4 Phases of a Career in Tech — Excited. Numb. Traumatized. Recovering.
….and other insight into how EQ can be a lifeline to black women engineers.
I was ready for this new journey in IT.
At least I thought I was.
I did everything I was supposed to do.
Excited
Hampton University Computer Science degree.
INROADS internships.
I was Unstoppable.
I landed my first job at a fortune 500 company. Although I had started there as an intern on the helpdesk, I was now a Network Analyst.
My job started requiring me to venture outside of the corporate office where most people were not familiar with me. As I visited our other locations, it did not take long for me to recognize the difference between what the employees there expected a technical expert to look like (and that was not me).
My first glimpse into the 2nd phase (numb) did not take long.
As I quickly moved up to higher profile projects, some of which required me to physically install networks to connect the company locations and its field employees, I started to travel.
As I traveled from location to location, I started experiencing abnormal stress. With any IT support position experiencing stress is normal.
My abnormal stress showed up when I become aware that I felt:
- pressure to perform,
- I had to prove myself,
- I had to ignore the stares and
- I had to ignore the micro-aggressions
All of this was because I was the one arriving to install and configure the network and servers.
How does a 25-year old, new to corporate America, learning the IT-ropes deal with all of this?
Numb
I popped Excedrin migraine like candy and lived off mountain dew while I struggled with my self-perception.
I questioned the reality of what I was feeling and experiencing, as I tried to ignore it all and just get my job done.
I had no one to talk to about what I was going through. I did not know where to turn. So I slowly learned how to manage myself.
I was developing my emotional intelligence or EQ (emotional quotient).
The EQ-i 2.0 Definition of EI is:
“…a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”
At the time I was in the trenches of IT, the idea of emotional intelligence or EQ was just growing in the psychology community and was not a validated skillset in corporations.
The IT Startups (dot-coms) were hitting the seen, and people were more worried about innovation and pool tables, in what was believed to be an intelligence-based field.
IQ or intelligence quotient:
“measures intellectual abilities and potential. Intelligence is said to be your cognitive skills, such as reasoning, logic, and problem-solving.”
I was very intelligent and excelled in academia, so my educational resume and intellect got me into many positions, but it took developing EQ (emotional quotient) to keep me there.
Emotional Intelligence can be defined as:
“a set of emotional and social skills that collectively establish how well we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”
Female engineers, especially black women and other women of color still deal with this today.
EQ can be a lifeline for them.
“For 515 senior executives analyzed by the search firm Egon Zehnder International, those who were primarily strong in emotional intelligence were more likely to succeed than those who were strongest in either relevant previous experience or IQ. In other words, emotional intelligence was a better predictor of success than either relevant previous experience or high IQ.”
Three of the domains in EQ-i 2.0 model that were crucial to my ability to not just survive as an engineer in the IT space, were
- Self-Perception,
- Interpersonal, and finally
- Stress Management.
It was essential for me to grow in these three domains to help me thrive. It was hard to learn how to manage my emotional and social functioning on my own.
I had different mentors over my career who checked on me and my well-being and poured into me periodically.
But remember, EQ was not a recognized space and emotional and social well-being were not the areas they checked on.
These three EQ-i 2.0 domains addressed the areas of my struggle where I needed the support.
“In the most complex jobs (insurance salespeople, account managers), a top performer is 127 percent more productive than an average performer (Hunter, Schmidt, & Judiesch, 1990). Competency research in over 200 companies and organizations worldwide suggests that about one-third of this difference is due to technical skill and cognitive ability while two-thirds is due to emotional competence” (Goleman, 1998).
In the domain of Self-Perception, I had already developed self-actualization, but self-regard was hard to maintain when there was constant scrutiny and little affirmation.
Emotional self-awareness was an area that was under constant development, as I struggled with the impact of the emotional roller coaster on my thoughts and actions.
- Processing the micro-aggressions,
- being “different”, and
- the added scrutiny in itself
was a full-time inner work.
“When awareness is brought to an emotion, power is brought to your life.” — Tara Meyer Robson
The only area in the Interpersonal domain that I needed to develop was to have mutually satisfying relationships characterized by trust and compassion, which was hard to find for me.
I felt isolated and alone.
I felt I belonged in very few circles at work.
In the Stress management domain, I was proficient in flexibility, but stress tolerance and optimism were areas I had to develop.
Over time the Excedrin migraine was not enough.
Traumatized
Stress became normal, and instead of addressing it, I carried it….until I could go for a run or exercise in some way (but who had time for that?).
Instead of being optimistic about things changing, I just adapted to the treatment focusing on trying to be perfect, when I could never be.
“What really matters for success, character, happiness and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills — your EQ — not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.” — Daniel Goleman
Recovering
So now I extend this lifeline to women in highly stressful and homogeneous environments.
I invite women in the many technical spaces to invest in themselves to build this competency and balance their emotional aptitude.
Even though I have not been a network engineer in 15 years, I taught computer technology and my female students were experiencing the same things.
This is not just self-care; it is now a recognized skillset that has proven to be an advantage for leadership and executive roles.
I did not have a space to grow in this area, but you do.
When I see the statistics that things have not really changed….I am still recovering.
