If These Heels Could Talk

There’s no shortage of confusion in the workplace right now. And clarity is about confidence - something really hard to find for leaders of all kinds at the moment. Sometimes, a mark of confidence is knowing when your thinking is flawed. Sometimes, it’s realizing that a negotiation isn’t going your way. 

It gives new meaning to ‘Know when to hold ‘em / Know when to fold ‘em.” There’s so much noise out there at the moment and so many new things to negotiate as we develop cultural norms collectively. Knowing when to walk away from a thought process or a negotiation is where the confident leader lives. 

Hear more from Michelle and JoyGenea in these 2 bite-sized episodes.

What’s one of the weirdest things about the pandemic experience? Wearing a mask while sitting at your desk or walking into the gas station? Not shaking people’s hands at a networking event? Zoom meaning something other than ‘super-fast’ in our daily vocabulary? 

All those experiences are things we’re sharing, but we’re sharing something else too - the process of negotiating these new behaviors in our professional and daily lives. What was super practiced and smooth - meeting someone new and shaking their hand - is now an awkward moment full of bumping elbows and nervous laughter. 

We’re used to making decisions looking for the best path through. We’re used to finding a way to get almost everything important to us.  What happens when that solution, experience, interaction is elusive? What happens when we have to trade off things we want for things we might want more?

Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle discuss trade-offs, risk, and social negotiations in this episode of “If These Heels Could Talk.”

What is Surge Capacity? Hint: It has nothing to do with the power strip under your desk. Instead, it’s about our ability to adapt to incredibly stressful circumstances, like a natural disaster. Or, say, a pandemic. But the thing about our coping mechanisms is that they’re time-based and intended for short-term emergencies, not long, drawn out (seemingly never-ending) circumstances. Like a pandemic.

JoyGenea and Michelle discuss surge capacity, resilience banks, and ambiguous loss - all the fancy names for these feelings of uncertainty, loss, frustration, and heightened anxiety that we’re feeling. And what could help you deal with those feelings for yourself and your team.

When we were kids playing Tag, most of us had a Free Zone - a place where we could go to rest, regroup, strategize. A place where no one was chasing us and we could stop responding to circumstances and start being proactive.

As a small business leader, life can often feel like you’re being chased. What if there was a Free Zone? What if you got a couple days away from everything to think, to dream, to plan for your business? Sound impossible? It’s not. In fact, it’s incredibly important, but no one is going to do it for you. You need to develop your Free Zone for yourself. Unstructured retreats with no agenda are the perfect way to land in the Free Zone and power down.

Need incentive? Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle talk about their professional retreats and why they value time away. 

Bullies create false power imbalances through words and actions. And, for a huge variety of reasons, many of us don’t recognize the signs early enough to prevent problems. But whether we’re looking at personal relationships, conversations with ‘authorities,’ or work situations, toxic power imbalances enter all our lives in a similar way. And just like sugar in our diets, these situations creep into our lives and we don’t always notice until there’s a real problem.

Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle explore the patterns in words and actions that create toxic power imbalances for so many of us.

Sometimes Michelle and JoyGenea talk about one thing. Sometimes they talk about more. Usually, when they record an episode, they have two or three other conversations right before and right after off-mike. Well, this week, those conversations were recorded.

This episode of If These Heels Could Talk is actually about two different topics: an idea to recognize a lifetime of the kind of quiet leadership practiced by owner-operators and how to react if an employee makes a personal choice that could have massive negative impact on your company. Enjoy! 

Failure is hands on and involves effort and even some pain. It’s messy and dirty and shameful. Or so we think. In reality, failure is the only way to truly learn and grow. 

JoyGenea and Michelle have both had their own version of learning how to fail successfully, one from the point of view of a childhood marked with dyslexia and academic frustrations and the other from a former ‘gifted’ child who spent early adulthood not living up to the promise of her gifts. Hear about failure from two pros who have paid for their own lessons in their own ways on their journey to business success. 

There’s a reason that romantic comedies end when the couple gets together. It’s all sunshine and roses at the beginning of a relationship. Conflict starts later. Business partnerships are the same way. Everyone is on their best behavior at the beginning of a partnership, but the end of a partnership may not necessarily be the same. Why? Because everything has an ending, but endings are usually sad. No one wants to hurt the beginning of something by bringing up how it will end.

Listen in as JoyGenea and Michelle discuss setting up a new joint business entity and hear just why it is so valuable to discuss the ending before anything even begins.

So we’re in a time of disruption. So what? What can you do? First step is to recognize just what is being disrupted. Then you can look into your crystal ball and discover just how you can capitalize on disruption through innovation. Maybe it’s a public service campaign around turning in change for the banks. Maybe it’s a creative solution for upcoming evictions. Or maybe it’s as simple as developing an ad campaign that shows how your product solves the challenges of tomorrow instead of yesterday.

Join JoyGenea and Michelle as they discuss their predictions for tomorrow based on what is being disrupted today. Are they right? Only time will tell.

Disruption can be many things: scary, exhilarating, expensive, and even revolutionary. One thing it’s not is passive. Turns out very few people enjoy having the status quo questioned, especially those benefiting from the way things are.

But when we settle for less than optimal experiences as consumers, it creates an opportunity for visionaries to create better experiences. And in a circumstance of disruption (like COVID), businesses that survive will be nimble, flexible, and seek out opportunities. JoyGenea and Michelle talk about disruption in the first half of this episode.