S6E10: Side Comments Change the World

In this podcast I discuss three mini stories where I was at an event or professional development training where a side comment from another attendee changed my life in a much more transformational way than any of the training sessions themselves. Here we talk about where event management should really live in academia, how compromise is bad (professionally and personally), and selecting target markets for organizations!

Things mentioned in the podcast:  7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Habit 4; IMEX America; Episode 80: Predictions and Curiosity with Janet Sperstad; Prince & Me movie; Episode 100: Find Your Way with Dr. K

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Transcript

Hello, hello, my friends!  It's a new podcast and I'm going to tell you, it's been a rough day. So having that hello, hello sound as good as that, I think the podcast might be my only enjoyable thing that I'm doing today. So thank you for providing me that output. 

So what's been going on? What's been going on in my life, I have just been in a constant shift, a constant evolvement of my ideas and my thinking, and it's kind of rocking my world a little bit. If you know me at all, or if you can gather from the podcast, I am a person who is a zero on the risk taking. Which seems so weird considering how much I've accomplished and all the things that I've done and the fact that I'm an event planner. But I am a zero in risk taking. I thoroughly weigh all of my pros and my cons, my fors and my againsts, before I make any decision, and I almost always take the safe decision. And this has really been kind of an interesting mindset throughout my life and there's a lot of origin roots from my childhood, and my family that kind of come up from that. But I've had some really cool and interesting revelations. I have one friend in my life, who I love hanging out with, and it's because of what I call intellectual stimulation. Now, when I try to describe this friendship, and this “intellectual stimulation” to other people, it doesn't always make sense. It's not that every single interaction or conversation is intellectual, doesn't mean that they're all stimulating, it doesn't mean that every time I have a conversation, it's about a deep topic. But I think that having multiple people with varied viewpoints in a single conversation can help you approach topics in a completely different way. And oftentimes, it's not actually the main argument, it's just a side comment that's made. And I find that a lot of times when I attend professional development trainings, it's not necessarily the objective of the lesson that impacts my life, it's the side comments made from the other attendees that inspire me to think about things a little differently. 

So today, I want to talk about three different things that have helped to shape my evolvement of my mindset to include one that just happened a couple of weeks ago, which I'm really wrapping my mind around and I'm gonna do some cool things on it. I want to start with saying that sometimes when your mindset evolves, it can seem like you're changing your mind or changing your decision. And this can make you seem wishy washy, or unreliable, or inconsistent. But when you are presented with new information, or new facts, or you figured out something new about yourself, or about your life, the only thing that's bad, is not listening to it. Ignoring it is bad. Changing your mind back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, can be difficult. But if you have become informed, if you've really looked inside, and if your opinions changed on things, then the only thing that's bad is ignoring it. We have to remember that oftentimes, all of our decisions and our viewpoints on the world are based on the experiences that we've had. And if you've only ever known one thing your whole life, or you've only been in one industry, or been in one city, then that's all you've ever known. And as you continue to become informed and continue to grow and travel and meet new people, then this evolvement should naturally happen and that's okay. But own it, right? Own it and stand alongside it. 

My first example I'm going to give is very specific to my field as an educator. When I started in event management within my studies, I was of the firm belief that events should be within hospitality, because that's all I'd ever known. I did events within hotels. I was at an event program that was within a hospitality program. I pursued continuing education and advanced degrees in event programs that were within hospitality programs and I was an advocate for this in a big way.

I remember very distinctly, I was at IMEX America and I was talking to Janet, who has been on the podcast before and I referenced this kind of mind breaking revolution. And Janet had simply made a comment that events should be in business, because they are a business, they are a multimillion dollar business. Why would an industry align itself just within one venue, when events is really outdoor spaces and arenas and all of these different areas that are not just hotels or lodging? Of course, events need lodging, but it doesn't mean that events are only looked at within the view of lodging. And it was a conversation, it wasn't a preachy moment, when you take it out of context, it sounds like that was the purpose of the conversation, but it really was just a side comment with a larger conversation. Itt completely shifted my view of where events should live within academia. And even since then, I've continued to evolve to say events maybe shouldn't be in business. Events is really everything. Events should stand on it’s own. Events is a business, but it's also hospitality, events is within tourism, it could be within tourism. Events is experience design, events is theater, events is really everything. And that's really kind of shifted my viewpoint of where should events live within a university setting. So that's my intro of where I'm kind of going with this topic. 

