Finding Your Personal “GPS”: A Mastermind Interview with Carrie Gallant
By Raman Kang
“I have a fascination with what makes people tick, so it was a natural evolution once I found mediation and coaching,” says Carrie Gallant, a women’s leadership expert, certified Conversational Intelligence (C-IQ) coach, mediator and negotiation strategist. Carrie specializes in women’s leadership issues - influencing others and advocating for yourself while maintaining your identity, authenticity, and ethics.
Everything Carrie accomplished led her to this field. Before her career in women’s leadership, she was a lawyer working in mediation. Her job consisted of finding out what was important to her clients and how they wanted to achieve their goals. In university, she studied psychology related to human behaviour, but it was a political science class that would shape her values on women’s’ issues. In particular, it was a paper she wrote about the equality provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that was the catalyst for changing her life. “To study women’s rights from that perspective and to see what was currently happening, that’s what started the ball rolling,” she says.
Once Carrie discovered coaching, she realized how similar it was to mediation and decided to study it. Her drive to help others came from her belief in people’s capacity to do good and strive to be better. For Carrie, coaching is having someone hold up a mirror to see your blind spots, it’s having someone in your corner to help you move forward, and it’s the application of human potential. Carrie follows a positive psychology approach that helps people become more grounded in who they are. She starts her clients off with an assessment to help them see themselves from different angles to get a clearer vision of their values and goals. She calls this practice her GPS (Gallant Power System). “When you’re clear on your values, and you’re clear on your vision for your life, and you're clear on the principles by which you want to lead, it’s an incredibly powerful GPS for navigating any uncertainty.” And navigating is precisely what Carrie thinks of when she thinks about women in tech. “It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to enter a field that is so underrepresented by women, and it’s amazing to see how women in tech are there for each other to support and share resources.” How you navigate your career and the tools you use are essential. That’s where her “GPS” comes into play, understanding who you are, what's important to you, and what you value. “If we’re not clear on what these [priorities] are, we might make decisions that are wrong for us because of peer pressure or societal pressure to be a certain way.”
While guest-hosting the Women in Tech World Mastermind, Carrie discussed how many of us trained to be experts in our field during university. Still, we rarely get an education on motivating and managing other people. You can be technically gifted, but being successful depends on knowing how to manage your team and influence others. You also need to know how to negotiate and how to say no. “We often don’t get that kind of training, and if we do, it’s from elsewhere.” For women in tech to be more successful, they need to use those people skills, she says. “It’s a power[ful] skill to be able to influence, persuade others, and communicate to get your message across.”
Her advice to people working remotely during this pandemic is to dial-up on your listening. “It’s important to get your message across, to influence, negotiate, communicate, and understand others when we're working remotely,” says Carrie. We can accomplish all of those things when we actively listen. The situation we’re facing isn’t just about working remotely and having most of our conversations digitally; it’s also about what is going on around us. Ask yourself, how can you understand the other person better? It’s essential to listen and understand what the other person is going through during this time as a way of connecting.
“We're all facing different things, so having compassion and empathy for yourself and others is super important right now. Admittedly, it’s always been important,” says Carrie, “But we’ve been thrust into a situation where if we aren't paying attention to those things, we will have misunderstandings in communication.” It’s important to advocate for what you need right now, and that can be challenging if we’re making assumptions. Having mixed understandings of what we expect from each other is often the place where we have miscommunication, which can cause conflict - so it’s vital to have those crucial conversations. “Having those hard conversations is not as hard as we think, sometimes we make them harder in our minds,” says Carrie. “Shared expectations are the key to a shared successful outcome.”
If you are interested in accelerating your business or career, learn new skills, and collaborate in a supportive and welcoming group then reserve your spot in the next Women in Tech Mastermind Series today! Sign up at https://womenintechworld.com/masterminds