Welcome to Issue 37 of The Elegance Edit – your weekly guide to body language, elegance, and timeless style. Each edition offers thoughtful insights to help you feel more poised, confident, and graceful in every part of your life.

A client recently expressed frustration that perfectly captured something I hear constantly from accomplished women. "I excel in formal meetings," she said. "But I keep hearing that the real decisions happen on golf courses, at poker nights, in cigar lounges – places I'm either not invited to or wouldn't feel comfortable. How am I supposed to build the relationships that lead to opportunities when the actual networking happens in spaces designed for men?" Today, the answer is revealed.

JULY 30 - The Elegance of a Leader
JULY 31 - The Elegance of a First Lady
AUGUST 1 - Presence Mastery

FULL TRANSFORMATION in one weekend

Formal meetings operate with clear agendas, defined time limits, and professional masks firmly in place. You're performing your professional role, others are performing theirs, and everyone maintains appropriate boundaries. This is necessary and valuable, but it doesn't create the personal connection and trust that make someone want to work with you beyond immediate transactional needs.

Casual environments – whether golf courses, dinner parties, charity events, or informal gatherings  – allow people to drop their professional armor slightly. Extended time in relaxed settings also allows relationships to develop naturally rather than feeling forced. Four hours on a golf course provides more relationship-building opportunities than a dozen thirty-minute meetings. The accumulated casual conversations, shared experiences, and moments of genuine connection create the foundation for trust that makes someone think of you when opportunities arise.

In a man’s world – yes we can hear that important decisions are made in golf courses, poker nights, in cigar lounges. But we are here to see how we as ladies can build even stronger bonds, sign deals, and maintain relationships our way. And today I would like to share an example of my dear friend Anna – how she was able to build relationships, and land the contract that is almost impossible to get.

My friend Anna founded a wedding company that allows American clients to organize celebrations in Europe. In the wedding industry, the standard model is simple: couples pay the company, then the company finds venues. Anna and her partner took a completely different approach – they wanted to secure premier venues before ever signing their first client.

This process took eight months. Not because of logistics or paperwork, but because of how truly elegant, sophisticated European businesses operate.

In the United States, if you want to book a venue, you send an email or make a call and you're done. It's transactional, efficient, and straightforward. But in France, particularly when working with the best châteaux – family heritage properties with centuries of history – business doesn't work that way.

Anna chose France's most distinguished castle venues as their flagship locations. Her Paris partner had to build genuine relationships with the boards, with family members who owned these properties. They attended dinners. They sent reciprocal invitations. They had extended conversations about art, culture, philosophy – topics entirely unrelated to weddings or business.

They needed to demonstrate their social standing, their intellectual capacity, their cultural sophistication. The château families needed to see who these people were beyond their business proposal. Only after months of relationship-building, after trust developed through repeated social interaction, could business decisions be made.

This European tradition of relationship-before-transaction, still very strong in sophisticated business circles though less visible in transactional culture, represents exactly what happens on golf courses and in other casual networking environments. The setting differs, but the principle remains constant: meaningful business relationships require trust that develops through casual interaction, not formal presentations.

Why Casual Environments Build Better Relationships

Formal meetings operate with clear agendas, defined time limits, and professional masks firmly in place. You're performing your professional role, others are performing theirs, and everyone maintains appropriate boundaries. This is necessary and valuable, but it doesn't create the personal connection and trust that make someone want to work with you beyond immediate transactional needs.

Casual environments – whether golf courses, dinner parties, charity events, or informal gatherings – allow people to drop their professional armor slightly. Conversations wander beyond quarterly results and strategic initiatives. You see how someone handles frustration when their golf shot goes awry, how they treat service staff at restaurants, whether they're genuinely interested in others or primarily self-focused.

Extended time in relaxed settings also allows relationships to develop naturally rather than feeling forced. Four hours on a golf course provides more relationship-building opportunities than a dozen thirty-minute meetings. The accumulated casual conversations, shared experiences, and moments of genuine connection create the foundation for trust that makes someone think of you when opportunities arise.

Anna's eight-month relationship-building process with French château families demonstrates this principle perfectly. Trust required to hand over ancestral properties to American wedding planners? That requires connection, development, trust, support, and proof of substance, sophistication, and integrity.

The Golf Course Problem: Traditional Male Spaces

Coming back to Golf - Golf represents the most frequently cited example of casual networking environments that disadvantage women, and for good reason. Golf culture developed as explicitly male territory, and despite increasing female participation, it is not always welcoming for women or women feel welcomed.

The practical challenges are obvious: not a lot of women play golf, and learning requires significant time investment. The pace of play means you're committing four or five hours, making it difficult to participate while managing other responsibilities. The expense—equipment, course fees, club memberships – represents barriers to entry. And the culture often involves behaviors that make participation uncomfortable even for women who do play.

