“All In for KC” was the theme of the Kansas City Area Development Council’s (KCADC) annual meeting held last Friday. A sold-out crowd of 1,500 attended the luncheon held at the Kay Barnes Grand Ballroom in the Kansas City Convention Center.
Tim Cowden, president and CEO of KCADC, and Brian Roberts, co-chair of the KCADC Board of Directors and chief diversity officer and director of operations at Lockton Companies, opened the event by highlighting the business triumphs and achievements of the Kansas City region.
Cowden also announced that NetPMD Solutions, a professional services and network design company, is locating its corporate headquarters to the Kansas City region. In addition, Ray Kowalik, incoming co-chair of the KCADC Board of Directors and chairman and CEO of Burns & McDonnell, shared that KDADC will be the new home of KC Global Design, a collective of the world’s leading architecture, engineering, design and construction firms based in the KC region.
The featured speaker, Mel Robbins, Kansas City-born author and motivational speaker, shared some of the insights detailed in her new book, “The High 5 Habit.” Each attendee received a copy of the book, courtesy of CommunityAmerica Credit Union (CACU), whose CEO, Lisa Ginter, also is co-chair of the KCADC Board of Directors.
Whitney Bartelli, chief marketing and strategy officer at CACU, shared the stage with Robbins, serving as the moderator.
Robbins said that in April 2020, she found herself in a place where she didn’t expect to be. She was fired from her dream job as a talk show host. Within a week, her children were sent home from college because of the pandemic. Robbins had a book contract canceled, and the publisher wanted the advance monies, which Robbins already had spent, returned.
“So I found myself, like many of you probably found yourselves, in freefall in April 2020, trying to figure out how am I going to handle this. You don’t have to be in the middle of a pandemic to experience that moment where you feel overwhelmed by the number of things going on,” she said.
She described a morning in April 2020, where she was standing at her bathroom mirror in her underwear, picking herself apart because she thought she “looked like hell.”
“So as lame as this sounds everybody, standing there in my underwear, feeling like life was just in a freefall, I raised my hand and high fived the woman in the mirror because she looked like she needed it,” said Robbins.
Robbins said she felt an immediate energy shift and started feeling better. For the next month, Robbins started high fiving herself in the mirror. She posted a selfie giving herself a high five, and within an hour, without prompting, 100 people from around the world started posting selfies giving themselves high fives.
“And that’s when it clicked and I thought, okay, wait a minute, maybe I’m not the only one who needs this,” she said.
Robbins undertook a year-long research project to show what the simple habit of giving high-fives does.
“A high-five is actually not just a gesture. A high-five communicates and satisfies your most fundamental needs: To be seen. To be celebrated. And to be supported,” she said.
Robbins explained that research has shown that the nervous system is hard-wired for celebration. When you cross the finish line or when your team scores, you raise your arms.
“When you go to raise your hand to yourself, your nervous system recognizes the gesture because of the neuro programming that’s already in your body, mind and spirit. And that jolt that you feel, that little switch kind of flips. That’s your nervous system giving you a little jolt of energy,” said Robbins.
That little jolt of energy is a drip of dopamine, a type of neurotransmitter made by the body and used by the nervous system to send messages between nerve cells. Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure.
Robbins urged the audience to practice the high five habit.
“You need to do this for yourself. You need to teach this to your kids because your mood impacts everything, especially focus right now. And if you can’t do this for yourself, you can’t authentically do it for everybody else. . . . You’re demonstrating to your brain that you have your own back and you believe in your own capability. That’s what this is really about,” she said.
Leaders can use the high five to motivate their teams. In running a meeting, she suggested that the team leader bring all team members, even the most introverted, into the discussion to demonstrate that the leader cares about everyone and their opinions. In addition, Robbins said leaders should make a conscious effort to call out a “high five moment,” highlighting something a team member has done right.
Robbins said it is great if it feels weird to high-five yourself because it is a sign that a new neural pathway is getting plowed into your brain.
“Just give me five lousy days. Five days. Brush your teeth, get the gunk out of your mouth so you don’t spread that dragon breath on everybody all day, and then raise your hand no matter how you feel for five days in a row, look yourself in the eye and you will be shocked at how the science works from the inside out,” she said.
Evoking memories of the championship parades honoring the Kansas City Royals and the Kansas City Chiefs, Roberts said in closing the meeting:
“When was the last time you gave a complete stranger a high five and didn’t think one second about it? That’s all in. That’s really what it means as a city and a region to be all in. We were all together celebrating something that was amazing. And so the question is what does it look like if this business community, this community at large, took that spirit and that energy and attacked the growth, attacked opportunity in a way that would just lift this region to another level?”