Tag Archive for: emotional intelligence

Elena Kim: VP Business Development, TV/OTT at Global Music Rights

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Elena Kim“I found a different lease on my otherness. I can’t chase everybody’s projection of me,” says Elena Kim, “but the more I recognize the uniqueness of my own experience, the more I feel I have to offer.”

Kim speaks to how she learned to dream, connecting through differences, emotional regulation and integrating masculine and feminine aspects of leadership.

How the Invitation To Dream Changed Everything

Kim spent the first six years of her career in investment banking in Moscow, before the financial crisis of 2008. She decided to take the ‘opportunity’ of the market slump to invest in herself by pursuing an MBA. While filling out the application, she had to answer where she envisioned herself in five years, which she had never considered: “It quickly became a self-discovery journey for me.”

When Kim pondered what she cared or was passionate about, she realized she didn’t know what she really wanted.

“It was the first time when I allowed myself to dream as if anything was possible,” reflects Kim. “At that time, it was films and TV series – my window into the bigger world, into a different world. Growing up in Uzbekistan, I never had allowed myself to even consider the possibility of working in entertainment.”

She received her MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles when digital media was becoming prevalent in media and entertainment, which created a permissive playing field of newbies. Jumping on the rising wave of digital transformation as major players were just coming onto the scene, she joined a startup and began to reinvent her career path.

For several years, she acquired film and TV content for digital platforms, such as Hulu, Vimeo and iflix. For the past three years, she has negotiated and licensed music rights for programming across broadcast, cable, local TV networks and streaming platforms, which gives her a bird’s eye view of the whole TV and film industry.

“What I’m passionate about is figuring out what makes people’s hearts beat faster. What do they really love to watch and what determines that?” she says.

Having worked across emerging markets, she observed the obvious: whereas what people prefer to watch in Latin America might differ from that in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa or Southeast Asia, the love for stories about human experience is shared universally.

The Curiosity to Learn

Early on, Kim believes that her strongest asset was curiosity and willingness to dig deep into a subject. She notes she had amazing teachers who taught her the structure of learning a new skill and how to dissect a new concept to understand it.

“So how do you learn a new industry, for example? You look at the main players and their business models: how do people make money? What is the current political, economic, legislative environment impacting the industry? What are the major trends? What stands behind the main buzzwords?” asks Kim. “As you learn the basics, you then start tuning into where the opportunity is. What forms core competitive advantage, and what is driving the opportunity, what needs to hold true to fully unleash value? etc.”

When she was coming from Russia to the U.S., shifting from banking to media, she applied this process: “It became very clear to me that the wind was blowing towards online viewing, and I knew I wanted a job that had something to do with digital distribution.”

She loves how digital distribution of content included many more voices in a global dialogue. Regardless of where you are from and what you believe, you can connect over Game of Thrones or Friends.

The Value In Our Differences

As an avid globe trotter (over 60 countries and counting), she finds traveling therapeutic. She especially enjoys interacting with local people who don’t speak her language, figuring out ways to communicate beyond verbal. She holds such memories dear to her heart after surviving an earthquake in Nepal, sharing music with children from indigenous tribes in Indonesia, self-driving through Botswana and Namibia with local hitchhikers, getting help from local police after being robbed in Argentina, for example.

During one such trip, she traveled to Peru and had her first experience with plant medicine under the guidance of a local shaman, who held space with due reverence to ancient practices and traditions: “This was learning on a cosmic level. I won’t even attempt to describe it in words. If my spiritual inquiry started with understanding the concepts of neuroplasticity (who you are today is not a verdict), my awakening was turbo charged by living through the learning during this psychedelic experience.”

Kim continues, “One of the things now running through my veins is the knowing that what makes me connect with people is the ways in which we are similar, what intrigues and draws me to people is the ways in which we are different.”

“My personal journey with ‘otherness’ has been an emotional roller coaster. I am Korean ethnically, born in a Muslim country of Uzbekistan, mentally grew up in Russian culture in the Russian society,” says Kim. “Now I live in the U.S. as a gay woman, a scientifically-inclined spiritual psychonaut, where I’m ‘too woo woo’ in analytical circles and ‘too in my head’ in esoteric environments, etc. Of course, these are mostly distorted self-assessments.”

Growing up, she felt the disconnection of being Asian in Russia by not ‘presenting’ as Russian. Yet she speaks Russian, not Korean or Chinese, for which she’s regularly mistaken. Last year, prior to the current geopolitical crisis, she spent time in Russia, where she identified a piece in herself that she feels is Russian: her sense of depth. She does not give people any box to put her in anymore: “I don’t even fit the labels I have for myself,” she notes, “I’ve stopped explaining. ‘I’m from Russia’ is all I say now.”

To Kim, whatever makes us different is what helps us to represent a specific side of humanity as part of the whole. She resonates with Jerome Braggs’s notion that if you believe in universal oneness, then excluding experiences that are unique leads to robbing others of a fuller wholeness. Therefore, the more different we’re perceived we are, the more important it is for us to show up in all areas of life – and she notes those differences are defined in so many ways beyond ethnicity, race, gender or sexual orientation.

Integrating Feminine and Masculine Traits in Leadership

In a previous role, Kim was encouraged to start an initiative to foster diversity, equality and inclusion across employees from 40+ different countries and cultural backgrounds, which activated for her the importance of so-to-speak “feminine” qualities of leadership, especially when dealing with something intangible like what gives people a collective sense of purpose, belonging, safety for authenticity, and striving for excellence.

Kim recounts we have historically glorified and rewarded traits of leadership that are labeled as “masculine” – assertiveness, linear thinking, clarity without questioning and go-getting. But traits that we assign as “feminine” – such as empathy, collaboration, creating constructive atmosphere – are considered nice-to-have but not necessarily perceived as attributes of leadership or rewarded.

