Nicole joins us to speak about the female experience in the workplace, as well as how she coaches women to enhance their confidence by embracing failure. This was a fun discussion and I thank Nicole for letting me wade my way through the messy bits.
Nicole is a coach and speaker with the mission of ensuring women have equal opportunities to reach their full potential by addressing the internal and external obstacles they presently face. She's also an advocate for cultural change as a corporate consultant.
Nicole joins us to speak about the female experience in the workplace, as well as how she coaches women to enhance their confidence by embracing failure. This was a fun discussion and I thank Nicole for letting me wade my way through the messy bits.
Nicole is a coach and speaker with the mission of ensuring women have equal opportunities to reach their full potential by addressing the internal and external obstacles they presently face. She's also an advocate for cultural change as a corporate consultant.
Hello everyone and welcome to Success Shorts, I'm Erol Senel. Today we're joined by Nicole Kalil. About five years ago, Nicole, after her successful role as chief development officer to become a coach and speaker with the mission of ensuring women have equal opportunities to reach their full potential by addressing the present obstacles that they face both internally as people and externally as employees, while also advocating for cultural change as a corporate consultant. Now, Nicole and I get into a big talk and we have fun doing it. She's very open about her experiences while also very caring in a way as she allows me to maneuver through the somewhat messy topic of equal pay and women in the workplace, especially since I'm coming at it from a male standpoint. So I think you're going to like this one and I hope you enjoy our time with Nicole Kalil. Let's go.
Erol Senel:
Nicole. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Nicole Kalil:
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Erol Senel:
Most definitely, it's an honor. I'm really excited about what we're going to get into, especially because as a dad, I really want to make sure that I'm starting to address some of the challenges that my daughter may face as she grows up in a really meaningful way. So I'm looking forward to all this, but to kick things off, I want to go on just more of a little bit of a personal note. Obviously we're coming out of just this really crazy watershed period that was caused by COVID, and I'm curious, what have you learned about yourself during this time and what are some of the things that may have shaped you in a way that you're going to come out of this moving forward?
Nicole Kalil:
Oh my gosh, so many learnings over the last year. First and foremost, I have a much greater ability to pivot than I ever thought. All the plans I've had starting in 2020, all the strategies and the focuses and the outcomes that I had in my business plan and my personal plan got that's thrown out the window, or at the very least reprioritized, which was also a little bit of a silver lining I think from the last year, as a reconnection and reprioritization of what really matters for me. I think another big one is I feel I've become better at identifying and avoiding time-wasters than I was prior to COVID. And I thought I was pretty good with time management or what I call choice management, because it's not time we're managing, it's the choices that we make with the time that we have.
Nicole Kalil:
But, with such limited time, given our daughter being out of school and not having summer camps and all this stuff, I just was able to recognize where I wanted to be investing my time, and where was better for me to say no. So those are a few things that come to mind as how COVID has really changed me and shaped me going forward.
Erol Senel:
Those were a couple of good ones, the pivot one, I think we're all very capable of adapting, more so than we give ourselves credit for. And I think COVID definitely showed us all that this past year, hopefully in some regard, if not... And I understand things have definitely been difficult, but I think for the most part, that's one thing that people have been able to do one way or another, but then the time-wasters part, and the empowering yourself to say no, I think because of the fact that we had to think of things through the term of not only just time, but also thinking through things through this prism of risk-
Nicole Kalil:
Correct.
Erol Senel:
... that really gave us the opportunity to prioritize ourselves, and what's more important than prioritizing ourselves? So hopefully we can all take that going forward because I think those are two phenomenal ones that we could definitely learn from. And so, I wanted to get into things with you, and we had a really nice time talking last week. We set time for about 15 minutes to initially introduce each other. And I think we were on the phone for almost an hour, and I really appreciated you taking that extra time. And one of the things that you shared during that time was that you really felt that your own personal confidence and mindset when it comes to how to approach failure, were the two real traits that you've leaned on throughout the years to drive your own personal success, those are huge ones.
Erol Senel:
And I don't think that everyone has those traits in their bag that they can always pull from, or it really takes some work. So I'm curious, so if you were to look back, when did you become conscious of your confidence and your ability to embrace failure and how did you foster those early on?
