Joanna Barsh – what an inspiration. After high fiving strangers to get my Engagement level up, hearing about her husband’s greatest skill being love (he likes to hug) and that being 23 out of 25 for her on a skill profile – I was enthused and bursting with excitement about leading. Joanna took us through her five steps to centered leadership in about 70 minutes, showing clips of her interviews with women leaders worldwide. Two steps in particular had great resonance. First, Meaning – having some greater relationship to the work one does. Joanna drew upon the research of some of the best thinkers in the area of happiness including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose pioneering work, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” explores exactly the feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill that one should experience when an activity has personal meaning for us. Joanna brought the concept of meaning to life by encouraging us to recall a peak vacation experience as a proxy for the sensation that meaning produces.

Framing was the other concept with particular resonance. After requesting that the audience all close their eyes, she surveyed for optimists and pessimists. Her exercise asking a self-proclaimed optimist and pessimist to describe a presentation in which a senior executive walks out on a junior colleague’s presentation perfectly demonstrated the range of meanings we bring to events, colored by our own inherent tendencies to see the glass as half empty or half full. Even with the realization that we bring our own story to neutral events, she counseled that we could practice a more constructive way of dealing with problem situations so that we avoided the spiraling sense of despair that thwarts so many talented people, particularly women.

Read her book How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life, and if you can, go see her speak. Joanna Barsh is a treat.

And visit the CWL web site for information on other great upcoming events free and open to the public.

Submitted by: Julia dePeyster, Assistant Director, The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson