Benefits of collaborating

Working with others can be a very different experience from working for others. The more we appreciate these differences, the more benefits we'll realize from our collaborating with others. Here's lots of those differences to get you thinking about how cool it is to migrate to more and better collaborating.

Once we've gotten the hang of working with others:

• It feels like we've moved onto a level playing field where we see "eye to eye"
• It brings out our better nature where we feel like being kind, considerate and compassionate.
• It shows us areas where we've taken our uniqueness for granted until we perceive how we differ from other contributors
• It teaches us about other ways to perceive the shared situation and common objectives
• It changes our story about our past as we act differently than before and find freedoms to be more of who we really are
• It revises definitions of problems we've endured by getting help from others who've outgrown them, see them differently or bring other resources to the issue
• It updates our goals, objectives and plans with better ideas about the differences we can make and the satisfactions we can co-create
• It transforms the ground we're standing on from shaky grounds that maintain our insecurities to common ground where our confidence builds naturally
• It grows our ability to understand others, empathize with their feelings and share their experiences with fascination
• It allows sacred cows, hot button issues and guilt trips to come to light where they can be regarded as developmental experiences
• It frames mistakes as essential to learn from, part of the collaborative process and necessary to refine shared intentions
• It provides us with high quality feedback from people who truly get: what we're trying to do, where we're coming from and what impact we want to have
• It helps us discover what we want to learn next, how our intrinsic motivation is changing direction and where our own curiosity is leading us
• It makes learning seem far more serendipitous, unforeseen and flowing from one good thing to another
• It confirms our suspicions that we really do want to help others, to contribute to their projects and to make the world the a better place

Once we grasp this extensive "benefit package" from our own personal experiences with collaborating, it's tough to go back to working for, against or without others.