Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: SILVIA ALLONE
Bap meogeosseoyo.
(Audience) Bap meogeosseoyo.
Bap meogeosseoyo is a Korean greeting, very common until a few years ago.
Literally it means, "Have you eaten today?"
In fact, it shows the concern of the Koreans for their own health.
We know that South Korea was going through a deep crisis,
until a few years ago,
but today it has become a global power
within the industry and technology fields.
"Bap meogeosseoyo," in my Korean experience,
is a symbol that crises not only can be overcome,
but can make us much stronger.
But how is it possible?
I have been studying crisis for years,
in societies, organizations and on a private level.
And one of the reasons why I am passionate about this
is, as they say in Rome, I had it coming.
I moved to eight different countries in the past 12 years.
I changed three jobs,
so I had to reinvent myself and start over from scratch many times.
And some of these changes have led to crises.
Other changes have occurred, instead, thanks to crises.
Today I would like to talk to you about personal crises,
how to go through them and use them to start over.
What is a personal crisis?
It is a period of our life
where we feel a deep negative energy within ourselves,
be it relatable to a particular event, a person or even a few words.
In the workplace,
could be "your performance is poor" or "you are fired."
In a love relationship, "I don't love you anymore, I want to break up."
Within family or friends,
"I have a health problem, I need surgery."
So I would like to ask you about your last crisis.
What was the event, the phrase that generated it?
[What was your last crisis?]
Done?
If you haven't found one yet,
please come next time to talk about how not to have crises.
This is one of the most significant crises of my life.
What you see, the geyser of Lake Geneva, is the symbol of the city of Geneva.
But it's also the metaphor of how I was feeling in Geneva.
In fact, I was at the top of my career,
while freefalling in my personal life.
Two years earlier
I had managed to enter, immediately after graduating,
in one of the largest multinational consumer goods companies.
It was my dream.
After two years I managed to be transferred to the headquarters,
to the European headquarters of that company.
I was thrilled.
But after a few weeks, things weren't going as I thought.
I was having many misunderstandings with my boss,
whom I couldn't get along with, he was very demanding.
The brand I was working for was in a deep crisis,
so there was a lot of pressure inside the company
and I couldn't settle in Geneva.
So I reacted in the only way I knew,
working longer hours.
But things did not improve that much.
In fact, working longer hours
I started having less free time and less time for friends,
I started eating badly, sleeping badly, working badly.
I became less productive, so I had to work even longer hours.
I was in a vicious circle and I didn't know how to get out.
I weighed up to 99 kilos,
and at times I cried before going to work
because I was too anxious to go.
Then a dramatic coincidence
forced me to stay in bed for 15 days.
And for the first time ever,
I didn't check my work emails.
I dedicated those 15 days to myself, to understand my situation,
why I felt that way, understanding myself better.
And when I got back to work,
I started talking to other colleagues who had worked with my boss,
who worked for other brands that were similar to mine,
who felt a lot of pressure,
colleagues who had just moved to Geneva too.
I started asking them, But how do you do it? What do you feel?
And to my amazement,
their answers were different from what I had expected.
In fact, they had the same anxiety, crises and struggles,
but they reacted differently.
They saw in those struggles a chance to learn something
because they liked their job.
So maybe, it crossed my mind, the problem wasn't the context,
it wasn't my boss, nor the company, nor Geneva:
maybe I was the problem.
Because I was reacting in this way;
because others reacted differently.
And then I started to look for the real problem,
what the real cause was.
And I did this exercise, the exercise of values.
I took a chart with all the most important values and things in life,
and I began to identify which were the closest to me
and put them in order,
and this exercise made me understand a lot of things about my situation.
In fact, I had chosen this career
because it gave me financial security and social security.
The famous permanent contract that many Italians look for.
In addition, it was also what my family wanted for me,
what would give me the stability to create my family.
But my true value, my main value, is passion.
And to the question
"Am I passionate about what I'm doing?"
the answer was simply "No."
A second question helped me: do I want to do my boss's boss job?
You know, in a company,
one of the reasons people work so much to get a promotion
and do the work of their boss.
Then work even more and become the boss of their boss.
And this process, if you're lucky, takes years.
There's an important question you need to ask yourself:
after so many years,
will I be happy to get the job of my boss's boss?
My answer was simply "No."
So these two exercises, among others, made me realize what the real problem was:
I no longer liked that career.
So I explored new alternatives and decided to get a PhD.
I graduated in Paris, to my parents' satisfaction and mine.
Later this led me to teach in Helsinki and Seoul,
where I now teach management, and I'm specialized in crisis management.
This is one of my last crises.
