An AccelerateUs: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Local Industrial Revolution conversation.
This conversation gave me time to talk with one of my dear friends and a woman that I so admire for her skills, her insight, her resilience and the authenticity that she brings to everything she does. I had wanted to get her on tape talking about the role of emotional intelligence in business growth and leadership for a long time, and I finally got my chance!
You can watch our conversation above, or listen to it on Soundcloud here. You can also pick up this and other AccelerateUs interviews on Stitcher or Spotify as part of the Building a Wise Local Economy podcast.
Christina Aldan is known in the tech start up world as Lucky Girlie Girl and #IAmAGoodMix, after her well-viewed TedX talk. Most of the time she trains business developers internationally on ways to manage their employees and themselves more effectively, when she’s not delivering web design and social media services through Arana Software.
I did this interview in the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, so this discussion was set strongly against the background of unsettlement, uncertainty and questions about what “after” was going to look like. And managing that rethinking process, for ourselves and our employees and colleagues and our organizations and communities, requires a very different skill set from the Complete Task According to Plan approach that we too often accept as doing the work.
In most of my life, I’m super guilty of going and doing without pausing or reflecting or evaluating. Which is ironic because I have written and talked a lot about unconsciously we stick to our paradigms and ways of doing things, even when they don’t fit anymore. Or perhaps I’ve become aware of that because I fall into that trap so often myself. The pause, and reset, and evaluation, and even some parts of the empathy that Christina talks about here don’t come easily to me because they’re not Getting Things Done. So I am grateful, as always, for how Christina makes me see these things differently.
To learn more about Christina, her insights and her training, check out LuckyGirlieGirl.com. For great interviews about everything from improvisation to grief to more, check out the Bite-Sized Podcast. For her beautiful talk about growing up Asian in an all-white community, watch this talk. And to learn about her software, branding and training company, check out Aranasoft.com
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