The Parlay Effect with Anne Devereux-Mills

Kelly: Would you like to share with our community who you are and your pronouns?

Anne: Absolutely. I’m an Devereaux Mills, which is impossible for anyone to spell correctly or pronounce. I find out all sorts of things about Devereaux, Devora Ex, etc. I’m known as a as a she. Her, but I’m also known as somebody who welcomes everybody regardless of pronouns and name pronunciation into my home and into my life.

Aurora: So, Ann, can you share with us a little bit about where you’re from and what have been the key highlights of your journey?

Anne: I love this question because where I’m from is physical, but where I’m from, his experience will as well. So I was born and raised in Seattle before Seattle was Seattle. And when I turned 18, I went off to college in Boston and had an incredible for your experience at Wellesley College in a community of women who exhilarated me and intimidated me at the same time because they were all pretty amazing. And as soon as I graduated from college, I moved to New York City, where I spent the next, you know, 30 some years of my life in both New York and commuting in from New Jersey when I was a mom. Building and running advertising agencies in an exceptionally male world and living in suburban New Jersey when I was a mom, which was an exceptionally different world than my my daily job. And because I ended up getting divorced relatively early, my girls were pretty young. I was a single mom in the suburbs commuting into a very aggressive business and trying to figure out where I was from more more figuratively than literally, because there were so many aspects of my life where I felt I didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit into the suburbs with most of the moms who were at home. I wanted to, but we didn’t have the same daily experiences. And so it was tough. And I I didn’t fit in necessarily in the work world because I was a woman and because I was a strong woman and because I was an outspoken woman. And so it was a very interesting adult life of feeling like I was successful by other people, other people’s standards, but not necessarily feeling like I was successful in traditional definitions of what that means. And it made me feel kind of like an outsider in a lot of aspects of my life, even though anyone who looked at my life would say, “Wow, she is doing it all. Raising kids and being a single mom and running companies and surviving cancer.” Which – I had cervical cancer when I was in the middle of my divorce and had to go through a hysterectomy, merged with, you know, going to court to get out of a scary marriage. So people would say, “Wow, she survived.” And I felt like, oh, my God, I’m clinging on for dear life.

Aurora: And that moment when you were clinging on for dear life shifted so much for you, Anne.