March 25, 2019, two months ago.
I remember this date very well.
I was in bed, looking at my room's ceiling
with a negative energy
fueled by my feelings,
work and family.
So I did the exercise I told you earlier to understand what the real problem was.
Normally, to understand what the real problem is,
it takes a few days, a few weeks to make decisions.
Meanwhile, you have this negative energy.
Have you ever experienced lying in your bed,
having no energy to go to work or see your friends?
So how can we handle this negative energy?
One of the reasons we feel it
is because our mind sometimes is our best friend,
but sometimes it becomes our worst enemy,
as psychology studies tell us.
In fact, the mind recreates that person, that sentence,
millions of times,
perhaps looking for a solution that now is useless anyway.
And every time this negative thought crosses our mind,
we get another wave of negative energy within us.
Therefore, in order to handle this energy, we have to handle our thoughts first.
The silent talk inside our mind,
our mental script.
And I applied this technique: I created the "help button."
You select a small circle of friends and family
whom you know can help you with this specific crisis.
The help button is thus a metaphor.
We can press a button, we can make a call
when we are particularly sad.
Talking to another person helps give us a new perspective
and change our mental path.
This time I added something different,
I used a path - more of a social, virtual help button.
In fact, I had been following two personal growth groups for a few months.
And I've seen that in the last few months,
people have started to post requests for help and advice
on books or general stuff, suggestions about time management
or how to manage stress, how to lose weight,
how to manage a colleague they don't like
or how to move on after a break up.
And so I decided to write my question too.
I got more than 120 comments.
The fact that some strangers, people whom I don't know,
had made time to give me suggestions,
made me feel less lonely.
Later I got in touch with some of these people through PM,
and we helped each other to overcome that crisis.
And I also had a series of books, audio and video
that I started reading, listening to and watching
that helped me understand what the real problem was
and finally overcome it.
This is the second technique,
the technique of the wish table.
The wish table is that image you see in front of my bed.
It's a simple PowerPoint slide image,
I split it into four areas, the most important to me in life.
They might be different for you.
Love, finance, career and health.
Then I opened Google, Pinterest and Instagram
to look for images
of how I wanted to be feeling in that particular area of my life.
So about love: I want to get married, have three children
and a relationship filled with intimacy, connection, joyfulness.
About finances, I want to reach a balance,
the so-called financial freedom.
About my career,
I put all the academic journals I set my mind on to publish,
the prizes I want to win as a professor,
the books I want to publish
and also how many social followers I want.
And about my health,
I put all the images of how I'd like to see myself
and how I'd like to feel when I eat.
Once I created this wishes table,
I printed it in different formats
and put it in the places where I spent most of my time:
in my bedroom, in my living room,
at the office.
I also set it as a cover, my phone cover.
And every time my mind wanted to cheat me or send me back to the past,
I tried to trick it and send it to the future instead, to my desires,
how I would want to feel, not how I actually did.
And I focused on this whole image and above all on the number 79.
What is 79?
79 kilos is my year-long target weight.
As I told you, during the Geneva crisis I weighed 99 kilos,
almost 100.
But I had lost so much weight, I managed to reach 82.
But I never managed to weigh less than 82 kilos.
On March 25, 2019, two months ago, I weighed over 90 kilos.
So I said to myself, I want to use all this negative energy
and turn it into my goal, the goal I've had for so many years:
reaching 79 kilos by May 25th.
That is today.
And so as a good engineer, what did I do?
I created a chart, I asked myself, how much do I have to lose on average
every week to reach this goal.
And I managed to lose - around April 20th I weighted 83-84 kilos.
I had lost so much by then.
But we know, the last kilos are the hardest to lose.
And then I stopped weighing myself for a while,
and today I would like to share this moment with you.
Have I managed to reach my goal or not?
(Applause)
So we have a scale that is calibrated with my weight,
the weight of my clothes.
Can we ask someone to check?
(Applause)
These two months have been a beautiful journey.
And these are some tools of mine to transform a crisis.
The first is to ask what the real problem is
because, as in my case, I could have changed bosses,
I could have changed brand, company or even city.
But then the problem would come back
because the real problem was, I didn't like that career.
This exercise of values
can help overcome and understand the real problem of many crises.
And then change the mental path,
and then create a real or virtual help button.
And this wish table that helped me so much to focus,
to turn negative energy into positive.
Because you know, I know I will have other crises,
I can't avoid them, probably,
I can't even keep you from having them.
But I know that you can go through them, and you can transform them.
So I would like to ask you how you will transform your next crisis.
What will be your 79?
Bap meogeosseoyo.
(Applause)