Nicole Kalil:
I can remember being purposeful about focusing on confidence building. And my relationship with failure was in my mid to late 20's. So, either 26, 27-ish. I had graduated from college, got my first job. I thought I wanted to be a teacher. And then when I got my teaching credential and started teaching, I was like, "Oh, I don't think this is the career for me." And feeling guilty about all the time and energy I spent becoming a teacher, only to decide that wasn't the right career, I had a bad breakup at that time. And so there was a lot of contributing factors, but ultimately where I know this became important to me was in those late 20's as a professional, I was looking around at the people that I interacted with, that I deemed successful, people who had lives that I wanted to emulate.
Nicole Kalil:
And I started asking myself, what is the common denominator? Or how do we behave similarly? Or what are the contributing factors that had them create this life? And what it boiled down to was confidence. They all had different strengths and different approaches and different ways of communicating and different skill sets, but what they all had was an internal confidence or trust in themselves and an ability, at least from the way I was looking at it, an ability to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get back into action when faced with bad days or rough moments or failures, they got back into action faster than everybody else seemed to. And that was attractive to me. And I started really paying attention to, how do I build the skill of recovery? How do I create a new and more empowered relationship with failure? And most importantly, how do I build my own confidence?
Erol Senel:
That's interesting, the way that you actually worded that because on the surface, it sounds like the thing that really appealed to you is this concept of grit. The way you were wording it at the end, it was almost like it was a strategic view of grit, "Okay. Well, how do I look at these instances, but actually have a process for processing what just happened?" We can all be very academic when it comes to our failures. And that in itself is very empowering because you actually learn as opposed to potentially falling into the trap of repeating some of them. And I love the fact that you embraced these traits. And also, I think you could throw into that curiosity, because without your natural curiosity, I don't think you would have come across these.
Nicole Kalil:
My coaching background, really, it was very helpful in this. It gave me the opportunity to witness, to observe, to practice myself and to experience. And I think without all of those, it would have at the very least taken me much longer to get to the point where, like you said, I was a student of this.
Erol Senel:
It's almost like you're a student of failure in a way, because it's through failure that you actually reached progress, if you do it the right way. And I think there's a certain level of fun almost in failing because it means that you're trying something new, you're trying something that you're not familiar with. And it's all about mindset as far as how you progress through it, it gives you a chance to problem solve, it gives you a chance to innovate all these things. So if you were to look back into that period, mid 20s, early 30s, whenever you were really of going through the energizing phase of trying to figure out what you're doing and all that, what's the most fun and revealing experience that you've had coming out of failure?
Nicole Kalil:
So I'll be totally transparent in saying that I don't know that I'm quite at the point where I associate fun with failure yet, at least not all of them. But what I have come to realize is, with the benefit of hindsight, I can get to fun, I can get to it being in a lesson, a learning opportunity, even a gift. Even if it might not feel good when I'm experiencing a failure, I now can tell myself there is going to be a time, there is going to be a point where I feel differently about this, and I might experience fun or gratitude or at the very least, have more knowledge and experience that I can take with whatever it is that I'm doing next. But one more recent actually example of where I would actually describe the failure as fun, earlier in the year, I released a podcast episode on failure. I made it very personal. I wasn't talking about failure from a conceptual standpoint, or even from this hindsight standpoint, not the, "I'm swimming in all of my successes. So let me share how I felt about my failure from before."
Nicole Kalil:
I made it a point of sharing something that was very current, very real and very uncomfortable for me. And to be honest, I wasn't even sure I was going to release the episode, but I was encouraged by people I trust. And very quickly after releasing that episode, it became fun because of a few things. Number one, I put words on my experience, I put words on how I was feeling. And that really lessened the amount of negative energy or pressure or even embarrassment or shame that I was feeling. Just being able to speak it out loud made a big difference. But very quickly after releasing the episode, I got notes from people who were encouraging. And I feel the same way too, I felt significantly less lonely. And it was just a really good reminder, somebody sent me a message. She said, "I know you already know this, but sometimes it's nice to hear it, you are not your failure." And it really did make the experience fun.
Nicole Kalil:
And it's ironic at this point, that one of my most listened to, or most commented episodes in all of the podcast recordings, has been on my own personal failure. So, that would be an experience I would describe as fun.
Erol Senel:
Anytime you have the chance to be vulnerable about something that you learned from, I don't know, I think it goes back to mindset a little bit. I think you could put a positive spin on anything if you really choose to, but to go through a learning experience like that, and to just quickly flip the switch on your perspective of it, from going from, "Am I going to release this?" To, "That was cool. I'm glad I did that," type of thing. You see the end results and how it connected with people. I think that's huge.
Nicole Kalil:
You said something that I think is so important. We have the opportunity to put a positive spin, or said another way, we have an opportunity to decide our interpretation or perspective of everything. And my coach, Lisa Kalman taught me this, and it's that failure is a neutral event. We are the ones who bring meaning to that event. And the reason I know that is because what I see as a big failure, you might see as a small one, or what somebody else sees as insurmountable may seem like no big deal to me, or any version of that. So we might as well choose a perspective or a meaning or interpretation that helps us, that moves us forward, that has us learn, that is more empowered or positive as you said. And I think that is such an incredible gift we give to ourselves.
Erol Senel:
It's the gift of cognition in a way when you really think about it. So think about animals, they go through the same things we do, they just don't think about them the way we do. Their lives are a continuation of events that don't get two thoughts, but we have this wonderful ability to think, this cognitive ability that separates us from everything else. And because of that, we apply our own feelings to every single event. So if we're the one that's choosing to apply a feeling and we're applying a negative one, we just as easily can look for a positive way to spin that. And that's where the whole mindset of gratitude and everything like that, you can choose to be negative, but you can also choose to go through it through gratitude. So as much as it hurt to go through this and not have it be the outcome that you wanted, you could very easily flip that same thing to be like, "Okay, it didn't have the outcome I wanted, but here's one, two, three things that I learned from it."
Nicole Kalil:
100%.
Erol Senel:
So, if we can just realize that, it empowers us to have a completely different spin on life. So I'm going to share something with you, and I didn't plan on doing this. So my failure was 2018, I trained to do a Half Ironman. It's a lot of training that goes into it, run, bike, swim. You get there, you're in the best shape of your life, you're ready to do it. I was looking forward to getting out of the water, onto the bike and then doing the run back, because the bike and the run are my strengths. I get there, jump in the water, waves are choppy, I swallowed three waves in a row, started throwing up, I pulled myself out of it, I didn't even get to the bike and the run, I was embarrassed, I get out of there. And there's nothing fun about failing in that moment, but it's how you react to it that allows it to be fun.
Erol Senel:
The second I got out of the water, I'm walking back to collect my bike and my gear and get in the car and drive back to home, I decided, "You know what? Screw this. I'm going to still do the triathlon. I'm just not going to finish this official one. I'm going get back home, I'm going to do the miles for the bike, I'm going to do the miles for the run, and I'm going to add the swim miles to the end of the run." And I had fun doing it. So I think it's just our expectation of what things can be. If we can move that, we can start to have fun with some of the failures that we do have that might feel a little bit debilitating in the moment.
Nicole Kalil:
That's such a good example, because it is that we all experience failures, we all experience things not going according to plan. Most of us have that first initial reaction of embarrassment, or what I call head trash, the things we say to ourselves about ourselves that aren't very kind, or that feeling of, "I want to give up," but exactly as you expressed, our opportunity is to shift that perspective, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, get back into action. And you chose a positive, more empowered perspective, but also actions will be in the way you choose to deal with it. So, thank you for sharing.
Erol Senel:
So, thanks for sharing you're a part of that too. So these two traits, obviously they're really vital in personal development. And we were just talking about every single event is its own event and we choose how to go about it, but when you combine them and you form this almost self-belief, where you have the confidence in yourself to work through failure to get to a good outcome no matter what, if you could harness this, you can pretty much do anything. So through your experience, first as a corporate leader, and then now as a coach, you really try to focus on this work and building these traits in women, because for one reason or another, this whole man-of-action concept has been somewhat more dominant in men, but we would definitely want to bring everyone along in this. Why do you think that it's so important to cultivate this confidence and tenacity in women so that they can start to own their own careers in a way that, in some ways they haven't been empowered to do so prior?
Nicole Kalil:
So, I first want to touch on something you said it was so important. The root of the word confidence is ultimately trust. And so when we talk about confidence, at least the way I talk about it, is trusting ourselves. And that is so important in all aspects of life. So you made a really good point that I wanted to double down on. As it relates to encouraging the advancement of women, especially as it relates to confidence, I want to first go on record and say, there are so many contributing factors to creating gender equity in the workforce, and just one of them is this idea of women growing, connecting to, and building their confidence. And it's one where I've thought and feel like I can be helpful, which is why I focus on it so much, but it's no secret that men have more confidence than women in the workforce.
Nicole Kalil:
I want to be really clear about this, women weren't born with less confidence, and men weren't born with more of it. It is more of a socialization process, that by the time we enter the workforce, men are entering with more confidence than their female counterparts. And what that ultimately leads to is, women don't go for the same opportunities, they don't raise their hand for the same promotions, they don't take the same level of risk as their male counterparts. And that is one of many reasons why you don't see women at the highest levels of leadership, or with the same access to opportunities in the workforce. So, we have that opportunity to connect with our confidence, shift our mindset on failure so that we don't hold ourselves. And one other thing I would add is, women have a tendency to focus on, or rely on competence over confidence.
Nicole Kalil:
And that's an opportunity, I think we have to learn from each other, men making sure that they're increasing competence and not just relying on confidence, and women certainly learning from their male counterparts that it's not always about having all the answers and knowing everything and having all of the education, that you can access and choose confidence on the road to competence.
Erol Senel:
I think there's something in just the fact that I feel like I can figure things out, I may not know it now. So it's a weird timing that we're having this conversation now, because constantly want to progress your career and you look for job opportunities, still with the same firm, but a role that there's certain elements that I don't have experience in yet, but I have no doubt in myself that I would be able to learn them on the fly, that I wouldn't necessarily miss a step. And I wouldn't let that necessarily get in my way of going for this opportunity. So what I heard you say in this situation is, that may be something where, if we are speaking about a female in the same type of scenario, she may be looking at that as like, "I don't have this competency in this area. So I should probably wait and get that before I go for something like this."
Nicole Kalil:
Yeah. And there's been research done that proves that women want to check off 80 to 100% of a job description before they'll apply for it, whereas men are more inclined to say, "Oh, I meet 40 to 60% of the criteria, and I will learn the rest as I go." Again, back to trust in self, that confidence that, "I'll figure it out."
Erol Senel:
Yeah. That has to do with the self, obviously, and how as men and women look at a situation and assess, "Can I handle this?" But then there's also outside factors that come into a woman's experience that men simply don't have because in many cases, men are the ones perpetuating the behaviors that can stymie the growth of females sometimes. So I'm curious, outside of the very overt harassment-level type of things, what are some of the other behaviors that you've witnessed and that you've studied and you understand, that get in the way of progress for women, that men actually, maybe sometimes even inadvertently put upon women as they're trying to progress in their own careers?
Nicole Kalil:
I mean, we certainly don't have time to go through everyone. So anything that I miss, forgive me, but I want to highlight a few. First is having access to equal opportunities, having access to the decision-makers at an equal level. So I'll share this anecdotally, I'll give a story from my career. I wanted to get to a certain role. And the primary decision-maker at the corporate level was a man who happened to be visiting our territory. And it was known that this man loved to golf. And so, the people in my organization arranged a golf outing. So it was the decision-maker and three other people. And the three people who got invited either didn't have the interest, or didn't have the track record that I had, that would even have put them as a candidate for that position, yet they got to spend, I don't know how many hours it was on the golf course, but they got to spend that amount of time closely connected to, and getting to know this decision-maker, whereas I didn't get the opportunity, I wasn't even asked.
Nicole Kalil:
I could give you 1,000 stories like that, both my own and what I've heard from other women where it's that we don't get the same level of access to the decision-makers, to the powers that be, than maybe our male counterparts would. A second thing that I think has become even more detrimental, or maybe more obvious in the last year, is this concept of the second shift. It is not always the case, I know there are a lot of single dads or dads that are very committed to partnership in parenting, but the reality is that women have the tendency to take on the lion's share of parenting responsibilities, the household management, even caring for parents in old age. And so women may go to work, work just as hard, work just as long hours, or potentially maybe not have the ability to work as long hours, and they might be just as capable or just talented, but they have this additional full-time job, or at the very latest is solid part-time job in addition.
Nicole Kalil:
And it makes this very challenging. And I think it sometimes just goes unnoticed or forgotten. And another one that I notice is, if we think of leadership in the terms of masculine qualities and feminine qualities. So as an example, maybe a more masculine characteristic of leadership is decisiveness or strategy, a more feminine characteristic of leadership might be empathy or listening. Now, all four of those examples are incredibly important leadership traits. And I think men can have feminine leadership traits and women can have masculine leadership traits. So it's not necessarily just about men and women, but culturally, a lot of organizations tend to value those more masculine qualities over the feminine ones. And so because of that value, people who demonstrate those more masculine qualities get promoted faster, get thought of for opportunities, get the tap on the shoulder.
Nicole Kalil:
And then finally, just the willingness to negotiate. I actually talked to an expert in a negotiation, and spent a lot of time trying to understand this. And what I've come to realize, and this is not my area of expertise, I'm just passing forward what I learned, is that it's not that women are worse negotiators than men, it's that women tend to shy away from actually negotiating. And they have a tendency to see it as a win-lose opportunity as opposed to a win-win opportunity, which is why they don't often engage where they could or should. So, those are a few obstacles and biases that I think are important.
Erol Senel:
I appreciate you sharing all that.
Nicole Kalil:
Absolutely.
Erol Senel:
We can take any one of those points and we could probably spend quite some time speaking about any of them, but the one about the different styles of leadership, one of the nice things that I definitely am exposed to, and I've had some great bosses that fit into this realm, is the whole concept of servant leadership. I think the more we look at the different styles of leadership as strategies, and different things that we can actually play up. I mean, if a woman out there is thinking about she wants to be a leader and she isn't a little bit more of the action oriented, she is more of the support and the listening and the empathy, you can be a servant leader, and think about what that is, and what strengths you have and how does that apply to leadership as opposed to just having this rigid view of what a leader is and telling yourself that, "That's not what I am."
Erol Senel:
Because we all got so much to offer. And it's just thinking about ways, how do we reframe it in our own minds? How do we take it from that failure mentality and flip it to the gratitude and figure out, "Okay, these are my weaknesses, but these are my strengths. I'm not going to focus on these weaknesses," because if you do that, you're not going to go for the opportunities.
Nicole Kalil:
Totally. And it's a proven thing now that organizations are more productive when they have diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of strengths, having all of your leadership team or having everybody who drives the culture, look, feel, think, and speak the same isn't going to result in as productive of an outcome.
Erol Senel:
Right. I really appreciate you sharing, all that. Even though you've gotten comfortable sharing your story, I'm sure it still brings up strong emotions when you're thinking about some of those experiences that led to some of those points that you were just talking about. And to all those listening, especially the men, I really want you to start putting the women that you love into these scenarios, be it your wife or your sister or your daughter, so that you can start to see the experiences that are out there. And it's like, "Would you want these things to be happening to them?" And would you be okay with what went down?
Erol Senel:
And if you're the answer to that is no, then we need to start analyzing how we're behaving when it comes to our role in power dynamics, our role in promotions and giving access and just creating fairness in that access, I think is something that needs to be explored a little bit more, because guys are far more open to asking, "Hey boss, why don't we go play some golf?" Is a female going to be in that same situation, "Hey boss, how about we go grab a drink?" Just that, inherently has a different thing to it if we allow it to.
Nicole Kalil:
Yeah.
Erol Senel:
I think we need to stop allowing it to be looked at as sexual dynamic or a gender dynamic, and really look at each other as competent people so that we can create opportunities for everybody, because like you said, through diversity of thought, economics works a hell of a lot better, profitability goes up. All of these different things are positives that come out of that. So, we just need to be more mindful with that. And if some of what I just said was clunky, I'm sorry, I'm not a perfect speaker, but I think it's something that we can all work through. And so to bring things to a close, I want to leave listeners with an absolute pearl, because you're a very successful and I've enjoyed talking to you the two times we had. So I'm wondering, what's one bit of advice that you would share with your younger self, if you could go back and do that now?
Nicole Kalil:
That confidence and failure go hand in hand. And so, to embrace and go after even the small failures and understand that in doing so, I'm building very big confidence. Something I had mentioned early on, was just being stronger, and I wish I would've done this sooner, in creating and communicating boundaries. It's not selfish and it doesn't damage relationships. In fact, it typically earns the respect of the person you're communicating to when you communicate your boundaries. And then I also just quickly wanted to thank you for being willing to have this conversation. I know it can be, "I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing, or I don't want to press any buttons." And I believe this is very messy work, and we have to be willing to listen, have empathy and be bold and brave in having this conversation. So, I wanted to thank you for doing that.
Erol Senel:
I appreciate that. You got to embrace the messy if you want to grow.
Nicole Kalil:
That's right.
Erol Senel:
So, Nicole, this was so much fun. I just want to thank you again for coming on and taking the time with us.
Nicole Kalil:
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Erol Senel:
Yeah. And that's all we have for this episode of Success Shorts. Hopefully you found today's topic useful. And remember, have fun, stay curious and keep it short.