At the beginning of April 2024, Lexi Godlewski ’16 flew 5,000 miles from Oahu to Endicott just to tell a story.
It lasted just 12 minutes—not very long—but the story was impactful because it was surprising, told from the heart, and originated here at Endicott.
You see, when Godlewski was a senior business major, she started offering marketing services for startups—mainly her friends—from the Callahan Dining Hall and the Colin and Erika Angle Center for Entrepreneurship, where she’d become close with its then-Executive Director Deirdre Sartorelli (more on her later).
“Between classes and work and everything, I’d be at Cally or the Angle Center building this passion-driven little side hustle,” said Godlewski.
After graduation, Godlewski accepted a full-time marketing job and was crushing it. Promotions. Pay raises. Building her team from the ground up. She was just 23 years old.
“But I hated it. I was miserable,” she said. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I just worked so hard throughout school.”
Why couldn’t she just be happy, she thought. This is what people wanted, after all. What was so wrong with a desk job, she asked herself.
But Godlewski knew deep down that she wanted to be an entrepreneur—just like she was at Endicott, whiling away the days from Callahan Dining Hall, the smell of French fries and pizza soaked into her hair.
“I just wasn’t using my skills or making an impact how I wanted to,” she said.
Then, out of nowhere, one of Godlewski’s co-workers took her own life.
That’s when Godlewski, struggling with anxieties of her own, woke up.
“I was young, I could handle a little bit more risk,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Let’s go for my dreams and see what happens.’”
She left her job and returned to what she was doing in Callahan Dining Hall as a Gull. Marketing. Consulting. Coaching entrepreneurs and startups.
Little did she know that risk would years later lead Godlewski full circle back to Endicott, when she boarded that plane to tell a story to a Klebanoff Auditorium audience for TEDxEndicott College, an independently organized event, held on April 4, 2024.
TEDxEndicott College was the feather in the cap of a year dedicated to the academic theme “Share Your Story,” as announced by President Steven R. DiSalvo, Ph.D., and Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Brandi Johnson at the fall 2023 Convocation.
“Each year, we choose a theme based on what we see happening in the world and also what we think will inspire and invigorate our community,” President DiSalvo explained. “Through stories, we break down barriers. We normalize experiences and perspectives that aren’t our own or don’t fit into our neat way of thinking.”
The beginning of the story
In October 2022, Alexandra Flodman ’25 was browsing TED talks in her residence hall when lightning struck.
“It usually starts with the fact that I have to watch a TED talk for class and then I fall down a rabbit hole and will watch them for hours,” said Flodman, an education major. “This usually leads to me searching for TEDx events in the area for me to attend, but there never are any.”
That’s when Flodman realized Endicott would be the perfect place to stage a TEDx event.
“I remember sitting at my desk and turning to my roommate and just being like, ‘Hey, we should have a TEDx event at Endicott!’”
The process took months—emailing, approvals, budgeting, marketing, and getting buy-in from key administrators across campus. By March of 2023, Flodman had applied for a TEDx license with Director of Academic Affairs Katie O’Grady, then the Director of Student Engagement.
By August’s end, TEDxEndicott College was happening.
“There are so many people at Endicott who have amazing stories and ideas to share, and TEDx gives them the platform to do that—not just within the Endicott community, but within a global community,” said Flodman.
Turns out, that global community was beckoning Flodman. Before she could see her brainchild take off, Flodman was headed to Italy to study abroad for the spring 2024 semester.
“Going abroad was a tough decision—I’ve been pouring my heart and soul into this project and it was difficult to know I wouldn’t be there for the final result,” said Flodman, who remained involved in virtual planning meetings and led the TEDxEndicott College social media promotion. “But having the opportunity to study in Italy is one I couldn’t pass up.”
Besides, TEDxEndicott College was in good hands. By then, an organizing committee had been assembled with Sartorelli at the helm and Professor of Sport Management Katie Kilty serving as the speaker coach for the event’s 10 speakers—a mix of current students, alumni, faculty and staff, and even a trustee, CEO of EBSCO Information Services Tim Collins.
“No other higher ed institution or organization has done a TEDx event on the North Shore in years,” said Sartorelli, a current adjunct lecturer. “It was aligned with what the College, what Endicott, is about for me in being entrepreneurial. And of course, this year’s theme is Share Your Story—so, it was just the perfect storm.”
