The Long Game

We've all heard the saying, “It takes a village.” But sometimes, what we really need is a tribe.

In this episode of The Long Game, Amy Calvert and Lisa Hardin talk about the power of women showing up for one another, building meaningful connections, and creating opportunities for friendship and support.

For Lisa, bringing women together is nothing new. From hosting Girls Night Out gatherings since 2006 to creating A Seat at the Table, she's long believed that some of the most valuable relationships begin when women make room for one another. That includes supporting other women in business, even when they're technically competitors.

As Amy and Lisa began sharing stories about their careers, friendships, and experiences, one phrase kept coming up: “It takes a tribe.” Those conversations eventually inspired The Girl Gang, a new opportunity to bring women together, build friendships, share experiences, and see what happens when women genuinely support one another.

Because the power of a tribe isn't about who you know. It's about the women who show up.

Have you ever sat in a meeting surrounded by people who sound like they know exactly what they're talking about and wondered if you're the only one who doesn't have all the answers?

That's where our conversation starts this week, when Amy asks a question we've probably all wondered at some point: Does anybody actually have it figured out? From corporate boardrooms to social media, we talk about the pressure to appear confident, successful and completely in control, even when life behind the scenes tells a different story. On social media, it seems like everyone either has the perfect life or is sharing every detail of the one that's falling apart. Whatever happened to somewhere in the middle?

That leads us into a conversation about confidence, work ethic, staying positive and the experiences that shape who we become. Of course, we take a few detours along the way, sharing stories from decades in the corporate world, including being underestimated and the pay disparities we've witnessed between men and women doing the same jobs.

It's a conversation about appearances, assumptions, hard work, resilience and realizing that maybe nobody has it all figured out.

And maybe that's perfectly okay.

In our first episode, we talked about how we spent more than 25 years running in parallel circles without ever actually meeting. But we skipped one pretty important part of the story. Who are we, and how did we get here.

This week, we're going back to the beginning.

Lisa shares her journey from college to working in Europe, building a marketing office, and eventually establishing her own marketing agency. Amy talks about her path through the television industry, from her early days in broadcasting to leading television stations and building media operations.

Along the way, we talk about the opportunities we took, the decisions that shaped our careers, and the experiences that brought us to where we are today.

Our careers may have taken different directions, but we discovered that many of the lessons and experiences were surprisingly similar.

Before we get too far into The Long Game, we thought you should know a little more about the two people behind the microphones.

How do two women spend more than 25 years working in the same city, knowing many of the same people, crossing the same circles, working for the same place and somehow never meet?

That’s pretty much our story. In our first episode of The Long Game, we talk about how a client sponsorship finally brought us together, how we reconnected afterward because we genuinely wanted to keep hanging out, and how quickly we realized just how much our lives and careers had been running parallel all these years.
And maybe the biggest surprise was the friendship itself. At this point in life, you don’t necessarily expect to meet someone new and have it click almost immediately. But it did.

We talk about that, the strange connections we keep uncovering from the past 25 years, and why we’re having so much fun figuring out where this goes.

Turns out, sometimes the right people show up a little later than expected