When we launched Talk Boutique in February 2016, we chose to create a Salon night to invite our community into our “living room” and create intelligent conversations that would inspire change. Throughout the years, our Salon Series gained a reputation as the “must attend” event for those interested in meeting and conversing with others who were thinking about and doing the work of changing our future to be more hopeful and resilient.
So… I was excited to bring back our popular live in-person event this past June exploring the concept of Agency & Power.
As always, we themed the evening around a QUESTION, it was:
“Has fear and global crisis driven us to numb out and forget our own power and agency leading us to simply exist rather than making the hard choices that the life we want requires of us?”
And we curated our speakers to explore this question. Laura Beauparlant and Karen Agro each added an interesting element along with my talk about diversity of thought leadership, for the audience to use as fodder for their conversation.
Laura’s talk helped us to see that we each have the agency to choose a “Life Worth Dying For”. In her riveting talk, Laura took us on a journey from a near death car accident, to entrepreneurship challenges to a life changing family sojourn in Sicily, Italy where for 10 months her family lived, worked, learned and played in order to live a selfish life of meaning. Laura’s dynamic speaking style and her provocative questions had the audience reconsidering their next step and thinking about becoming a digital nomad – if only to find their own selfish life of meaning and build their life worth dying for.
Karen shifted the mood, beginning her talk by expertly playing the haunting opening bars of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah”. Her talk began with a life threatening climbing accident, an accident that resulted in a 6 month long recovery and the threat of losing the use of her right arm and hand.
Using the style of a singer / songwriters, Karen beautifully wove the harmony of the song throughout her talk where she revealed her rejection of music in favour of a more secure career as a scientist, going into pharmaceutical medicine and becoming a pharmacist and consultant to the industry. However, that fall made her reevaluate her choices, allowing her to connect, in a moment of crisis, with a love she had rejected and now may have lost forever. Karen’s talk helped us to understand how music can and does work as a medicine and how we can intentionally use it to heal, to soothe and to create clarity. Her message, beautifully delivered through the harmony of Hallelujah was clear: “when we find ourselves at hard places in our lives, turn to music to help you find your truth, it works faster than any drug and lasts longer than the hit of dopamine from a semi-viral social media post.”