Anne: It did. It shifted in an instant because I was running my fourth company. It was the recession. My oldest daughter had gone off to college. My younger daughter was getting ready to go to college. And I got news that the cancer cells that had been replicating super-fast years ago were back and starting to do their thing again. And I had to have more surgery. I thought, OK, I’ve survived before. This is – you know, I’m grit, I’m tough, I’m going to do this thing. And I walked in my four inch heels at Madison Avenue into my boss’s office, who I’d started these companies for over the last 20 some years. And I said, “Sorry, I gotta take a few weeks off, but I’m gonna be fine. I will be back. I’ll be running this company. Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” And he said, “Nope, I’m going to have someone else run the company.” And in that instant, I lost my job, my stability, my health. My last kid was leaving for college and I didn’t know who I was. Without the definition of “Hi, I’m Anne. I’m the CEO,” or, “Hi, I’m Anne. I’m Lauren and Kiera’s mom,” or “Yeah, we’re at the gym every morning at 5:30 working out before we go and have our big careers.” I had none of those things and I literally realized that my adult career was spent defining myself by these outside measures of what I did or who I was related to instead of what I believed in and what I wanted and what I valued and what I was missing. And so it was a forced pause. But probably the best thing that ever happened to me because the one piece that didn’t fall apart when when all else did was the man I was dating who lived in California and I was in New York. And we had been having a a long distance romance for a couple of years. And he was with me for surgery and then he said, “You know, honey, I know you are successful, but doing what you’re doing is literally killing you. I don’t think this is such a good idea. Maybe you should move to California. We’ll be together and we’ll figure out what the next step is.” And to be honest with you, I didn’t have a lot to cling to at that time. You know, I didn’t I wasn’t. I wasn’t saying goodbye to much else because so much had been pulled out from under me. So I literally dropped my younger daughter off at Tulane in New Orleans and kept heading west and moved in with the man who’s now my husband. And we bought a house together and I was standing on the roof looking out at the San Francisco Bay and Marin. And it was a sunset and the clouds were pink and feathery and it was beautiful. And I thought, oh, my God, this is fabulous. I need to have a girlfriend over for a glass of wine. And then I realized I had moved into a city where I didn’t know anybody other than David. I didn’t have a friend. I didn’t have connections. I didn’t have work. I didn’t have an identity. And I thought, oh, my God, how – what do I do? Where is my life and what do I want it to be since it’s clearly starting from as blank a slate as you can possibly have? And I thought back to those years at Wellesley College with 2000 women and I thought back to being one of three daughters in Seattle. And I thought back to being the mom of two daughters in New Jersey. And in each of those situations, I was surrounded with women where we could be authentic and vulnerable and talk about the things that there weren’t other safe places to talk about, like our fears, like how isolated I felt, like how much I felt like a failure for having lost my job. You know, all of these things that I didn’t have safe places to talk about. I wanted to replicate that. So I started this crazy experiment of inviting strangers into my home. I literally asked friends of friends, who do you know in the San Francisco area who might want to come over to my house and yes have wine, but to talk. And I was really looking for a diverse group of strangers. So I didn’t want to be with a bunch of other sort of 50 year old white women just like me. I wanted a more diverse life experience. So as I was building this this group of strangers, I really looked for a range of ages and a range of sexual orientation. And to have people with different color skin and different life experiences and hopefully who all didn’t grow up in the United States. And it was amazing. I started to pull this group together. We had 12 women in my living room in San Francisco and a friend of mine, Tamsin Smith, who’s a poet, sort of led us in a very loose discussion of how to make poetry accessible. But it wasn’t really about that. All she was doing was setting the stage for open and vulnerable conversations. And I found as soon as I said things like, “I feel like a failure. What this poem says to me is, yes, you have to hang on to the people around you who are really there for you.” I said, you know, “I was in this position of power and I had thousands of people who I’d worked with who had worked for me that when I got sick and lost power weren’t there for me. And I was invisible.” And as soon as I said these things, the strangers around the room nodded. And these were not women whose lives were the same as mine, but they were women whose needs and insights could relate to each other. And so 12 people left that day and said, “Let’s do this again. And we’ll each bring a friend,” and 12 became 40 became 50. And now has expanded to nine cities around the world with more than 5000 diverse women participating. So, yes, my life did a total flip, but a flip in the right direction.

Kelly: And I’m so curious and like, what made you crave to be with people unlike yourself? And what did you.

Anne: I was bored with people just to like me, to be honest. I was sick of having the same conversations with people who I knew would agree with me, who had been to the same places or felt challenged by the same things. I wasn’t being emotionally challenged, and I didn’t feel connected to the world because it was very clear to me that most other people in the world were not living the same experiences I was. But because of where I lived and who I was, I didn’t have chances to find out about their lives you know, in a balanced way. I could mentor young women, which I was. I have a number of young mentees who are different races and have different cultural backgrounds. But that’s not a relationship on a parallel level, those are people I can help lift up, which is super important. I wanted to hear the stories of women who are not just like me and understand their lives to make my life richer and hopefully to help open the door for them to.

Kelly: Yeah what is it about groups of white women when they get together in their same age range and kind of checking off the list of what they’re talking about? You’ve mentioned I’ve heard you say the term transactional before.

