What had I gotten myself into? Was I going to spend a day with a bunch of woman talking about feelings and singing kumbaya in support circles?
Looking back on this reaction, I have to laugh. This conference was one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had and I almost passed it up because of a lack of self-regulation (we will get to that in a minute) and color.
The summit was put on by Shandel Slaten. She is an executive coach "who helps business professionals realize their personal and professional goals" and the Founder of True Life Coaching. Up until now, when I thought of a business/life coach/therapist (yes, they all blended together) the character from the movie First Wives Club immediately popped into mind, "Learn from love. Grow from love." Again another poor stereotype.
Shandel changed my viewpoint on coaches the moment she kicked off the conference. I don't know her personally but her stage presence, confidence, honesty and transparency was definitely far from the First Wives Club character I had just described.
The description of the summit was as follows: The 2011 Seattle Women’s Leadership Summit has the overall objective to teach women to lead confidently with purpose and wisdom. However, the main focus of the day was on understanding your Emotional Quotient (EQ) or "your ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of your emotions and the emotions of others in order to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity".
This Emotional Quotient has a number of layers that each speaker addressed throughout the day:
1.) Self-Awareness - The ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others.
2.) Self-Regulation - The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods and the propensity to suspend judgment and think before you act.
3.) Motivation - A passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status, and a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence.
4.) Empathy - The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.
5.) Social Skills - A proficiency in managing relationships and building networks.
Now, prior to the days events, we were asked to take a survey online to measure our EQ and these specific layers of our EQ. I'm not going to share the specific results of my survey but I will tell you that while I have work to do in all categories, I was particularly surprised by my Empathy score. That will come up later though.
Shandel kicked off the summit at the base level of the Emotional Quotient, Self-Awareness. Using an analogy, she demonstrated how our emotional state is like a glass of water. When calm and rational, the water is "clear". However, as we run into more and more obstacles (red food coloring) throughout the day, our state begins to become "cloudy". When the obstacles overwhelm us, we become "flooded" emotionally and instead of calm and clear, our glass is now "red".
According to Shandel and later, Dr. Leslie Parrot, when we reach this emotionally flooded state, our brain literally shuts down our rationality and we operate in the same way we would if we were in a fight or flight situation. Another interesting insight is that it takes roughly 4 hours for our emotional state to return to clear after becoming flooded, which means you spend 4 hours operating in a suspend state of rationality.
It makes all the sense in the world to me now why I would want to avoid every reaching that state if I could.
This leads us to the topic of Self-Regulation and identifying disablers (those things that take you to "red" or emotionally flooded in an instant) and enablers (those things that bring you back to calm). For me, I identified "waiting on people (which inevitably resulted in being late)" as a disabler and the following video below as an enabler. Particularly moment :35 seconds.
My biggest takeaway though from Shandel's session was something she said about our response to being in an overwhelmed emotional state. Basically, the point was that venting in that state does NOT actually relieve the "flooding" but simply prolongs it. On top of that, you're very likely to pass on your emotional distress to the person you are venting to. Yuck.
During lunch, there were two break out sessions. Melody Biringer, a start-up junkie whom I particularly admire, was hosting a session on Motivation and Melissa Benaroya was hosting a session on Empathy. Since Motivation was my highest score and Empathy my lowest, I decided while I really, really wanted to listen to Melody, that it would be more beneficial for me to spend lunch with Melissa.
The Empathy session had a specific focus on children so it wasn't as relevant as I had hoped but I still had a couple great takeaways. Specifically,that one can reinforce good behavior by acknowledging the effort, instead of praising the outcome. This point was actually driven home that same day when I went to the gym after the summit. Long story short, the gym likes it when you bring your shower towels down from the locker rooms. I realized that the woman at the reception desk understood this idea of "acknowledging effort" when she said to me "Thank you SO much for bringing your towel all the way down here." I smiled and felt good about myself. I had not received a reward for bringing the towel down or been punished for leaving it upstairs, my behavior was simply reinforced by that comment of acknowledgment. Cool.
The last session was lead by Carol Olsby, an amazing woman who has "over 20 years of HR and business experience providing HR leadership, operational, and tactical solutions to her clients." Her session on Social Skills and Servant Leadership, hands down, had the most profound impact on me and was probably to hardest session to listen to. As a leader and manager, my employees are my most important priority. I know from experience that I do better work and work harder when I think that the person I'm working for has a vested interest in my growth. I have always kept my employees and there well-being at the forefront of any decision I've ever made for the company so I initially felt as if Carol was preaching to the choir. However, as the session progressed I realized that my sentiment for my employees was being lost in some of the policies I myself had put into place. What a tough realization. That being said I'm so thankful to have been made aware of this and I have a chance to change it.
Shandel will be sending me the slides from Carol's session in the next couple of weeks and once I have them I will add them here as well as posting them separately so that you can get a better understand of the ideas she discussed.
Beyond the sessions, there were some incredible woman at this event and unfortunately, I think this post is long enough, otherwise I would talk about them as well.
Overall, one of the most important things I learned today about your Emotional Quotient is that you can have an impact on it. You can develop skills to deal with your emotions and those around you. I think this is one of the most encouraging points of the summit and something that I've committed to improving.
So as you can see, I gained a lot more from this conference than I had originally anticipated. Thank you again to Shandel for putting on this incredible event. I really appreciate the insights that you and the other speakers have just given me.
I will leave you all now with a short snippet of the quote Shandel left us with:
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness had genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Good night!
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