Healthy Mind, Healthy Business Event!

On Sunday, we hosted our very first event – Healthy Mind, Healthy Business! We wanted to create a space for female entrepreneurs, beauty bosses and women in business to connect, inspire each other and have honest conversations. Our main topic of discussion was the importance of self care on social media – we all know it’s essential in this world, especially when you run a business! But we wanted to delve deeper into the ways we’re currently using it and how we can use it in a healthier way, to maintain a healthy mind, enabling us to run a healthy business.

We had four key speakers on the day, each with their own themed talk around the topic of staying mindful on social media and to say they were inspiring is an understatement! They were all hand picked based on personal and business experience, as we felt they all had great knowledge to pass on to our event attendees.

First up were Suz Selcuk & Gaby Power from mental wellness platform Crazy Creative Cool. Individually, Suz runs a creative agency and manages our social platforms here at Wonderland HQ, and Gaby is London based, working in music management for bands such as The Gorillaz. Through the platform Crazy Creative Cool, they provide workshops, tools and strategies to support women to manage their wellbeing. They encourage us to “believe in our creative energy, acknowledge negative self talk + replace it with positive action!”.

At our event, Crazy Creative Cool discussed the importance of being aware of how much time we actually spend on our phones. All of the attendees were given cute “social wellness trackers” to fill in, to help them to create healthy boundaries. We learnt all about the tips and tricks that social media apps use to keep us addicted to our phones, strategies to create a healthier morning routine WITHOUT checking IG first (we’re all guilty of it!) and how to get off the comparison train by filling your feed with people who truly inspire you and make you feel good!

Next up was social influencer and self-love advocate Chanelle McCleary! Chanelle has over 700k followers on Instagram and is no stranger to the negativity and trolling it can bring! Chanelle gave a super inspiring talk about how she deals with the negativity and a mini workshop where every woman in the room gave a compliment to the person next to her (so empowering!). It was incredible to hear all about Chanelle’s journey to self love and comforting to know that it’s just that – a journey – not a destination! For us at Wonderland HQ, this just reinforced the fact that everyone is going through something, so be kind – as that confident person you see on IG stories everyday might also be struggling with their self esteem!

Chanelle really helped to raise to energy of the whole room and by the end of the talk we all had a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be an “influencer”. It’s not all freebies and followers, there is a difficult side and sometimes that’s hard for us to imagine when we’re aspiring to grow our own following.

In between talks we had an amazing brunch prepared by The Living Room (did we mention it was bottomless?!) and it was lovely to see so many women in the room make new connections, take pictures at our incredible flower wall by The Prop Co, and shower each other in compliments! It proved to us that girl power is still very much alive in 2019!

Finally, we had motivational powerhouse Wendy Crowther dishing out the hard lessons and eye-opening inspiration, learning about her story of moving from Swinton to L.A and back again! Wendy coached various people in the room throughout her talk as we all found our trigger points and things that resonated for us in our personal and business life. Her main message was LOVE – we should all spread more of it and be nicer to each other. We feel this is so simple but so important, as in the social sphere there is so much emphasis on trying to compete and overtake each other (most people have used the hashtag “my___ is betterthanyours” at some point or another!) it was refreshing to hear another woman’s story of turning pain into power and use it to motivate and support others.

Our first event exceeded all of our expectations and we are so grateful for every single person who attended! At Wonderland Academy, we are not just a nail technician training academy, we aspire to be a supportive place for all women in business to connect and grow together.

Pictured above: not even half the ladies who attended our event! (but an accurate representation of those who stayed right until closing to make the most of the bottomless brunch!!).

If you missed this event but would love to attend a future one, make sure you sign up to our mailing list!

We’d like to say a very special thank you to all of our sponsors, The Prop Co who provided us with a beautiful flower wall, The Balloon Fairy Manchester and Elit Party Event Hire, who decorated the room beyond anything we could ever dream of, plus our goody bag sponsors: Missguided for gifting us full bottles of their Babe Power perfumes (!), Vida for offering a generous discount on skin and nail treatments, Purpose Foods for the energy bars, Balance Meals providing healthy homemade snacks, Naf Stuff for the cutest nail decals, Serenity With Sarah for the healing salts, Vega for the protein powder, Rescue Remedy for the relaxing droppers, MAC for the primer samples and last but definitely not least The Wakey Bakery for the delicious cakes!

Until next time…

The Wonderland Team

xo