Thank you so much for joining today. I'm really, really thrilled to be here. This session is entitled, Return to work with presents. I'll tell you a little bit about why I called it that. But first I have a couple of questions for you again.Answer in the chat since you can't unmute yourselves. All right, but you can just, you can just put like a plus one if you have ever cried at work. Anybody here plus one cried at work. Yeah. Uh huh. Katie Jessica. Thank you, Janine, Marta Lee. Uh huh. Uh huh OK. Suna. Good for you. OK. All right. I've cried at work many times. Second question. Second question. Who has ever cried in front of their boss at work? Plus one right here. Yeah. Mhm. Yep. Yep, Jessica. You and me, Fabiana. You sound Italiano too. Fabiano plus one. My manager. Yeah. Oh, no, sad face. It's OK, Marta, it's all right. I used to go to the cry, the crying bathroom. Oh, that's great. That's great. Janine. OK. All right. Third question. Third question. Who here has when they stopped crying in front of their boss or someone at work? Felt a deep sense of shame and regret. Yeah, plus one here. Anybody, anybody, Marta, thank you for joining me. If I could put plus two plus three, I cried many times at work. I'm, I'm half Italian. I'm a redhead. Uh I emote at work. Thank you. Thank you for participating. Um It Yeah, I have definitely been there and I wanna tell you a quick story about a time. Oh Simone, thank you so much, Simone.

I wanna tell you a quick story about a time when I was working in a job at a company that I had only dreamed of working for. Seriously. This was uh my most favorite job that I ever had. I was on cloud nine and frankly, I was kicking some butt at this role. I will just say that at my first year after my first year at this job, I was getting compliments left and right. I was getting results. And so I'm now walking into my end of year performance review. Enter in the chat. Anybody here have end of year or yearly performance reviews. Enter in the chat, say plus one for me. Yup. Ok, Marta. Yup. Yup. OK. Performance. So many of us are working for big companies. Many ti oh, more than just once a year gail I bet. All right. So many of us are working for companies with performance management cycles. And uh yeah, I was going into my first end of year performance review and I was feeling pretty good. I mean, II I was right to feel that way. To be honest, I got high scores on my quality of work and just like I had expected my boss congratulated me for those high scores.

And then he suddenly flips the page and he starts talking about what they call competencies, which is how you do your work or how you show up. I didn't get such high marks. I started getting feedback. Like the volume of your voice is too loud. You take over in meetings, people are intimidated by you. Yeah, you bet. I cried out of the blue. I felt like I'm not a culture fit here. This place. I considered my dream job. I felt completely lost. And frankly, I thought I only had two options. The first option was to become the corporate robot that they wanted me to be. And I don't know, well, you don't know me very well, but I'll just say I'm an Italian redhead from New Jersey. So conforming to cor corporate robot isn't really in my bag of tricks. Not even for my dream job. Let's be honest. So option two was to leave and that's what I did eventually. My favorite job. Oh, Gail, that's uh redheads rock. Thank you, everybody. But here's the thing my friends is that I thought my choices were binary. I thought that I could only change or leave. What I didn't realize was that I actually had a third choice and that was to master executive presence skills because every day, go New Jersey, I see you, Janine. Every day I was showing up to work as default. Joanna default Joanna is gregarious and fun and passionate and loud. Yeah. You know what? My voice is loud and I participate a lot in meetings. That's who I am. My default persona is actually someone that I really like and is easy for me.

Frankly, I didn't think, and I don't think I should change default. Joanna was doing pretty well. She has a master's degree from an Ivy League institution. She has worked at household names that you've heard of like jetblue and l'oreal and Tiffany and Company. And she has successfully made it in New York City. What I didn't realize at the time was that I actually didn't have to become a different person. What I did need to master was my ability to come off in the best possible light no matter who the audience was and I had that power. I just didn't know how to use it yet. I want to tell you that story because I don't want you to think that you have to change who you are. Let me be very clear about that. I don't want you to change and frankly, I don't want you to act like a completely different person. You're not an actor, but I tell you this because you can take control of how you are perceived. And now I have a slide. Sorry, I'm going back and forth from the slides. There we go. So you can take control of how you are perceived. All right. So just to go back, you can take control of how you're perceived. It can be decided by you, not for you. Like I thought it was for me, your default persona is not your only option.

