In this week’s Bright & Wize podcast, Brize’s founder and CEO, Leslie Ferry, shares a personal experience of how strong soft skills led a Marketing Manager to offer Leslie, an Accountant, a position in Marketing. Leslie had not even taken a marketing class as an undergrad. So this was certainly a significant career change she could never have imagined as a 17-year old when she decided her vocation.

This story is about the unsung heroes and power of strategic thinking, collaborative behaviors, and positive mindsets and how they can bring about exciting opportunities and positive unintended consequences at work.

Today’s Bright & Wize guest is Dr. Saundra Schrock. Dr. Schrock brings a unique and far-reaching perspective to the topics of career growth, development, and success. For almost 35-years, Saundra was in the financial services industry, beginning her career as a bank teller and rising through the ranks to her role as Executive Vice President at J.P. Morgan Chase. Saundra shares how it was this last role that led her to develop a deep practice in mindfulness. The life-changing impact of her practice then led to Saundra founding a successful mindfulness development company and completing her Ph.D. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Our conversation covers topics ranging from:

• The critical skills required in our new world of work, which are Collaboration, Communication, and Creation.
•  How fear of failure is a misguided belief that we can all overcome by quieting our inner critic. And Dr. Schrock shares an excellent exercise to silence that deflating voice.
• To an exercise that aids in graciously accepting feedback, even if unkind, to overcome missteps and grow and develop in our careers.
• How Saundra survived a severe bout of COVID-19, which led her to write a book during the pandemic, Thriving in a Global Pandemic and Beyond: More Than 100 Real-Life Lessons, which you can purchase at: https://store.bookbaby.com/book/Thriving-in-a-Global-Pandemic-and-Beyond

#emotionalintelligence #careersuccess #confidence #feedback

This week's Bright & Wize guest is Latané Conant, the Chief Market Officer of 6sense. During our conversation, Latane shares how developing confidence at a young age has steered her approach to work, how taking initiative and sweating the small stuff is just her MO. And when you listen closely, you'll hear Latane talk about how she now innately goes about problem-solving to remove barriers to her teams', company, and self-success. And that is how she looks at success. She provides what her team needs and then what her company needs. And with that emphasis, she also succeeds, without her success being her primary focus.

Latane also shares how her parents' high expectations were a gift that fuels her ability to push adversity aside and achieve her goals. 

The emotional intelligence work skills we talk about in this episode include:

Empathy
Initiative
Critical thinking
Problem-solving
Confidence

6sense is a California-based SaaS, or software-as-a service company that is leading the RevTech Revolution with their #1 Account Engagement Platform. 6sense leverages artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning to increase the success of a company’s entire revenue generation team, not just those with the word Sales in their title.

In this episode, Leslie Ferry explains how emotional intelligence (EQ) is essential to achieve our career goals. She links EQ and career goals with a specific example: getting a promotion because of a desire for more meaningful responsibilities or contributing to more purposeful projects. Leslie then tells how a particular work experience led to her getting tapped to lead a strategic, customer integration task force, not once but twice, following acquisitions by two of her employers.

The emotional intelligence cognitive skills Leslie highlights in this episode are:

• Active Listening
• Critical Thinking
• Problem-Solving
• Initiative

Brigitte Deel has already developed impressive self-awareness at 24-years of age. Brie attributes the early start of her personal awareness journey to being a student-athlete at Highpoint University.

As she transitioned from academia to the start of her career in 2020, she brought with her excellent time management and prioritization skills. After just 6-months as a Sale Development Representative with Salesforce, she has discovered a need to strengthen her active listening skills further.

Brie and I discuss:
• Managing competing responsibilities
• Delivering on your commitments to others
• The benefits of being coachable and accepting feedback as the gift it is
• The benefits of being open to diverse ideas
• And her discovery of the importance of active listening

This week, Sarah Smith joins Leslie to talk about her journey from Air Force brat to becoming an Episcopal Priest at St Andrew’s On-the-Sound in Wilmington, North Carolina --- via an unconventional route. 

Sarah’s journey includes a personally described moral crisis, which called on her to evaluate her core values as a young 20-year old. From there, you’ll hear Sarah share a series of life experiences, twists and turns that climaxed in her coined “quarterly life crisis,” which led her to Christian Education and the Ministry.

I came away from our conversation with an even deeper respect for Sarah on many levels, especially her abundance of confidence and humility. She has an enviable balance of self-respect and respect for others.

Just some of the topics from our thought-provoking conversation include:

• No one is one dimensional, and our skill-set is not always our vocation
• Sarah’s personal values of accountability, responsibility, & gratitude
• Our weaknesses are our strengths misused
• How our values and behaviors are interrelated
• Embracing what is a perceived failure as a growth opportunity
• Strengthening leadership skills to include leading through change
• And much more

We close our conversation by discussing how this year has been a uniquely humanizing experience. Behind every topic we as a society classify as an issue are people, human beings with real wants and needs. Sarah and I are like-minded in that we both hope this is a reckoning we all can remember and carry forward as we get through the year that is 2020 together.

In this episode of the Bright & Wize podcast, Leslie talks with one of her dearest friends, Victoria Parks. Victoria is a highly self-aware wife and mother of a 18-year old son. It is Victoria’s confidence that Leslie believes will appeal to you, given we all can be inflicted with imposter syndrome.

Leslie and Victoria discuss how, if someone entrusts you with a task or responsibility, they are expressing their confidence in you, so we need to embrace that belief and then go figure out how to get the job done. We need to embrace that confidence and then hold ourselves accountable to deliver on this belief by others.

Victoria shares how she has developed a strength of intuition, her belief that self-talk should be self-respect, and one of her weaknesses of having a bit of a temper.

The emotional intelligence (EQ) skills Leslie & Victoria discuss include:
Confidence
Intuition
Critical Thinking
& Optimism — although not explicitly stated, so listen closely

..our strong, trusting work relationship. Leslie shares an illustrative story to talk about the importance of investing in building relationships beyond work interactions with our colleagues. Hear why it matters and how it lowers stress & anxiety.

The emotional intelligence skills shared in this episode include:

Trust
Investing in Building Relationships
Confidence

In the first Bright & Wize episode, our founder, Leslie Ferry, kicks things off by sharing the unique characteristics that she had discovered through her continuous self-awareness learning journey. 

Leslie strongly believes that it is even more important to deeply understand our weaknesses to succeed at work. In this episode, Leslie shares some of her shortcomings to demonstrate the power of being vulnerable. She decided to share this view because when we know our weaknesses, we know when we don't know how to do something, and we need help to achieve a goal.

The Emotional Intelligence skills and characteristic Leslie shares include:

Loyalty
Trust
Self-accountability

In this episode of Bright & Wize, we hear another personal experience from Leslie. She shares how a failed work experience turned into a significant learning opportunity to develop critical thinking. You will hear her story and how she has benefited from this momentary feeling of failure.

The emotional intelligence skill discussed in this episode --- Critical Thinking (to state the obvious.)