“The DE&I initiative quickly led me to a path of dissecting and challenging the leadership paradigm that we were operating under,” reflects Kim. “It’s so clear to me that to be successful in a multicultural organization, you have to have an acute level of empathy and cultural awareness. And the soft skills are increasingly becoming must-have.”

She has come to see that “feminine” leadership qualities are a necessary complement to “masculine” qualities, not a compromise or trade-of. “I used to hold this myth that once you start being softer, you lose your edge, an ability to reach goals in a timely manner. I had this notion you either be like a robot or you float in the clouds, and that was a misconception.”

Reflecting on the evolution of her leadership style, she says: “Even if I was telling myself a different story, early on I was truly managing out of egoic fear of losing control. I was never a micro-manager, but I was a micro-controller. I had to know everything, call the shots, be the one interacting with management to control the narrative, etc.”

Kim realizes this came from being extremely demanding on herself, and meant she came off polished and unapproachable. As she steps up as a leader, her focus is increasingly shifting to creating opportunities for others to push their growth edges, normalizing making mistakes while minimizing their impact.

Now she finds herself at a company that’s thriving despite the global pandemic. “We have set clear goals, roles, strategy and timeline, while the flow and interaction within the team remains fluid, supportive and trusting. I don’t need to chase anyone to get their job done, rather keep communicating progress, so folks can self-direct their work streams to deliver on time. This release of control within set boundaries is still work in progress as my ego peeks its head constantly. With that, I find myself being successful at my job, really supported by my team and a much happier me.”

Emotional Regulation and Co-Creation

Kim feels the pandemic, socio-economic inequity, and current geopolitical crises have brought a set of unique challenges around managing people’s mental and emotional states. Leaders are not necessarily equipped with due skillsets, protocols or guidelines to attend to people’s emotional turbulence. She is increasingly interested in the area of emotional self-regulation and has heard many executives speak to challenges of operating in toxic environments where stress and reactivity are the norms: “Even in my relatively emotionally intelligent company, without the acquired self-regulation practices I’ve exposed myself to in the last couple of years, I could not have managed some of the incidents that have come up inside and outside of the company. A simple thing like taking a deep breath might lead to a more beneficial outcome in an emotionally charged situation. These tools are teachable and the impact is quickly palpable.”

Her latest fascinations include Web 3.0 and decentralization, and she’s presently teaching a blockchain fundamentals course at chief.com to a network for executive women.

By Aimee Hansen

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Danielle Arnone: Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Combe

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Danielle Arnone“In times of uncertainty, the focus has shifted from seeking answers to raising questions and building relationships to lead through the unknown,” expresses Danielle Arnone. 

Arnone speaks to leading through disruption, the value of listening and encouragement and the importance of taking risks as the stakes rise.

Be Willing to Challenge, Even as Stakes Rise

“Each step along the way has offered me an opportunity to learn and develop my leadership style. From a career perspective, I continue to challenge myself to push ahead in order to grow,” says Arnone, about her twenty plus year of working in technology, digital and e-commerce across various industries – and most recently, in beauty, health and wellness.

With tech at the center of every business, her work is about leading enterprise change “from the inside out and the outside in.”

Early on in her career, she felt she brought a different perspective to problem solving and would regularly test the status quo. Often the only woman in the room, as she began to move up the ranks and the stakes rose, it began to feel riskier.

“It’s a double whammy. You’re challenging the status quo and you represent change in just who you are,” says Arnone. “I’ve had many moments where I had to remind myself – you’ve got to stick with it – because I believed in what I was fighting for.”

She continues: “I won’t say it’s not hard, because in my opinion, it’s unnecessarily hard for women in STEM and why we lose so many and particularly those with high potential. At a certain stage, I decided I didn’t want to be another of those women.”

Being in a male-dominated industry can amplify self-doubt, but being aware of that has often helped her to overcome it.

While many hurdles are systemic and the pace of change is very slow,” Arnone says, “I realized that I’m the only one that can get me unstuck and that is powerful.”

Navigating Uncertainty through Vision

Despite the challenges during these pandemic years, Arnone has focused on leading long term change. While the emphasis in tech has often been to develop the next innovation as quickly as possible, today she stops and asks at every critical decision point: “Where do we ultimately want to go? Not just in the next twelve months but what do we want to envision in five or ten years time? And are the things we’re focusing energy on now truly in service of that long-term goal?”

“The circumstances of the last two years have made me a different leader. I had to take a step back and ask: what did I do in this time? And take the necessary steps to hopefully be proud of the answer,” reflects Arnone.

If there’s one thing Arnone has confronted as she rose, it is getting comfortable with uncertainty. She’s found that by letting go of the notion that you need to have answers, you can come together with curiosity and openness as a team, and arrive at better results.

Speaking to vision and prioritization, she says, “You have to conserve energy to focus on what’s really important, knowing that can change in a moment’s notice.”

“I’ve had to get comfortable with ambiguity. We often don’t know the target or the rules of the game to hit the target,” says Arnone.

Listening and Fluidity in Thinking

“The leaders that I admire most have the ability to listen deeply and surface the question behind the question, without putting people on the defensive, and in a way that takes the conversation to the next stage,” says Arnone.

She feels that listening is key and that an analytical approach can be useful in managing conflict and problem solving. “In an emotionally charged situation, I will encourage the team to tease out the facts, take the personalities out of it and then listen for what is not being talked about.”

When it comes to what she brings to the table, Arnone is adept at absorbing new and broad ideas and loves encouraging the exchange of ideas around the table.