You're the one who gets to choose which parts of yourself you bring to the table. You get to choose how you speak, how you act and how you look so that you can achieve the goals that are important to you. Because at the end of the day, you're the one who gets to make the choice about how you show up. And this tool kit that I'm gonna teach you today is about choices. It's about taking your power back. You can become a corporate robot, you can leave or you can choose to exercise your innate power within the systems that are already in place in your workplace. By the way, if you didn't know the third option was even possible until now join the club. OK. I'm glad you're here. Like I said before, I've worked for a lot of companies that you've heard of. Probably even a few companies that you haven't heard of. It's only taken me 20 years of working through all of my executive presence challenges to realize all of this by the way, by the way, my crying story is from one of these companies and now I have my own company called Copper and Rise, where I teach women the transformational leadership tools that can help you lead with character, confidence and style.

By the way, where did my uh company name come from? Copper is the color of my hair and rise. Rise up in your life. Copper and rise. If you, if you were a male, will your manager give you the same feedback? Probably not, but that's not what we're gonna talk. That's I feel like that is a whole other conversation. That is a valid one. But today, what we're gonna talk about is what we can control and what we can control is ourselves. I want to tell you another story about this lovely lady right here. Obviously, I'm the one on the left with the red hair and the lady on the right is my mom. Uh This story will help you understand why I care so deeply about helping you make these choices and taking your power back. So this is my mom, Laura and my mom passed away 15 years ago. But while she was still here, we were really, really close in some ways. We were a meshed by that. I mean that our worlds were really, really intertwined. There was a lack of separateness between her and me. The boundary between our identities was very fluid and I'll say diluted. Now, maybe you have experienced that with a family member or another loved one. And if you have, you know how complex it can be.

The thing is that I deeply loved and love my mom to this day, she's a huge part of who I am. And for which frankly, I'm very grateful. She was amazing. And I was a part, a huge part of who she was too. That brings a lot of complexity to my life. The story behind all of that is that I'm an only child and my mom wasn't ever supposed to be able to have Children. My mom was a survivor of polio. And so part of the reason why she and I were so enmeshed. So intertwined, lacking separation was because I was a miracle child. So when you're in this kind of a unit, when we were together, we were a whole. And as an adult, I've come to understand that that's not the easiest way to move through life because especially when my mom died very suddenly 15 years ago, I actually felt like a part of me was gone in many ways. We lived for each other. And then here I was now without her. Ultimately, my relationship with my mom was and is deeply, deeply important to me. Let's not forget my mom left me with many, many gifts. But because we were so enmeshed, so without boundaries, when it came to our identities that I've had to learn what it means to be my whole self without her. Shout out to my therapist just fy I and I see a few things coming.

Oh, I'm sorry that you have the same. Oh Mary. Yeah, I'm with you Mary. So I tell you this story because in the very same way that we can become a meshed with people, we can become a meshed at work. That's why I cried during that performance review because I felt like a piece of me was being rejected. The situations we find ourselves in are often complex and nuanced. But in every case, drawing the lines of separation between yourself and your work is empowering and you can use executive presence tools in order to do that. A mesh at work happens very, very easily. You've felt this or I'll say if you felt this, understand that it's actually a relatively normal thing in today's modern workplace culture, we often look to work to make us feel whole, to make us feel worthy to make us feel validated as people too often work becomes our entire identity.

We can't find that line of separation. I mean, believe me as an entrepreneur, I know I don't find a healthy divide and it's necessary to do our best work and not burn out. So just some, some red flags here, you know, when you're in in an enmeshed workplace, when boundaries become very blurred, you're no longer simply a part of a workforce. You're a part of a family. I heard that many times. This, this place is a family and one you're expected to devote your entire life. To side note, I'll just shout out to the country of Portugal. Portugal recently made it illegal for a boss to text someone on their team after work hours. Go Portugal. Anybody here is Portuguese.

