I am meant to be revising for the last exam for my masters (it’s accountancy, ugh), and so of course got sucked into YouTube where I found this video of Pink watching other people play covers of her songs. It’s fabulous to watch. Her genuinely astonished reactions (and then the reactions of the people watching her, watching them) are really delightful.
The thrill of having someone they admire comment on what they’d done is visible, and heartwarming.
It reminded me of the CIPR Awards dinner recently where current President, Sarah Hall, took a selfie with a young PR practitioner, Olivia Shalofsky (currently an up and coming PR intern at Direct Line).
Celebrating #CIPREXCEL with @marcelkl and @OliviaShalofsky pic.twitter.com/m22ovgzE2N
— Sarah Hall (@Hallmeister) June 6, 2018
I saw Olivia’s follow up reaction to that tweet. She was absolutely thrilled to have been noticed by Sarah and included in that picture.
I also spotted this mention of Ketchum CEO, Jo-ann Robertson, from Taylor Bennett Foundation alumni Yarohey Sekha. Yarohey is currently one of the mentees on the BME PR Pros scheme and in her profile piece on their website said how influenced she’d been by meeting Jo-ann on a visit to Ketchum as part of the Foundation’s programme.
For Sarah and Jo-ann these were instances where they were automatically kind and generous, but probably didn’t think much about it after the event. Yet to Olivia and Yarohey these were incredibly important events which had lasting effects.
We shouldn’t under estimate the influence senior practitioners have over those people who are new to the industry. So if you have the opportunity to be kind, generous, and share a platform then do – you could make a world of difference.