She also enjoys the invitation to step out of linear thought and indulge her penchant for abstract thinking, in which perceptions move and change shape, which is not unlike the leadership skill of having the flexibility to navigate uncertainty.

She will often step away from work to get in the zone so that she can reset and let ideas pour in. These days, she’s exploring artistic outlets. She also jokes that if you saw her many playlists, you wouldn’t even believe they belonged to same person.

Encouraging Others Towards Their Best

Arnone finds leaders who encourage others towards their personal best in service of a greater mission to be the most inspiring. She feels it is rare to encounter, but she has had the fortune to have supportive mentors along the way that have greatly impacted what she values most in her life and in her work.

“Encouragement can be an antidote to self-doubt and frustration. It’s as simple as saying, ‘I see you struggling – what’s going on and how can I help you’.”

She wants to be known for her work to develop people and is especially passionate about helping women succeed. She observes that women coming into the workforce today have a strong sense of what they expect from employers beyond a paycheck.

“I want to see this generation of women keep the momentum going. They are demanding more equity, more balanced and fulfilling lives and holding leaders accountable. To me, that is progress.”

By Aimee Hansen

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Why a Women’s Retreat Is Not Really About Getting Away

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women's retreatWhile it might seem strange to say this as a women’s retreat creator and facilitator, no woman ever needs a retreat. A retreat is not an endpoint. What every single woman absolutely needs is herself. A retreat is just one way a woman sets her own feet on a path back to herself.

While a week away offers a break, in my experience a woman rarely goes on retreat just to step away from her life. Instead, the underlying motivation is often the opposite—a restless desire to step into her voice, and into her own life, more fully.

What a woman often yearns for is a big, wide open space away from the status quo routine and constant noise to listen inwards and reconnect to her inner truth, to catalyze the internal momentum to clarify and heed what she hears, and perhaps to surround herself in an atmosphere of support that will validate and even magnify her voice.

Cyclical Time and Cyclical Rebirth

In the day-in, day-out focus on “doing” in life, it can be easy to move through the motions, stay close with the inertia of our current trajectory and just keep going. But from the physiology of our bodies to the seasons of nature—with the continuous cycle of birth, bloom, death and rebirth—a feminine sense of time is not linear, but cyclical time.

So that moment arrives, yet again, when what once created personal meaning or fulfillment no longer animates us. Or perhaps a key role or circumstance is stripped away, and the sense of value and safety we derived disappears with it. Or perhaps we just sense our “stuckedness” and discontent, though we can’t put a finger on what needs to change. We are asked to meet ourselves all over again.

We repeatedly come to a kind of crossroads with self, and we are supposed to. We ache to shed a skin, to break out of the limitations of a fixed identity, to evolve into our next adventure or creation—even if we cannot yet know what that looks like or how it will show up or take form.

The openness to listen to our own voice and allow ourselves the life-giving force of staying true to our inner truth — to move with it as it shifts—is part of the ever-unfolding path of personal evolution, and reflects feminine integrity, even if at times it renders us somewhat unrecognizable to our former self.

Whether we will be asked to make changes inside or outside, and often both, we come to realize the deadening feeling of ignoring our own voice is far more dangerous to our well-being than avoiding the fear of change. We are nudged towards the necessary discomfort, and often uncertainty, that comes with growth, like metaphorical labor pains in the cycle of our own rebirth.

Catalysts For A Crossroads Moment

In her best-selling book Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live, Dr. Martha Beck speaks to three kinds of catalytic events that can cause a re-evaluation of life and transform your self-definition:

  • Shock—A sudden external event that rattles your way of life to the core. Not all shocks are “negative”, but they are a sudden and fundamental change. We have been inside of the collective sustained shock of the pandemic for over a year now. I know few women that have not also faced big questions in her personal sphere amidst the collective spin.
  • Opportunity—An external “lucky break” comes in some way that offers the opportunity to take a big leap towards an adventure that your “essential self” wants to live out. Because it’s an opportunity, not forced, it brings up the dilemma of whether you’re willing to leap.
  • Transition—When the desire for change arises purely from within, a slow brew of dissonance with your currently reality becomes eventually intolerable. An internal transition requires feeling your “negative” feelings rather than numbing or running away from them, as well as acknowledging and validating your thoughts, preferences and desires too.

Transitions require a willingness to give credence to your inner voice. Transitions can only be self-validated, which necessitates emotional courage, as others may not understand your changes or decisions, and sometimes, until you get through it, you may even struggle to explain them to yourself.

Reconnecting With Your Voice

“We’re often blind to what creates our limits and blocks,” writes Nicki Gilmour, CEO and Founder, Evolved People (theglasshammer.com). “We all have goals, but we need to surface our subconscious gremlins, who are trying to thwart are best-laid plans for change by creating hidden competing agendas.”

When we seek to reconnect with our voice, we often find that unconscious limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging patterns are holding more sway in our lives than we realized, even if we have visited them before. Unexamined, they will run us in a circle of repetitive limited experience so that even as the characters and stages change, the familiar plot wears itself out in our interactions and relationships.

Just as time is not only linear, emotional and spiritual growth also does not happen in a straight line, however. The growth of becoming conscious of limiting beliefs and patterns often feels like a spiral outwards, returning to familiar themes in new iterations with a little more distance from the red-hot center of pain. We begin to hold increased perspective, as both experiencer and witness, and a greater ability to respond rather than be highjacked by emotional reactivity.

Sometimes, as explored in Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal The Heart by Tara Bennet Goldman, entire schemas or lenses of skewed perception are at play which require the piercing light of our conscious awareness, if only to open up the 1/4 second opportunity of choice in what we do with how we feel.