The same dynamics apply to other traditionally male casual networking environments: poker nights, sporting events, certain social clubs, hunting or fishing trips. These aren't explicitly excluding women in most cases, but the culture, expectations, and practical realities create effective barriers.

Create Your Own Casual Networking Environments

Perhaps the most powerful approach involves creating your own casual networking opportunities that feel more natural to you while serving the same relationship-building functions that golf courses serve for men.

This is exactly what Anna's Paris partner did with the château families. They created their own opportunities for extended casual interaction – dinners, cultural events, conversations about shared interests – that allowed relationships to develop naturally while demonstrating their sophistication and character.

Dinner parties, wine tastings, cultural events, wellness activities, charity involvement – these all provide extended casual interaction allowing relationships to deepen. The key is approaching them strategically as networking opportunities rather than purely social events, while maintaining the relaxed atmosphere that makes them effective for building genuine connections.

Hosting dinner parties for professional contacts, for instance, creates extended casual time where you control the environment and guest list. You can invite people you want to develop relationships with, facilitate introductions between contacts who should know each other, and demonstrate social sophistication that enhances professional credibility.

The principle underlying all these approaches: casual networking works because of extended time in relaxed settings allowing genuine connection. The specific activity matters less than creating the conditions for that connection to develop. You don't need to adopt male-dominated activities when you can create your own opportunities serving the same function.

Anna’s Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/vowtailors

Transform Your Professional Presence in Nine Weeks

If Anna's story resonates and you recognize that meaningful professional relationships require more than transactional interactions — our Elegance Refinement Mentorship was designed for you.

Over eight intensive weeks of primarily live interaction, you'll develop the executive presence, social sophistication, and confident communication that creates the kind of trust Anna and her partner built with château families. Not through theory, but through personalized coaching, real-time feedback, and practical application with other accomplished women on similar journeys.

You'll master the body language that commands respect, the social intelligence that opens doors, and the refined presence that makes people want to partner with you – whether at formal meetings, hosted dinners, or any casual environment where real relationships develop.

We maintain limited enrollment to ensure individual attention. If you're ready to bridge the gap between your inner competence and external presence, schedule a complimentary consultation with our Elegance Education Advisor.

The relationships that transform your career don't require golf courses – they require genuine presence, strategic social intelligence, and the confidence to create your own opportunities. Let's develop yours together.

The Sun Valley Conference brings together media moguls, tech titans, and finance leaders for what's famously known as "summer camp for billionaires" – an invitation-only gathering in Idaho where some of the world's most significant business deals have been conceived during casual conversations. 

Taking place each July, this ultra-exclusive event demonstrates exactly what we've explored about casual networking environments – the most consequential professional relationships and opportunities often develop not in formal boardrooms but during relaxed interactions where guards come down and genuine connection becomes possible. 

While most of us will never receive Sun Valley invitations, the principles remain universally applicable: create your own valuable gathering spaces rather than waiting for access to someone else's exclusive event, focus on building genuine relationships rather than transactional networking, and recognize that the most powerful professional connections often develop in casual settings where people can be more than their titles and quarterly results.

July 2026 

sunvalleyconference.com

What separates women who build powerful professional networks from those who remain perpetually on the outside is this: they create their own consistent gathering, rather than waiting for an invitation to someone else's.

Start small and intentional

Invite six to eight people for dinner at a restaurant with a private dining room, or host an intimate gathering at your home. Curate the guest list strategically – mix people who should know each other, while deepening your own relationship with each attendee.

Make it recurring

Quarterly dinners, monthly wine tastings, seasonal cultural outings. The power is not in any single evening – it is in the rhythm. Relationships deepen over repeated gatherings in ways they never can in a single meeting.

Keep a simple system

A dedicated notebook or document tracking who attended, connections they mentioned wanting to make, and follow-up actions you committed to. Before each event, review your notes. Build on what came before – never start from scratch.

The woman who creates valuable gathering spaces wields more influence than the woman trying to insert herself into spaces where she will always be peripheral.

The power of deep connection is not found only on a golf course. And if the doors are not opening to you – you build your own. You create your own environment, your own room, your own atmosphere. One where you are naturally central. Where your role as connector and host makes you the person everyone wants to know. Where people leave your gatherings talking about them for weeks.

This is precisely what we explore, practice, and embody together in the Elegance Refinement Mentorship. Our cohort opened June 9th but there is still time to join.

If this resonates with you – if you are ready to build the presence, the connections, and the rooms that matter – I invite you to schedule a conversation with one of our Elegance Advisors. We would love to learn more about where you are and where you are going.

One graceful step at a time.

You do not need the golf course. You need only to understand the deeper game – and begin playing it with intention.