Earlier this year, I published a post outlining what we can all look forward to from Living for Monday in 2014. In it, I said that we would use this year focus on becoming the most inspiring and creative media and training company for young professionals in the world. But, in order to do that, we have to be the most creative and inspiring media and training company serving young professionals in Atlanta first. Here’s a quick review of what I had to say:
…if we can’t build community in Atlanta, then we have no business building community around the country and world. There is no greater asset than being able to take a short drive to record a podcast episode, head over to a local startup to profile their organization, or work with inspiring young professionals across the city to develop the best articles on the web for young professionals.
Equally exciting is the opportunity to create amazing live events for the local audience. If we have a broad-based community in Atlanta, we can run retreats, mastermind groups, live interviews, live trainings, and more. Without that community in Atlanta, we’d have to ask people to fly in from all over just to take a chance on one of our events…
I wholeheartedly believe that if we can become the best in Atlanta while creating a sustainable revenue model, we can rapidly expand to new cities to reach a wider audience. I described the first step towards becoming the best in Atlanta in the same post:
…we’ll be inviting 15-20 young professionals to be our 2014 contributing editors at LivingforMonday.com. The commitment is a minimum of one article per quarter, which will give us at least one new how-to article per week. With the inputs of so many talented people, we can remove me as a bottleneck and I know the quality of our articles will skyrocket thanks to the collaborative potential of so many brilliant people.
Building a supportive community of incredibly talented people to write for LivingforMonday.com was by far my top priority to kick off the year. If you’re one of the many people in our audience wondering why we haven’t been publishing content this year, this is why. We’ve been busy rounding up the most impressive and inspiring Atlanta young professionals to write great articles that serve your needs.
Many media companies that serve young professionals ask career coaches and others looking to sell their services to write for their sites. I believe that tarnishes the quality of the content and focuses it more on pitching a service rather than providing true value. (I know because I’ve written for that kind of site.)
To be the best in the world, we know we need to be different, which is why we’ve taken the opposite approach. Every contributor to Living for Monday is someone that is in the trenches everyday, working hard to build a badass career. So, without further ado, here are the 2014 LivingforMonday.com contributing editors:
Courtney Clymer (@LifestyledATL)
Courtney is the owner of LIFE.STYLED, a wardrobe consulting & personal styling company in Atlanta. Many of her clients are working professionals, with day-to-day attire requirements from casual to suits and ranging in age from 20’s to 60’s. Check out the website at www.lifestyledatlanta.com.
Elizabeth Davis (@ElDavis8)
Elizabeth works at The Coca-Cola Company as the Manager of Strategic Initiatives for the Global Sustainability department. We are working toward empowering 5 million women globally, becoming water neutral in Coca-Cola’s use of water, bringing new sources of potable water to communities, and countless other projects that help communities on both a local and global level. The global impact and scale of these projects makes her proud and passionate for the work she does everyday. A fun fact… when she was 5 years old she was charged by a grizzly bear while hiking in Yellowstone National Park. Everyone was fine but it was quite a heart-pounding moment.
Amy Dodge (@AmyDodge1)
Amy works for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, providing digital marketing support for Starwood’s beautiful properties in South Florida and the Caribbean. She loves promoting world class destinations while encouraging and enabling others to pursue their love for travel. Her background is a mix of PR, social media, travel and tourism and in her free time you’ll find her cooking up new recipes and exploring the world on as little money as possible. Through work and play, she’s pet four tigers on two separate occasions – they’re not as soft as they look!
Maureen Flaherty (@MFlaherty7)
Maureen is the Email Marketing and Campaign Specialist at Pardot, a salesforce.com company. A graduate of the University of Georgia, she has previously held digital media and communications roles at Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, Chick-fil-A Bowl, Engauge and 360 Media, Inc., and she loves working in a constantly evolving industry. A long-time resident of Georgia, she has also spent time living in Germany, where she added participating in a professional German musical to her resume at the age of 5.
Nicole Foo (@NicoleA366)
Nicole is an account manager for Dodge Communications, an integrated communications (PR and marketing) agency that represents healthcare technology clients. She loves her work because she gets to spend everyday working on interesting campaigns to best promote her clients and their products/services. She enjoys running, reading and traveling. Plus, she speaks three languages!
Tessa Greenleaf (@TessaGreenleaf)
Tessa works for AMAC, a division of Georgia Tech, where she consults with state agencies and university systems all over the country to help better serve students with disabilities. In her spare time she sings with the Atlanta Women’s Chorus and is passionate about the community of women the group has built in Atlanta. One day Tessa hopes to write on a more full time basis, preferably with a fluffy Pomeranian puppy at her side.
Daniel Groce (@DGroce10)
Daniel works in Corporate Communications and Public Relations for the nation’s largest publicly held insurer. He loves his work because he has such a diverse set of responsibilities that the job is never the same each week. He was a gymnast for 13 years and at the age of 16 he was ranked 27th in the nation on the rings when. And yes, there were at least 28 male gymnasts that year.