Anne: Mm hmm. I live in a society that’s set up to have expectations of favor returning. I call it transactional relationships. So I drive your kid to soccer and you drive my kid to soccer. Or if I do this thing for you, I’m sure you’re gonna do something for me in exchange. And what I found was a lot of important relationships in my life would sort of weaken or even fall apart when the expectation was reciprocity, the expectation was giving back the same thing or in the same way to someone else. So the minute I stopped thinking about what do I get back from this and framing relationships as an exchange of goods rather than just a a connection which sometimes might be imbalanced, but that might be for a reason. All of a sudden I could find happiness even in imperfect relationships. And let’s face it, even if were partnered with the best person in the world or have a best friend or have a sister that we’re incredibly close to, none of those relationships are perfect. And the minute we stop expecting it, both of ourselves and of those people in our lives, we have much richer experiences because the differences are as important and sometimes, at least in my experience, more important than the similarities. That’s where you find the stretch, that’s where you find the growth. That’s where you find the insights, the things you’ve never thought of. Jesus, I’m gonna be 90 years old and still meeting people whose life experiences opened my eyes to new things because, you know, if you know everything what’s the fun of that? You just become stagnant.

Aurora: Well, I think that’s the point. And and I’d love for you to share a little bit of the intention of the Parlay House, because this speaks to the curiosity, the eagerness that you had to expand your connection and relationship with a broader community.

Anne: I did. And, you know, just just for listeners, the name of my organization is Parlay House. And the word parlay comes not only from the fact that most of the women who join us are in some sort of transition. They might be changing jobs. They might be changing relationships. They might be in a different life stage. You know, there are all sorts of ways that we evolve as humans. But I find when you’re evolving sort of more loudly than at other times in your life, you’re open to looking at possibilities when you’re just doing not evolving, when you’re, you know, in the in the groove of going to work and getting things done, you’re sort of looking straight ahead and you’re all about the doing. I I like to parlay with people who are open to looking around them because something is transitioning. You know, the word parlay also means to talk. This idea of when you’re in a transition actually being open about what that experience feels like. When I went to buy the website to own the name parlay house it all sorts of gambling sites popped up. And I thought, huh, why would why would gambling site have anything to do with my inclusive women’s organization? And it’s because a parlay in the world of gambling means the stakes are higher with cumulative bets. The stakes are higher when more people are in it together. And that was really an aha for me because I found the stakes for our community and the stakes for my personal happiness were higher and better. The odds of success were better when it was a group of people supporting each other and getting out of their bubbles and getting out of their routines and getting out of their neighborhoods and coming to connect with other people. And it wasn’t just me that felt that. In fact, you know, in Seattle and Oakland and Atlanta and Denver and Washington, D.C. and Paris and London and soon to be Amman, Jordan women are having conversations about their hormones and their sexuality and about how to deal with the narcissists in their life or how to spot people who have psychopath-like behavior or on a much more down to earth level, you know, what do you do when your life is changing and you feel lost? How do I provide a forum for those people to start to test out little propositions and get answers? And that’s what the Parlay House gatherings are about. Everyone comes with a different sort of intention or need, and some are about our content, our speaker and what that topic might be. But a lot of them are about coming to be with people who might be doing something that interests them that is a little way for them to get started in trying something new in their lives that provides richness and growth and fulfillment.

Aurora: And you’re very deliberate and you’re very deliberate in not having participants who come show up with business cards.

Anne: Right.

Aurora: Tell us a little bit about the process that you use and actually the environment you create.

Anne: Yeah, I mean, we have very few rules because we want it to be a comfortable place that can be whatever the people there need it to be. But there are two there are two key rules. And the first is you don’t come to ask something of someone else. So at the very beginning, we had people who would be like like you guys, you know, experts in in marketing and advertising. And you’d have another person who wants to start her first nonprofit. And the minute you started framing yourself by what you did for a living, she was pretty excited to meet someone who might be able to help her. And your night of putting yourself at the top of the hierarchy of who gets taken care of rather than being the one taking care of everybody else just got blown away because someone is asking something of you and taking away from your chance to do something for yourself. So we have this non extraction policy. Now things happen outside of Parlay House when when women connect and walk out the door. There are many, many ripple effects of connections and it might be work related or it might be a project or it might be a volunteer opportunity. And the second rule is diversity at the core. So I wanted it to be impossible for women to only talk with women just like themselves when they’re at Parlay House, which is why we push really hard for 20 year olds and 80 year olds and, you know, people with all sorts of backgrounds and identities to be part of our organization. And I think that those two things mixed together is is really the secret sauce of what makes everybody feel invigorated and heard and inspired and moved and human.