Yes. Another red flag. You struggle to develop an entirely, let's say, independent sense of self outside of work. Work is you, you are work and burnout can become your default setting. If any of these red flags sound familiar. I wanna remind you again that you are the one who gets to choose who you are at work. You get to define yourself separately from work. Your options are not simply to just become a corporate robot or leave. I know it's tempting to believe that these are your only two choices, but they're not. Instead, I wanna invite you today to think about how you might choose the third way. How choosing to master executive presence skills can powerfully transform both your experience at work and how people perceive you think about it. What if you could continue to influence others as a version of yourself that you choose to be not one that requires you to sacrifice parts of yourself. What if you could work with different audiences with courage and poise and positively impact those around you? That's what I'm gonna teach you today. I've helped hundreds of women take control of how they're perceived at work by setting clear boundaries with their bosses and teams getting out from underneath dysfunctional work relationships and building their self worth.

The bottom line here is that I'm on a mission to help you feel more comfortable, confident and courageous, no matter what room you're in. So you can be recognized for your hard work, be a positive influence on the people around you and rise to the ranks of leadership that allow you to fulfill your purpose and potential. I'm going to equip you with some science fact tools today that will help you not change who you are at your core. Nothing about this tool kit will ask you to behave in ways that don't feel true to you. You have choices. So the first tool in your tool kit, I call the priorities triangle. And before I hit up the priorities triangle, I do just want to pause for a second and see if there are any, you're moving to Portugal. Yes, Sunda. Fantastic. But I want to ask if there are any questions before now. I'm going to dive into your toolkit. I'm about halfway done with my presentation. So I will just pause for a moment and see if there are any questions from those in the chat. I don't see any questions, but I'm happy to answer any that come up during the toolkit portion of my presentation. All right here we go.

So there are three tools that I'm gonna teach you that that will help you, help you not change who you are, but help you change your mindset as to how you can present yourself more positively at work. The first one, like I said is called the priorities triangle. Now gotta give, give credit where credit is due. The priorities triangle is something that I have tweaked, but it's originally from Doctor Marsha Linehan, dialectical behavior therapy just so, you know, but I've tweaked it quite a bunch. Here are the things that I've heard from my clients.

Tell me in the chat, give me a plus one in the chat. If you've ever said these things or a version of these things, it's hard to balance it all and stay efficient. I feel guilty when I put my mental health first. Sometimes anybody ever say that, put a plus one in the chat if you've ever said that or a version of that. Yep. Thank you, Jessica and Menga Sunda. Thank you, Jody. Yes. Ok. I, I find it hard to balance it all and stay efficient as well. By the way, I'm an executive presence coach and I still feel those things. Well, one of the ways that maybe you can make this a little bit easier on yourself is with a triangle. Yes. And I know that you're all women in tech. So you all, you're looking at this triangle and you're like, that's an equilateral triangle, I know. So each corner of the triangle relates to a different aspect of a cost benefit analysis that you do every single day. Those cost benefit analyses are what helps you make a decision about how to move forward. So the first part of the uh triangle getting tongue tied here is objective. So when I say objective, I mean, any time you're faced with making a decision, you have to know what your goal is. Ultimately, what your goal is when I talk about, I live in New York City. So my Starbucks is literally around the corner.

And when I walk into Starbucks, you wanna know what my objective is is to walk out with my grande oat milk chai latte. That's the objective. The objective is not to make new friends to learn about the new menu items. Now, now I want to walk out with my oat milk chai latte grande size. If we bring this back to work, maybe your objective is that you have to complete a slide deck. Great. I'm sure we all have to deal with slides. I feel like powerpoint is like losing its luster, but I still use powerpoint as you can see. All right. So we all have in our cost benefit analysis. The objective second piece is others. So all of the other people that are affected by your decision. So if I have to complete a slide deck, and I'm also considering others I'm gonna submit my slides by their deadline that they told me because if I don't submit by their deadline, then there are some consequences that go with that, that among many other consequences might probably be that their trust in me wanes.

