The Art of Being Bold at Work

Happy Monday. Happy Monday with Cadre. It's really nice to be here with you. My name is Jean Mitchells. Just going to hang out for a hot second and see if anyone else would like to join on this beautiful Monday. It's cloudy here in Minneapolis, but there is sunshine awaiting us. Happy April Fool's Day. If anyone's played any jokes on you, I am trying to stay not connected today because I am a sucker for April Fools and get hooked every single time. I have my trusted advisor here. Hi, Jules. If you haven't met major yet, he makes the showing in most of my daily calls.

Hello, Alec. So nice to have you here. Anyone else have any four legged fur babies that supervise all of their calls? When they're virtual, I always find them fun. So again, my name is Jean Nichols. I am here on Monday to talk about our bold, authentic selves. Good morning, Jules. And you know, I always find this fascinating, the word bold, right? And I chose that word with intention. And I didn't notice until later that JC also talked about bold followership. So they. They really go hand in hand.

But bold. Sometimes when we read that word, we think of aggressive or we think big. We think all different types of things. Maybe we think to ourselves, I'm not bold. And I chose that word intentionally because it does set us off a little bit. Bold could be. Today I am going to go have a one on one with my manager and I'm going to share something share with her an activity that drained me last week that can be in bold action for some. Because sometimes when we think about our one on ones with our managers or how we are supposed to think about our work, we're not supposed to talk about the things that de energize us at work.

We think we're not supposed to share with our managers or leadership the activities that drain us on a week to week basis because we're supposed to be good workers and roll up our sleeves and do whatever we're asked to do. And so I use the word bold to help us just think differently about how might we engage in conversations that allow us to advocate for ourselves a little more. So I wanted to share an example. I've talked in a few different series about strengths. As I've mentioned, I'm a certified strengths coach.

I'm certified in a few different personality inventory insights. Neurocolor, which is around brain. Four quadrants of our brain. Human design, which will works a little with our astrology. And speaking of astrology, today is the first day of mercury in retrograde so if you are an energy person. Hi, Sam. Then today is the start of 25 days of mercury in retrograde. And the highest level, it just means takes some time to slow down. But in previous series, I've talked a lot about strengths and how to engage with your strengths more.

And when I think about being bold and having a conversation with our managers and bosses about an activity that drains us, that is a bold activity, because it takes courage for us to say wow every single week when you ask me to punch in. Oh, Alec, right. I also love McCree in retrograde. I've already been walking into doors that are stationary. So it's going to be a month, I tell you what. But when we think about having that conversation with our manager and taking time to slow down and reflect, so we're gonna use mercury in a positive way to slow down and reflect a little and find out what really brings us joy in our day.

Find out what really drains us in our day. So I'll give you an example. For me, it's already Monday. m.. I get to be on a call with my team at my consulting job. So I'm a corporate consultant. I do change management and communication strategies for large scale programs, sometimes small, but this one happens to be large. It's a global project, and every single Monday we get on the same call. And half the team will start to dm me halfway through the call about how de energizing this particular call is.

And I find that I feel the same way about this particular call because we don't make forward progress. There's never an agenda. We talk about the same issues every week, and the project manager doesn't happen to capture those issues. So then we end up talking about them over and over. And so we are putting a stop to this meeting. We're doing a pause because on the call today, I raised my hand and said, it seems to me that we've talked about this same issue in three different meetings. So I'm going to create a call to action, scheduled time with these three people, and we'll come up with a solution so that we can start to make forward progress.

Because after the third week of nobody taking charge of this particular issue and the issue not seeming to come to resolution, my strengths as someone who is forward thinking, someone who is a maximizer and wants to make sure that we are making forward progress, I couldn't take it anymore. And I got like five different DM's that just said thank you. Behind the scenes, we are in the process of changing out that individual. But the point of that is, is sometimes it requires us to be uncomfortable for a while before maybe we take an action and we raise our hand and we just say, enough.

And so I'm going to share with you an example. This is really fascinating study about our strengths and our weaknesses, how one thing it can be really energizing for some person can be super de energizing for someone else. So a while ago, the Gallup organization had done a study, and there was a study done on a select group of people, and it was a speed reading study. So for a one month, four week period of time, individuals were going through a speed reading course, and they put them into a couple of different categories.

There were the people that were really energized by the. Energized by the work or energized by reading, right? And then you have people that are like, ah, give me the cliff notes. I'd rather watch the movie or give me a video instead. Or maybe just summarize it for me. And so for four weeks, everybody that was in this study literally learned new tactics on how to read faster or read better, so increase our reading comprehension. And so it was really interesting is they tested everybody coming in, and they put them into two categories.

And there was a lot more to this study than just this. But the first category is, we'll just call slow readers. And the second category would be called fast readers based on an average. And so before going through this study and this set of courses, the slow readers could read, on average, about 85 words per minute, and the fast readers could read already 300 words per minute. So you could see that there was a big disparity there. Now, there's a whole bunch of different reasons, and there were some qualifications.