Aurora: And what are some of the magical connections? I mean, aave you gotten a chance to hear what has transpired, as you call it, the ripple effect of Parlay?

Anne: All the time. And sometimes they’re in kind of big ways and sometimes they’re in small ways. So, you know, a big way might be we had a panel of women who had been following their husbands careers to Singapore and they were all expat wives sitting in one of the expat neighborhoods, you know, watching their kids play or whatever. And they realized that their own goals had been put put away because they were following their husbands careers in other places. And they all sort of said, “Well, that’s bull. I don’t I why I want to write my book. I want to start my nonprofit. I want to be a consultant.” And so they made a pact to meet on an ongoing basis and hold each other accountable for following whatever her personal goals were. And this was the panel talking to us while in the audience was a physician who had had a successful career, but was feeling sort of unfulfilled, not knowing what her next steps were. And so as she walked out that night, she realized she needed to replicate what they had done. And she created her own group that had nothing to do with Parlay House of Women to pursue their next step in their lives and hold each other accountable. And then a woman at Parlay House who is from Silicon Valley, who heard what these women were doing, thought, “O h, my gosh, that’s exactly what I need.” And she did the same. So now we have waves of women who hear about, you know, these opportunities to support each other, forming groups way outside of Parlay House to do that. So I love that example. The other example is a fascinating personal one. I had a group of girlfriends, a diverse group of girlfriends in San Francisco say, “Anne we want to have a a birthday dinner for you at our house.” And I thought, oh, my gosh, I moved here and I didn’t know anybody. And now I have a group of friends who are welcome welcoming me into their circle and they’re doing a birthday dinner for me. This is phenomenal. So I’m at their house and sort of we’re toasting each other. And I said, you know, “When I moved here and didn’t have a friend, this is what I was looking for.” And they said, “Well, and when you moved here and didn’t have a friend, we didn’t know each other. Our friendship came when we met one and one and one and one at Parlay House.” Right. So it completely it filled my need. But what I thought I was walking into a community of people that were already connected and already friends when in fact that community formed because they had met each other over the years at my organization. So that was kind of, you know, proof of concept and lifted me a lot because I had no idea. I felt like, you know, I guess we always see ourselves as sort of more of an outsider. But I was I was the instigator and I loved that.

Aurora: Oh, I love that.

Kelly: So special.

Aurora: That’s beautifully special. And I think culminates. I mean, so exemplifies what you are doing. You’ve cultivated for so many of us who’ve had who’ve had a chance to participate in parlay house. And it’s bringing that sisterhood together. I think it’s a huge part of what what Kelly and I are modeling here on the Opt In is, you know, how do we how are we vulnerable? How are we honest? How are we at times messy and uncomfortable, but with with love and without shame so that we can connect and come together?

Kelly: And I say this with love to you, Anne, in that when I was thinking about when you first were telling us about Parlay House, and I was kind of like, “Wow, this seems really novel that that you’d have such such such an eclectic group of people.” And then I was like I kind of turned to Aurora and I am like, Is this just novel for like white women to not do to all of a sudden, you know, want to be in community with women and sisterhood and this net and you know, do you see this as something that’s new or is this age old? And Aurora kind of looked at me and was like, hmmm…

