Finding Your Path: How Emotional Intelligence Can Shape Your Nonprofit Journey

Rhonda Parker Taylor is an American writer, entrepreneur, and academic researcher. Born on October 18, 1964, in Noblesville, Indiana, she is the second youngest of five children to Anita and William Parker, founders of a steel manufacturing company. Rhonda’s childhood was spent in cornfields and cows, attending Heritage Christian School in Indianapolis.

While pursuing her academic explorations, Rhonda attended the University of Phoenix for a doctoral program in business and earned an MBA and a bachelor’s in science management from Indiana Wesleyan University.

Rhonda’s diverse writing spans from educational works to fiction, and she is well-known for her research on emotional intelligence. Her academic achievements extend to being a prominent leader presented at the United Nations Global Compact Committee.

Beyond her writing, Rhonda has an extensive background in teaching and training, with a decade of experience in business, management, and leadership education. She has taught a wide range of business courses at various institutions, including the University of Indianapolis, Oakland City University, National College, and others.

As an entrepreneur, Rhonda founded Intelligence Solutions, providing training, development, academic research, and business writing services. Prior to this, she served as Campus Director and Professor at National College and co-directed a small to midsize advertising agency named Partnership Plus Design Studio.

Overall, Rhonda Parker Taylor is a multi-talented individual who continues to inspire and impact others through her writing, academic achievements, and entrepreneurial ventures, all while embracing life’s adventures with her husband and three dogs.

More information at – https://rhondaparkertaylor.com

Read the Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, Founder and President of a nonprofit called SynerVision Leadership Foundation. SynerVision is the combination of the words synergy and vision. We create synergy as leaders by being very clear with our vision. We lead teams. We influence people’s lives. And as good leaders, we are always working on ourselves. And my guest today is Rhonda Parker-Taylor. And Rhonda’s got some really good skills that she can teach you. And wow, Rhonda, we’re ready to have inspiration from you. But first, You know, you have a long title, but it’s a really good title. Are you feeling deluged by your nonprofit strategy? Let’s get in balance through emotional intelligence. So, ah, that sounds intriguing. But before we go to there, tell us about your background and why do you do this important work?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
The reason I do this work is so many of us have so much potential, so much desire. We want to do the best by ourselves and others, but guess what? Sometimes we hold ourselves back by our own emotions, by our own fears, maybe our own desires, and sometimes even by our own envy of other people’s success or fear of success. Does this sound like you? Then you’re the person we need to talk to today because if By chance, you are feeling overwhelmed. That’s what deluge is. If you’re overwhelmed by the fact that you’re doing this and you’re pulling that cart by the horse instead of the horse pulling you, guess what? You need some help. You need to not be isolated and you need to be able to significantly improve your creativity to just be a better version of yourself. Well, how can I say that? And how can I say that it’s a better version of yourself? Well, maybe my doctorate in business might help. Maybe my creativity and writing might help, or maybe my successes and failures you can learn from because I’ve done them all. May you have a great day today and let’s enjoy ourselves.

Hugh Ballou:
Successes and failures. Which one did you learn the most from?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Oh, of course, it’s always the failures. And it’s always the things that you pulled yourself back and maybe you should have, or the risk you should have taken and you didn’t, or the risk you took and you shouldn’t have. It’s all of those because when you learn from the path you took, that reflection helps you understand how to be a better version of you the next time you go through it.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow, I should be a real expert, because I made a lot of mistakes. I’ve heard success is where you get up one more time, then you fall down.

