Denise Shannon

I attribute my success to God, my faith, and really the calling that God puts on my life, and my ability to follow that, and to listen to that. When I'm working and remember that it's not just my passion, that it was really a calling that was given to me, then I'm not alone, and I can do just about anything.

That failures are not negative. Failures are also basically an opportunity to learn, to grow, and to realize maybe other things that never would have happened if you didn't fail.

I would just say to follow your calling, follow the passion that you have, and not to be afraid. There will be ups and downs, but when you are living your passion and working your passion, it will always be successful.

The challenge that I always see is that anytime people think that you're going to talk about faith or religion, it oftentimes makes people kind of back up, or at least even sometimes run. What they don't realize is that there's so much that is incorporated into our spiritual life. Once you're working with me, or maybe spending some time with me, then you understand how much of our spirituality really impacts all of our life. But I think that's the one thing that people don't realize, and so my challenge always is to be able to explain that for people so that they would like to start to work in that area and really see what is possible. As for opportunities, I just feel like we live in this very chaotic world where there's so much going on, there's so much negativity, there's so much division. Oftentimes, we feel very anxious, and we feel very vulnerable. Sometimes you just need somebody to sit down with you, and to kind of calm that nervous system a little bit, and be able to have you realize that you really have a lot of wisdom inside of you, to be able to identify what your purpose is, and what you want to do in your life, and what kind of life you want to lead. The opportunity that I see is to capture most people, and just get them to sit long enough to just really be, and not be so crazy all the time.

I live by three key values, whether it's personal life or professional life. First is the value of integrity - doing what I say I'm going to do, following through, I'm a person of my word. Second, I am all about being authentic, authentically me, and allowing people to be authentically them, without pretense, without apologizing. And then thirdly, anything that I can do, either personally or professionally, to help connect with people and to connect people with other people, is incredibly important to me.