We can also question and rewrite the narratives through which we tell the stories about ourselves, those around us and our lives. We come to find that we all have deep stories through which we shape our stories and through which we write our lives, but they do not need to be set in stone.

If we are open and fundamentally teachable as a student to life, we will keep unfolding ourselves to reveal more of who we are. Life opens up relative to how receptive to our own tender being, with all her feelings and all her contradictions and all her needs, we are willing to be.

Ultimately, stepping into our voice comes down to self-allowance and not trying to constantly earn our value through the endless outcome-focused “doing” of the patriarchal paradigm, but rather claiming our inherent self-worth.

We surround ourselves with others who can remind us should we forget, because unlike the mythical solo journey, a tenet of the “heroine’s journey” is to recognize support is available from soulful allies along the road.

Walking Back Towards Yourself

When you come again to a crossroads of self; when you reach a moment where you can no longer distract, ignore,  or downplay your feelings, needs or intuition; when you can neither watch yourself hustle for approval nor conspire against your own deeper desires; when you will no longer believe in a culturally-defined success if it isn’t also aligned with your own truth—then, you step through a new doorway.

What you find is more of who you are waiting there, if only you are willing to receive her, if only you are ready to follow her wherever she may take you. When our value is self-possessed, we are free to be and move and create, from the inside-out.

To me, a women’s retreat is never about that one week you stepped away from your life. It’s not really about getting away, but getting in. It’s about walking back towards yourself and stepping further into the truth of who you are.

In addition to lead writer for theglasshammer, Aimee Hansen is the Creator of Storyteller Within Retreats, Lonely Planet Wellness Escapes recommended women’s self-exploration retreats focused on connecting with your embodied inner voice, through writing, yoga, movement and more, to animate your unique expression. Her next luxury retreat event on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala takes place July 31st – August 9th, 2021 with 12 spaces available.

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Check-In: Let’s Put Self-Love On the Conversation Table.

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self loveWhile it’s now normalized to talk about self-care and self-worth in the discussion of our professional lives, it’s rare that we dare to talk about “self-love”.

Yet self-love is an internal orientation from which to envision and navigate our lives—be it personal or professional, and it is what fosters self-worth, self-respect and self-care.

So as we near Valentine’s Day, let’s invite self-love to join this conversation.

Is Self-Care Enough?

According to Psych Central, “self-care is any activity that we do deliberately in order to take care of our mental, emotional and physical health.”

But we often talk about self-care as a momentary respite from a hectic life in order to restore our energy, or a set practice we do before the day runs away from us.

“Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure,” writes Brianna West writes in Thought Catalog.

“Self-compassion is regarding yourself compassionately. Self-care, by contrast, is treating yourself compassionately,” writes Charlie Gilkey, “…Self-care without self-compassion discharges a debt, usually with suffering somewhere else.”

Self-care spa dates alone are no proxy for cultivating a state of self-love as your foundation for experiencing yourself and the world. Without self-love, superficial self-care can be the coping mechanism or distraction from living a reality that is painfully out of alignment with your needs, desires, meaning fulfillment or growth.

Self-Love Means Self-Valuation

“Self-love means finding peace within ourselves — resting comfortably within the depths of our being. We might find temporary respite by doing something to nurture ourselves,” writes John Amadeo, Ph.D. in Psychology Today, “But a deeper inner peace requires cultivating a certain way of being with ourselves — a warm and nurturing attitude toward what we experience inside.”

Self-love is by definition an ability to meet ourselves where we are, loving and accepting of this moment of “me” right now, right here. It asks us to create expansive change from a place of love and respect, rather than shame or fear.

“Self-love is not simply a state of feeling good. It is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth,” writes Deborah Khoshaba Psy.D. “Self-love is dynamic; it grows through actions that mature us.

“When we act in ways that expand self-love in us,” Khoshaba continues, “we begin to accept much better our weaknesses as well as our strengths, have less need to explain away our short-comings, have compassion for ourselves as human beings struggling to find personal meaning, are more centered in our life purpose and values, and expect living fulfillment through our own efforts.”

As “actions that mature us,” self-care can include listening within with radical self-honesty. It can mean making the sometimes difficult, heart-aligned, self-discerned choices and changes that create a more integrated life.

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing,” West writes, pointing out that self-care often means doing the thing you least want to do — whether it’s figuring out your accounts or leaving the position or relationship or forgoing the immediacy of a compulsive habit to self-parent yourself into making the choices that nurture your growth.

“Self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness. Self-love means taking care of your own needs and not sacrificing your well-being to please others,” writes Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President & CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. “Self-love means not settling for less than you deserve.”

Increasing Heart and Mind Alignment

According to HeartMath Institute, which studies the effect of heart activity on brain function, the mind and the heart (which has its own neural network) are constantly in two-way communication.

The heart actually actually sends more signals to the brain, influencing both emotional processing and higher cognitive faculties, than the brain sends to the heart. Your brain is constantly responding to your heart.

A big part of self-love is coming into that place of acceptance and self-validation where your mind and heart are more aligned more often, and you create from this space.

When you’re out of alignment with the core pulse of your inner being, you may feel life is hard and that you’re stuck. You may feel disconnected with yourself and sense that something is generally off, no matter what you do.

You may often feel foggy and lack energy or animus or vision, like your personal meaning has drained of color. You may feel like you’re living an external reality that does not match, or no longer matches, who you feel you are inside, and your self-care is your attempt to cope.

Sometimes, you can be in a moment in life where your meaning-maker is in cyclical change: where what used to fulfill you no longer nourishes you the same and perhaps your personal evolution calls for something more.

However, when you are deeply honest with yourself, deeply accepting of yourself, and honoring and validating your needs while acting from personal alignment, you begin to feel less stress and more vitality. You do not block any emotion because emotions can provide data and feedback.

You feel a greater sense of wholeness and peace within yourself and connection to yourself, to others and to the world. You are more curious and more creative. You feel mentally and physically more solid and have greater resilience for accepting yourself even in your struggles.

Questions To Check-In With Your Heart:

– How open are you to feeling all of your emotional experience? Do you block, disallow, distract or escape from experiencing certain emotions? Can you accept yourself in both uncertainty and vulnerability? Do you practice bringing awareness to your emotions as information?

– Do you trust in yourself — and at least as much as you trust others? Do you listen to your own voice as the authority in your life? Are there areas in your life where you could gently build up more self-trust and inner accountability? Are you able to forgive yourself?

– Do you create the space to intentionally check-in with your heart? Do you slow down and get still enough to discern the signals of your own truth from the collective noise, or do you keep the wheels spinning so you can’t? What would you hear if you did?

– Do you self-validate your experience and your own needs? Are you compassionately aware of your needs and willing to take responsibility for them and clearly communicate them? Or do you invalidate, dismiss or disown them? Are you willing also to own and validate your inspirations and curiosities and desires for expression?

– Are you willing to listen to and even act upon the wisdom of your gut and heart? Or are you dismissive of internal callings or yearnings if they fall outside of your mental framework of what’s rational or realistic?

– How honest can you be with yourself? Are you attached to any concept or identity of yourself that inhibits your ability to know yourself more deeply and possibly, openly? What questions are you unwilling to ask yourself?

– Are you willing to say “no” from love? Have you created boundaries as a healthy container for honoring your values, your energy and your time? Are you willing to choose yourself?

– Do you know what you value? Are you willing to act in alignment from your values, even when it’s difficult? Do you live with intention and are able to make the choices that nurture your center and further your growth?

– Is what you are committing to, through where your energy and action goes, the same as what you want? Can you bring your habitual commitments into closer alignment with your desires?

– Are you still hustling to earn your sense of worth and value from others or do you claim it for yourself? Are you able to embrace growth opportunities or do you shrink at criticism? What is one area of your life where you might need to claim your worth and value?

We are all on a journey of cultivating self-love, and that journey impacts everything about not only how we show up in the world — in every facet of our lives — but also how we experience ourselves as we do so.

When it comes to enjoying that ride, cultivating self-love is probably the richest, most valuable, rewarding work we will ever do.

By Aimee Hansen

(Our “Heart” Coach)

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Your Negative Emotions Can Guide You to Value-Based Actions

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negative emotionsWhen we ignore, invalidate or suppress our negative emotions because we don’t want to feel them, or feel they are unacceptable, they do not go away.

“Effective leaders are mindful of their inner experiences but not caught in them. They know how to free up their internal resources and commit to actions that align with their values,” writes Dr. Susan David and Christina Congleton in Harvard Business Review. 

You Can’t Negate Negative Emotions

David, Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the award-winning book, Emotional Agility, shares in her TED Talk that a third of us either judge ourselves for having “bad emotions” like sadness or anger or grief, or try to push these feelings down.

“Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” says David. “Psychologists call this amplification.”

Indeed, research indicates that fighting against thoughts on addiction only magnifies them, restraining thoughts can create more stress and suppressing negative emotions spawns more emotional eating than admitting the emotions are there. 

David and Congleton have found that executives and leaders can get “hooked by” negative emotions— buying into them, avoiding situations that evoke those feelings and limiting themselves. Or, by denying the negative thoughts and rationalizing them away, even pushing themselves into situations that aren’t aligned with their values. 

Ultimately, suppressing or “fixing” negative emotions often ends up in cycling through the same reoccurring trigger areas of challenge for years. 

The Benefits of Feeling What You Don’t Want to Feel

“The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic,” says David. “We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.“

Positive emotions are simply those we tend to “find pleasurable to experience”—such as joy, satisfaction, love, serenity, interest or amusement. Whereas negative emotions are simply those we don’t find pleasurable to experience—such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, rage, loneliness and annoyance. Neither of these definitions imply the effect of having the emotion is entirely positive or negative within us, just that we judge experiencing it as so.

Apparently, a 3:1 positive/negative emotional experience ratio is necessary for a sense of flourishing, but the balance plays a part.

“One idea in the study of emotion and its impact on psychological health is overdue for retirement: that negative emotions (like sadness or fear) are inherently bad or maladaptive for our psychological well-being, and positive emotions (like happiness or joy) are inherently good or adaptive,” writes June Gruber.

So-called negative emotions have an inherent value. Negative emotions can foster detailed and analytical thinking and less stereotypical thoughts. Feelings like sadness can increase focus and help us to learn from mistakes and assess social situations better.

Negative emotions can facilitate us to go deeper into self-understanding and empathy. Being willing to experience them can build emotional resilience. They help us to evaluate our experience and detect when an area of life feels off and needs our attention.

Experiencing and accepting emotions like anger and sadness are important to our mental health. Mindfulness training has been helpful in overcoming anxiety disorders, not because it eradicated negative feelings but it trained participants to accept them. 

Research has shown the ability to hold mixed emotions together at once precedes improvements in well-being, even if it’s unpleasant or difficult. Across a study of ten years, frequent experiences of mixed emotions were strongly associated with relatively good physical health and that increases in them weakened age-related health declines.

“We find that psychological well-being is not entirely determined by the presence of one type or kind of an emotion,” writes Gerber, “but rather an ability to experience a rich diversity of both positive and negative emotions.”

From Emotional Data to Values-Aligned Action

David urges us to realize that emotions are data that “contain flashing lights to things that we care about”—when we get clear on precisely what we are feeling and can respond by taking steps that are value-aligned.

“Emotions are data, they are not directives,” she caveats. “We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them.” Rather, we pay attention to how they point to what we value. 

David and Congleton suggest four practices derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), originally created by Dr. Steven C. Hayes.

Recognize You Are Stuck.

Recognize your own patterns. Where are you caught in rigid, repeating mental loops—your thoughts like a broken record inside that is insistent on replaying? Does the loop feel familiar from the past, like situations you’ve felt before that triggered and created similar contraction? These loops only deplete your mental resources. Notice if you often feel undervalued, for example.

Identify Thoughts and Feelings. 

Label your thoughts and emotions distinctively to create emotional distance and clarity of the emotional data. If you feel you have to be available all the time for work, then you can get perspective by stating “I’m having the thought that I have to be available all the time for work.” Then you can look at what you feel and want to do.

Rather than saying “I’m sad” and being drowned by the emotion, you can say “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad,” and create enough space to look at the data. This is a mindfulness practice that can improve behavior, well-being and promote beneficial changes in the brain. 

Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectal behavior therapy, emphasizes that validating emotions requires accurate—observing and describing the event, thoughts and emotions, perhaps how it feels in your body—not interpretation or assumptions, which can invalidate and cause distrust in your internal experience.

“When he interrupted me for the second time, I felt anger and felt tightness and heat in my chest” is an observation. “I shouldn’t be so sensitive” is not.

Accept and Observe.

Rather than suppress or try to control your thoughts or emotions, even if you can’t rationally justify them or they don’t match how you think of yourself, allow them to be present. Breath ten deep breaths to check in. Rather than making them feel better, this is about making room for your raw emotions to reveal. What is going on internally and externally, and what is the energetic quality of your feelings? 

If you can get underneath the emotion, are they giving you a clear signal of something that matters, for which you could respond differently? 

Act in Alignment With Values. 

“You don’t get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort,” says David. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”

When you can treat your emotions as data, you can create choices of how you respond to them to act in a way that aligns with your values. 

Rather than be absorbed by or pulled into reaction by your emotions, you can be guided by your values, which is a primary focus of executive coaching. You can consider what actions will bring you closer to and further from them.

“When you take values-based actions, you will eventually arrive at a choice point,” tweets David. “Will you move toward your values and act like the person you wish to be, or will you move away from your values and act against them?”

By Aimee Hansen

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Emotional Intelligence – Part 2: Do Women Have Higher Emotional Intelligence than Men?

By Aimee Hansen

Emotional IntelligenceLast week, we wrote about Emotional Intelligence as a true leadership differentiator beyond IQ or “hard skill” levels or task mastery, and a prerequisite for real leadership belonging at the C-Suite level.

As Daniel Goleman, Ph. D, author of the New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence among other publications, highlights: “Members of a successful corporate team must, collectively, have a high level of emotional intelligence. On a team with high EI attributes, it is easy to spot those few who do not…”

But according to research, it would seem that women are significantly more likely to be amongst those who do.

Women Demonstrate More EI Competency More Consistently

Whether women have higher emotional intelligence than men has been a topic for debate by Goleman and others, though a Korn Ferry study of 55,000 professionals across 90 countries found that “women score higher than men on nearly all (11 of 12) emotional intelligence competencies, except emotional self-control, where no gender differences are observed.”

The authors, including Goleman, “found that women more effectively employ the emotional and social competencies correlated with effective leadership and management than men.”

According to the Korn Ferry results, women were 86% more likely than men to be seen as consistently demonstrating emotional self-awareness as a competency (18.4% of women compared to just 9.9% of men). Women were 45% more likely than men to be seen as demonstrating empathy consistently.

Women also outperformed men at “coaching & mentoring, influence, inspirational leadership, conflict management, organizational awareness, adaptability, teamwork and achievement orientation.” The most narrow margin was “positive outlook” (9% more likely), and the only gender neutral competency was “emotional self-control.”

When it comes to excelling at what we value, these findings complement research that shows that men are more likely to undervalue the relationship interaction with customers and clients, which women will tend to emphasize as important.

Closing the Gender Gap of Competency Perception

Generally speaking in the workplace, women tend to undervalue their skills competency and performance while men overvalue themselves on both.

These perceptual differences, reflected in the cultural mirror, can mean women preemptively take themselves out of the game. In one Hewlett Packard report, men went for the job if they were 60% qualified based on job criteria whereas women went for the job only if they were 100% qualified.

Zenger Folkman found that women’s confidence increases with age and experience so that by our mid-40’s, we’ve closed the gender confidence gap to meet men. But it’s the leaps we may have forgone in our 20’s and 30’s, when the gap was prevalent, that still factor in as lost opportunities.

Dr Richard E. Boyatzis, Distinguished University Professor, CWRU, spoke to women undervaluing, and men overvaluing, their competencies in the workplace: “Research shows, however, that the reality is often the opposite. If more men acted like women in employing their emotional and social competencies, they would be substantially and distinctly more effective in their work.”

“The data suggests a strong need for more women in the workforce to take on leadership roles,” said Goleman. “When you factor in the correlation between high emotional intelligence and those leaders who deliver better business results, there is a strong case for gender equity. Organizations must find ways to identify women who score highly on these competencies and empower them.”

Emotional intelligence is considered a key differentiator at the top leadership level, and it’s a competency asset women can deeply value even as we develop it.

How do you further develop your “EQ”?

According to a Forbe’s Coaches Council article from Cari Coats, there are four main attributes that can be recognized in emotionally intelligent leaders, paraphrased below.

