Merideth Ranahan

I attribute my success to my parents - they raised my sister and me to be strong, independent women. They're staunchly conservative Midwestern Republican folk, even though they raised us in California, and they'll say, what happened to you when you went to school in Santa Barbara? Well, Mom and Dad, you raised us to be strong, independent, and self-sufficient women. And that's who I am. I've always been somebody that can just take care of things that need to be taken care of. I agree with hard work, determination, and self-sufficiency, though I've learned in recent years that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness, and it's okay to do so when you need it. I also attribute my success to my friends and my experiences in life - all the things I've been involved in, especially performing arts. I learned how to be confident, engaging, and able to work with people and speak to people in a kind and confident manner. Those are things that have just always driven me and led me to feeling good about being in the world. My Up With People experience was life-altering in such a positive way, and my greatest friends in the world come from that organization. We're all professionals in different spaces, and we lean on each other, support each other, and lift each other up - that's the greatest gift.

The best career advice I've ever received is being authentic to yourself and not being afraid of who you are. I think as women, we're taught to be a little afraid of what we bring to the table - again, patriarchy. But we're conditioned in our society to not speak up, to allow others to tell us what how it should be, or how they believe we should be. I've been fortunate that in my early years of doing this job, I was working with an exceptional group of women who were unapologetically themselves, and I learned so much about myself from them. I've always been a little unapologetically myself - you could talk to my parents about that - but I think working around women that were assuredly not afraid to bring what they had to the table, and walking that in action and being encouraged to be that way has really helped me become the person that I am today, absolutely.

What I always say is, find a place where you can learn from others that have been doing it for a while. I believe that hospitality is at the very core of what we do in this industry, and that goes across the board. I say to my team of producers, our first priority, always, is based in hospitality. So I do say, if you've not worked in hospitality, and you're trying to get into this industry, start working at a hotel or start working at a restaurant that does events. Be in a place where you're actually really having to be in service of others. Because being in service of others is actually what this career is. It's not just making pretty parties and cool events and beautiful things on the screen. Everything that you do in this industry is in service of your attendees and your guests. Just like if you're going to a restaurant and you're sitting at a table and your waitress or waiter or server comes up, or you're at a store and you don't have somebody around to help you - what is your experience like? This is no different. We are in service of others, it is purely based in hospitality, and if we approach everything with a hospitality mindset and think about how we, as a person, might want to experience something, it's going to help you develop the way in which you approach the work in a meaningful and true way that really helps create the experience that you're trying to create.

AI is both a challenge and an opportunity, and I know that's true for many fields, especially in event production. It's finding the right balance between what is artificial and what is a true human-created thing - how we use AI to positively impact an experience. The challenge is that there's a little bit too much reliance on what AI is creating, and you can't forget the human element, and AI is not human. For me, I like to jokingly say - and actually it's not jokingly - I'm analog. I know we're in a tech world, but we have to remember that as human beings, and here's where the sociology comes in, it's actually analog, and we cannot forget that we cannot rely on technology to create human experiences. We just can't. If we remove the human out of the creation, then we're removing the idea that the human is part of the experience. We cannot deny the power of our own beautiful brains. I tell my kids every day, you guys, I'm analog! Leave me alone! But I think it's important - I'm not trying to be old, I'm just trying to help people acknowledge that we are actually living, breathing, molecular things. And so there is no technology that can take that away.

Honesty, trust, and support in all ways are most important to me. I'm coming out of a very toxic marriage, and what I allowed to happen to myself, and how I allowed my voice to be suppressed in that space, has deeply impacted how I approach life now. In my professional space, it felt safer to be who I was, because I could trust the people that I was with. If I can trust who I'm with - my coworkers, my colleagues, my vendors - relationships are so deeply important to me. So the value of creating trustworthy, reliable, and encouraging and uplifting relationships is critical. I think that criticism in a negative way is terrible, and it breaks people down, so one of my biggest values is more of coaching and encouragement and positivity. I've been called Sunshine by most people in my life, not because I've asked them to call me that, but because they say that's what I bring to the table, and I have embodied that fully and wholly. So positivity, positive intent, and really supporting one another is one of my biggest core values in a positive way. And the best success that I've had have been in environments where that's how everybody operates. And when that starts to crack, then the professional environment starts to crack.