Allegra Huston is the author of "Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found", the novels "A Stolen Summer" and "Say My Name," and many screenplays including the award-winning short film "Good Luck, Mr. Gorski," which she also produced. In 2019 she published how-to books on “the stuff nobody teaches you,” including "How to Read for an Audience" by Allegra and "How to Edit and Be Edited" by Allegra and James Navé. Allegra's and James' most recent collaboration is a book for authors, "Write What You Don't Know."

"At major turning points in our lives, the circumstances are rarely perfect for us to make the next move or decision about what to do next. The obstacles may be vast, but it’s at this point that you 'throw your hat over the fence,' or in other words, 'just go for it!'

“In my experience, most people don’t know what they are good at—what they are naturally good at. So sometimes you have to find one or kind of create one for yourself. You have got to put food on the table and send your kid to school. So, there are those reasons. I think if we are good girls or boys, we try to fulfill the expectations that are inevitably held for us. If we're bad girls and bad boys, we're fighting against those expectations. But in either case, we're still being driven by other people's expectations. It often takes time, maturity, mistakes and even unhappiness to lead you to what you really want to do–to start to find what it is that makes you excited in the morning, that makes you want to be doing whatever it is that you want to do.”

Sally Loftis is the Managing Director at Loftis Partners, a 100% woman-owned human resources consulting firm located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Sally works at the intersection of human resources, organization development, and social justice. Loftis Partners specializes in strategy, people, facilitation, and pay justice. Since launching in August 2020, Sally and her firm have worked with 54 clients across 3 continents. She completed her master's thesis on pay equity in nonprofits. She was published in the Journal for Applied Behavioral Sciences (“Building Trust Through Action Learning in An Uncertain Transorganizational Context”).

"I had I kept joking with people that it was a little bit like trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up–but in your forties. I had worked in human resources for 20 years at that point. 

“Human resources is a really broad practice area. So part of it was trying to figure out what parts of human resources I wanted to work in. Two things were really helpful in narrowing it down. One is that I had just finished my graduate degree in Organization Development. I was really interested in that field because it is systems change in corporations, nonprofits or government. I had always worked on the strategic end of HR about how the people related to the strategy, so I knew that was a passion. And then I had done my thesis on pay equity, so I knew I had that, too. 

“Then the second thing was some great advice I got early on from a friend who said, ‘You should do some volunteer gigs if you can't get paying work immediately. That can help you kind of figure out what you do and don't want to do, and then also can give you some immediate feedback.’ Since this was early 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, I was able to do some virtual volunteering. That really helped me in my decision making.”