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Well, that’s what they say. Believers fall down seven times, get up eight. But you know what? Guess what? If you’ve fallen down eight, you better get up the ninth, too. So that’s Proverbs saying it. But we all know that that is part of life. It doesn’t matter if it’s a life hit moment or a self hit moment. They’re the same in many a ways on the way you have to get back up. But just remember what they say in the African proverb, no skilled sailor is made by calm seas.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s profound. So you’re listening to the, if you’re on a podcast, coming by on video or listening to podcasts, this is the nonprofit exchange. You can find it at T H E. nonprofitexchange.org, the nonprofitexchange.org, where we’ve had all these wonderful interviews, and this one will be on top. You can find us there and find out about it, subscribe to it on your podcast platform, wherever you get podcasts. So, Rhonda, you’re an author too, and what is your book about, and why is it relevant to this topic today?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Well, my fiction novel, people are like, okay, you’re from business. Why are you writing a fiction novel? Well, first of all, I love whodunit thrillers, Agatha Christie, John Grisham, all of the wonderful, you know, stories that have clue base and you’re trying to figure out, you know, what happened. So I wanted to successfully accomplish writing a novel. That was my goal. But what I didn’t realize what I was doing, because my background is in emotional intelligence and business, is I was making every one of my characters out of balance. So you had the workaholic. How many of us out there working for nonprofits, leadership, are workaholics, reformed workaholics, something? She gets called to the jury duty. Now she’s got to try to keep her job up and be a foreman. Then you have the law and order guy. He’s all about the law, all about the government, all about right and wrong. Well, guess what? That means he’s eating out of cardboard boxes at night alone. How many of us have done that? Then you have the one dedicated to his friends, out there at the party all the time, going out and guess what? Now he’s up for being a conspiracy to a murder. what the heck happens, but you know what? We can learn from this in our business practices. I wanted to entertain people. I wanted them to think about their own lives in a different perspective. We all hit crossroads where we have to make decisions. Meryl Hemingway blessed me by reading the book and writing the foreword to the book. And the reason she did, and for those of you that may be too young to know who her grandfather was, her grandfather is the great Ernest Hemingway. She, in her own right, is an actress and author. And she read it, and she chose to endorse it. The reason she endorsed it is she said, we all come to a crossroads where we have to make a decision, what’s right, what’s wrong, where we’re going to go in our lives. And when we reach that crossroads, we have to decide. And we have to realize that even chocolate has an expiration date. Now think about that. How many times in our own businesses do we put good money after bad, make the same decision wrong, do the same processes that aren’t working, but we don’t change it? So although Crossroads is a fiction novel, it describes our lives. It describes what we go through every day.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s fascinating. I’ve written a lot of books. None of them are fiction books. That’s a real journey. So let’s talk about this feeling deluged. Dig into that a little bit more.

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Sure. So many a times when we’re in our own space, whether it be at work or at home, what ends up happening is we get overwhelmed. We have all these things. We have our responsibilities for our employees. We have the responsibilities for the financial aspects of the business. We have the responsibility of making sure that we’re making a difference in the nonprofit space, especially. You’re always trying to, maybe even get people to contribute, especially now with grants being harder to come by and all the money’s getting tighter and tighter. What are we going to do? What are we going to do to make sure our organization survives even past us as a leader? So in doing that, you not only have to gear yourself up for your own strategies, at the organization, you have to gear yourself up for your strategies to be successful as an individual. And all of those can look at your physical wellness for your individual space and your workspace, physical wellness of your organization. How are you going to make sure you physically have the space, you physically have the products, you physically have the need and the value that is required? So that’s an overwhelming statement all the way. So what do we have to do? We have to embrace the practices. that promotes on our individual level bodily health, drink our water, eat our berries, stand up so you don’t turn into a chair. And then you also have to do it from your organizational space. How do you have some vitality in your physical well-being of your organization? How are you getting seen? How are you adding the value to your mission and your vision that other people need? Are you answering a question? So you go through all the areas of your organization and you break it down into small chunks so that it’s almost like a checklist for yourself. So you don’t get overwhelmed.

