239-SYB-Emily-Rogers.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
What if I told you that leadership is as much about the heart as it is the head? We’ll listen in to my conversation with Emily Rogers on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience. Hi there and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. We are wrapping up the series we’ve been doing, highlighting some of the women in our Thought Leader Academy. So make sure to go back and look at the past four episodes if you want to get a good sense of the kind of women who we work with and the kind of thought leadership that they want to put out into the world. I’m delighted to have on the podcast today, Emily Rogers, who just recently graduated from our Thought Leader Academy, and we’re going to talk about how much leadership is as much about the heart as it is the head. As a high achieving woman and as a left brain logical, analytical person. I’ve realized in the last couple of years how much I’m missing out by living so much in my head and not tapping into my body, my heart, and my emotions. So Emily and I have a really fantastic conversation about what it means to have somatic wisdom, the work that she does with the executives that she coaches, and how she discovered that leading with your heart can transform companies and cultures and teams as much as it transforms individuals.
Carol Cox:
If you would like to join our Thought Leader Academy, enrollment will be opening again soon in September, you can get on the interest list and get all of the details by going to speaking your brand.com/academy. Again, that’s speakingyourbrand.com/academy. In our Thought leader Academy, our goal is to transform you from a sought after expert to a recognized thought leader. And we do that by helping you craft your message and your core story, helping you develop your structured signature talk, and then your visibility strategy, your monetization methods, and then how to deliver your talk both in person and virtually for impact and income. It’s a five month program. You have weekly group zoom calls with the other women in the group. We keep the group small. It’s about 10 to 12 women. And then you also get one on one coaching calls, because we know how important it is to have that one on one time to talk through your ideas and to have us as the ones asking you questions and being that sounding board. It’s an incredible process that the women go through, and they tell us that not only do they get the tangible benefits, the tangible deliverables of their signature talk, their core story, their visibility strategy, their monetization, but they also gain a network, a community of women, and they gain confidence in seeing themselves as thought leaders. So if this is something that you would like for yourself, go to speakingyourbrand.com/academy. Join our interest list. I’m also happy to have a consultation call with you. There’s a button right on that page where you can schedule a call. Now let’s get on with the show. Welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast, Emily.
Emily Rogers:
Hi, Carol. So good to be with you today.
Carol Cox:
Well, I am delighted to have you here. You are one of our recent graduates of the Thought Leader Academy, and I have so enjoyed getting to know you over the past four months and really seeing your transformation into a storyteller as part of the speaking engagements that you’re doing. I know that you have several coming up in person speaking engagements for the fall, so I really want to dig in with you today about not only storytelling, but really the passion that you have for women at work, for women in leadership, and really making sure that women are able to rise in the ranks and able to do the kind of work that they want to do within organizations. Because not only does it benefit the women themselves, but as you know, it benefits the organizations and the companies. So, Emily, to kick us off, can you tell us a bit about the consulting work that you do?
Emily Rogers:
Sure. So I founded my business in 2013. It exists to help people and organizations grow and realize their full potential in very purposeful and balanced ways. And so I work with leaders from all different types of industries and at various levels within organizations to help them go within and dig deeper and access the highest and best version of them, so that they can thrive in the roles that they’re in and prepare to advance in their career. And so I do a lot of individual coaching with women and men as well as team coaching. So I love to go into organizations and help organizations work better together, function better. Her together work within the system to help them function better as teams and achieve their potential as a team.
Carol Cox:
And Emily, I know you have a very impressive background. You were a president of a company and you so you rose to the ranks of that company and you did a lot of big deals with in a very male dominated industry. So can you tell us a little bit about that part of your career and how that career that you had there has impacted the work that you do now? Yeah.
Emily Rogers:
So for 12 years before I started my business, I had an incredible career ride. I look back on that time, um, the successes, the failures, the trials, the tribulations with an immense amount of gratitude for all the ways I grew professionally. I started with IAG, a sponsorship consulting firm, back in 2000, and I was the company’s first telecommuter. That’s what it was called back then, and it was before the days of Skype or smartphones or the cloud. And somehow I made that world of telecommuting work. And it was primarily because the clients that I served were all over the nation and around the world, and I led teams of consultants to deliver sponsorship strategies to global nonprofits, professional sports teams, fortune 100 brands, uh, professional membership associations. And so we advised and counseled them, delivered strategy to them and help them implement that strategy. And to your point, the world that I operated in professional sports media, fortune 100 brands that were led by male, mostly male CMOs at the time, it was a man’s world. And so I was a young woman in my 30s and early 40s, walking into these male dominated industries and advising them on the ins and outs of sponsorship with literally millions of dollars on the line every day.
