is a veritable ton of business literature available to train you how to manage your team, sell your product or service and how to engage your customer to create a successful enterprise. You can learn every mechanical “Phase 2” process and best practice in the world but true leadership is not about process, it is about belief. Leadership is creating a big hairy audacious goal and inspiring the people around you to believe in that goal …and more importantly in their ability to achieve it and make the impossible, possible.

So don’t worry about having all the answers—history is full of stories like the Space Race and of people making incredible and seemingly absurd goals based on shaky premises. If you truly believe in your idea, hold on to it and you will find a way to realize those dreams while inspiring everyone else around you. And when they ask you how you did it—just tell them you learned everything you need to know about leadership from the Underpants Gnomes.

Please leave a comment below to keep the conversation flowing.

Connect with Colleen Jolly: Website (US) |  Website (UK) | Twitter | LinkedIn

Filed Under: International Leadership Blogathon Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,