A Case for Indirect Skills: How lessons in yoga, sewing, and parenting/coaching have impacted my professional career

Biomimicry is the study of design inspired by nature. Neuroplasticity is the ability to change one’s neural pathways through seemingly unrelated repetition such as EMDR. Marketing is business-applied psychology meets economics to motivate people to buy or do something. Each of these represent an application of indirect skills where we combine the understanding of one thing to offer an insightful, innovative solution to an unrelated problem.

Yoga

Much of the books I have read on leadership and the concepts we have covered in our Emergent Leaders Vistage program stem back to the knowledge I gained while training for my Vinyasa teacher certification in 2019. Concepts like stress management, breathing techniques, and projecting confidence are all equally valuable skills in the studio as well as the conference room. If you dive deep enough into the science of leadership, you will inevitably learn about how the brain is mapped out and engaged in various situations. For example, anytime you are triggered or stressed, whether it is in the face of danger or you must deliver unfortunate news, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. As a result, the activity in the brain shifts away from the frontal lobe (where high executive functioning occurs), to the emotional center of the brain known as the amygdala. If you’ve ever felt yourself get frustrated in a meeting and you notice your body temp start to spike or your heartbeat speed up, that’s your sympathetic nervous system kicking in. Knowing what these things are and how they exist in all of us certainly puts you ahead of the curve but understanding how to leverage it will reap the most benefits.

For example, in big yoga postures such as warrior II, you extend your arms out wide toward the front and back of the room with your head tall and feet grounded; taking up as much space as possible while supporting your knee joints and hips. The expansive movement is not dissimilar to Amy Cudy’s famous superwoman pose she shared in her 2012 Ted Talk. Amy discusses the science behind the studies that demonstrate your body language not only influence how you are perceived by others, but also how relaxed and confident you feel within yourself. Always within the practice of yoga you are reminded to release any tension in the jaw, neck, and shoulders. Not only does this help you allocate your energy into the muscle groups you are isolating, it further influences the rest of the room. Humans are social creatures and we pick up on other’s cues. When someone else is tensed up, whether you consciously observe it or not, your body reacts to that and mirrors the same condition. My practice of yoga has helped me find the tools to not only better manage my own thoughts and reactions, but influence those around me.

Sewing

I first learned how to sew when I was about 4 or 5. I saw my mom making curtains at the dinner table and was mesmerized by the transformation of simple fabric to a functional, household furnishing. Curious to understand how she performed this magical sorcery, I sat next to her and watched. I saw the wheel turn on the side of the machine with the touch of the foot pedal. I watched as the thread fed through the vertical slot and out the eye of the needle as it punched through the fabric. I was hooked. In that same day, my mom handed me a threaded hand needle and some leftover fabric to play with. This curiosity grew into a hobby. I got my first sewing machine on my 10th birthday and spent countless hours making dresses, purses, skirts, and other garments well into the wee hours of the night. Later, I managed the costuming department in my high school’s theatre program, made my prom dress, and took up a seamstress job at Jennifer Leigh Couture Veils while in school. It’s hard to say if my appreciation for machinery and manufacturing grew through my explorations of sewing, or if it was there all along. After all, welding is just sewing with metal.

Skills I didn’t realize would later serve me in my career through this creative endeavor include but are not limited to reading patterns (aka engineering drawings), understanding grain alignment and markings (because like fabric, metal also has a grain), reading functional symbols such as notches, call outs, and tolerances, and the overall understanding of how to take a 2D raw material and transform it into a 3D object.

?Parenting/Coaching

The last skill set I’ll bring up that has influenced my career is a controversial one and I may lose some folks who are more closed minded. I’ll start with saying, I think we can all agree that parenting is essentially management in the household. As a parent, you practice boundary setting, managing expectations, and behavioral conditioning. What if I told you, you do not have to be a parent to employ these skills? As a volunteer with the Boys and Girls Club, specifically as a Counselor in Training, you are responsible with watching up to 100 kids at a time (not all by yourself). In high school, I spent in total about 700 hours as a counselor in training watching typically 40 nine to eleven-year old’s on field trips. I also nannied two siblings on the weekend for ~ 20 hours across two 10-hour shifts. Managing a large and small group of children require much of the same foundational skills as managing teams in the professional environment. The dynamics of human interactions on the playground and in the home are not dissimilar to what you find in the workplace setting.

Here are a few examples:

·??????? Person X is upset because they keep getting talked over so they shut down and stop contributing ideas.