Self-awareness of your own internal motivations and tendencies and emotions and both understanding and acceptance of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”. Emotionally intelligent leaders can take feedback without defensiveness. One practice that can help is to become aware of how you respond when challenged or when things don’t go well.

Transparency both in your own vulnerabilities and flaws and mistakes as well as in speaking with truth and clarity with others. As Dickson writes, “the key is showing up as a whole human and being unafraid of transparency, then working toward improving relationships within an organization, within team communications or with customers.”

Being present to perceive and listen and respond to the person or situation in front of them without judgment, while recognizing the emotional needs of others at play. An emotionally intelligent leader is able to appreciate and allow other’s emotions and handle them with empathy.

Self-mastery of emotional awareness so that they are not yanked into emotional reactions, but instead can more aptly choose how to respond in any given moment.

Want to go much further? For a comprehensive list of leadership training opportunities, books, tips, exercises, videos and assessments to help develop your emotional intelligence, please check out the Positive Psychology Program for resources.

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Emotional Intelligence – Part 1: The Higher Your Go, The More It Matters!

By Aimee Hansen

Research has shown that leadership accomplishment at the most senior levels is highly correlated with emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence in LeadershipEQ is said to be responsible for up to 58% of performance outcome. Whereas cognitive ability and IQ are “threshold competencies,” emotional intelligence is a differentiator at the leadership edge.

Emotional intelligence is so important in leadership that research has found that within groups with no dedicated leader, having the highest emotional intelligence is one of the driving factors for who will ultimately emerge as a leader. It’s not only an asset for leadership, but a predictor of leadership success.

It’s been called “the next sign of great leadership” in a Forbes Council Post, and in the quiet and remarkable transformation happening in business, “Honesty, intelligence and empathy are required.”

“Yes, this requires a level of vulnerability that makes old school CEOs and COOs cringe,” writes Rebecca T. Dickson, “But for those open to it, leaders are building trust they were never able to when they hid behind authority.”

No Soft Skill

Dr. Daniel Goleman, the most famous of the emotional intelligence researchers, highlights that EI is especially critical in the C-Suite. Goleman told Acertitude, an executive search firm, “what I found is that for jobs at every level, emotional intelligence is about twice as important as cognitive ability. The higher you go in the organization the more it matters. For top-level C-suite jobs, 80% to 90% of the abilities that distinguish high performers, as identified by the company itself, is based on emotional intelligence.”

Goleman told Acertitude, “What they’re looking for is the ability to manage yourself and to handle relationships effectively. That’s the definition of emotional intelligence. That’s what really matters.”

When IQ and technical skills are similar, emotional intelligence (no soft skill) is what moves people up the ladder. It pays too.

One study found that participants with high degrees of emotional intelligence made an annual average of $29,000 more than those with a low degree of emotional intelligence.

What is Emotional Intelligence

Goleman breaks the emotional intelligence framework into four areas:

• Self-Awareness: accurate self-assessment, self-confidence, and emotional self-awareness
• Social-Awareness: empathy, organizational awareness, and service
• Self Management: emotional self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative, and optimism
• Relationship Management: inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, change catalyst, conflict management, bond-building, and teamwork

With emotional intelligence, you’re able to bring awareness to your brain’s fast operating system, which is automatic, default, irrational and often quick to interpret events negatively rather than as opportunities and react with disproportional emotion to the situation in front of you now. You attune more to your slower, more cautious and intentional second operating system so that you may respond rather than react.

Within self-awareness, empathy plays a particularly important role when it comes to C-Suite leadership:

• Cognitive Empathy is being able to see the world through other’s perspectives (mind-to-mind connection).
• Emotional Empathy is being able to feel what others are feeling.
• Empathic Concern is being able to relate to how others think and feel and to care about helping them (heart-to-heart connection).

The best leaders possess these empathic characteristics and can articulate and inspire others in a common vision.

Primal Leadership

Goleman introduces the concept of “primal leadership” – “No matter what leaders set out to do—whether it’s creating strategy or mobilizing teams to action—their success depends on how they do it. Even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should.”

“This emotional task of the leader is primal—that is, first—in two senses: It is both the original and the most important act of leadership.” Goleman states. “Leaders have always played a primordial emotional role.”

Fred Kofman, an Argentinian economist and author writes, “Hearts and minds cannot be bought or forced; they can only be deserved and earned. They are given only to worthy missions and trustworthy leaders. This applies not only to organizations but also to many other domains of human activity.”

A leader who is highly effective is often a leader that has done substantial work on herself or himself when it comes to emotional mastery through what Nancy Koehn has called “the gathering years” of harnessing one’s emotional awareness to access her or his deeper strength.

At the helm of any organization are those who navigate the relationship of that organization’s behavior to the very ideology it operates from, the relationship with all those who it serves and the relationship to all those who support it to exist.

Cultivating a sophisticated relationship with yourself, with your emotions and with relating to others emotions is the prerequisite to C-Suite leadership, and more than ever, to evolving how leadership shows up.

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What Skills Differentiate Women Who Make It To The Top?

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Image via Shutterstock

Guest contributed by Steven Stein

What does it really take for women leaders to make it to the top in the business world? Over the past 20 years, we’ve compiled the world’s largest database of testing results on emotional intelligence—approximately 2 million people worldwide. The Emotional Quotients Inventory (EQ-i 2.0) is the first and most widely used emotional intelligence test in the world. One of the areas we look at is the relationship between emotional intelligence and success at work. In addition, we’ve looked at the role gender plays in how these emotional skills are expressed.