Carol Cox:
Emily, this is a good segue, then, into your talk that you’re going to be doing or a couple of talks that I know you have coming up in September for some in-person speaking engagements. And so we’ve have been doing some sessions together, some coaching calls on your talk and about this idea of, you know, you got burnt out at that company at that position because obviously all the long hours and the high stakes and then and the environment there and then, now the work that you do as a consultant and then the talks that you’re going to be doing about how would you describe it, like bringing more, not necessarily femininity into the workplace or tapping into kind of our the feminine qualities that would help us, which you feel like for that period in your career, you had to completely shut down.
Emily Rogers:
Part of it was the times, right? I’m we’re talking about 15 years ago, in the height of my career, there wasn’t a place for a whole lot of femininity in that world that I was operating in on many days. And so I checked a lot of that at the door as a leader and a first time executive who was leading a company through the Great Recession at the time, huge crisis. Um, there wasn’t a whole lot of place for heart in those on those days. Right. Fast forward today. We’re, you know, leaders are are leading through another huge crisis, this Covid crisis. And I think that we have learned a very important lesson about the role of women in the workplace, the effectiveness of women leaders in crisis, and the need to lead with our hearts while we are also holding our people accountable. And so that is a lot of focus of a lot of the work that I’m doing with both male and female clients that I am coaching these days. And I just think it’s so important that we feel comfortable bringing our whole and authentic selves to our roles as leaders, because when we feel like we need to check a part of ourselves at the door, it takes a lot of energy to compartmentalize, right? And to feel like we can’t be truly ourselves for whatever reason, while still being professional.
Emily Rogers:
And so I, I work with leaders to find ways to lead authentically, to leverage their natural strengths, to be strong as well as warm, to be driven as well as grounded. And and it isn’t about, you know, male qualities or female qualities, right? It’s not about that anymore. It’s about the best of both and the blend of both. And so women leaders can be strong and direct, um, and they can also be warm and compassionate. And the same thing goes for men. Right. And so. That’s what that’s my hope for the world, is that we quit compartmentalizing all of this. And, you know, thinking about this in terms of male stereotype versus female stereotype and what makes a good male leader versus a good female leader, and finding the best of both of that and expressing that authentically in ourselves and encouraging the people that we lead to do the same because we create healthier organizational cultures. That way, when we don’t feel like we have to check our emotions at the door, or check our femininity at the door, or be try to be a leader and show up like a leader that just doesn’t fit our natural style, takes too much work, drains too much energy, and creates burnout. And that’s the last thing we need these days.
Carol Cox:
Yes, absolutely. Emily and I remember a story that we had talked about that I think you’re including in one of your talks about when you were working at that company, you had someone who was a direct report to you, who worked on your team and a situation that developed with him. And then you had kind of a moment of clarity where you recognize that really the best leadership response was a compassionate one, not a kind of like a employee. You’re having a problem like a, you know, like a personal problem. Leave that outside of the work doors and just come do your work. But as you found out, that wasn’t going to happen.
Emily Rogers:
Yeah. It’s coaches. One of our roles is to help our clients get really clear about their coaching agenda and to work on that. And when we go to work on the coaching agenda, one of the most important things that coaches do is they ask powerful questions that cause us to pause and think about something from a different perspective and to consider a different path forward. So as a new executive that was leading this company through the Great Recession, one of my salespeople was really struggling and I was doing everything I could to empower him professionally, give him all the tools and resources to be successful, being with him in sales meetings and sales calls, I was doing everything I knew to do to help him be successful, and I was just lamenting the struggle that we were having with my executive coach and my executive coach. Bob asked me, well, what if you led with your heart, right? And it caught me so off guard. I literally stopped in my tracks when he asked me that question. And I looked at him and I said, you know, this would just be so foreign to me, like, really foreign to me, because all I can think about right now is the numbers, um, this decline in revenue, this need to get our sales numbers up, um, these gut wrenching decisions that I’m having to make to let you know, laying off people at this time, which many companies were at that time, 2009.
