A Virtual Micro-class
The Power of a Positive No
This time for women in particular!
Tuesdays, October 3 & 10 at 11 am pacific
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My Aunt Sara raised three kids, co-founded a tech company in N.Y. and maintained her joie de vivre throughout. A month before she passed, she said something that stuck. She spoke of how what people said to her mattered:
“The words are more than anything.”
My Aunt Sara, 101
Her words echo.
Thematic in my coaching and teaching practice is linking stewardship of your specific talents to manifesting well-being. It’s a novel approach supporting the synergy between our daily talk and our effectiveness as a contributor. Convos with ourselves, others, trees, tech (an endless list:) close us down or become a vector for possibility, generating personhood and community.
While writing this, a serendipity -I was honored to lead a team offsite I call “My Life As a Generative Communicator" at Autodesk, where generative AI is key.
The word generative is in the zeitgeist now. A yogurt I like has “regenerative” written across it's container and I just read the musician Brian Eno calls himself a generative composer -actually he did this way before it was cool. I teach an MBA course “Live Exchange: Generative Communication” where our inquiry is something simple and complex: the mash-up between our professional/personal conversations and the results we generate IRL.
Becoming a more effective communicator is amazing yet just a launchpad. Introducing a generative approach to communication opens the trapdoor to self-understanding and collaborative know-how that might otherwise remain hidden. A minds-on/hands-on/hearts-on counterpoint within quant worlds.
When I get a bee in my bonnet, I tend to trust and run with it. As a creative, I cherish phases of independent inventing simply to give myself time to find out what I am thinking. So in developing the GenC playbook I offer as a coach, I wasn’t inclined to look up the word 'generative" for awhile. Only much later did I glance at a dictionary (after first noting “generative” does not yet appear in the thesaurus ☺).
The first definition frames generative in a feminine way:
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This femme bent is apt.
The hidden side of GenC’s gorgeously future facing, active face is a treasure trove of yielding skills: listening, adaptability, intuitive reasoning and improvisation. Although yielding qualities, rest assured they are no less generative. They open the door to reflection, nuanced readings, the agency to differentiate, heal and bond.
GenC is visceral.
We sense when we are in the presence of healthy communication (or an ambush). Our speaking body clues us in, letting us know it is safe to let the feels in your throat, heart, gut or tummy register. Feel good chemicals like endorphins, serotonin and oxytocin flood us.
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GenC's safe structure, strategic steps and scrappy ethos allows you to follow an inclination, lose yourself, mess-up and re-find footing as you go. Working a terrain of design research you garner deep knowledge of a problem space, while seeing how others process the same data. Unforced rapport springs up.
Full throttle ensemble work asks you to stay the course, to bring that strength others count on you for. It respectfully culls wheat from communicative chaff and with that, voluntarily spills you into a zone of high-value behaviors. It will hold you captive; rapturous in the gap between evidence-based data and the silken invisibility of human creativity.
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