We were the first to document the differences between men and women’s emotional intelligence profiles. Interestingly, the results were consistent around the world. And while there’s no significant difference in overall emotional intelligence scores, there were differences in the types of emotional intelligence. Men scored higher in independence, stress tolerance and problem solving. Women, however, scored higher in emotional self-awareness, emotional expression and empathy.

Building on women’s strengths

In the early days of reporting on my organization’s emotional intelligence and organizational success research, I was challenged by a number of businesswomen. They told me that to be successful in the male corporate environment, such as in financial institutions and the tech industry, it was important to be tough. They thought that they had to be tougher than the men in order to succeed. Being aggressive, they said, was rewarded and the way to get ahead.

I thought differently. I suggested that women were generally better in interpersonal skills, empathy and emotional expression, and they should leverage these skills. While the traditionally male-dominant traits of stress tolerance, independence and using appropriate emotions in solving problems were important qualities for leaders, women’s skills in these areas did not lag behind the men’s. And to get ahead of the curve in leadership, the skills women already excelled in were the ones to focus on improving even more.

Women are moving the needle on defining leadership traits

One of our current research samples includes 280 executives who are about to be or are currently on boards of directors. These high-level executives, most of whom have worked their way up the organizational ladder, have acquired the skills one needs to make it to the top. The sample shows that women have essentially closed the gap in the areas where men traditionally score higher—independence, stress tolerance and problem solving. They have had to deal with stress throughout their careers and, at this stage, are more balanced in dealing with difficult situations. Also, they’ve been at a decision-making level for a significant amount of time and can manage the decision-making process well.

But the data also shows that women who make it to the level of senior executives moving onto boards bring some extra skills with them to the boardroom. These women outscore their male counterparts in emotional self-awareness, emotional expression and empathy. These skills have now emerged as defining future leaders.

What difference does it make having females on the board of directors?  The New York Times reported on a study by Credit Suisse looking at gender differences of board members. They examined almost 2,400 global corporations from 2005 to 2011, including the years directly preceding and following the financial crisis, and found that large-cap companies with at least one woman on their boards outperformed comparable companies with all-male boards by 26 percent.

The report continued, “Some might assume that there was a cost to this as well, that boards with women must have been excessively cautious before the financial crisis of 2008… Not so. From 2005 to 2007, Credit Suisse also found, the stock performance of companies with women on their boards essentially matched performance of companies with all-male boards. Nothing lost, but much gained.” Unfortunately, the number of women getting to the boardroom is still much lower than men.

Increase your emotional intelligence

Whatever your emotional intelligence strengths, you can develop and enhance the three specific traits exhibited strongly by women in leadership roles.

  1. Cultivate self-awareness. Practice can help you become more emotionally self-aware. Through activities like meditation and mindfulness, you can learn to focus more on what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling that way. Knowing yourself better will help you become more balanced and centered when dealing with stressful situations and people.
  2. Find the balance for emotional expression. Being emotionally expressive comes naturally for many people. There’s nothing wrong with letting others know when something is bothering you or when you’re pleased with someone’s work. Be honest and authentic. Expressing your feelings can make you more real and likeable as a person, especially when you learn to manage it well. On the other hand, being overly expressive or under expressive can lead to trouble.
  3. Make empathy your secret strength. Great leaders are empathic. They are able to listen to others and understand where they’re coming from. But don’t mistake empathy for believing you must give in to everyone’s wants and needs. Understanding another person’s situation helps you make better decisions about what feels right for you.

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Steven Stein, Ph.D., is a leading expert on psychological assessment and emotional intelligence. He is the founder and CEO of Multi-Health Systems, a leading publisher of scientifically validated assessments. Dr. Steven Stein is the author and coauthor of several books on emotional intelligence, including his new book, The EQ Leader: Instilling Passion, Creating Shared Goals, and Building Meaningful Organizations through Emotional Intelligence

Disclaimer: The views and advice given by our Guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

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Tips for Developing Your Soft Skills: Learn How Raising Your EQ Can Boost Your Career

Overhead view of office staffBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Learning how to be good at your job is easy, but having what it takes to be great and be recognized by your peers and managers as a rising star requires extra effort and attention to something known as your soft skills. The senior women we interview often encourage young people to distinguish themselves from the pack as early on in their career as they possibly can.

But, this can be easier said than done when you look around and notice that most of your peers are essentially at the same technical level as you are. So what is going to make the difference between good and great at work? Listening, leading with compassion, adapting to change, being a good team player — all of these attributes (and much more) make up your unique set of soft skills, or what is commonly referred to as emotional intelligence.

Improving your soft skills, in addition to keeping your technical skills sharp, is one of the fastest ways to elevate yourself above the competition. Since developing your soft skills is such an important aspect of your career advancement and professional development, we have compiled some important tips for honing your soft skills at work. Following these simple tips will make you a more valuable asset to your company.

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Tips for Managing Your Personal Brand at Work: Are You Doing All the Right Things?

iStock_000018133371XSmallBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

In our conversations with top female executives, we have noticed that one of the most popular topics discussed is the importance of managing your personal brand and how this influences your career advancement. But what exactly does it mean to manage your personal brand and how can you do it effectively? Believe it or not, your personal brand consists of more than your outward appearance. Of course how you present yourself at work is very important, but when you think about your personal brand, you need to take more factors into consideration.

Your personal brand is always working. Whether or not it is working for or against you is completely in your control. Every time you enter a conference room, a networking function, or a team brainstorming session, you need to be thinking about how other people perceive you.

Take a look at the list below to see what factors are the building blocks of your personal brand. Making sure that you are always putting your best self forward can help you get noticed by the people who matter. This could lead to career changing opportunities such as getting a sponsor or being chosen for an overseas assignment.

When managing your personal brand at work, you should take the following factors into consideration:

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