Emily Rogers:
Um, it was gut wrenching. And I was using all the rational, logical parts of my brain. Right. Um, I was using my gut to make some intuitive decisions that also needed to be made. But the missing piece was my heart, right? And I wasn’t bringing my heart into some of these conversations. And I was missing information and missing opportunities to make richer, deeper, more meaningful connections and therefore help my teammates, you know, find a better path forward for themselves. And so, you know, in the moment when I was being coached and that question, what if you led with your heart, you know, stopped me in my tracks? I literally couldn’t see it. I was blind. As leaders, we all have blind spots, and that was one I was completely blind to at the time. And it took months. It took months for me to really understand what that question meant, and to see how it could potentially be applied in this very stressful world that I was operating in at the time.
Emily Rogers:
But once I saw it, I began to see the difference that it could make, which has really led me to the path down the path of helping my clients tap into the somatic wisdom of the body. So I just referenced, you know, the head, the gut, the heart. Well, I have specialized training in this that helps clients tap into all the wisdom that exists throughout our body. Like we’ve all had those moments where we have that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomach. Well, that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach is sending us a message about something. It’s sending us a really strong signal about something we need to do or not. Right. We get our body, sends us those really strong signals, or we’ll have those goosebump moments. Like all of a sudden we’re taken by surprise or something shocking happens, right? Goosebumps. What’s that signal? And so I help my clients as they are leading, as they’re making decisions, as they’re, um, contemplating strategy to tap into that somatic wisdom of the body because there is so much rich insight there. And I certainly learned that firsthand as an executive leading through a crisis.
Carol Cox:
That is fascinating, Emily. And it reminds me of a book that I’ve started reading. I haven’t finished it yet. It’s called The Extended Mind. And I heard the author on a podcast interview. Have you heard of the book?
Emily Rogers:
I have not, but I’ll recommend another one to you. Your Body is Your Brain by Amanda Blake Amanda is one of my coaches. I’m proud to say she’s one of my coaches and she has coached me both. You know, as a person, as an individual personally. And I have participated in her coaching training program. So, um, same idea. Yeah.
Carol Cox:
Okay. Oh well, fantastic. I will check that one out. And for the listeners, I will make sure to include links to the both of those books in the show notes so you can go grab those. So the book you mentioned, Emily, is your body. Is your brain.
Emily Rogers:
Yes, by Amanda Blake.
Carol Cox:
And then the one I mentioned, it’s called the your the Extended Mind. And I don’t remember the author’s name, but I’ll go find that. All right. And I, and I do think this is so important. And I will say that I consider myself kind of a left brained, logical, analytical person for sure. And, Emily, I’m sure you can relate, as do many of our of our clients. And I know that for me, learning to tap into my body and into my heart, right for me right now has to be a very conscious, intentional process. It is not like my default natural place to go. Uh, and so that is something that I, that I am recognizing is something that I’ve been missing for so many years. And then I think about how much like, what are the other ideas or things that I could develop if I started to tap into that more. Yes.
Emily Rogers:
And you’re not alone in that. As high achievers right as we are, and the people that we work with are high achievers, right? It’s hard to slow down and notice those signals that the body is sending us. So first and foremost, we have to slow down. We have to pay attention, and we have to learn the skills to interpret these signals. And what I have found with my clients is when they’re stuck or when they’re uncertain about which way to go. Tapping into the somatic wisdom can help break patterns that are no longer serving us right. Sometimes we keep trying the same thing over and over and over, and it just doesn’t work right. And these are old patterns that just aren’t working for us anymore. They probably did ten years ago, but now they’re not right. So we need to we need to examine those patterns and we need to understand what’s going on. Tapping into the wisdom of the body helps us see what’s going on, and helps us wire these new patterns that better serve us going forward. And we move forward with much more wisdom and much more insight when we’re able to do that.
Carol Cox:
Um, Emily, are there a couple of practices that you would recommend to get started with this?
Emily Rogers:
Yeah. So, um, years ago when I was being coached by my life coach, Margo, and I was, um, this, you know, a senior leader with an EEG and preparing to step into an executive leadership role. The first homework assignment that she gave me was. Emily. You just need to sit and breathe for five minutes a day. And I thought, what? I’m way too busy for that. That’s all you’re going to give me? Certainly you can give me something more challenging than that, right? You know, and, um, so then I tried it, and I realized how hard it was to pause, to sit still and to do nothing but breathe for five minutes. And thank goodness, today we have apps like the calm app to help us with this. Right? And I still use a calm app and, you know, guided meditations from Tara Brock and others because we need we need tools to help us focus. It’s hard to be disciplined, to stop and slow down when there’s so many things on the to do list and so many things that we want to accomplish and be known for. Right. Um, and so we just we have to be disciplined and we need tools. And so thank goodness today there’s a lot of tools out there that can help us be more mindful. If you will, and to stop and focus. Yes, I.
