The second annual Charge Into Leadership Conference was Friday, Oct. 14, on the GHC Cartersville campus. It was coordinated in conjunction with the GHC School of Business and Professional Studies and Student Engagement to bring strong leaders to the college and teach attendees how to use leadership skills to forge the life they envision for themselves.

The conference proceeded between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., with three breakout sessions led by GHC staff and other speakers and two speaker panels: the Women in Leadership panel and the Entrepreneurship panel.

There were 96 total attendees with 30 of them being high school students hailing from the Youth Leadership Bartow program of the Cartersville-Bartow Chamber of Commerce.

Shanika Turner, Associate Professor of Business Administration, said the purpose of the conference is to teach students about leadership.

“We give them many different examples of leadership with our keynote speaker, with our panels and our breakout sessions, and so, it’s really focused around leadership and showing great examples of leadership and how to be a great leader,” Turner said.

“We were very excited to be able to open it up to a little bit of the community to bring in some high school students so they could experience the Leadership Conference as well,” Turner said.

The keynote speaker, George Mitchell, is an Atlanta native currently residing in California. He works in Corporate America in financial services and licensing agents to help with investment securities and helping families become financially independent.

“The biggest thing is understanding what you want,” Mitchell said. “I think the biggest thing is just really recognize what your weakness is but put a lot of focus on your strengths because your strengths are something that’s a part of you.”

Mitchell said that people need structure in their lives to be successful, and for him, that structure was band.

“You know how the military is, it’s very structured, everybody’s on one accord, and so, it just taught me a lot of discipline,” Mitchell said. “I think that’s the main thing that helped me become the great leader that I am today.”

Joy Hambrick, Division Chair of Business and Professional Studies, led a breakout session about having a healthy work-life balance.

“You’re learning as a leader, you’re supposed to be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the knowledge that I hope to impress on [attendees] is that that’s not a good life to live,” Hambrick said.

She said that leaders need to have a balanced life between work and leisure in order to give their best to their profession and their team.

Grace Belisle, a Woodland High School student in the Youth Leadership group, said “it was really interesting to see how balance is really, really important, and how there’s different types of balance and different things that you need to do to be in a satisfied position.”

Alec Morris, a GHC Associate of Science major, said that his favorite breakout session was Mindset Mastery led by H.A.N.K. Music and NYLA XO, independent music producers who own a recording studio.

“The most important thing that I could take away from their interview is to keep your passion on your mind and to always remind yourself of what your passion is because I feel like the main point in living is just to pursue what you love,” Morris said.

Morris added that while the conference provided good general information on leadership, he would have liked to see more in-depth guides on how exactly some of the breakout session leaders got to the point they are at today.

“I would want to apply the thing I learned here by having a more consistent schedule and just aligning what I want to do with what I actually do,” Morris said.

Courtney Ringo, a GHC student pursuing a Bachelor’s in Healthcare Management, said that she plans to use the things she learned at the Leadership Conference to help her earn a master’s in human resources.

“The No. 1 key to being a good leader is communication and listening skills,” Ringo said. “You know that, but you don’t really realize it until you hear all these really successful people explain some of the things and how – that really makes a huge difference.” Ringo added that she is going to become a better listener so that it will help her in her career and general life.

Turner said that she is grateful of the faculty who led the breakout sessions and the panelists in the Entrepreneurship and Women in Leadership panels. She also stated that she is developing an entrepreneurship podcast called “The Loop” that will be available on the entrepreneurship webpage on the GHC website.

“That’s what I want students to see. If they have that passion and they really have that idea that they can really push for it and do it and be successful, just like the people here at the leadership conference,” Turner said.

“People should try these conferences out and things that the school offers because it’s actually pretty cool,” Ringo said.