Anne: I do think it’s something that is new. I mean, I think humans by nature tend to to hang out in their tribes of people that are familiar and like them. But I also think we want to get out of our bubbles and get out of our, you know, our familiar tribes, but we don’t know how to start. And I think so much of what we do at Parlay House is helping people get started, whether it’s creating a more diverse and inclusive experience at the events or figure out how to get started with your next chapter of life in a transition of any sort. You know, all of this is sort of allowing for broader thinking and not predictable paths, because I think we’re educated and and groomed in our families to have certain expectations of ourselves and how we behave and what is OK for us to do or what other people are doing it. If you know, you sort of I truly don’t believe there new ideas. I think that there are iterations of things that that improve upon or make next steps in life more relevant, personal, better. And if so, if you’re only exposed to a limited number of inputs, you’re only going to be able to creatively think about a limited number of experiences. But if if you load up your life hearing, hearing the stories and the points of view and the challenges and the victories of people not like yourself, all of a sudden it opens up your world to possibilities that you wouldn’t have had if you’d stuck in your little community with people just like yourself.

Aurora: And I think that’s what’s beautiful about parlay, Anne, is before you talked about access. And I think access – I look at it in two ways. Right. So like you, as someone who spent most of her life in corporate America, there is a level of constraint that at times or most of the time happens, particularly for women, because you’re abiding by some type of code written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken about how you’re supposed to behave. And one of those ways in which you’re not allowed to behave is to be vulnerable. That, I think, limits our ability to connect beyond the task or the goal or the outcome that organizationally we’ve come together to achieve.

Anne: That’s absolutely true. You know, I don’t think we’re aware of how limited our thinking is by the daily experiences that frame our lives. We’re looking for places of truth and trust. And so, you know, I try to make what I’m doing, a place that allows for truth and trust without judgment. I think we need to be uncomfortable on a recurring basis in order not only to check, but to grow. Here’s a perfect example. I was interviewing for one Parlay House event, a woman who’s a practicing witch. And by practicing witch I don’t mean, you know, black pointed hat and whatever. But she’s pagan, she’s highly educated. And she talked a lot about the intersection of strong women and being called a witch. And it’s not only, you know, happens in politics. It’s happened through history. But women who did not fit in and weren’t the cultural norm were, you know, pariahs or burned at the stake or insulted or left out of the conversation, et cetera. And I thought this is a very interesting story that I that I haven’t heard and I’ve never met someone who’s an overtly practicing pagan witch. But when she told her story, it actually felt very understandable and not that different from other forms of religious practice. And when that event ended, a woman walked up to me who I’d seen at Parlay House many times before I knew she was a recurring member. I knew her as someone who who was a marketer, had a job in marketing. And she said to me, “Anne I think I need to tell my story at Parlay House.” Now, a lot of times when women come up to me and say this, it isn’t actually the right topic and I have to manage it kind of gently. But I said, “Oh, really? Why?” And she said, “You know, I suffered from depression and low self-image for a good part of my life. But a few years ago, I got my depression under control. All of a sudden felt my body. I felt my soul. I felt my life. I started to feel good about the world. And as I did, I started to experiment. I started to figure out what makes me feel alive and happy. And I realized that I’m a dominatrix, that my sexual interests are to be a dominant person. And so I want to talk about what that feels like and what that means to me.” And, you know, I never thought that I would be hosting a group of strangers in my home to hear a practicing dominatrix talk about her life journey and her life. But I think we were all not only intrigued because it was a piece of of our lives that was totally unfamiliar, but to have someone who found her sexual truth and be willing to talk about it in an in an open forum with a wide group of strangers. And we kept all of her confidences in the room. And we do have a sort of what happens here, stays here. Agreement among all of us that when people confide, we keep their truths and keep their secrets and hold them hold them sacred in the room. But we were all more informed and engaged as a result of her boldness of and willingness to do that. And so I think we look at, you know, learning about other people’s unique experiences, sometimes by the obvious: Are they age group, are they a different race? Are they a different nationality? But oftentimes when you peel back the layers, the the unusual truths aren’t necessarily divine defined by those obvious things. They’re defined by things that unless you’re providing a safe space for someone else to talk. And unless you’re being open to hearing their truth without judgment, you’ll never have these experiences that make you understand a piece of society and maybe a piece of yourself in an in a different way.

