Fab Feb - Four People, One Body

Entrepreneurial Mindset and Emotional Intelligence Workshop

❌Fitness

❌Alcohol Free Day
✅Free Workshop
✅Free Lunch

For the last two days I have felt like four people in one body while participating in a workshop about entrepreneurship. I need to unpack that sentence a bit.

Two days. The workshop ran from 8.30am-5.00pm but I skipped the last couple of hours on the first day to write that day's blog post.

Four people. (1) I am a writer. This is particularly prominent in my mind this month as I try to post every single day. As a consequence, I have a narration of my experience occurring in my head as it happens. (2) I am a teacher. I teach topics similar to the ones covered in the workshop. I know a lot of the content but have picked up some new ideas too. I also view the workshop with a critical eye. I have some minor issues with the content and bigger issues with the pedagogical practices. These issues are then analysed against my own teaching to check whether I am meeting my own standards. (3) I am a business owner. The teaching aspect falls in here too, due to the workshops I run under my Think Learn Act banner. Just last month a friend and I ran the Business Savvy Girls workshop. Business owners, or potential business owners, are the target market for the workshop. The EQ (emotional intelligence) aspect driving the workshop centres on the WHY of who you are and what your (potential) business is about. (4) I am a researcher. What's odd, is that my original motivation for signing up for the workshop was that I figured it was related to my PhD research. In reality, it is rather removed from the enterprise programs I intend to investigate in schools, so has proved fruitless in that regard. However, it was a good demonstration of a course being about and for entrepreneurship, not through entrepreneurship. The about/for/through entrepreneurship framework came to my attention via my research last year.

Participating. Due to the split personalities, I wasn't as fully engaged as the majority of the audience who appeared to be wholly invested in improving their entrepreneurial selves.

Workshop. If the workshop had been conducted in its originally intended location, the Incubator, it would probably have been more like a workshop. Instead, in a lecture theatre, it was a bit like a series of lectures with some interaction with who was sitting near you. In my case, this was John, so not so bad, but if we had been forced onto tables of small groups we would have interacted with more people and learnt more from each other.

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As a teacher, the EQ element of the workshop is an integral part of what I do on a daily basis in the classroom. For instance, at the start of the workshop there was an emphasis on shared expectations of how the workshop should run, something that is often a part of teaching. Also similar to the presenters, I have conducted sessions on choosing language wisely and public speaking, plus digging deeper into the why behind certain behaviours.

As a teacher, my critical voice raised issues with the workshop not being prepared sufficiently in terms of technology (visual and audio issues, but not much), equipment appropriate for the space (the large post-it notes were not large enough and the pens too fine - I use bigger and thicker versions in smaller spaces) and not being flexible with certain definitions and concepts (eg the one best way to make oral presentations). A couple of times the presenters were dismissive of what schools taught. There was an outright claim that schools don't teach emotional intelligence. Many schools do. There was a claim that schools don't teach public speaking. Most do. It becomes tiresome when people think that their experience, nay, their distorted memory of their school experience, is THE school experience.

Actually, the public speaking session of the workshop was annoying. Too much time was spent on this when the segment about developing a personal brand was rushed. It was also said that women's voices are too high and need to be lowered to sound more credible. This is an example of how we are socially conditioned by the patriarchy. I believe there needs to be more women's voices in the public sphere so they become a part of the acceptable norm. The irony is that the presenter not running this session is the more polished speaker.

Of my professional development workshops, Putting the Brain into Gear, is my weakest. Emotional intelligence is a fundamental part of my course. I will be using a couple of the concepts brought to my attention at this workshop, but credit them properly (image sources should be acknowledged more directly than they have been by this workshop).

As a business owner, it was an interesting exercise to nail down the underlying drivers of my business and identify obstacles to preventing my business from going further. When we looked at leadership qualities, we had to choose a couple of people in our lives who demonstrated good leadership and how they did that. A decade ago, Gilbert was a good leader for me because he was supportive, had my back and I felt like he had faith in me, my teaching and my instincts. Even further back in time, Kim was a good leader for me because she encouraged me to learn more, step up and thus built confidence in myself. Towards the end we went through a goal setting exercise. One of the presenters provided an excellent demonstration of coaching people through this process by asking questions to develop the goals to purposeful and specific actions. The coaching process was also applied to decision making but turned into a bunch of people giving the guinea pig on stage advice.

Sometimes being four people in one body can be complicated but I'm finally at a point in life where I think I have the balance right. I am able to feed each of my people regularly and in the case of this workshop almost all four at once.