Shoot for the stars: Don’t miss this inspiring advice from Sylvia Acevedo

Photo above by Nathan Anderson via Unsplash.

Last spring, Kidsburgh’s first batch of podcast episodes included interviews with six remarkable people with Pittsburgh connections, all with advice to share with parents and kids. Among our guests was Sylvia Acevedo, who is an entrepreneur, an investor, CEO of Girls Scouts of the USA and — literally — a rocket scientist.

The author of “Path to the Stars” is a strong believer that each one of us can do things to improve our communities and the world. She spoke with two members of our team — Kidsburgh’s director, Yu-Ling Cheng, and KDKA-TV’s Kristine Sorensen — about her journey and her thoughts on raising kids who feel confident shooting for the stars.

Among the wisdom she shared that can benefit kids and parents:

When you break down a big goal into smaller steps, it becomes much easier to imagine tackling: Acevedo’s family didn’t have a lot of money to pay for her scouting activities when she joined Girl Scouts as a child. But her local troop leader allowed her to use proceeds from her cookie sales to pay for the activities she wanted to do. “That meant I was going to have to sell a lot of boxes of cookies, and that seemed pretty overwhelming,” Acevedo remembers. The troop leader asked her: How do you set a goal, and then how do you then go about achieving that goal?

The troop leader broke the process of selling a large number of cookies down. “She said, we’re going to sell cookies for six weeks. So we divided that number by six. And then she said, you’re probably going to sell cookies six days during those six weeks. And so then she divided that number, and then it became a single digit number. And that was very achievable!”

When you get stuck, ask for help. “For me as a young child, that was like this, the ‘aha’ moment — a breakthrough moment. Because I realized that’s how you make your dreams come true. You set a goal, you break it into smaller steps, and when you get stuck, you ask for help.”

Sometimes your first try at something doesn’t work out — whether it’s selling cookies or doing anything else. But you don’t have to give up after that first try. You can keep at going. Acevedo’s troop leader taught her not to leave the site of a cookie sale until a potential customer has said no not just once, but three times. That approach worked well for her as a Girl Scout and she has continued applying it throughout her life. “It taught me the importance of persistence, resilience and kind of, how do you find common ground?,” she says. “How do you get someone to a yes? Thanks to Girl Scouts, as that seven year old little girl, I began working those muscles of, how do you create opportunity, and how do you get to a yes? How do you find common ground, even though you might hear a lot of no’s along the way?”

You can find more parenting insights and great advice from Acevedo on the Kidsburgh Podcast.

Listen right here or find us on Apple Podcasts, Pandora and Spotify, or at the SLB website. And you can download the episode here (file size: 37.9 MB).

Find the first six of our podcast episodes right here, and stay tuned for new episodes later this fall!