Aurora: Yes, absolutely.

Kelly: Yeah. Incredible. How do you curate such a diverse group in each city?

Anne: Yeah so I’m constantly at every single event saying, please bring women here and bring if you see there’s a group that’s not represented or underrepresented, bring more of them because it’s up to our community to continue to curate the most diverse possible subset of ourselves. So we only are what members make us because we don’t market, we don’t promote, you know, we have a little social media following. But really, this organization is built around the world by women pulling other women forward. And it’s it’s the onus is on the members to make it diverse. And in terms of content, I also listen very carefully to what people are interested in struggling with, you know, because we create these environments where people say, “I almost didn’t make it tonight because I am trying to manage my aging mother and my angry teenager. And I you know, I’m stuck in the middle. And, you know, this is overwhelming to me.” You know, when I hear those truths, it it sort of goes in into a checklist that me and I have a amazing chief relationship officer named Ariel Fuller, who helps me. And we just create a running list of when we hear something cool like the stories that grandmothers tell us and the stories they tell us when they’re when they’re cooking, you know what? What can we learn from and what stories will the grandmothers pass on to us that might be gone if we didn’t pay attention to this important group? You know, the sort of the people that came before us

Anne: Yeah, totally.

Aurora: That’s beautiful. So and you know, you started by saying that you hit up a very monumental transition moment in your life that propelled you to introspect and then call for something new in your life. But I also believe that that calling into something new was also seated inside of you as a person who is curious, as a person who is a storyteller, as a marketer, you were an incredible executive across multiple advertising organizations for the for the female or listener that’s sitting at home and saying, “Well, I don’t have all those experiences and I don’t have access to a parlay. And I’m not in a transition because I have a life that’s, you know, it’s good.” How how do we get her to become curious?

Anne: Well, I mean, truthfully, I think we can’t get anybody to become curious that they have to decide that there’s something missing or something that they’d like to try or something that they don’t know. You know, it’s kind of like trying to get an alcoholic to stop being an alcoholic. Nothing is going to happen until they decide this is a priority for them and sort of commit their their lives to it. But I think what we do is make it easy. You know, if you had listeners who are in a city where there isn’t a Parlay House, one of our major goals is to support women who want to create Parlay house communities it in their own environments and to help them get started. So, you know, I don’t think we can force anyone who is not open to change or looking for change or looking for expansion or looking for new experiences in some way to all of a sudden become that way. But I think we can help people who want to do something but don’t know where to start by by supporting them in exploring whether launching a community like ours makes sense. I’m a firm believer in testing the water a little bit before jumping in. So if your life is pretty good, but you’re feeling either bored with it or, you know, you’re tired of the routine, you’d like to have some different experiences, but don’t really know how. A lot of what we talk about are very small steps that of experimentation, of trial, of inquiry that you try until something feels either easy to you or that you react in a passionate way to in some way. And by passionate, I don’t mean, “Oh, I love this. I’ve always wanted to do this,” which might be true. But, you know, I have a friend named Nancy Lublin, who is a very sassy serial entrepreneur. She was the founder of Dress for Success. She was also the CEO of Change.org. And then she founded Crisis Text Line and all three of those times when she impacted our society in truly meaningful ways, it came because things were pissing her off. You know, she she was furious that women reentering society didn’t have any support to do that, which is how when she inherited $5000 from her grandmother, she used it to start dress for success. And when she was running change.org, people started calling her on their on their hotline, which was for political purposes. And she started hearing signs of people in distress and not knowing how to help someone who is calling me and they’re suicidal or who is calling me and they’re terrified and running away from an abusive situation. Or and because that made her so upset, so angry that our system doesn’t support people like that in safe ways she started founding organizations to to address it. Now, that’s big. I mean, she’s really the only person I know who has had that much impact in a social services way on our society, not not once, but three times, but on much smaller versions of that, you know, what are you reacting to? What what makes you not be able to believe that your community or your life is lacking something or has so much of something that is disproportionate that you want to do something about it, that you want to do something to get started? It might be very small. It might be noticing that there’s someone in your workplace that just cannot get out of their own way for something that is so coachable and being the person to say to them, hey, let’s go out to lunch because I have some guidance for you or you don’t know how to do this. Will, this comes really easily to me. So let me take a few minutes to just pass pass this on to you in a way that that might help. And so I think that for the people who know that they might not want to you know, they’re not, Nancy, they’re not going to go and start the next major nonprofit, but they want to do something to address something that is important to them. Were were really good at helping people find places to start. And I think that that’s what your podcasts does as well, is it helps people think about values and life experiences and ways to make even good lives richer and better and more meaningful with small steps.

