Dr. Thomas Field, the Director of the Engler Agribusiness Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Nebraska said, “I used to stay up at night wondering how I could better support the women in our program because despite their immense talent, they were hesitant to launch businesses and only represented 25% of our leadership team. After two years of initiating consistent Brave Conversations Over Coffee, I now lose sleep wondering how to grow the same kind of powerful experiences for our men so they can keep pace. Women now make up 75% of our leadership team and 53% of them have launched or pivoted businesses.”
What began as a program of in person and online modules educating young women on how to build their own entrepreneurial confidence quickly evolved into creating a formal platform whereby those conversations over coffee could initiate a safe and intimate space for dialogue.
“Just about everyone told me, you can’t run two businesses at once. They weren’t wrong.”
Elisabeth’s friend and mentor, well known author and marketer, Seth Godin explained that she needed to integrate her ideas.
“His empathy, perspective and general sensibility has always reminded me of my Dad and I’m so grateful that he didn’t just agree with everyone else and ask me to choose between Caffé Unimatic and Legacy Out Loud. He said ‘I am smart enough to know you are not going to choose one, so I need you to figure out an architecture by which you can do both.’ And I spent the next year and a half creating exactly that.”
What Elisabeth came to realize was that upon analyzing and deconstructing the dialogue within her Legacy Out Loud retreats, she had built an intuitive platform of listening – the crucial element that helped these young women find their space and place. It was in listening to their stories that helped build their entrepreneurial confidence. It was in the asking of questions. It was in listening to the response. It was initiating a space whereby these young women would be heard. The light bulb went off. Elisabeth realized the methodology itself incorporated the science behind post traumatic growth, resilience, and how we build trust as humans. The most crucial aspect of any conversation is in the listening.
“When I was a kid,” said Elisabeth, “I internalized the way I could bring down my Dad’s blood pressure by the way I communicated, particularly by the way I listened. As an adult, I learned the science behind listening and started intentionally practicing what I had actually been doing my whole life.”
As Elisabeth explains, having coffee, going for coffee with a friend or colleague, creates that space to listen.
“There was something about the way coffee, confidence and conversation went together, that I couldn’t shake. Confidence comes from the way we rise from challenges. Conversation is how we connect with others and contributes to our resilience. And coffee brings us together, ‘let’s get coffee’ is a phrase that connects humanity. They each led me back to my Dad, but more so, they led me back to myself. My passion has always been at the intersection of communication and leadership. My honors thesis in college was on leadership, my favorite parts of my MBA were the emotional intelligence courses. Everything I gravitated toward my whole life was because I am endlessly fascinated by how we communicate with ourselves and others and the impact we can have. Since coffee is the global symbol of connection, as well as a talisman of hope, inspiration and daily positive forward movement, I knew that I was put on this earth and in this industry to use it for something bigger.”
BRAVE Conversations Over Coffee® is now a formalized learning platform offered to institutional and corporate clients across the US with the mission of teaching how best to initiate an open forum of dialogue. Using her knowledge of neuroscience, positive psychology, and her own personal experience, being BRAVE to Elisabeth – and to increasing amounts of corporate teams around the world – is all about learning how to listen.
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