Dance to Success… With Us! October 2, 2015FeaturedOff

With the mantra, “courage to do what you love,” for 11 years now, PINK has encouraged women to create not just a powerful, meaningful career, but also a beautiful life.

Dance is the beautiful life part for me. And I wish that, in all our striving and advancing, women could find more of the joyful authenticity experienced in activities like dance; that all the getting ahead could feel more like grand jete leaps across the floor then climbing up a cold metal corporate ladder.

According to Bain & Company, confidence and ambition plummet 60 percent a couple years into a new job. Respondents admit worries of paying a high personal price for professional success keeps them from taking stretch roles. Perhaps if more women experience the freedom to be themselves at work as they do on the dance floor, we’d be more likely to snap up promotions.

At the last PINK event, then Brookdale CMO Tricia Conahan said her best mentoring came from watching a race car driver take first place not because of how hard he worked or how fast he drove on the straight away, but how well he danced around corners.

My youngest asks, “Mom, is dancing your way of coping with things?” He’s on to me. Sometimes after meetings or conference calls, I slip away from my computer to the empty building with wooden floors at the back of the lot. I turn up the radio and practice a routine I learned at Dance 101. I took my first dance class in high school after girls in gym class laughed at my awkwardness. I have been dancing around corners ever since but more lately, since our youngest and his brother went off to college.

I dance to relieve stress at work and at home. I dance when I am sad and when I am happiest. I dance just because. On the dance floor you can let go and give yourself over to the music, flying, twirling through space, wild and free. In that moment, movement and music replace worry and pressure.

I know it’s possible to find that thing that makes you feel alive, able to express who you really are, even if at first you resist putting it on your resume. I now know it’s possible to trim those corners and win, not just the race to the top, but to happiness.

So, on October 19th at 10:30am, 500 ambitious career men and women will gather at Atlanta’s InterContiental Buckhead hotel to find out how some of America’s top business leaders choreographed their extraordinary careers. Will you join us? Speakers include Alison Lewis, CMO Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies; Linda Galipeau, CEO Randstad North America; Bill Burke, COO Newell Rubbermaid; Ann-Marie Campbell, The Home Depot’s Southern Division President; Michelle Grech, President of Melt; Tami Barron, CEO of Southern LINC Wireless and Sheila Stanziale, Chief Executive Officer of Mighty Leaf Tea.

CLICK to learn more about PINK’s 11th Annual Fall Empowerment Event. Find out how our powerful panelists stay happy, authentic and successful.

“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.” Satchel Paige

By Cynthia Good
Photo by Bubba Carr

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