Event Planning from the Inside Out: Embrace Your Experiences and Enhance Your Planning

By Lisa Gareau

Always one to find connections between her life and work, life-long event planner and Connection Strategy Coach, Lisa Gareau has embraced her life experience as a source of inspiration for her work. For over 15 years she has been coaching everyday event planners to embrace their experience so they can enhance their planning.

 

In her first story-filled book, Lisa shares familiar situations and stories from her own life that will help readers understand that purposeful planning requires us to start "Event Planning from the Inside Out". She believes that meaningful event planning starts when we're ready to connect to who we truly are, to embrace the experiences that make us unique, and to let each life lesson help us plan with more purpose and passion.

 

This special compilation of stories now sits as the heart-centered companion to Lisa's long-running workshop series, "Candy's Five Keys to Event Planning". Through each section in the book Lisa unpacks the essential keys to event planning and wraps each key in a significant story from her life!

 

Candy's Five Keys to Event Planning

Key One: Purpose + Plan

Key Two:  Design + Decor

Key Three: Space + Time

Key Four: Sound + Light

Key Five: Food + Drink

 

Lisa Gareau has been planning and promoting events all her life, has been serving in-house and do-it-yourself event planners through her business Candy Event Consulting since 2008, and supporting planners and their teams as a Connection Strategy Coach for over a decade. Lisa believes any event can become a "connection point" where clients, customers, core teams, or community members can gather and grow. If you are ready to embrace your experience and enhance your planning, let Lisa guide you to "Event Planning from the Inside Out"!

 

• Candy's Five Keys to Event Planning (©2014-2024) is a 5-session workshop series for anyone planning or promoting events, created and presented by Lisa Gareau for Candy Academy of Event Planning and Promotion. • 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Gareau
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224037025

Lisa Gareau

Lisa Gareau is a life-long event planner and has been a Connection Strategy Coach for over a decade. When founding Candy Event Consulting in 2008, she began her life's work to help in-house and do-it-yourself event planners embrace their brilliance, activate their experience, and cultivate meaningful connections that would last through the events they plan. Lisa knows that events can become energized "connecting points" where communities can gather and grow, and she helps make this happen by offering high-level strategy sessions and deep-dive coaching guidance for everyday event planners and their teams. Her heart for community and passion for connection shines through as a speaker, facilitator, coach, and the creator of learning and connection opportunities for planners including Candy Academy of Event Planning + Promotion, Moments Magazine - Event Planning Ideas + Inspiration, The Connection Architect Program, The Connector Next Door Podcast for Planners, and now Candy's online mastermind - The REDI Room! Lisa loves living and working from her home base in Calgary, Alberta just a stone's throw from the Canadian Rockies – a favourite family playground.

Book preview

My Path to Purposeful Event Planning and a Passion for Connection

It was 1982.

I was 12 and – hot off the heels of my oldest sister’s wedding – my mom, dad, middle sister, and I were packing up and making the move from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Winnipeg, Manitoba – one Canadian prairie province to the East.

Everyone in our immediate family had relocated several times but this was the first time I had to uproot one life for another.

My parents were born in small town Saskatchewan. After experiencing a life transformation that ignited their faith and imagination, they had an unquenchable passion to pour hope into communities no matter what the journey would hold.

Their schooling, teaching, ministry, and community building activities took them to Mexico in their early 20’s but they raised up their anchor a few times as they raised a young family.  My oldest sister was born and raised in Kansas, my middle sister in Oklahoma, and then shortly after landing in Saskatoon, I showed up on the scene in 1970.

The scene I was born into was busy and bustling. By now my dad had established himself as an effective pastor and kind shepherd to the congregations he had served with my mom over the years.

To the measure my dad was steady and strong, my mom was a vibrant visionary working to bring ideas to life and people together to make those big ideas happen.

They were yoked together on marriage but my mom would joke that my dad was the work horse, and she was the racehorse.

Somehow this steady and speedy combination worked, and the impact of their contributions showed in everything they put their heads – and hearts – into.

Their years in Saskatoon started with a deep dive into the community and – by the time I came around – my dad was welcoming hundreds of members into the doors of our church with a happy handshake each week.

My mom was just as involved playing piano and making meals but was most passionate about pushing the envelope and creating meaningful connection in the community they called home.

Never one to sit still or settle for the status quo, my mom went to work creating a women’s initiative in the early 70’s. What started as a small in-home woman’s prayer group grew to be a meeting in the Saskatoon Convention Center with almost a thousand women attending each month!

The speed of growth and significance in the community couldn’t be ignored and she started many other related meetings, events, and initiatives. Even a radio show was birthed from the clarity of her vision. 

My first understanding of community was being part of one. Mom carried us girls under one arm and her passion projects under the other. As we got older it was up to us to keep up!

Even though I simply tagged along to sharpen pencils, set tables, or care for the kids of our guests, I felt at home with those in our church and needed within the community my parents built.

Like many of you reading this book, my entry point to event planning was raw and messy – I was young and inexperienced – but it was fun as a wide-eyed pre-teen to add what I could to these experiences that seemed to bring such meaning, healing, and joy to others.

But sometimes success comes with unforeseen shifts. Our move from Saskatoon to Winnipeg in 1982 was a sad one.

My young mind didn’t understand it at the time but a brewing power play had pushed my parents out of their roles and into a hunt for a new home and community where they could once again contribute.

Winnipeg called, and my parents carved the path to our new life.

Soon after our arrival, my middle sister and I entered the rundown-drugstore-turned-church-building on the edge of Winnipeg’s downtown core.

The two of us sat in the front row on one of the donated