Sometimes it's good to break your own rules
2024 has been a blur. I spent a good part of the year caring for my mother in Indiana while maintaining a high-touch customer experience for my clients in absentia. Somehow, I’ve managed to do it, and I’m grateful for all the help from my very nimble and responsive team.
After my mother passed away in late April I was able better focus on my business. I knew running a PR firm on the fly couldn’t be a long-term strategy, so I settled in and kept the media wins coming for existing clients while thoughtfully onboarding new ones. To do that well, I created certain ground rules for how to operate.
One rule was to put event PR projects on hold. This work, while rewarding, can be very time-consuming, requires considerable lead time, and is challenging to tackle with a backlog of work and opportunities.
Lo and behold, I was challenged to break this rule the moment I put it in place.
Flashback to the pandemic in 2020 …
I met Dinisha Mingo on an Urban Chamber Zoom call that year. Her charisma and passion for helping others immediately inspired me. Mingo is the founder of the Las Vegas-based nonprofit, Solutions of Change, which is committed to helping minority and disadvantaged populations access mental health care. She also runs Mingo Health Solutions, a behavioral health practice in Las Vegas.
Through the years, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with both her business and the nonprofit.
Dinisha recently reached out for help to promote Solutions of Change’s upcoming 7th annual Healing to Health conference. The event will be held on Saturday, July 13 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Tyrone Thompson Student Union at the CSN North Las Vegas campus.
With only a few weeks until the event (event PR usually requires a 90-day runway), I was faced with the decision: do I stick to my rules and decline the opportunity? Or was it time to bend/break an important rule?
Healing to Health 2023
If you know me, you probably already know the answer. I simply couldn’t say no.
Sometimes, rules must be broken, especially when your gut knows it’s the right decision. This was absolutely the right decision.
Any effort that works to eliminate mental health stigma and supports helping everyone find the care they need checks all of my personal life vision boxes. June is Men’s Mental Health Month, and I know there is no shortage of men who don’t access the care they need for financial, stigma-related, or other reasons. Next month is Minority Mental Health Month.
This year’s conference is titled “Identity Confirmed” and will shed light on the power of being rooted in faith while actively working on mental health. I have attended this conference in the past, and was privileged to see its value, firsthand, and I’m more than happy to break my personal rule to help make it a success.
Making this decision reminds me of something my late mother, Sally Hamburg, used to say. Late in her life, she would insist on picking me up from the airport when I came to see her. I knew driving was challenging for her, and I would tell her it was not necessary to pick me up.
She would respond: “It’s not necessary, but it’s possible.”
No, it’s probably not necessary for me to help promote the Healing to Health conference, but it is indeed possible – and very much worth it.
