Nobody Asks the Psychologist During the Talk. They Line Up for Her at the Gala Instead.
Out of the spotlight, a glass of wine in hand, full of questions.
Last week, I got to be my husband’s plus one at an international convention in Belgrade, Serbia 🇷🇸. It’s this cool four-day event where business people from all over Europe have meetings half the day and spend the rest of the time eating, networking and having a good time. A free European trip with nice people, a fun schedule and lots of good food? Yes, sign me up, please.
The Serbian organisers made a bold move this year. They included a one-hour session in the schedule, delivered by a renowned Serbian psychologist, called “How to overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome in family-owned businesses.”
As a plus one, I wasn't expected to attend any of the meetings, but my husband asked if I wanted to check it out and I immediately said yes.
I don’t have a family-owned business, but I was curious about the angle she’d take and the kind of response it would get from these mostly male, white-haired businessmen in suits. How would they feel about moving from strategy, numbers and business to an hour of emotion talk?
The speaker was a brilliant woman, a master public speaker who’d been coaching companies for years. She started with defining imposter syndrome, then moved to a series of concepts I was already familiar with, but that might have seemed quite foreign to this specific crowd: emotional regulation, emotional agility, self-awareness, constructive vs destructive emotions.
All throughout the talk, she kept asking: “Do you have any questions?”, “What are your thoughts on this?” She got a couple of questions by (surprise!) one young lady and one young man, but the rest of the time: crickets.
As she was speaking, I was constantly monitoring her audience. Two guys behind me spent almost the entire time talking and laughing about something else. Others were on their phones or typing away on their computers. One older guy kept taking pictures of the slides, which was nice to see. The rest seemed to be paying attention, but silently. No questions and no comments. God forbid they get caught showing interest in such a topic.
Mid-talk, the speaker asked us to take five minutes and discuss the slide on constructive vs destructive emotions with the person next to us. My husband and I had a little debate on whether guilt is destructive. Afterwards, one lady CEO told me that during their chat, both the guys on her right and on her left, big business shots in their sixties, told her that their emotions never affected their business decisions. They said that throughout their entire 40 years+ career, they had never felt anxious at work, nor angry, nor sad. All the decision-making happened in their heads, always. I don’t know about you, but I call bullsh*t.
The speaker must’ve been used to those silences because she ended her talk with an invitation: She'd be at the gala dinner that evening, and she'd love to answer any questions we hadn't asked.
I was determined to put that debate on guilt to rest, so I kept glancing at her table all evening, looking for my chance to approach her. It wasn’t until hours later that I finally got my turn. And you know why? Because people had been coming up to her all night.
I had been feeling bad for her because of all those silences, but when I told her about it, she said she was actually having a glowing evening, because of all the interest the topic had generated. So I realized it’s not that her talk didn’t have any engagement. It’s more that the engagement had to happen under the radar. At the dinner, after the dim lights and a few drinks, on the sidelines. It couldn’t show its face in the conference room. That was too visible… no, thank you… too risky.
And I keep wondering why. Why is curiosity about our inner life still treated like a “soft” topic to be consumed privately? Why do grownups have to wait until the gala dinner to ask the psychologist a question? Probably because we still live in a world where emotions are equated with weakness. And nobody wants to look weak in front of their peers.
Coming from a ten-year career in corporate, I’m painfully aware of how lacking most workplaces are of emotional skills. Imagine a world in which these are openly talked about and rewarded. Where managers get sent to emotional agility training, and where people’s bonuses are tied to specific emotional skills, like self-awareness or empathy.
I think we’ll get there someday. Things are already changing. But meanwhile, please, let’s normalize interest in emotional skills. They play a much bigger role in performance than they’re given credit for and their absence has a scandalous, invisible cost to everyone close to a man who claims he has never once felt anxious at work.
💬 What's something you've been curious about for years that you'd never bring up at a work dinner? Tell me in the comments 👇🏼
PS. If you've been doing the inner work in private for a while and you'd like a space where the curiosity gets to show its face, I work with a small number of 1:1 clients.
Such an interesting experience and agree it's a bit of a taboo topic in the corporate world!