The third piece of the pie here in our cost benefit analysis is self. How many times do we consider in our cost benefit analysis ourselves and ourselves being equal to the objective and others? That's rhetorical. Think about that for a second. So if I were to say, OK, I have to complete a slide deck objective by their deadline, others and I need to work out again, cost benefit analysis. And the way I describe this visually is that if I were to say, you know what, I'm going to work out, I'm actually gonna pull on that self end of the triangle in order to give it a little bit more weight. And yes, maybe I don't submit it by the deadline and there, there's a risk there or maybe I don't complete the slide deck. So if we pull on one corner, we may risk the other corners, the other pieces of the pie not being complete. And are we OK with that? If the answer is yes, then cool, great. Do it. If we're not OK with that, then we gotta rejigger which corner we're pulling in a perfect world. This would be a equilateral triangle at all times. But frankly, that we don't live in that perfect world at all. And sometimes we get to make the choice as to whether or not we're gonna pull on one certain corner or not. And listen, if you choose not to pull on self, that's ok.

I just wanna make sure that it's your choice and nobody else's, this is about empowering you to make choices now, just as an fy I as well. There are some people I'm sure you know them who overused certain points of the triangle. For instance, if someone overuses objective and I'm saying overuse like this is, this is dysfunctional at this point. If they overuse objective, finish the slide and skip the workouts that I love it, overuse objective is get it done at all costs and that could be OK. But over time, day, over day, week, over week, month, after month, how are you perceived people pleasers, someone who overuses the others side as well as narcissists, someone who, someone who overuses self again. I'm not saying that we shouldn't go on our workout. As a matter of fact, after this, I'm gonna go on a walk. But time as time passes, if we overuse one of them, it can become dysfunctional. So the priorities triangle is just something to think about my friends. This is a mindset shift as to how to think about the choices that we make at work and how we show up. Speaking of showing up, here's another tool for you that will help you remain authentic but also psychologically safe. I call it levels of vulnerability who here has said this or something like it. Put a plus one in that chat I wanna share, but I don't want the other person to be uncomfortable. I have a difficult time. I think that's supposed to be with silence many times.

It leads to me over sharing. Yes. Ok. Thank you. Priyanka Janine says over sharer Jessica. Fantastic. OK. Me too. I'm an over share. It has taken me many, many, many years to get used to silence. Over share. Nancy. Thank you for, for joining and, and letting us know. All right, there is a wonderful, wonderful woman named Brene Brown. I hope you've heard of her. She has done a lot of research on vulnerability and courage and shame. She's really incredible and she talks about how vulnerability is actually the key to all authentic human connection. I agree.

Lindsay dare to lead is awesome. There's also a New Netflix special called Atlas of the Heart. That's fantastic. She says that vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Here's the thing though. Vulnerability is not binary. I'm either being vulnerable or I'm not.

Mm mm During my story, I told you about how I was vulnerable because I cried a lot, cried. But being vulnerable doesn't necessarily mean that you let it all hang out, doesn't necessarily mean that you just wave yourself out to dry. And hope someone catches you, there are levels to vulnerability. So I want you all to think about this in a way that allows you to feel psychologically safe and also make connections with your coworkers and your boss. So levels of vulnerability, it's a sliding scale. There's low risk, vulnerability and high risk. The risk is how people are going to perceive you positively or negatively. And this is all about perception and it's very, very, very subjective. So this is where the science becomes the art. But for instance, just, just some examples here, low risk. So I watched Spiderman no way home this weekend and loved it. Maybe that's at the beginning of a meeting. You're chatting with someone. I would consider that for me to be low risk vulnerability. But I'm talking about something I did on the weekend. It's personal. OK? High risk. I left my ex at the altar by the way, I did not, I made that up. But, but that's high risk. Like what will people think of me if I said I left my eggs at the altar, middle, my dog is really sick and I need, may need to stay home with him for the next few weeks. It's sad but people understand.