Hugh Ballou:
Oh, wow. You’re trying to remember what was in the title. It’s emotional intelligence. How does that help us navigate? And there’s some things that we don’t know about ourselves. So how does emotional intelligence help us navigate some of these situations?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Well, you’ve got to look at what emotional intelligence is. It’s the ability to manage your own emotions, feelings, biases, and perceptions, and those of others. So it’s not just, oh, I know how I feel. Let’s make it transactional. You do this for me. I do that for you. Scratch each other’s back. But it’s being able to deconstruct what your perceptions are about every aspect of your organization or you. I’ll give you a good example. They told me when I was young, never eat a peanut. So all my life, I thought I was allergic to peanuts. Everybody, every dinner table, every restaurant, don’t allow any peanut oil, nothing, she’ll end up in the hospital. Guess what? I ate a peanut. Nothing happened. I had my own perception and biases. And that happens in our business. You can’t do this because this will happen. Or people won’t believe in your product if you do this. You get these perceptions, these ideas, these values, or you forget to include everybody in the organization, or at least every section of the organization. And you end up not getting a strategy that includes everybody. And so you get to the mail room. Let’s say you left the mail room out and all the letters being mailed are from another year or all the brochures are being mailed to the wrong person and the wrong client, whatever it might be, because you didn’t include and you didn’t hear the fears of others. when you in that room, because you didn’t include everybody. So it’s real important that we look at the physical wellness of us and apply the emotional intelligence, which is the emotions of self and others and deconstruct them and control them. So they’re not a blow up, they’re a true collaboration of how to make you better.

Hugh Ballou:
Whoa, whoa. So what are some hidden things that we don’t see about ourselves? What kind of people do you work with?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
I work with everybody from transitioning from high school to describing what they want as a career path and creating that path to multinational leaders that need someone to follow their leaders around and help them develop to where they can be more emotionally intelligent about their processes. So we even, for example, for the UN Global Combat Committee, which is one of the committees of the United Nations, they were at Case Western for their committee meetings. And they were asking for calls of papers, calls of research. And one of my cohorts and I, we had done a report or a experiment or test on both domestic leaders, which are people that just worked in one country, and those that worked in multinational capacity, which is two or more countries. And we tested them for their emotional intelligence and all 21 characteristics. And what we found was not only was the multinational leader scoring higher on their emotional intelligence, which is your right brain versus your left brain, kind of put it in perspective. But two of the qualities, they rated lower. And you’re like, I wonder why they would rate lower. But the domestic leader rated higher in self-impression of self. and lower, on the lower capacity of zero, of empathy. So your domestic leader was going around being more transactional, more big fish in a small pond, demanding, authoritarian more than their groups and the multinational leader because they had a higher impression of their ability to assess the problems without anybody’s input.

Hugh Ballou:
So when you work with people, what kind of results do they have?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
The first thing that we look for is, where are you in your career? What is it that we’re wanting to accomplish? And we’ll say, okay, if tomorrow was perfect, what will it look like? That’s a psychology question. They call it the miracle question. If your organization was perfect tomorrow, what does that look like? And we create those metrics. Then we say, okay, how are we gonna get there? What are we doing that gets us there? And most of the time, what we’re doing is not matching what we’re wanting to accomplish. I’ll give you a personal example, especially after the pandemic. I do this on a personal note for myself. Every three years, I’ll make myself go through it on the personal note and then on the professional also. And I was like, I’m balanced. I’m doing 33 home, 30% this, you know? And I’m like, but I’m just not getting joy in my purpose. So I did it and I sat down and I realized that I was staying balanced, but I wasn’t doing any of the things that was getting me to my purpose. I had stayed stuck in a rut of doing what was required when we had the pandemic and what we could do from the home and what ended up happening instead of cooking, which I enjoyed. I was ordering doordash because we couldn’t go out to eat anymore. Instead of getting out in the world, I was watching more television and it was like 25th on my enjoyable rating. So same thing with a business. You start out down this path, maybe as an entrepreneurial, sole entrepreneurial corporation, you know, wherever you’re at, you start down a path and you think you’ve gotten there and you quit strategizing. You quit re-evaluating. And then what ends up happening is you stop losing focus on what is my views, my values and my thoughts. And when you lose that perception of where you’re going, you’re following a trend that’s no longer in existence. And many a times you start seeing the downward cycle because that value statement that you put out 10 years ago is no longer the values of the 2025 or that personal integrity model that you put out for your staff to follow. and your core values no longer fits the fact that 40% of your people are working from home now, or whatever the new model is that you have in your professional pursuit. So by reevaluating and reflecting where you’ve been and where you want to be, then the exchange in your leadership strategies need to change with it too.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, and the world changes sometimes more rapidly than I can think. Oh, yeah.