Kelly: I actually think a great place to start is your book, The Parlay Effect. I mean, I really enjoyed it kind of walking through, you know, deconstructing myself in your book, Anne.

Anne: Thank you. Yeah. You know, that was the point, it was I sort of wanted to deconstruct for myself and be very open and personal and vulnerable – how I got started because some of this I sort of accidentally fell into. I didn’t think I want to start a global organization that brings diverse groups of women together to talk about things they don’t talk about other places. I did not have that clarity. But by deconstructing my abilities and my weaknesses and the things that were missing and the things that were in abundance, I was able to start to experiment. And so I think that the book being, you know, it has it has a how to component to it that is helpful for a wide range of people who sort of want to change something but don’t know how to start.

Yeah, we have it right here. We love your book.

And I think it’s a great place to start. I mean, I even know where to go, where to show up. I mean, that’s that’s where you and you don’t know where to look first. I mean, that’s who we’re trying to get people look in the mirror. But Ann’s book is a perfect way to look in the mirror and what have you.

Aurora: You now have the Parlay House and now you have this phenomenal book that is is a beautiful first step in sort of, you know, asking yourself some some key questions. Hearing examples. I love all the examples that you pepper across the book. How are you seeing that sort of effect change and sisterhood and women?

Anne: It’s interesting because not only do some women benefit from being lifted by others, and an example that I talk about a lot is my mentee from Cambodia who – She’s about to graduate from Scripps College and she went to London School of Economics her junior year. But this is a girl who grew up in a country recovering from genocide, who comes from a family that had no higher education. She wanted to go to college in the U.S. and had every qualification to get a scholarship except that passing the Tofel exam English as a second language was freaking her out. She was having sort of a undiagnosed panic attack. And I had happened to just meet a young woman at a Parlay House, gathering 27 years old, expertises mindfulness. And she was teaching kids in inner city schools how mindfulness could help them challenge some of their anger and fear and strong feelings into more productive outlets. And she volunteered to call my mentee in Cambodia and teach her some very basic techniques over the phone for 15 minutes to help her calm down enough to do well enough on this test to get her scholarship. And obviously, it worked. And that was an amazing small chain of events. As a society, we often focus on who is mentoring who. But that 27 year old, when realizing that she was, despite her young years at becoming a teacher, instead of becoming the the student, the mentee gained an incredible amount of strength. And I think the great thing that that happens in this chain reaction of women is it’s not always top to bottom. In fact, the person who has something that they naturally do well that’s really easy for them to bring to the next person is a giver who’s passing on something super meaningful to the next person. But they grow in confidence and strength and self-actualization by realizing that something that they take for granted that comes so naturally to them is actually a gift and sort of a superpower in a way that’s very affirmation.

Kelly: That’s wonderful. You know, what do you believe right now and is critical for the sisterhood of women to do to own at this moment in time what is critical?

Anne: I think the most critical thing is to become a unified force to see our differences as strengthening us as a group rather than dividing us into sub segments. And it’s so interesting because when I speak publicly, which I do a lot, one of the things that happens is people say, well, when is Parlay House gonna be available for men? You know, men need to be vulnerable men. Men need to –

Kelly: What about us?

