Three great insights on maintaining resilience:
Because we are physically distant, we need to be empathetically close.
Listen more deeply, pay more attention to emotional nuances, even over screens. Realize that other people are scared – they may be worried about their mother in a nursing home, or a daughter who’s an ICU nurse.

By Andrea Petersen in the the Wall Street Journal

That last one hit close to home, as you regular readers know. My daughter is an ICU nurse dealing with COVID patients. Maintaining resilience is a crucial part of how she is able to get up every morning and counsel a family on the need to let go of a loved one or handle it personally when dealing with a mother who is 30 weeks pregnant and has to be put on a ventilator. Everybody’s got a story that will break your heart – your job is to be willing to listen to it.

Executive presence tip – Carol Keers

I am 100% Icelandic on my dad’s side and Danish on my mom’s side. That’s why I loved reading about this sign from a store in Denmark. It listed the first bottle of hand sanitizer as the US equivalent of $4 – but the second one at $95! Classic Scandinavian thinking of negotiation during a pandemic!

Miss Rose McGee is the founder of the Sweet Potato Comfort Pie Project. She started baking after the Ferguson tragedy and hasn’t stopped since. 

McGee encouraged people to bake a sweet potato pie and present it to someone they don’t know as a way to honor Juneteenth. She was poised, beautiful, dedicated, and fierce. She expresses her activism through baking. It is a way to comfort those in sorrow or provoke new thinking. 

I bake very well and I like sharing my gift of baking. McGee’s recipe inspires me. It is DELICIOUS and her back story is fascinating. 

I baked a couple of pies using her receipt. I thought hard about who I could give a pie to act as an influencer. Ultimately, I decided to give one of the sweet potato pies to the Plymouth, Minnesota Police Department. Even though I’ve lived in Plymouth for 30 years, I never learned about their attitudes toward race. 

I did some research and decided to contact my local Chief of Police for more in-depth information on their commitments to racial justice. All because of Miss Rose and her “eyes on the pies.” 

There are many creative ways to influence others to take action. Even using your talents to bake a Sweet Potato Pie.

There are three foundations we build our coaching upon at Change Masters to help people understand and increase their executive presence. They also apply to help us all see others differently. Those three areas we do a deep dive on are:

• Microexpressions – tiny little moments that make people feel supported or judged
• Saturated moments – these are moments that are highly significant to others, even if you don’t understand why
• Metacognition – this is the ability to know what you don’t know, to understand your own thought processes.

When you see these objectively on video, you’ll never be the same!

Executive Presence tip – Carol Keers