For many of us, collaboration is something we enjoy doing, but don’t always have the opportunities and time to do so. Concepts like discovering or refining best practices and building a more mutually beneficial professional relationship can only blossom after taking the first steps of collaborating with others, for example. Overall though, the benefits of collaboration are extensive and beneficial to everyone’s situation.

Collaboration provides us with perspective. Too often we can get stuck in a rut when something isn’t working for us or we aren’t seeing positive results emerge quickly enough. Gaining perspective through collaboration is the most satisfying part of our work for many of us, or at least extremely rewarding. Someone who provides a rewarding perspective through collaborative talks is someone we should value highly. Seeking to collaborate with someone does two things for us, both of which are highly beneficial. Either we gain perspective and see things from a different point of view and correct the path we’re on, or we are provided with validation and reassurance to keep doing what we’re doing. Collaboration only leads to a win-win scenario.

If we had to model the benefits of collaboration, we could think of it as a ‘Wheel of Momentum’, a model that shows cascading positive effects cooperation and collaboration have when we are idea building. Each of these creates clarity and confidence for the long term so that finding a good formula becomes a simple process. All this is grounded in the simple roots we discover when collaborating with someone. It’s really all about ‘who’ we are (collaborating) with as opposed to ‘how’ we are doing something. Finding the right ‘who’ allows us to break through the walls of complexity we all regularly experience.

An important tool we can learn or at least reinforce when it comes to collaboration is how we communicate. All too often, especially for small businesses, a voice, or maybe only a collection of common voices, is heard. Going outside that bubble and communicating with others opens a variety of different and rewarding avenues with regard to perfecting our communication skills, especially when we don’t think they need perfecting!

More recently, collaboration has made a further leap into technology with the app Clubhouse, which is helping bridge people’s collaboration gaps. For many people, finding a room with a topic relevant to them is enough. Others, who are running rooms themselves often remark that choosing topics to discuss and making their room stand out from others only really emerges from, you guessed it, collaboration.

Finally, let’s leave with this in mind. Collaboration is for those with an abundant mindset. We live in a world of abundance and of course, it implies there’s plenty of everything to go around. So collaboration is like providing mutual access to this abundance. Helping each other help each other. It’s really quite a beautiful concept, right? So as the great philosopher Vanilla Ice once said, “Alright stop, collaborate and listen.”

This article was based on my conversation with Marc Ronick on the Simplifying Entrepreneurship podcast (Episode 4).

You can watch my interview with Marc below.