The second thing that I want to point out is a personal thing. And I think that this is really interesting. I'm gonna reference The 7 Habits of Highly Effective training. I know I mentioned it in one aspect last week, too. It is a super impactful training, but what I'm actually going to talk about isn't necessarily the training itself. It's my mindset on the training and someone else's comment. So within The 7 Habits of Highly Effective training, of course, I was at this training a month or so ago. Habit Four is “Think Win Win”. And there's an example in Habit Four, that…it talks about how compromise is bad. When you have groupthink, think about when you're at your work, and you're maybe in a design meeting, and you're all sitting around and you're building on each other, and you're saying yes and, yes and, yes and. Then obviously, the, the outcome is going to be better than any of the individual inputs. And one of the things they did in the training was they used an equation, they said, okay, if person A is…. say we assign them the number one because they're one person and person B, we assign them the value of one because they're one person. So if we were to divide and conquer our work. So think of our group projects, we divide and conquer, and then we bring it together, one plus one equals two. Makes total sense. And then they give an example of how when you're saying yes and, yes and, yes and - that if you have two people in a room, and you're bringing them together around a problem, or creative idea that one plus one could actually equal three, or five, or 10.

And if you if you're starting to compromise on things, if you break up the work, or you have to make a decision, and you can't come to an agreement, then if you're compromising, then person one only gets maybe .75, and person two only gets .75. So when you add those together, it's only 1.5. And that makes total sense, right? And when I had originally read the book years and years ago, I said, Well, duh, obviously brainstorming! That makes so much sense when you're at work, and you bring people together, and you think about a compromise is bad. Because compromise means that nobody gets what they want and it's better to just divide and conquer or to have this groupthink - to me total sense.

So I'm sitting there at the training and everybody's talking about their biggest takeaways from Habit four “Think win win”. And someone in the room said that they… their biggest takeaway was this with their husband. And thinking about this in terms of their, their romantic relationships and also their friendships. And I don't know why….I had never thought of that. Some of you listening might be like, “Well duh Kristin, really….” but I had never thought about it in terms of my personal relationships. Because society has always told me, and told us, that compromise within your marriage is a good thing. That if you can't come to an agreement you should compromise, but really you shouldn't. And this one person's comment just really sat with me. And literally for weeks, I think about that comment. And I am trying to untrain my mind, and trying to break away all of those neural pathways that says compromise is good. Compromise is not good! And compromise just isn't not good at work. Compromise is also not good at home and that's not something that society tells us. They say, compromise is a good thing that you should compromise with your partner, but .75 plus .75 is 1.5, which is less than two. And so really sitting down and having that communication and saying, “Okay, we need to think of a creative solution that's a win win for both of us. If you want this, and I want this, then how can we come together to think about other variables?” It also makes me think of that movie Prince and Me, when the prince is sitting there in the negotiations, and he has two people on opposite sides of the table, and he says, “You want this and you want this, and neither of you are willing to move, so maybe there's a third factor that we can consider.” And I think I had just never thought about that in terms of personal lives. Like if you want this, and I want this, maybe the third factor is one of us gets a part time job, or we hire a babysitter for an extra date night, or maybe we get a roommate, or whatever the situation could be. You have to think about all of the factors and not just factors within your control. Because if you sit down and you brainstorm with your partner, just like you would sit down and brainstorm with the people at your work, then one plus one can equal three or five or 10 and you can feel so much more fulfilled. I have no idea why I did not think about this in terms of my personal relationships. And again, I knew the concept from the training, I knew the think win-win, and when I had always been like, obviously, this works in work life, but I never thought about it in my personal life. So that's so fascinating. 