So I want you to think about how you can use vulnerability to build connections because once we do that, people see you as human, they trust you more. But also you have to protect yourself. That's how to stop a mesh from happening is to still be whole when you're being vulnerable. All right. Last but not least. And I have five minutes left. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm gonna give you a way to contact me afterwards. So if you have questions, you can, you can ask me. But I also want you to be aware that another way to have presence at work but still remain whole is to flex your own communication style on purpose. Who here has ever said one of these things go ahead and put it in the chat plus one, every time I get an email from her, I think she's mad at me or he gets so stuck in the weeds and all I wanted was the green light. Don't need my SVP to get stuck in the weeds. Thank you, Janine and Jessica and Sunda. I see you. You know, there are just some people that whenever you communicate with them, it's kind of like you're reading between the lines and you're not so sure. So there's actually an executive presence skill called communication flexing, which means change the slides, which means that you can go towards someone else's communication style, their default style. Let me show you what all of the styles are. Has anyone here taken the dis disc?

If you have, you probably recognize these four communication style uh types disc. Now you can take a free assessment online, but you will be put into one or two of these communication types, but nobody puts baby in a corner. So just know that you can be one or two or sometimes even three. But there's three types of communication. And you may know people that fit into each of these types, the direct type, influential type, steadiness, type and conscientious type. OK. Stabilizer. Sc Thank you, Lindsay. That's fantastic.

Great. So I do an entire other workshop on the disk itself. And if you're interested, you can contact me, Janine. You're ad I Janine, I'm an ID by the way. So um you could probably see right through me there. But the point is that if you were to take a screenshot of this, if you didn't know anything about the disk and you just thought to yourself, hm. The person that I have to influence today, I think is a super logical thinker, I think is someone who like dots every I and crosses every T that sounds like conscientious and you, no matter where you start from, you can flex towards that person. That is just the tip of the iceberg on communication, flexing. But also all of these executive presence tools that help you combat dysfunctional relationships, allow you to stay whole in the workplace and also be liked and respected. I wanna remind you that it's your time to rise.

That's why I called my company Copper and Rise because it's your time to get unstuck and make choices from an empowered place. If you want to hear more about those choices, I invite you to join my mailing list. I send out a weekly email on Tuesday mornings. All you need to do is to text copper to 66866 and you'll get on my mailing list. Thank you, Janine. Thank you. So happy to have you here. Text copper to 66866. If you don't have an uh usa phone number, you do have to email me. So then here's my other contact info. Please please contact me. Here's my email address. Follow me on Instagram. Find me on linkedin Mary. Yes, please email me. Here's my, that's my direct email address. It goes right to me when I get your email. I will look like that in the picture. I will be so excited. I will. I'm happy to stay on for a few extra minutes though because I wanna make sure that I can answer any of your questions that you might have in the moment. So what questions throw them in the chat for me? And what is the text number again? Great question here. It is text copper to 66866 Jody. I'm so excited to connect with you as well. Thank you. Awesome, Vicky. Uh Here's the text copper to 66866. What other questions can I answer for you? I'm here. Mhm. By the way, this is a compostable straw I just want you to know I'm not killing the turtles. Ok. Love the turtles. All right.

Well, I'm not seeing any questions in the chat, so I will speak slowly in case someone is typing slowly. But if not, please join my mailing list, text copper to 66866 or email me, find me on the gram. Here's all that other information. I thank you so so much. Oh, thank you, Marta. Thank you so so much for joining. Have an amazing rest of the conference. What an incredible event this is, by the way, uh I I will just tap you on the back and say good job because in terms of that priorities triangle just being at this conference you're pulling on that self corner bravo to you. It's your time to rise ladies. Thank you so much for joining and have a great rest of the day. See you everybody. Bye bye. Thank you. See you.