A Virtual Micro-class
The Power of a Positive No
This time for women in particular!
Tuesdays, October 3 & 10 at 11 am pacific
.png)
A month before my Aunt Sara passed at 101, she said something that stuck: what people said to her mattered.
“The words are more than anything.”
- Aunt Sara
Her words echo.
Guiding people on taking the reins of their communicative life, I know the synergy between our daily talk and our effectiveness in life matters. A lot. Convos with ourselves, others, trees, tech (an endless list:) either close us down or become a vector for generating/producing personhood.
The word generative is in the zeitgeist now. A fave yogurt has “regenerative” written on the container and I heard the musician Brian Eno calls himself a Generative Composer. Recently I led an offsite called “Life As a Generative Communicator" for a team at Autodesk. It's a pleasure as a coach offering clear, personalized ways for clients to practice something simple and complex: the mash-up between our professional/personal conversations and the results we generate IRL.
Effectiveness as a communicator is invaluable. But it's more than going through the motions -effectiveness is a powerful launchpad. Introducing generative ways to communicate opens the trapdoor to an energetic self-understanding that might otherwise remain hidden. This acts as a sustaining minds-on/hearts-on counterpoint to our 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:
.png)
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.
.png)
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.
.png)