Interest In Emotional Balance on the Upswing for Male Audiences
For years now, my travels around the country have given me glimpses of different companies, cultures, industries, various people, and various struggles. One constant in my purview has been women changing or trying to change by reaching across the gender barriers to find ways to expand themselves and "fit in" (and do so authentically). Another constant is men staying pretty much the same, or at least not changing in that one way, looking anywhere but across the gender barriers, not expanding themselves, and not altering themselves in any way either to fit in better with women or help women fit in better with them.
For the record, I'm not saying men aren't trying. I'm saying they haven't been looking at changing themselves as a means to find any sort of new balance in corporate culture.
As a professional speaker who speaks mostly about emotions in leadership, presence, and presentation, I'm a rare male preacher of the soft skills, usually playing from the Yin playbook in a business universe of Yang strategy. I've met with literally hundreds of men who will hear about it, but honestly don't want to hear about it. By "it" I mean the "e" word – emotions.
Therefore, it was a surprise to stand before an audience of hundreds of Utility Workers in the Midwest Energy Association's (MEA) annual conference in Aimes Iowa at eight in the morning one day this past August, to find that something seems to be changing in the very fabric of manliness.
The situation was this. SagePresence was hired to do two back-to-back presentations to the MEA annual conference in Aimes Iowa, speaking on Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Presence. I expected a full house on Leadership Presence, but I was fully prepared to drive all day and rehearse all night to rise and shine with a pot-full of hotel coffee and present to a mass audience of 5 people, who would probably have been the team-spirited organizers of the event.
My first surprise is that the coffee was pretty good. But that was nothing compared to what was coming next. At 7:55, two brave men walked in and sat down (well, one of them left, but not right away). Then after farting around with the powerpoint, I looked up to see well over a hundred people filling the seats in the small auditorium.
Two things about these "people." First, they weren't just "people" – these people were men! Secondly, they weren't just men, they were "manly" men. These were energy and utility worker types. I saw flannel, and steel-toe boots, and I could just visualize hard-hats and utility belts. Some were more administrative and leaderly. But there was something about the collective as a whole that screamed of the "traditional man" category.
There were only two women in the audience, and I felt for them, suspecting them to be women who've had to learn to function as anomalies in their male-dominated industry.
So far, this is what I expected as an audience, only there were about a hundred more than I would expect at an 8:00 am presentation on emotions. And don't get me wrong, I'm not judging the audience, only noting the attendance as compared to expectation. And then it happened.
I was curious enough to ask the question point blank in my intro: "What in the world are 100 plus men in the utility area doing in an 8:00 am presentation about emotional intelligence? What brought you here?"
A man raises his hand. He was sturdy, kind, and blue-collar in presence, dress and dialect. "I'm trying to find a better emotional balance between my work life and my home life," the man said. I am seldom at a loss of words, but I chose to smile and look for another hand.
"I view emotions as the foundation and fabric of all my relationships, and I'm looking for anything I can get to gain a better understanding of how to build stronger emotional bonds with my teams and my clients," says the next.
I'm used to responses like this in women's conventions, but here? Again, I take another response, and I get, "I've noticed that the emotional state of my team has a huge amount to do with how well they interact with others, and how safe my team is on the field. One emotional swing can lead to a compromise in safety procedure and I want to learn how I can be more proactive about managing emotions on my team."
A forth: "I've realized when I meet people that the first relationship I form is on the emotion, then I get to know about the person second. The emotion side has a lot to say about how the conversation goes." This and flannel – I'm beside myself!
In ten years of presenting on emotions and leadership, I've never had a single man ask a question like that without some serious leading on my part. Was I in some sort of emotional Twilight Zone? Could the Energy Industry Workers be the next leaders of social change?
For many years I've seen women reaching across the gender barrier to learn what men had to offer them. After that presentation, I've found myself running through my mental logs of trainings and presentations to answer the question: "Are men evolving?"
I think the answer is "yes, they are" – socially, intuitively, business-wise and in their dealings with professional women. Don't get me wrong. We still have much distance to go, but we are actually going... somewhere!
I've spent a month talking about this very question with my partners. And I'm seeing it more and more, but I just hadn't had as big a sign to believe it. Men are finally joining women in looking across the gender gap and asking the question, "what can I learn from them that would give me an edge and help me expand myself?"
More and more men are satisfied enough with what they know about "Yang" and are looking for a deeper meaning by exploring their "Yin" side. It took me a couple presentations at the MEA to recognize that this subtle shift is turning the "women in a man's world" paradigm on it's back, and into "men and women crossing over to become complete together."
Expect updates on this phenomenon in the future, as I check my impression with more audiences. Either the energy industry is where our most advanced male attitudes lie, or it's just a sign of the times – that men are finally evolving to recognize what women recognized many years ago – we're not so different, women and men, but we're different enough to offer something worth sharing and similar enough to grow closer together by looking for it.
I can here the musical in my head. The man sings: "We can feel anything better than you can, we can feel anything better than you!" Woman: "No you can't!" Man: "Yes we can!" Woman: "No you can't!" Man: "Yes we can! Yes I can, yes I can, yes I can!"
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