What do you get when you mix pajamas, lipstick, and the company of an epic girl gang? Well, xoNecole's inaugural Pajamas & Lipstick event of course!
Planned by It's Your Party, the event took place on Friday, December 21 in Buckhead Atlanta, and offered everything a lit girls' night in could ask for. We had desserts by Good-N-Sweet Treats on deck, signature cocktails, tee pees, and a spicy card game that would truly act as the grand finale of our incredible night together.
Although I loved the attention to detail, the accents of pink and xoNecole blue that dripped throughout the intimate setting, what I loved most was the tribe of women xoNecole's Editor-In-Chief Necole Kane helped cultivate by bringing this idea to fruition. A room full of strangers and writers quickly evolved into an unbreakable bond as we shared dating tales and the moment when we found our self-worth.
The highlight of the night was a custom card game called Pajamas & Lipstick that was inspired by xoNecole's hottest topics on dating, relationships, sex and womanhood. Each attendee pulled a colored paper from a fish bowl to see which color card we'd get to pick from the pile. What happened next was nothing short of amazing.
Mecca Gamble
The event ended up being the girls night we didn't know we needed. A circle of support, unity, and transparency, one that echoed and embodied the site, mirroring our core messaging of empowerment and uplifting all multifaceted woman. We were able to completely let our guards down and be open to share our experiences in a non-judgement atmosphere while also receiving the experiences of others.
As a result, for a lot if not all of us, walked away from the girls' night in experience with an undeniable feeling of empowerment, our heads held high, and crowns unmoved.
Mecca Gamble
Check out the slideshow below for more moments from our first ever Pajamas & Lipstick event:
Mecca Gamble
For more information on upcoming Pajamas & Lipstick events, follow us on Instagram. All photography is by Mecca Gamble.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image courtesy
No matter what group you belong to, here are a few tips for things you need to get rid of today if you want your office space to be a place of peaceful productivity and calm inspiration:
How To Declutter Your Office Space in 2024
1. Outdated or miscellaneous files... whether digital or paper
Listen, I'm the first person to tell you that I am a digital file hoarder. I'll keep emails for more than a decade, save files on the cloud and forget about them for years, and don't even get me started on my digital photo albums. In my line of work there's a lot of downloading and uploading, so I empathize with anybody who can't bring themselves to delete things.
That being said, delete 'em. There are certain best practices when it comes to tax documents, accounting records, payroll stubs, invoices, and the like, and there's a lifespan for every file.
And if your company is into paper files, find out the procedures related to purging from your manager, HR rep, or other professional who knows more about the file-keeping and file-shredding protocols. Figure out an organization process and find ways to go digital when you can. Address this quarterly or even bi-monthly, and get some assistance. Either way, you want to get rid of file clutter and free up valuable space both on your tech devices and physically in your office.
2. Those extra knicknacks, mugs, children's drawings, or expired snacks in or on your desk
We all love those special drawings we get from the little loved ones in our lives, but you can't keep every scribble or class project at your desk. A great way to enjoy these while at work is to take photos of them and include them in a digital photo album on your desk or as your screensaver on your computer. You can also utilize wall space and frame them to put up.
Also, let's purge those little Rasta-man figurines from your last Jamaica vacation, those three impulse-buy Stanley mugs gathering dust in your bottom drawer, or at least throw away those stale snack cakes you were saving for a rainy day.
If you really love certain knicknacks, they'll be top-of-mind and useful. If you have the space, add a bookshelf or floating wall shelves that can house three to five select items that are simply there for mood-boosting or to spark inspiration. Otherwise, take them home, donate them, or sell them.
stockfour/Getty
3. Old tech or equipment
It's a good time to consider whether you need a tech upgrade or a total replacement, and this applies to your computer or laptop, your work phone, and other tools you use to do your job. (Here's a good guide on how to decide or at least what to consider when pitching to your manager or the IT team for the budget approval to do so.)
If you're using tech that's not helping you in the ease and efficiency departments and have the power to get rid of it or at least upgrade the components (i.e., programs, apps, or actual equipment), take the time to do that now. Do your research on the latest technology that will make you and/or your team more competitive, productive, and fulfilled, and tech that will save you time and stress in the job that you do.
Incorporate tech that will help you automate some parts of your job like scheduling meetings, responding to emails, or relaying information, and get rid of tech that's archaic, not a good fit for the people you work with or the job you do, or simply isn't a good product.
And you don't necessarily have to go big or expensive for this. It could be something as small as recycling or selling an old monitor to get a new, larger one with better resolution or trying a wireless mouse and a new mousepad. It could mean finally donating that old printer you've had in a corner, or calling your phone carrier to negotiate a deal on a newer phone. Look into the warranties that you might have on equipment, coupons, sales, or other ways to purge and replace.
4. That busted or uncomfortable desk-and-chair situation
This is often overlooked, but the comfort and set up of your office desk and chair can play a major role in negatively contributing to not only your productivity but your overall health as well---especially if you spend the majority of your time at a desk during your work day. It's very important to have a desk-and-chair setup that is ergonomically sound, and if you work for a company, this is something that should be a priority for them as well.
If your work chair is half broke-down, the seat or other padding is worn out, it's made of hard uncomfortable material, or it's not adjustable for your height, the height of your desk, and a comfortable eye level to your computer screen, it's time for an office makeover.
Maybe even consider a standing desk and a walking pad if you want options that will spark activity, productivity, and wellness while you work. Figure out the best positioning of your desk and chair or other nontraditional options for this. Trust me, your back and mental health will thank you in the long run.
Let’s make things inbox official! Sign up for the xoNecole newsletter for daily love, wellness, career, and exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
Featured image by ljubaphoto/Getty Images
