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Shonali Devereaux

Shonali Devereaux

Chief Executive of the Meetings Industry Association; emcee, speaker, and mentor in events management with 25+ years of industry experience

Jun 14, 2026

38:24
It's all good
38:25
... circuitous route back to wherever it is.
38:26
But, so it was sometime in my 40s when I was like, "I really can't be back of house anymore.
38:32
I really don't have the energy for this, um, to constantly service client need, and I need to desperately find what it is that I'm doing that isn't logistics management in events." And that was partly the break to the British Heart Foundation, and every job teaches you something, and at that point I was doing a lot of leadership coaching because that was the, the flavor of management in British Heart Foundation at the time.
38:55
So I thought, I said to Jim, "Look, I need to, I need to find what makes me tick, and, uh, we, can we reorganize our finances for..." I thought it would be, like, I'm like, three months.
39:05
No chance.
39:06
It took about a year and a half to figure out, uh, where my real calling was, right? And I found it in March 2020.

14 MINS LATER

53:35
Mm.

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