There is a line I keep coming back to. I feel that I am here as a lighthouse. To shine light on as many people as possible.
I did not invent it. I found it the way you find something you already believed. The truth is that I learned it from two women before I had a word for it.
Betty Jane Creedon
My grandmother packed up her life in California and moved to Ohio to give me stability when my childhood could not. I was a small person then. I did not fully understand the size of that decision. I do now.
She fed me. She listened to me. She made ordinary evenings feel like a safe place. She believed I was worth the move. When I remember her, I do not remember a grand gesture. I remember the kitchen light on at five thirty in the morning, a teapot, and the way she said good morning like she meant it.
The way she showed up for me is the way I want to show up for other people. That is a whole philosophy, right there.
Mrs. McCabe
Fifth grade. Mrs. Peggy McCabe. She told me I could. I do not mean she told me I could do the assignment. I mean she told me, in a hundred small ways over a year, that I could be a person of consequence. I believed her. That belief has carried me further than any promotion ever could.
Every time I meet with a young woman on a weekly mentoring call, I think about Mrs. McCabe. I think about how she spoke to me. I try, on my best days, to be to someone else what she was to me.
What this has to do with the company
Universal Events Inc. serves nonprofits. Sister's Circle. Vision Keepers. Stand for the Silent. Law Enforcement Against Drugs. Brighter Christmas. The list keeps growing because the need keeps growing.
But the reason I am in this work is not strategic. It is personal. A lighthouse does not decide which ships deserve the light. It is on. It stays on. It looks for the ones who are trying to find their way home.
When someone asks me what kind of clients we take on, I try to remember that. We take on the ones whose mission is to help someone keep going. The rest follows.
Mentorship, up close
Mentorship does not look like a podcast. Most of the time it looks like a fifteen minute call on a Tuesday afternoon. The two of you take apart a limiting belief together. You name it. You hold it up to the light. You put it down and you pick up a better one.
Over months, this changes people. I have watched it happen. I have been on the receiving end of it. The credit for whatever I have become is shared across a long list of people who made time for a fifteen minute call when they did not have to.
A letter to the next one
If you are a young person reading this and you think your zip code or your mobile home park decides the story, listen. It does not.
Somebody is going to be the one who tells you that you can. Maybe it is your grandmother. Maybe it is a teacher. Maybe it is a stranger who sends you a link to this page. Whoever it is, believe them. Then become the kind of person who says the same thing to someone else.
That is how the light gets passed down. That is how all of us stay standing.