Anne: You know, Bond. Men need to have safe places to talk about things that they can’t talk about other places. And I agree they do. But until women are included equally, whether it’s in the boardroom, in corporate America, in communities, whether they’re paid equally, whether they’re empowered equally, whether they’re represented in government equally, you know, we it’s up to us to lift each other and it’s up to us to teach the men who want us to be equals in all of those places to support us as well as possible. And we’re not going to do that if we’re fragmented. We’re not going to do that if our power is diluted by false definitions and false separations of the differences, instead of the appreciation of those differences, that gives us breath and power together.

Aurora: Hear, hear. Love that. Love that. Anne, what would you aay to your 20 year old self?

Anne: So many things I would say perfect is impossible. And it’s not even pretty. You know, I spent so much time hiding my failures and my worries and my imperfections and worrying about, you know, whether it was the shape of my body or the speed of my running or whatever it was feeling feeling less than looking at the one thing that wasn’t working rather than the things that made me unique. And by unique, I don’t mean perfect. I mean human in a glorious way, I would say I spent way, way, way too long searching for perfect and missing what was really good.

Kelly: Mm hmm.

Aurora: What you just said just resonates so much and wise, wise words. You know, we loved how you were talking about one of the themes being about the stories that our ancestors share with us while they’re cooking. And you know, what is in intergenerational wisdom that you’ve picked up or that you were taught that you’d love to share with our listeners?

Anne: And, you know, I had this bad ass grandmother who who was feisty and difficult and strong at a time when, you know, she she would be in her hundreds now, you know, at a time where women really didn’t have a voice and she knew who she was. So she became the first woman to run a major department at a university. And when it was wartime and she couldn’t go and fight because women couldn’t fight, she could teach aerial navigation. And so she did. And when she was getting older and there were things that she cared about, like social justice, she would be on the front lines with young gay people and with people who had been in prison and with the homeless. And she would do that. And at the same time, when she was in these meetings and being sassy and being strong and being, you know, a feminist without saying “I am a feminist,” just through her actions, she would knit green and gold hats for the Green Bay Packers to give to all the homeless people in Milwaukee who needed hats because they were cold. And so she was this incredibly interesting, complex granny knitting hats and fighting for people who didn’t have the same opportunities and life experiences that she had. And while I never fashioned Parlay House to be in her honor, clearly her legacy lives with me.

Aurora: Yes, I love Granny.

Kelly: And what is your opt in for our listeners?

Anne: my opt in for all of your listeners is look for those trigger points that you’re where your reaction seems maybe disproportionate to the situation, because it’s a cue that that is something where you feel passion and could be committed on some level that engages you, makes you feel your life experience is richer and is a place to start shaping this next chapter of the one life you have to live.

Aurora: And in this one life that Anne has to live, what’s next?

Anne: There are so many places around the world that women don’t have a safe space to connect with each other, with people outside of their communities. To have these conversations. So, you know, my goal for the next number of years will be to help parlay house launch in every place where there is a group of women who would be strengthened by lifting each other.

Kelly: Mm hmm.

Aurora: Here, here, too many more Parlay Houses, too many more connections to many more women supporting each other and being there for each other.

Kelly: And yeah, for those who haven’t had sisterhood learning what that means.

Anne: Exactly.

Aurora: Anne we love you. This has been such a lovely time. Thank you so much.

Kelly: Can’t wait to be with you again.

Anne: Hope to see you at a Parlay House again soon.

Kelly: So let’s go to the next Parlay House event, Aurora. Seriously.

Aurora: I’m there! And just as a side note, if Parlay House isn’t in your city, you can change that! Let’s spread this.

Kelly: We want to hear from you. What is an unexpected, but meaningful connection you’ve made? How are you honoring their work? Find us on the socials @the opt in.

Aurora: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Aurora: Bye.