Andi Stevenson is a speaker, facilitator and consultant who has spent 25 years strengthening the nonprofit sector and nurturing women’s leadership through dialogue, strategy and coaching.
Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, she speaks to women’s, youth and business audiences nationwide about risk, rookies, perfectionism and leadership.
Andi's 2018 talk at the One Woman Fearless Summit in Montréal focuses on perfectionism: what causes it, how it shows up in our lives, and how we can and must fight it. She offers specific advice and actions to help us escape from unreasonable expectations and detox from the pressure to be, like Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way.”
In early 2017, Andi sat down with Sheila Mullen, host of the "Blue Skies: Stories that Heal" podcast, to talk about perfectionism, giving ourselves permission to be authentic and flawed, and her own experience with eating disorders. She describes the process of recovering from both the need to be "perfect" (however that's defined) and the use of food as a form of control. This warm, easy conversation between friends demystifies a cloudy subject and laughs at the hazards of "coming out" as someone with an eating disorder.
Andi's 2015 TedX talk, “The Importance of Being a Rookie,” clearly and warmly defines the costs of perfectionism and explains the benefits of risk-taking, lifelong learning and the willingness to step outside our circles of competence.
She translates her experience as a competitive amateur ballroom dancer—where she is a comically sequinned rookie—into a case for innovation in both our work and personal lives, for surprising ourselves, and for moving toward, not away from, the opportunity to be a novice.