January 19th, around 7:30 am (EST), I woke up like any other day. Still half asleep trying to get my brain functioning, I pulled out my cell phone and opened Twitter. Scrolling the recent tweets, I stumbled upon Tim Ferriss’s tweet mentioning a new blog post. Intrigued by the title, I clicked and began reading.
NEW – “How to Become an Effective CEO: Chief Emotions Officer” bit.ly/zo5Cjb
— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) January 19, 2012
The post started out by Tim Ferriss introducing Chip Conley, who is an author and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality. After the brief introduction, Chip, stepped in and started the discussion of how to be an Chief Emotional Officer.
Chip had just finished his new book, Emotional Equations, where he dives deep into the trenches of 19 meaty emotions. Through his research, Chip has compromised helpful equations (yup, like math equations) to derive at how each of the 19 emotions are produced. For example, Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerless. Broken down, the level of uncertainty and the level of powerless you are currently undergoing will exponentially produce your level of anxiety. Cool, right? Formulas are an effective way to learning how to increase or decrease results.
Back to the blog post, Chip briefly upacks 4 of his 19 equations– Despair, Happiness, Anxiety and Awe. For each equation, he reveals keys to reducing or elevating each of the equations. Going through a time currently in my life with many uncertainties (try starting your own business and dropping any salaries you had before), I gravitated to the Anxiety equation.
At the end of the enlightening post, a contest was posed and to enter you needed to answer 3 questions. The contest winner would get to spend the day with Chip, plane tickets and two nights at his famous Hotel Vitale.
So, I told myself “It’s time to get Vulnerable! (thanks to Brene Brown)” and I wrote my answers to the 3 questions.
Two weeks later, I received an email from Chip that I won. 🙂
Since January we were keeping in touch, figuring out the optimal time for me to fly out to San Francisco. Chip is not only an author but also a major speaker, with 120 speaking engagements around the globe this year alone. Finally, we scheduled the meet up for May 3rd. The plane tickets were purchased and I picked up a copy of Emotional Equations to delve deeper into all 19 emotional equations.
One of my answers to the contest entry was that I would share what I learned from Chip to as many people as I could. As such, my following post will be my learnings from my time spent with Chip. Stay tuned!