The Beginning

One of the reasons that I decided to work on Entrepreneurship for my degree is that I feel that I can help other people with this skill  I really don't know if I will use it to create a business or not, but I felt impressed that this knowledge would help my family and those around me.  Elder Bednar's talk, "Your Whole Souls as an Offering Unto Him" really resonated with me.  I know that I will find it much easier to dive deep into learning if it's not just for me.  If this was just for my own benefit, I would probably take a shortcut.  However, knowing that this will bless someone else makes me want to learn and assimilate all that I can.  It will be interesting to see how God will use this new information through me.

Even though I feel this will greatly benefit the people around me, I have to move forward with a clear vision of what I want to accomplish.  I have always loved landscaping.  My father was a landscape architect and I loved working with him when he would install his designs.  When I went off to college, I realized that designing landscapes and appreciating outdoor spaces was what I thought about when I wasn't thinking about anything else.  When I was in college and studying to enter this field, I had to stop because I had young children.  My father encouraged me to keep working at it and I freelanced landscape design in my spare time.  I figured that if I were to ever enter the workforce again that I would want to be designing residential landscapes.  When the opportunity came for me to do BYU Pathways and finish my degree through BYU Idaho, I realized that this would offer me the ability to move forward with this.  Through BYU Idaho I will be able to study how to start a small business and I will also be able to learn how to draw up my plans on the computer with CAD.  That will make the process go SO much faster.

Something that make me a little uncomfortable is networking.  I haven't quite explored in my mind what concerns me the most about this.  I actually really like people, but I like to do things face to face.  The world has changed so much and it seems that most networking is done through the internet and social media instead of face to face.  I will need to work on these skill so that I can move forward and use the tools that are most effective for being successful.  LinkedIn will be a great tool to master and I will need to learn how to "Brand Myself."  The concept of branding myself seems like such an elusive idea to me.  How can I take the things that I've learned and my experiences of the past 20 years and weave them into a marketable tapestry?

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