This Monday morning was all about dreaming big. Parker alum, Regine Rousseau kicked off the week with an energetic, lecture-style MX, providing a little Monday motivation to the 6-12 grade audience.

Rousseau is a business owner, author, and poet who was back at Parker to tell her story and discuss her perspective on achieving success. Her current business, Shall We Wine, began in 1997 and has since blossomed into a thriving business. Shall We Wine is an experiential marketing, event planning, and media company that helps winemakers market their product through in-store demos, tastings, corporate events, television exposure, and social media. The brand has grown significantly in recent years and is frequently featured on live TV.

Still, Rousseau preaches that success does not come easy. Before Shall We Wine, Rousseau worked in theater and hoped to become an actress, playwright, or director, but didn’t find any luck. Later on, she owned and worked at a salon for six years while also working another full-time job. All the while, Rousseau felt the pressure from her Haitian parents to become a doctor, lawyer, or nurse. Even when Rousseau began her career in wine, she soon realized that the wine industry had its own challenges. In September of  2017, Wine Enthusiast, a leading wine publication in the U.S., published its prestigious list of the “Top 40 Under 40 Tastemakers”. The list was immediately subjected to a great deal of criticism because not one tastemaker on the list was black. As a woman of color, Rousseau quickly learned how difficult it can be to jump into the wine industry.

“A lot of African-Americans who are interested in wine don’t know anybody in the wine business… So there’s a huge barrier,” Rousseau said in an interview with Black Food and Beverage.

As Rousseau shared her background before Shall We Wine and the experience of starting a business, she noted that there were many people who tried to discourage her from following her dreams. Rousseau calls these people “the dream killers”, and she has a couple of methods for dealing with their negativity:

The first method she calls “the face”.

“It has to be a face that says ‘you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m capable of,’” Rousseau said as she tilted her head, pressed her lips, and narrowed her eyes, giving the audience “the face”.

The second method is a direct response to a “dream killer”: “Thank you for your opinion, but your fear is not my reality.”

Rousseau credits the negative energy of the “dream killers” to their fear.

“The vision I had for myself was greater than the vision others had for me,” Rousseau said. “Dream killers are afraid because they’ve internalized that they themselves can’t do it.”

Her big message for the audience was to choose a career based on passion, not anyone else’s vision. Then, find supporters. She still claims that her greatest assets when starting her business were her mentors, the self-proclaimed World Wine Guys Mike DeSimone and Jeff Jenssen. Rousseau emphasized that a mentor must be someone who is already following their own dreams. But most of all, she reveals that no dream can be realized without a person who truly believes in it.

“I was told my business was just a hobby… but I didn’t let their fears become my reality,” Rousseau said, capping off her positively inspirational MX.