Everybody that joined the survey already knew how to read, and so it really was focusing in on that. So after this four week period of time, the slow readers could now, they increased, right. They could now read, on average, 134 words per minute. Now, I'm going to take a pause, and I'm going to ask you for the fast readers type in the chat, whether you're on replay or if you're live right now. For the fast readers, testing out at the end. And they started at 300 words per minute. How many more words per minute do you think that they could read at the end of this course?

At the end of this study, I'm going to take about a 32nd pause. I invite you to just type in. You can do a number of words plus or -300 what do you think? And I know I have a little bit of a delay, but what I will reveal to you might shock you two times more. Alex, great. Thanks. So that would be 600 words per minute, fast math. Thanks for giving me a simple one. So, at the end of this study, when they retested the fast readers, they could read 1800 words per minute. That's 600% more than what they could at the beginning of this study.

Now, here's what's really fascinating one. Everybody can learn how to do something better, right? So the test validated that if they go through the program, they will have results that will show that everybody will increase their ability to read. But what they also found that they didn't expect to find is that the people that were considered the slow readers in this study, or this survey in this study at work became more disengaged. They got into performance plans because their work wasn't up to par.

They got into more fights with their spouses and significant others. And overall, their general demeanor was less excited, less enthused. And that was showing up at work. It was showing up at home. Just going through a speed reading study where every night they needed to do these activities as a part of this study. The fast readers, on the other hand, were more engaged, more excited, read more articles, shared more books at the water cooler or the water fountain or in the cafeteria that they just had read and that they were excited to read and new information that they learned.

So, one activity that caused a whole group of people to get better incrementally, but feel more and more and more drained as they went through that exercise, and the fast readers got more and more and more excited. Same activity, same course. So, as I mentioned before when I talked about strengths, there's a one in 33 million chance you and anyone else will have the same strengths in the same order. And that's if you're taking the strength Gallup strength fighter inventory. What that tells me is that we are all perfectly unique individuals.

So even if we are on team of five people and all of us have the same job title, what is going to bring my colleague Sam Joy versus my colleague Andy Joy, versus my colleague Alex or Jules Joy is going to be very different. Then what might bring me joy, what that also means is how I need to be communicated to might look different. What I'm engaged by might be different. Some of us might be really excited about learning something new. Some of us might really enjoy things consistent over a period of time and strive for consistency.

So when I'm thinking about taking a bold, authentic action. It's about really starting to understand, where do I want to invest my time? And let's pretend you had $1,000. I'm gifting you $1,000 to go invest in a course. Invest in something that is going to really help you engage and lift up. Now, yes, you could choose to take that $1,000 to invest it in something that might be a draining activity for you. You will get better. You might not retain it as long. You might not use everything that you learned, but you will get better.

And if I gave you that same $1,000 and you invested it into something that you were super excited about, something that made you light up, made you spark, made your curiosity go online and start googling to learn more. If you took that thousand dollars and you invested it that way, your outcome, the return on that educational investment, that return on that investment for you will be exponentially more because you're already naturally attracted to it. You already have energy and enthusiasm for it.

Most likely, you've been doing something that would use this new talent, this new learn tool already, and you're enhancing and growing from a place of positivity already. So when you're thinking about having that bold conversation with your manager this week, maybe that bold action is talking about something that drains you. And maybe it's about coming up with a way forward so that maybe somehow it's less draining. For example, if you're really competitive, maybe it's about offering in some timelines that stretch you a little bit more to get it done.

And at the end of it, you get to have some kind of a reward. And maybe that reward is something you give to yourself. Maybe that bold conversation is asking to volunteer into some work that maybe you don't have capacity for. But maybe it is just enough of a stretch that when you are energized by that work, you are really excited by that work. Your results will show the team around you, the manager around you, that maybe they want to have rely on you to do that work more often. Maybe they want to engage you in that activity more often.

Remember, what drains some people will energize other people. So when we work on a team and we can lift up the person that's drained and lift up more other people around us, now our team becomes well rounded because we have a team of people who are engaged and excited about the future direction of where we're going. So on this amazing Monday, April Fool's Day, first day of mercury in retrograde one week away from a solar eclipse. There's a lot of energy in here, a lot of time that we can spend investing, reflecting, and communicating out so that we can continue to become advocates for ourselves and our future selves as we continue to grow in our careers, in our days, and in our lives.

So, Cadre, thank you for this morning's 15 minutes snippet. If you have time at noon, we have preparing leaders by Matthew. We have bold followership. Later today with JC. We can take a walk with Nick. Understand that our setbacks can be our comebacks with Daryl. So I invite you to log in later to keep learning, keep connecting with one another, keep asking questions. I will post a challenge in the comments for Monday as well, to remind you to take a bold action today. And with that, I hope you have an amazing day.

Stay tuned for more.