But the organizing committee next needed a theme. Flodman’s application was focused on leadership, but, per TED guidelines, the theme needed to be much more abstract and open to interpretation; that way it would leave room for a mix of topics and speakers.
“What we talked about as a committee was, how can we make this a little bit more Endicott-centric? How have you expressed leadership in your personal or professional life when you’ve come to a fork in the road?” explained Sartorelli.
“Be Your Beacon” was born.
When developing stories with the speakers, Kilty took the idea further to focus on self-leadership. “What leads them when considering the big idea they’re sharing?” Kilty said.
A trained sport and performance psychologist, Kilty found parallels between performance coaching and speaking.
“In sport performance, you put your routine together, then practice it so you can get it in your bones and perform it in a way that’s authentic to the person,” she said. “With TEDx, you have to be a presence on the stage, you have to have body language that aligns with what you’re saying for emphasis. It’s an embodied experience.”
Be Your Beacon
The “Be Your Beacon” theme seemed especially prescient to Godlewski. While applying, Godlewski saw the theme and thought, “Oh my god, I think I might have a chance at this.”
She had never gone wrong listening to the “nudges” of her intuition, her guiding compass, that internal beacon. “My whole thing, what everything comes back to, is the soul comes first,” she said.
So, during the pandemic, when she saw that Hawaii was incentivizing remote workers and entrepreneurs to move to the state through the Movers and Shakas program, which was offering just 50 spots for 90,000 applicants, she knew what she had to do.
She wasn’t chosen in the end, but the program placed her on a secondary list—and that was enough.
She sold her car, bought a one-way ticket, packed two suitcases and a duffel bag, and never looked back. It’s been three years.
In Oahu, she expanded her consulting business, leaning into her intuitive callings and dubbing herself a soultrepreneur because she’d risked everything to listen to herself—and it paid off.
“I’ve been leading and listening to my soul for so long and I wanted to tell this audience, here are the places that it’s brought me, and here’s the possibilities it’s opened up for me, here’s the adventure it’s brought me on,” she said. “And I wanted to share how others can do the same.”
Like Godlewski, when Marc Lerebours ’17 M’18 saw the casting call for applicants for TEDxEndicott College on Endicott’s channels, “my inner self was telling me, ‘Oh, you’ve got to apply,’” he remembered. “I’ve always wanted to do something like TED.”
Interestingly, Lerebours also manifested TEDx into his life. When he was just 20 years old and a sophomore at Endicott, he created a five-year plan of things he wanted to accomplish. “One of them was being on a show,” he said. TED was close enough.
For the sport management major, interpreting “Be Your Beacon” meant recounting his professional journey, too.
“I called my story ‘Balancing the Tightrope’ because it’s about balancing your career and your passions and redefining your expectations around career success and personal fulfillment, and how to integrate,” Lerebours said.
Lerebours, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., works a corporate job as a Revenue Operations Manager for Totango by day and, by night, is also an entrepreneur. Along with his former roommate at Endicott, Diego Maillo ’18, he co-founded In-Form Sports.
Just like Godlewski, Lerebours and Maillo founded their business during the pandemic and grew it to be a leading video provider for sports recruitment in the country.
“The key thing I try and tell people is you have your career track and then you have your passion track—your passion track doesn’t need to be a business,” he explained. “It’s something you’re passionate about and could add to your overall identity.”
A few weeks after TEDx had ended, Lerebours said he was still processing the event and what it meant for him.
“A big takeaway was trusting my intuition,” he said. “Ultimately, it gave me additional reassurance in the sense that, hey, I’m already on the path.”
TEDxEndicott College was a momentous effort produced by Flodman, Kilty, Sartorelli, and Director of Special Events Lauren Bek; Director of Student Engagement Steve Rossi; Director of Marketing Michael Melia; Professor Linda Robson; and hospitality management majors Maile Gallagher ’24 and Ana Mar Molina ’25.
The event was co-hosted by Jack Smiley ’25 and Meghan Fennell, Global Director for DEI Eminence at Deloitte. Visit the TEDxEndicott College website for a full list of speakers and bios.