Learning a New Way of Being - Alison Whitmire at TEDxOverlake

Alison is about opening people's minds to create greater focus. That means helping people to ferret out what matters, to determine what they want and how they want to be and to set a course of action that gets them what they want.

Six years ago I took a presentation skills class.

It was a four-day intensive workshop

in which I was videoed practically constantly,

and I learned the ABC's of presentations. It was:

A for authenticity, B for believability and C for clarity.

Well, when it came time for me to be evaluated on presentations,

the workshop participants told me

that when it came to clarity, I was great. Yay.

When it came to B for believability, I was good

and when it came to A for authenticity, I sucked.

They were basically telling me that I sucked at being me.

(Laughter)

And initially I thought to myself:

"How do you know? You don't even know me!"

And then I watched the same videos that they watched

and I saw they were right.

Well, that's a big deal for me, I'm a CEO coach,

one of the things I do is I help CEOs become better leaders

and authenticity is a pretty important leadership trait

and if I'm not showing up as authentic

I'm not really showing up as very credible doing what I do.

So, as painful as that experience was,

it made me realize that

I wanted to learn a new way of being.

And it gave me my first step in the process

which is getting feedback on blindspots.

Now, believe it or not, when I got this feedback

that I was showing up as not authentic

I didn't know. I had not idea, I wasn't conscious of it.

And then they shone a light on this being I had

that wasn't working for me

and my life hasn't been the same since, it was a gift.

Now, I want to say a word about accepting feedback.

If someone takes the time and trouble to give you feedback,

just take it.

Unfortunately, my experience is that

people have one of four reactions to feedback

which I call the four Ds.

Defensiveness, denial, discounting and drama.

Okay? (Laughter)

So, defensiveness looks like:

"No, you just don't understand, you don't get me."

Denial looks like:

"No, you are wrong - and it's about you."

And discounting sounds like:

"You know, it's just - it, you know, what's the big deal?"

And drama well, we all know what drama looks like.

Well, once I had a taste of feedback

I realized I wanted more,

because if I had one way of being that wasn't serving me,

I probably had more than one.

So I took this assessment called the EQ profile,

and one of the things the EQ profile does is

it looks at your and assesses your positive-negative orientation.

It's another way of thinking about

how optimistic or pessimistic you are.

So, it's a bit like this image.

Some of your will see two faces,

some of you will see the candlestick,

you're all looking at the same image -

it's just how you see it.

Well, what I learned when I took this assessment,

is I see risk where others see opportunity.

Well, again - that's a problem for me.

I work with entrepreneurs who eat risk for breakfast.

(Laughter)

And if I'm seeing risk where they're seeing opportunity,

I'm not going to be able to help them very much.

So, this is how it shows up for me:

I run CEO round tables,

and a CEO came to the round table one day

and he wanted to use the group to explore

possibilities around a new business.

He explained the new business,

he got all kinds of great feedback from the people
in the group.

They told him:

"Hey, you just need to get your metrics down,

use the metrics to create a case study,

use the case study to get VC money

and scale this thing and sell it to Facebook.

And all I could think of was: "Don't quit your day job."

(Laughter)

And again, I realized that, that was my pattern.

That was me doing that thing I do

which is seeing risk where others saw possibility

and it didn't make me right.

It was just my pattern.

I was seeing this entrepreneur

fall into this great crevasse versus land on a candlestick.

And it brought me to the second step

in learning a new way of being

which is noticing how we are being in that moment

when we are acting in that unconscious way.

I call this engaging my observer self

or looking over my own shoulder.

Now, there's a very important reason

why we tend not to accept feedback

and why we tend not to notice how we are being.

And it's because of the erroneous belief that we are right,

or at least that everyone else is wrong.

Kathryn Schulz has written a book called "Being Wrong"

and she's got a great TEDTalk on the same topic

and what she has found as she has researched people

who are wrong and think they are right,

is that they make -- Am I holding the right fingers?

they make three unfortunate assumptions.

Unfortunate assumption number one is:

"Everyone else is just ignorant."

Assumption number two is:

"Everyone else is just kind of an idiot, they're stupid."

And assumption number three is that

everyone else is just evil, they're trying to hurt me.

Well, my experience with people who receive feedback

is that they make those same assumptions

about the people who give them feedback.

A professor from University of Chicago, my alma mater,

did a study on feedback in the workplace,

and they found that we're actually remarkably poor predictors

of how people see us, and here is why:

We experience our life like a movie in which we know

the history and the feelings and the characters, everything.

And other people experience us like a snapshot, right,

a series of snapshots,

and they make up stories in between, okay?

Well, this explains two really important things:

Now, one explains why we are

such poor predictors of how people see us.

And it explains why we think we're right, right?

Because we have all this history,

but what is happening really is that

we're behaving in a way today

that's based on something back here in our past.

And the way we're behaving today no longer fits,

and the people around us can see that

and we cannot.

And that brings me to the third step

in finding a new way of being.

And that is to make a conscious choice in the moment

to be different.

We all have ways of being that don't get us what we want,

whether it's being controlling, or being judgemental,

or being judging, or being worrying.

We all have those ways

and I'm not saying that this is easy to be different,

to get the feedback, and accept it,

and to notice, and to make a different choice.

It's not easy. It's not easy for me to be authentic.

It's not easy for me to be positive.

And it's not easy for me to be warm.

I've also got feedback that I'm not warm.

(Laughter)

And, if I can realize that

in order for me to fulfill my purpose,

which is to make lots of leaders' lives better,

then I can turn those things on

and act in a way that gets me what I want.

I believe that we all have a purpose in life,

and that we have ways of getting in our way

for the full expression of that purpose. Right?

And if we can just get feedback

on how we're getting in our own way,

and we can embrace and accept that feedback

and then notice how we're being in the moment

then we can make a conscious choice to be different.

I invite you to take a look at your life,

see how you're getting in your own way

and learn a new way of being

that gets you more of what you want.

Thank You.

(Applause)