queen of connection | Shelby L. Phillips

TEDxManhattanBeach Invites Collaboration

Have you ever attended a TED or TEDx conference? I attended my first last year and it changed my life. It changed my thinking about education. It changed my thinking about what is possible for our children. It changed the way I look at things. So imagine my delight when I had the opportunity to collaborate on the team creating this year’s TEDx conference in my local city?

After months of prepping, coordinating and coaching, I helped present TEDxManhattanBeach’s 2013 Conference Imagine That!  to a sold out audience. Attendees were treated to talks that came at creativity from all different angles. It truly was inspirational. But the biggest thing I walked away with was this notion of collaboration. Dr. Marco Villa, project manager for the Hyperloop, invited us all to get involved. Bill Welser from the RAND Corporation, encouraged many of us to help create planetary defense tools to destroy the asteroid coming to earth someday. Tattoo Artist turned inventor, Fred Giovannitti, encouraged us all to lend our talents to an eco-issue that means something to us and not to let our position in life stand in our way. Even comedy writer and Modern Family producer, Dunny Zuker, invited us to flex our comedy muscle and laugh together.

The common thread in each of these amazing talks was that we need each other. Each one of us brings a skill set to the table that is useful. I loved Bill Welser’s example when he pointed out that the Apollo missions were not going to happen using engineers alone. We needed behavioral scientists, nutritionists, physiologists, and a multitude of other –ists and -ologists to work with the rocket scientists and engineers in order to put together that successful program that ultimately made it to the moon and back. It wasn’t a one-dimensional problem and neither is the challenge of dealing with any one of the issues facing us today. Charlene Spretnak, author and relational thinker, shared evidence that we really are all connected, thus driving home the point that working together, collaborating, is how we’re going to not only survive, but thrive in the decades ahead.

I was walking home from school yesterday with my family when one of our neighbors thanked me for working on TEDxManhattanBeach. It didn’t stop there. Throughout the day people acknowledged what an inspiration this year’s conference was, and expressed their gratitude that I lent my talents to make it happen.  I can’t tell you what an awesome feeling it was to know that I made a difference on such a grand scale. It has always been my dream to impact large audiences in a meaningful way — to inspire them to their full potential and to incite love and connection, and I didn’t have to do it all by myself! I was able to make my childhood dream come true by collaborating with a great group of people, each lending their own talents and gifts to the effort.

The fulfillment of my dream certainly didn’t look how I’d always imagined it, but like artist and architect, Alison Wright reminded us last weekend, it’s not what you look at but what you see that matters.

November 19, 2013 at 8:42 pm 2 comments