During the “WEC San Francisco Act II: Your Pathway to Professional Enlightenment” general session, Denise Soler Cox took attendees down a quick rabbit hole of exploration and questioning and understanding perception and creating magical belonging.
“You know your power doesn’t reside in what you withhold, right?” her husband asked when she was deeply questioning her own decision to initially screen her film “Being Eñye.”
She’s has subsequently spoken about her film on stage more than 150 times, realizing that the aspects of the film that caused her anxiety to show are the parts where she’s the most vulnerable.
“Authenticity is the source of your power and authenticity is what belonging feels like,” she explained.
That segued into a personable discussing about perceptual differences that impact our outlook on what’s real and what’s right. For instance, singular-perspective theory, she notes, is essentially the notion that your perspective must be correct. By way of example, out came a cookie tin. (Watch her keynote, when available, to understand the full context.)
The second psychological theory with which she engaged the audience was positive interdependence—a sort of blending of self-reliance and the collective. She explained that combination is what belonging feels like.
Then she took the audience back to an Australian vacation she and her husband had near where the rain forest essentially meets the Great Barrier Reef. That space between the two, like the cantina nearby that she and her husband visited (which she discussed—remember Aerosmith?), is another metaphor of belonging.
Stretching her comfort level for the closing, she whipped out a guitar to do something she’d never done before—she began to play and sing “Hey Jude” on stage with the audience joining in.
Right there, she created an instance of the magical sense of belonging teased at the start. Belonging. That’s what her presentation was all about.