·???????? Person Y is interfering with another group’s process, saying their way of doing it is stupid and they should do it “my way”.

·???????? Person Z is proud and feeling good about themselves because they just accomplished a challenging task and it was recognized out loud in front of others.

Any of these people I just described could be at any age. Even though I don’t currently have biological dependents, I have had the opportunity to coach others and set the tone for a loving, engaging, and learning centric environment.

As a people manager my primary focus is in developing the team in their roles as well as individuals. The most effective and scalable way to do this is to train for behavior and thought patterns. This is where my psychology training meets workforce management. I will describe 3 basic Cognitive Behavioral Training (CBT) terms and give an example of each. The first two are similar in nature but often get confused as being interchangeable. Positive vs negative reinforcement are distinctly different from each other. Positive reinforcement might look like praise after a job well done. It may also look like giving constructive feedback or punishing someone for a wrongdoing. They key in understanding positive reinforcement is knowing that the reinforcement comes by way of adding stimulus to increase or decrease a behavior. It’s “the thing that’s said or done after someone did something” that makes it a form of positive reinforcement. Whereas negative reinforcement is removing a stimulus in order to increase or decreases a behavior. For example, if you’ve ever applied the “squeaky wheel” method, then you’ve practiced negative reinforcement because you stopped complaining once you got the support you needed. Similarly, if you stop doing something once someone starts practicing the desired behavior, then you are removing something that causes discomfort (such as friction or pain) where previously there was none. We’ve all experienced hearing the repetitive and annoying sound our cars make when we start driving off without our seatbelt. Once we click in, that annoying sounds stops and makes the drive more enjoyable. This same practice can be applied in the workplace.

For instance, I am someone who prefers to block out my time and prioritize tasks to focus on what matters most. This gives me a skeleton outlook for the day so that I can plan my focus on the most impactful tasks with the ability to shift priorities as needed. The easiest way for me to do this is to list out my priorities for the week and day to efficiently filter out the “to-do’s” from the “do-laters” and “delegate-outs”. The overflowing fountain of requests often come in various forms via email, teams message, meeting action list, and the infamous drive-by. Personally, I hate the drive-by and find it to be not only inefficient, but rude to assume a convenient in-person conversation for you is a sufficient manner to submit a request for non-urgent matters. Now, if I get a request in this format from my manager or the CEO, it’s important to use best judgment and put personal preferences aside. However, with most of my co-workers, I much prefer for the ask to be made via email or teams so that I have access to the details of the request without having to transcribe it first for my own records, then decide wither it’s best to deprioritize or delegate it. Functionally, it’s a lot easier to forward an email than it is to record it then pass it on. So, back to the negative reinforcement topic; If I am typically responsive when you reach out over teams or email but then you find that I am less responsive when you come by and ask for xyz, then you are going to learn that the best way to get what you want is to stop doing drive-bys and start sending requests over email. To be clear, I don’t do this without explanation. I always take the time to explain why I prefer requests in written form and how it helps me manage my resources to help them faster. Typically, when I share this they understand and even apply that practice with others, however, others require more training ??

Positive and Negative reinforcement conditioning are tried, tested, and proven methods to promote or discourage behavior in kids, pets, and adults. What kicks it up a notch in effectiveness is the last term we’ll cover today called “variable rewards”. Variable rewards are exactly what it sounds like; sometimes you reinforce the behavior and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you make a bigger deal out of it and other times, it’s a small gesture. This spectrum of reinforcement seemingly applied at random is exactly the mechanism that makes gambling or playing the lottery so addictive. Variable rewards are more enticing because the brain releases more dopamine, aka the feel-good reward chemical, when the reward feels randomized versus predictable. Many of us know that getting an “attaboy” every time we do something good gets old but receiving a discrete compliment or the infrequent display of public recognition feels more genuine and earned. I would argue that in certain situations, negative reinforcement should not be applied at random and consistency is a must; especially as it relates to safety. *As a disclaimer, there is a distinction between manipulation and encouragement and people have pretty good B.S. detectors. If you start using any of these techniques without their benefit in mind, your effort will not pass the sniff test and do more harm than good.

Yoga, sewing and parenting/coaching, are just 3 indirect skill sets I have found to be especially influential in my professional career. I hope this inspires you to take stock of your hobbies, activities, and other “non-productive” practices and find the lessons learned that add color and wisdom to something in your life that is entirely unrelated.

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