Of course we keep up to date with the hottest events in London – it’s our job! Some of our team (including lecturers, event volunteers, students, alumni) are bound to be at each of the biggest and best events in London and the recent Women of the World festival at
London’s Southbank was no exception.
Who wouldn’t want to hear a range of inspirational speakers, celebrating the roles and challenges of women in the world today?
Claire Derrick, our Director of Education, enjoyed the weekend session and one of our current students, Antonia Hurley, attended the Women of the World festival on Friday.
#WOWLDN 2015 boasted a fantastic line up including Annie Lennox, Lauren Laverne and Caitlin Moran (among others), addressing issues that matter to women of all ages, at all points in their career development and their lives. The organisers have also made
talks and
photographs from the week-long festival available via the website so anyone can benefit from this event’s world changing mission.
We loved the discussion with radio presenter, now entrepreneur,
Lauren Laverne at #WOWLDN on the glass ceiling that still exists for women and the importance of doing things differently to everyone else, even though you might not win everyone round first time.
Laverne started her career by creating a girl band,
Kenickie, in a music industry that was and still is rife with misogyny. Listen to the part of her talk where she recounts how someone in a record shop wouldn’t sell albums to her because he didn’t want to waste them on a girl!
With a successful career as a front woman and as a radio presenter despite such blatant sexism, she is now reshaping her career by founding a digital project called ‘The Pool’, aimed at gathering and sharing useful digital content for women. As Laverne discusses her professional journey, our favourite part of her talk is on embracing imperfection. Instead of waiting until we are perfect and the finished article, Laverne encourages us all to take first steps and try realising our own unique ideas first even though they won’t all succeed. As she describes it “that is what human beings are: spectacularly imperfect” and urges us all to be less afraid of it.
Here at Event Academy we feel strongly about inspiring women to get out into the workplace by following the lead of positive, feminist role models. In fact, it is important for all of us, anywhere (not only women) to get out into the world to try or test our ideas. It’s the best way to learn and is exactly the approach we take in our event management training courses. You will never get it completely right first time, but you will learn from practical experience. On top of that, life is more fun that way!
If you want to listen to some inspiring stories from women who have created global personas for themselves and whose work is changing the world, take some time to browse the recorded interviews on the
Women of the World Festival sound cloud feed. Remind yourself how important it is to value your contribution and your career development no matter what your gender or what point of your career development path you are on.
For all the women out there reading this, go take on the world and let’s go out there and “claim our half of the world!”, as Laverne says in her interview. How will you challenge yourself today to make sure your voice is heard and make your unique contribution?