The third thing, which is really interesting, and it's been on my mind a ton in the last two weeks. So in episode number 100, two weeks ago, I did a grand reveal that I was opening up a consulting, officially, a consulting company called Find Your Way. And the tagline that my students came up with is “Find Your Way with Dr. K” and it was really focused a lot on instructional design and crafting better design experiences. And my whole concept, which I say in my classrooms all the time is…. I am as good of an educator as I am because of my background in events, because events and education are the same. What is an event? An event is two or more people brought together for a common purpose. And if we think about it like that - every single class is an event, because every single class is two or more people coming together for a common purpose, which is to learn that day's objectives. Or maybe in some cases to get an A or to pass the class or to get their degree, but they're there for a common purpose. And so if teachers were doing their job right, they would design that experience to look at those objectives and how best to meet those. So awesome, great. That is obviously what I'm doing. I'm an event education champion, and I'm a champion for quality event education. Awesome. So I did this launch and that and that was like my whole purpose and my whole vision, my whole goal. And then I had a couple people reach out to me and they said, Hey, Kristin, heard your podcast, thats so exciting…”Do you work with with coaches like life coaches, because we're not in events but the concepts are still the same with two or more people coming to the for common purpose to learn that day's objectives…those objectives just don't have to do with events.”

And I don't know why, but my brain was just like, obviously!!! Why hadn't I really thought about that, in that pursuit? I help all the different teachers at my university, my former university, different universities, I help them all with their syllabus and their grading structures and thinking about their different assignments creatively. And I don't know why I just never thought about it in terms of like a coach for coaches… like a coach market. If you become a life coach, or if you're becoming a business coach or career coach, you have very specific content you're trying to get across. This is a very crowded marketplace, and oftentimes, when people come in, they're advised to have very low overhead costs. So they typically do like a voiceover PowerPoint, really long lectures, and that's not good.

Like, nobody's going to be engaged with that. It's actually going to be harder to sell your product. And they think that that's their only option, because it's a low cost. And they don't think about different things like, well, you can record on Zoom for free and then you can have your picture and your video, and you can have all those different elements incorporated, very, very inexpensively. I was having kind of this thing, of course, I'm like, Yes, I will definitely help you. Let's figure out what that looks like… I would love to help you. And then a couple days later, I got an email that was not related to my podcast, somebody never even kind of heard of me heard of me through word of mouth, and said, Hey, I'm in this education sphere for K through 12 and we're doing some programming and we heard that you're really, really good with facilitation and with program design and we would love to know if we can meet with you for an hour or two to kind of look at our program and our program structure. And it just like all kind of clicked. All at once, of just expanding that mindset to be like, what is my goal in life? Is my goal just to educate on events? Is my goal just to advocate for the event industry? Is my goal just to be a teacher? And really, my goal, and my purpose has always been to design transformational experiences that benefit individuals and the world. And I've applied that within events as an event designer, structuring event programming. And I've done that within a classroom for event students, where I'm designing that classroom experience. But really, those kinds of comments planted a seed that said, my goal and my purpose is actually way more generalizable. And way more in demand than even I knew - it was people been reaching out to me, which is so fantastic. And I don't know why it was just a mind shift of like, Hey, I have just this really cool skill set that can benefit so many people. 

So I really challenge all of you that maybe listening to the passive webinars, maybe you're looking for that content, to really try to challenge yourself to attend either live events, or synchronous events where multiple people are logged in at once. Because what I really find is the interactions and the side comments are what really helped to shift my viewpoint, because they're made from people with different viewpoints. And that's awesome. And I hope that some of my comments today, even though this is passive on a podcast, have led to some inspiring thoughts and processes in your mind, whether it's event or instructional, design related or if it's academia related, or especially the concept about compromise in personal relationships being good versus not good, because I know that was like….. I'm using the exploding head actions right now with my hands, but you can't see that because we're not a video that was like truly a mind bender for me, in terms of that concept. And I'm still wrapping my mind around it. But I want to thank you all so much for logging in, for supporting me, for reaching out to me, for hiring me, for following along in the podcast and I hope that you found some of today's content useful, and I never take you for granted. Thank you all so much for making the time to take the time. I'll talk with you soon.