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Thursday, May 14, 2009
Keep Your Ego In Check
I attended the monthly networking breakfast of the Women's Business Exchange here in Seattle this morning. The featured speaker was Connie Thompson, a local TV anchor and consumer advocate. Her talk was authentic, honest, refreshing and funny. She shared from her heart about the challenges and changes she's experienced in the TV industry, including being bumped from nighttime anchor back to consumer reporting and how she chose to respond to that change. She told a hilarious story about getting a massage in Europe in which she carefully put, what she thought was, a shower cap with holes for her ears over her head. Only after the massage was over and she was getting dressed, did she realize that she had actually carefully placed a pair of underwear on her head! Her message was to take our work seriously but be willing to laugh at ourselves and our mistakes.
As we all laughed heartily with her, I remembered my own examples of the universe helping me get perspective. Several years ago, a colleague and I gave a talk at the ASTD International Conference to an audience of 500 enthusiastic participants. They loved the session and their evaluations were unanimously, top-of-the-scale, positive. I thought I was hot stuff. My inflated ego and I caught a plane back to Seattle, with a stop-over in Denver. Imagine my shock when I walked to the gate for my connecting flight and discovered an entire team of ten people who had attended a failed company retreat I led a few months before! They were all waiting for the same flight home to Seattle. From elation to deflation in one day! I laughed inwardly at my personal smack-down and resolved to be more balanced in my assessment of myself.
Ah, yes, humility is a wonderful thing.
Posted by Cynthia Clay at 6:13 pm