The virtual room was packed with hungry minds. Even though we were all miles apart, you could feel the energy of the whole room buzzing. That’s why I love attending CMX conferences. They are filled with people who love building a Culture of Connection as much as I do…
It is amazing how welcoming and engaged everyone at these conferences are.
I can only imagine what a CMX conference would look like in person! I hope one day I will be able to experience that energy.
In the meantime, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the 2021 CMX Summit: Rise. And Rise we did! Throughout the experience, I was able to connect with community leaders around the world. I learned from their experiences and shared my own, it was a wonderful time and new connections were made.
I was excited to make connections through our award-winning program, Dance Floor Theory, and identify what Level of Engagement each person was – it was awesome! The fully involved attendees (5s) were BLOWING UP the chat. They were throwing in emojis, tweeting every minute of their experiences. Then, of course, you had your 4s, 3s, 2s, and 1s followed by your neutrals, who were probably logged in with the conference on in the background.
Personally, I had so much fun getting to know the top attendees (our 5s and 4s), reading their comments, watching them engage in conversation with the hosts, and making connections with them via LinkedIn. (Connect with me!)
Although my takeaways are similar to my previous post, I wanted to share with you all my experience and what I have learned from CMX: Rise.
101 ways to build belonging with Ramel Wallace
Ramel’s content was AMAZING. What I took away from his presentation were the following agreements that he and his company BAM use:
- Be impeccable with your word
- Don’t take anything personally
- Don’t assume
- Always do your best
- Use people’s names or appropriate pronouns
- Use “I” statements and explain your lived experience
- Expect to learn something from the conversation
- Call in instead of call out
- Challenge ideas and not people
- Explain all language and explain definitions
- Share the mic
Not only was I able to take away nearly a dozen amazing key points from Ramel’s presentation, I also had the chance to join a book club and I am excited to be a part of yet another community!
Gut Check Yourself, Before You Wreck Yourself – Celina Zamora
From Celina’s presentation, a few key takeaways that she has shared with us that I believe to be important are as following:
- Listen Often
- Mind – hesitations, concerns, overthinking, worry, peace.
- Body – heart rate, migraines, changes in breathing, body pains, illness, lack of patience, heck yea moments. Etc.
- Create Space
- Personally – meditation, journaling, exercising, talking to a mentor/advisor, leadership training, your go to’s
- Professionally – set the tone and build trust with team members by creating a productive and safe way to gut check things with one another (1:1s lead by example, coffee chats, weekly team-building activities)
I thought it was important to share the above information with you, our amazing community, because it is important to know who you are in your position and know that you are okay. So make sure you check in with yourself. Make sure that you listen to what your body is telling you and listen to what your team has to say.
Although I only highlighted two sessions that stood out to me the most, I wanted to shout out to the following five presenters and their amazing content. I wish I were able to sit in every single presentation that CMX had to offer, however as we all know at conferences, you can’t be in two places at once!
Shout Out to These Amazing Presenters and the messages they gave:
- Community Engagement by Developing Top Contributors Programs – Monica Lluis-Arroyo
- Scale Your Community with a Growth marketing Mindset – Scott Wilder
- Don’t Guess. Ask! An Easy Research Approach to Kick-off Your Next Initiative – Moly Milosovic
- Showing the Value of Community Operations – Tiffany Oda
- Hidden Figures: Why You Should be Building Your Personal Brand for the Good of Your Business and Your Career – Aly Merritt
Lastly, I wanted to highlight Ilker Akansel for being an amazing Emcee and Beth McIntyre for rocking her introductions and wrap-ups from each day. Without their energy and enthusiasm, CMX could have been very boring, but thankfully it wasn’t!
I already got my tickets for CMX 2022; I cannot wait to continue to connect, engage, and be a part of this community even more.
I would love to end this post with an amazing quote that one of the CMX attendees, Michele Matzeck-Kunstm, said during the conference, “I like the comparison from family and community. Family is a community and community can become family”.
