The Women Who Taught Me a Lesson or Three

A couple of weeks ago I was doing a presentation called “It’s Your Choice” for a group who are in career transition. The audience had a wide range of experience and skills, from executives to entry level, social workers to sales people, and everything in between. Uniquely, they all had two things in common: they are all female and they are all in career transition.

My presentation was part of an excellent program called “Focus”; it is designed to help women work not only on career planning, but on getting to know themselves a little better and on pursuing their dream careers.  At the end of the program, they hosted a networking event and, this time, invited me to be the guest speaker.

The key message of my presentation pertains to increasing our awareness of how choice / decision making is so ingrained in our lives and how, each day, we are also making and reaffirming the bigger choices in life, such as our belief systems, our thoughts, and attitudes that tint our experiences.

My 90-minute session went very well. There was a great discussion about how much power each person had in that room in determining their outcome, their dreams, and making it happen. Overall, it was a great event; we had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

At the end of the session a number participants came up to say a few words about the presentation as they generally do after any session.  One woman approached me and started by saying that when she walked in and saw that there was a male delivering the session, her first thought was just to turn around and walk away. But she chose (interestingly, since after all making choices was the subject of the presentation) to hear me out for 5 minutes and make a decision based on that.

Frankly, her comment caught me a bit off guard. Then she followed it up by saying, “but I knew right away when you started to speak and to share some of your personal stories that this was the place to be.”  In the end she wanted to thank me because she thought the presentation was exceptional and that she had learned a lot, so she was very happy that she had stayed.

The first part of her comment had really struck a chord with me.  It wasn’t because I felt offended or defensive, but truly because it was a comment that I had never received before.  My “maleness” wasn’t something that I ever thought had any impact on my presentations before. I continued to think about what she had said, to the point that I searched for more input from the important females in my life, like my wife and a few close friends.

My three big lessons from that experience were:

1) Listen first. Don’t judge.  Specifically, I’m referring to myself and reminding myself not to judge and say “that’s crazy thinking!” Just listen first and not judge–because there are probably many good reasons why she felt that way.  If we are judging what a person is saying to us while they are saying it; are we really listening at all?

2)  We all have unique challenges. Professional women have a series of unique challenges that I might never understand because I haven’t gone through those challenges myself.  One of my unique challenges is living with diabetes.  The disease itself is not unique, but, it is how I have learned NOT to make it an obstacle in my life by learning from others, which in turn allowed me to live well with diabetes.  So, it is not a matter of the challenges we have, but how do we choose to look at those challenges and who in our support network may be a source of aid for us.  Which leads us to the next lesson I learned.

3)  The power of a community coming together as a team. These women came together and shared their unique experiences over those two weeks and continued to share them during my presentation in a way that is essentially no different from the way other communities work. Whether they are business communities or sports communities (I play a lot of sports, like hockey), they all illustrate how we can learn from each other through a community or team approach.

While at first her comment caught me off guard, I really want to thank the woman who came up to me with that comment, because it helped me articulate my thoughts and the lessons I learned.