Carol Cox:
Love that, Emily. And five minutes doesn’t seem like very long, but it is. And I like to say that I have an on again, off again relationship with meditation. So there are periods of my life that I’m very I’m much better about doing it, at least on our, you know, semi-regular basis. And then I know I have not been doing it now for a long time, and I really and I keep telling myself that I would like to get back to it. I did a three day silent meditation retreat years ago now, and I did not. Once the three days came to an end and it was the the evening of the third day. And so we were, you know, getting ready to like, break the silence and have our discussion among the other people, the retreat participants. And I was fine chatting with them because it was a small group, maybe about eight of us, but I didn’t want to turn my phone back on. I didn’t want to go back out into the world like I really that that third day I really felt what can happen because your mind really does start to clear once you get past the first day of all of that to do list and the all the, all the things that are running through your mind, and then you start to notice so much about your body, but so much about the world. Because I would take do walking meditation. We were at Unity Village in Kansas City, and so we would do the walking paths and notice things. And it was extraordinary.
Emily Rogers:
It is. I’ve read another book that, um, is is really useful to many of my clients called Finding the Space to Lead. And that’s exactly what you’re describing. It’s by Janice Marturano, and I’ve participated in some of Janice’s workshops as well. And that is the purpose, the slowing down, the focusing on ourselves, being present to ourselves, um, creating that spaciousness so we can see new perspective, we can see new context, and we’ve got the space to think more strategically and to reprioritize in a way that works for us and the people around us. It’s really important to have that spaciousness. And meditation is is a way to to create that spaciousness. And I’m glad you mentioned the walking meditation, because both for myself and many of the clients that I coach, just sitting and breathing sometimes just doesn’t do it for us. Right. And one client in particular that I’m coaching right now, she needs to move like she needs to physically be moving while she is being present to herself and her surroundings. And so we’ll do meditations with our movements, or we’ll do a walking meditation out here in the studio right behind my house here. And so don’t just get fixed on this idea that we’ve got to be silent, we got to be sitting still, and we got to be sitting on a cushion. Right. Um, there’s lots of different ways that we can bring a mindfulness practice into our day to day lives in a real time way that works for us.
Carol Cox:
Let’s talk a little bit about your speaking experiences, because I know that obviously, as an executive at this company, you know, you did a lot of speaking, whether it was at conferences or just in those boardrooms and presenting to clients. And now, of course, with your own consulting business, I know you do regular speaking. You don’t. You live about an hour away from Orlando, which is where I live. So I know that you’re involved in the local business community where you live. So tell us a little bit about the speaking experiences you’ve done and why you decided to join the Thought Leader Academy. What skills did you want to develop?
Emily Rogers:
So, you know, through the years, um, I’ve done a lot of speaking at, at conferences across the nation and in some cases around the world. Um, lots of training and facilitation experience as well. I’m now, uh, based here in, in Lakeland, in the heart of Central Florida, in a region of our state that is growing very rapidly and very business friendly. We have a lot of business startups and a lot of hyper growth companies in our area, um, small and medium sized companies that are really in hyper growth mode. Um, and so I am really involved with our Central Florida Economic Development Council as well as our Lakeland Economic Development Council. And I’m looked to as a thought leader in the space of leadership, um, with those business owners. And so I have a, um, presentation coming up in September to our Lakeland Economic Development Council, um, focused on this topic of women in the workplace and what’s changing and how organizational systems need to adapt to the needs of women in the workplace and everybody in the workplace. And the pandemic has certainly shined a light on that when we look at all the women that have decided. That, you know, um, maybe they don’t want to work 9 to 5 in an office all day long anymore, right? And there’s so many other options for women these days. So I have that coming up, and I’ll facilitate a panel discussion along with that. And then we have a community event that’s hosted by Score in September. Um, that’s their fourth annual women’s empowerment event. And so that event will be, um, women from, you know, the area that are professional women and business owners and entrepreneurs. And I’ll also be speaking with them about the topic of women in the workplace and what women can do to support other women and, um, how we can help each other rise, rise in the workplace and in our professions and in our businesses.
Carol Cox:
And so then when you join the Thought Leader Academy, what were you looking to do? Yeah.