Brandon Hayes
Brandon Hayes is a VP & Private CFO™ with oXYGen Financial where he helps families and business owners navigate through the multiple areas of financial planning including budgeting, investments, retirement, insurance and estate planning. He loves his work because he gets to see firsthand what proper education and empowerment can do for consumers as they set out to make smarter financial decisions through their many life stages. He’s also a diehard soccer fan and takes a lot of pride cheering for Arsenal of the English Premier League.
Alex Heller (@AlexHeller)
Alex works for a large medical supply and solutions company, Cardinal Health, managing a team of sales consultants in Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. He loves creating a positive environment and supporting his sales team to make an impact with healthcare providers and their patients. His team represents experience levels ranging from 3 months to 37 years! If he could do anything, he’d be a professional wine taster.
Daniel Kosmala (@DanielKosmala)
Daniel is the Director of Media & Marketing for Radical Mentoring. He loves his job because he knows that his work each day makes it possible for the lives of men around the country to be impacted in a powerful way. He’s played piano since fourth grade and he’s have been dreaming of changing the world for as long as he can remember.
Jill Peets (@JAPeets)
If someone would pay Jill to travel the world, she’d drop everything and do it in a heartbeat! Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, so instead, she’s pursued a career in the hospitality industry which is proving to be the next best thing. Currently a Field Marketing Manager for Starwood Hotels and Resorts, she manages digital marketing efforts for a portfolio of Starwood’s full service brands in Texas including Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis and W Hotels. She loves her work because of the great people and great products.
Chris Sanders (@SandersCJ)
Chris is a 2011 UGA MIS graduate and Senior in the Advisory Services practice of Ernst & Young LLP, with a competency in IT Risk. He enjoys discussing IT Risk strategies, issues, and improvement opportunities with his clients on a daily basis. Before graduating from high school, he lived in five different cities and has not lived in the same apartment for more than a year since.
Lindsay Shoemake (@VivaLaLindsay)
Lindsay Shoemake currently resides in Atlanta, where she works full-time as an Account Coordinator with JWT INSIDE. When she’s not working, Lindsay avidly pursues her side passion, That Working Girl, and loves how the blog has connected her to the Atlanta blogging community. Lindsay got to see herself in print for the first time in September 2013 when she was featured in JEZEBEL Magazine!
Blake Shubert (@Shubs51)
Blake is a leadership and organization development practitioner. After working in Africa in the nonprofit arena, he developed a burning passion for human organizing. Discovering strength in the most unexpected places inspired him to help more people leads lives of significance. Now, he directs operations for Roam, a coworking startup in Atlanta, which is on a mission to build a collaborative business community.
Rebecca Thomas (@RebeccaEllen14)
Rebecca works in Client Services at The Propel Agency, a full-service boutique brand strategy and design firm in Atlanta. She loves her work because of the relationships with teammates and clients, along with the exciting challenge of connecting brands to consumers in a meaningful and authentic way. The coolest thing she’s ever done is learn how to hang glide in the Outer Banks (where the Wright Brothers learned to fly), and her highest flight was at 2,000 feet!
Lindsay Trinkle (@LindsayTrinkle)
As the Program Director for Atlanta Ventures, Lindsay’s work allows her to be a part of building one of the largest and most vibrant startup hubs in the southeast – Atlanta Tech Village. She also founded Creativity Everywhere, an online community exploring what it really means to be creative. As a kid, she wanted to be the head speechwriter for the US President.
Wrapping Up
This post is the most exciting post I’ve published since founding Living for Monday more than two years ago. The people on this page represent the future of Living for Monday — they represent our vision for a world where people look at their work as the number one way to make an impact in the world. A world where people wake up on Monday and look forward to the important work in the week ahead.
Starting next week, you’ll hear from these Atlanta contributing editors once a week on topics that will help you become great at what you do. Everything they write will reflect our core values by encouraging you to:
- Grow as a person at work and at home
- Invest in a community of inspiring people who help you reach your potential
- Seek experiences and learning that push you out of your comfort zone
- Hustle to earn what you want from work and life
- Enjoy the people, experiences, and things you already have
They’ll do that by writing on topics you’ve told us are most important to you:
- Career Advancement – Productivity + Goal Setting ; Managing Work +People + Self ; Leadership + Organizational Politics ; Job Performance ; Job Change (Internal + External)
- Tools – Software ; Apps ; Gadget ; Gear
- Entrepreneurship – Startup Culture ; $0 Marketing ; Business Strategy ; Community Building ; Business Systems
- Soft Skills – Sales + Marketing ; Personal Branding ; Communication ; Professional Relationships ; Training + Growth ; Creativity + Problem Solving
- Style at Work – For Men ; For Women
- Lifestyle – Personal Finance ; Personal Relationships ; Learning + Growth ; Travel + Adventure ; Sleep + Diet + Exercise ; Spirit + Faith
If you want to keep up with the Atlanta contributors on Twitter, click on their handles above, or you can follow our Living for Monday Contributor list.
As we launch our new content plan by inviting these inspiring Atlanta young professionals to write great articles for you, we’re already on the look out for the cities where we will expand next. If you’d like to see us round up a crew of contributors in your city, let us know. A crew of contributors means we’re more likely to bring live training events to your area as well.
So, what do you think? Excited? Apprehensive? Let me know on Twitter: @BarrettaBrooks (be sure to tag @LivingforMonday as well).