Wow. Atlanta showed up for us last night!
The energy at the W Atlanta Midtown for our first Southern event was incredible. And the conversation? So inspiring. We were graciously joined by four panelists: Dominique Love (founder of Corporate Community Outsourcing and the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival), Nicole Garner (author and founder of The Garner Circle PR), James Andrews (media entrepreneur and current Chief Digital Evangelist for StudioGood) and Cinda Boomershine (founder of handbag, travel bag and accessories line, cinda b).
There were so many thought-provoking points brought up throughout the night, we wanted to share a few of them with you (as always check out #LiveGrey for a tweet-by-tweet account of the evening):
Be a student of life
Education doesn’t come from just schooling. Learn from those around you (everyone’s a teacher, remember?). Nicole made an excellent point that you can only get yourself so far, and that you’ll benefit tremendously from having a “mental glam squad.” For Nicole, that means mentorship. Nicole’s advice is to have mentors for all areas of life, not just career because as we say, it all blends together.
On the topic of learning, James offered that we should strive to become life-long learners, a lesson he learned from Jane Fonda, one of his former-clients and now one of his mentors (make your colleagues your friends in action!). Stay curious about what’s happening in the world around you. We are living at a time when knowledge is at our fingertips and it’s extremely easy to educate ourselves. “Learn as much as you can,” Dominique adds. “Just GTS, Google that shit!”
What does all this education talk have to do with living in the grey? The more you learn about yourself, your passions and the world around you, the better you’ll understand how to blend them all together!
Believe in yourself
Taking the first steps to live in the grey is hard. No doubt about it. Cinda even remarked that she’s “jumped out of planes, done the world’s tallest bungee, but starting cinda b was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”
What do you do when fear and self-doubt enter the picture? James stated simply “Bet on yourself.” And Cinda quickly added that once you do it that first time, “then it will become part of you and easier to do over and over again.” Awesome advice.
Define what grey means to you
We completely agreed when Cinda said one of the first steps to living in the grey is to define what your grey is. ‘Grey’ means different things to different people. Everyone on this panel happened to be an entrepreneur and while that is one path to grey, it certainly isn’t the only one. As Cinda stated, “if you’re in the corporate world, figure out what the ideal blend of work and life is for you and ask for it.”
We love what Soa, an audience member added to the conversation via Twitter after hearing Cinda make this point:
We’ll leave you with something Dominique shared towards the end of the evening,
“I’m surrounded everyday by hundreds of people that live in the grey that inspire me.”
What better way to be motivated to take risk, overcome fears of failure and make the choice to take a step towards the grey then to be surrounded with people doing the same? That’s exactly why our community means so much to us. Thank you Atlanta, for joining our family.