You Can’t Pour from an Empty Cup

Ashley Wedding is the Public Relations Director of Puzzle Pieces and the newest team member to the administrative staff. In her role for just a month, she was excited to attend the Fill Your Cup Conference on Feb. 7 and shares her thoughts on the women-only event.

As just one team member of an all female administrative staff, I can testify that women truly do run the world. In the few short weeks that I have been at Puzzle Pieces, I have witnessed women, from all different backgrounds, excelling at what they do and coming together to better the community. But I also know that as moms, wives, daughters and working professionals, we get drained and often neglect ourselves while trying to fulfill all of these roles. 

Three of Puzzle Pieces’ directors worked to break this cycle by attending the Fill Your Cup Conference, hosted by local businesswoman Suzanne Cecil White and her Nashville-based entrepreneur friend Amber Zaricor. Last week, nearly 100 women from all over the region gathered at White Chateau, Suzanne’s newly-opened event venue in West Louisville, with one main goal in mind -- investing in ourselves. 

The idea behind the “fill your cup” brand was that women cannot pour into others if their cup is empty. We were challenged to fill our own cups by focusing on ourselves so that we can use the overflow to give to others. 

“So many times as women leaders we are on the search for relationships that inspire us to dream bigger, relationships that understand when we are in a valley and not a mountain, relationships that help push us out of our comfort zone, and relationships we are willing to be intentional with because they in fact fill our cup up,” said Puzzle Pieces Executive Director Amanda Owen. “Suzanne and Amber created an event to meet these people to form these relationships while the day filled our cups. Women tend to invest money to make our kids happy, invest money into making our careers successful, invest our time with our husbands to make a happy marriage, invest our time into our team to make the dreams come true.....BUT we don’t invest in ourselves! The Fill The Cup Conference was a reminder to invest in yourself and I made a promise to myself to do more of that in 2020!”

My personal takeaways were simple, yet things that I needed to hear from women walking similar paths as me.

Learn when to say yes and when to say no. You can’t be everything for everyone. Prioritize your yes’s and no’s and don’t apologize for it.

We need each other. No one understands you better than a woman walking a similar path. Find your community and be intentional about spending time together. 

Value yourself. As a mom, I feel like I always put my kids’ needs before my own. But if I do not invest in myself, I’m not giving my kids the best version of me. It’s OK to take time for yourself. You will be a better mom for it.