When not enjoying time with his family, Kym Yancey is Co-Founder, President, and Chief Marketing Officer of eWomen Network, one of the most successful membership business networking communities for women entrepreneurs in North America. In addition, Yancey is the creator and executive producer of The GLOW Project, a film that according to the Orlando Film Festival is “one of the most inspiring movies ever created for women.”
With such an impressive track record of accomplishment behind him, one might expect Kym Yancey’s story to follow the template of so many American entrepreneurs and thought leaders – hard-driven, tunnel-visioned, and even a little bit mercenary. Not so in this case. All of Yancey’s endeavors have their roots in happiness.
“I want to make sure that everyone knows that happiness is a skill,” Yancey says. “It’s something you cultivate It’s a practice. You cultivate happiness. You practice happiness. It’s an ongoing thing. There are very specific things you do.”
Yancey’s “Aha!” moment came when he met George Fraser, author of Success Runs in Our Race at a book signing. Yancey remembers, “I had my own advertising agency in Ohio. I would go to networking events and I always left empty because I would go there with the intention of finding someone who’d want to buy my services. And he [Fraser] was from Cleveland and I was in Dayton, Ohio, and I’d never met him.”
“George said that networking was about giving. It wasn’t about taking. And when you network, you network to give, not to get. Nowhere along my journey had I ever heard anyone say that you network to give, not to get. And it really, honest to goodness, changed my life.”