Emily Rogers:
So when I joined the Thought Leader Academy four months ago, I was anticipating these upcoming speaking engagements next month, and I was feeling a bit rusty because I’ve just been behind a computer monitor for so long, like everybody else. And the speaking engagements and the training and the facilitation has largely been from, you know, behind a screen versus in front of a live audience. And so it was just feeling a bit rusty. And I thought, you know, I want to, um, sharpen my message. I want to feel well prepared to get back out there in the live world of speaking engagements again. Um, back in May, during the Thought Leader Academy I hadn’t had, I did have the occasion to do a live speaking engagement, and it was about wellbeing in the workplace was really what this was. This this one was about, which is something I’m also passionate about. And, um, I started that one by telling a story. Right. Um, through the work with the Thought Leader Academy, you help me get better at my storytelling. And so I started that that live presentation back in May, just telling the story of me as a recovering workaholic. Right. And those, you know, 60 plus hours a week, I used to work and traveling over 60% of the time. And you know what my days looked like and how really unhealthy that was for me and how unsustainable that was for me. So I enjoyed telling that story before I shared some best practices on how this audience that I was speaking with could take care of themselves while they’re also taking care of business. And that was the theme of the day. So, um, so it was fun to get back out there in the real world in May for that speaking engagement. And I’m looking forward to these ones that are coming up in September.
Carol Cox:
And so you graduated from the Thought Leader Academy just two weeks ago by the time this episode airs. And so for our final call, every woman delivers a short graduation speech using the different elements that they learned during the Thought Leader Academy. So, Emily, can you just you don’t have to recap the speech itself, but what were the elements that you wanted to make sure that you included in your graduation speech because you did an incredible job?
Emily Rogers:
Oh thank you. So I incorporated some music at the beginning and the end, which was fun. And I was very purposeful about the music that I selected. And so I enjoyed doing that. That was really creative. Um, wanted to make sure I interjected a little humor, even though I can be a rational, logical, and pretty serious most of the time. I wanted to bring in that humor element, which is so important. And then, you know, you taught us the importance of bringing the emotions and the vulnerability about our struggles and, and, um, you know, how hard it is sometimes to step outside of our comfort zone and try new things. And yet when we do it, you know how incredible we can feel when we do that. And so, um, those were some of the kinds of elements that I wanted to weave in it was a fun assignment for me because, you know, we each had two minutes and there were a lot of elements at play that you had taught us over this four month period, and so much that I wanted to incorporate, and it was really fun to bring it all together in the in the way that I did.
Carol Cox:
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I remember you had questions for the audience, so you had audience engagement. You had a cupcake metaphor where you talked about the cupcake and then the frosting and then the cherry on top. So he was memorable, I remember that, yeah. All right. And, Emily, I wanted to make sure listeners know that you wrote a really fantastic article for Forbes, and I’m going to include a link to that in the show notes as well as well, because it talks about these organizational changes that businesses can do, and so that they can make their workplaces more receptive for women and for women who are rising through the leadership ranks. And then I also want to make sure that people know that you are going to be on our next LinkedIn live show, which is on August 30th. So for. Those of you listening didn’t know we are doing a LinkedIn live show every other Monday at 2 p.m. eastern time, so Emily will be on, as well as one of our other thought Leader Academy graduates to talk about their experiences in the Academy and to answer your questions. So come on live if you can. If you can’t, you can watch the replay and ask questions there. And we’ll also dig in a little bit more with Emily on the work that she does around women in the workplace. Emily, besides LinkedIn, where else can listeners connect with you? So you can.
Emily Rogers:
Find me on my website at Emily Rogers. Com and I also have a Facebook business page. And so we’re posting regularly to LinkedIn and Facebook. And it’s real easy to find me on my website. All right.
Carol Cox:
Fantastic. Emily. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Emily Rogers:
Yeah, it’s great to be here, Carol, and fun to be part of your amazing network of women that you’re shining a light on. So thank you for inviting me to be with you today.
Carol Cox:
Thank you again to Emily for taking the time to come on the podcast. It’s always a delight to talk with her. And if you would like to join the Thought Leader Academy so you can go through that transformation to become a recognized thought leader, to develop your message, your story, your signature talk, your visibility strategy, and your monetization methods related to speaking and thought leadership. Get on the interest list for our Thought Leader Academy. We’re opening enrollment again in September. Go to speaking your brand com slash Academy again. That’s speaking your brand.com/academy. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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