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
In the steel industry right now.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. So one of the the issues we deal with as leaders. I mean, some people are procrastinators, some people don’t really have a pattern for how they meet or how they move forward. And some people give up, they’re just not resilient enough, so they give up before they succeed. Any of those themes you wanna speak about?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Well, I think the first thing to realize is every organization and every person in the organization has different methods of resiliency. You have your spiritual, you have your physical, you have your emotional, and you have your mental. Now put that in the personal space and then put that in your professional space. If you want resiliency, you need to know what the pillars of resilience are. Grit. Do you have you know, well-being? Do you have emotional, you know, support for your staffing? And I’m not talking about necessarily a counselor. What happens when things go wrong? Can they come see you? Can they talk to you? Or are you closing your office away from the emotions and hiding behind your desk because you don’t want to face it? Personal example, I wrote Crossroads, found a publisher. They backed out after two years of us working on it. And then turned around, my sister said, why aren’t you doing anything with Crossroads? I go, oh, this client, this client had every excuse in the book. That was one of those failures, I thought. It ended up being a blessing. Because as soon as she called me, she says, no, that’s not it. You have fear of success and vulnerability. I’m like, what are you talking about? She says, you talk about it every day. When you have fear of success or fear of making yourself vulnerable, you’re hesitant in that decision-making model. You haven’t controlled those emotions. Guess what? Within a week, I had found a new publisher. And within a month, they had delivered it to Meryl Hemingway. You couldn’t have asked any better than that. No. So successes and failures are blessings at the same time as they are the curse at the time.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. This is great. So I want to go visit your website and, um, I’m going to share it on the screen. Now. Some people are listening on a podcast, so they can’t see this. So I’m going to, um, start on your, your homepage. So you’re, um, I’ll give people a URL. It’s your name, Rhonda, R H O N D a Parker, taylor.com Rhonda Parker, taylor.com. So people go there, Rhonda. I need to get back to the homepage. There it is. Rhonda Harper Taylor. What will people find? Yeah, I went looking at your blog.

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Okay, so they can find me right there on the on that homepage, you can go and you can send it, there’s a link for my all my social medias at the bottom. And there’s also an email link where you can shoot a direct email to to our organization and we’ll answer it. And the blog is just it’s a new blog coming out. So there’s only two, I think three, three, three posts at this point, but there’s more. I also do speaking events. I’ve got one with the Women’s Real Estate Organization in Indiana this next week. And some of the topics that we deal with are business, obviously, emotional intelligence, resilience, writing, any authorship kind of events. And I love to hear from people. I just love to hear from people, because when I hear from you, I really feel like I’m connecting with what my next path should be.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. Is this a reciprocity in sharing with other people, isn’t there?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Mm-hmm. There definitely is. I think that the one thing we can always learn is you get, and it’s part of the resilience model, is helping behaviors. When you can help others, you become a better person, and you become more fulfilled. It’s part of the self-actualization model of success.

Hugh Ballou:
And as we equip ourselves, we’re able to influence more other people. Definitely impact other people’s lives. So Rhonda, you’ve given us a lot of new stuff to think about today. So people looking at this, if you didn’t catch all of those are listening to the podcast, you didn’t catch all those really good sound bites. There’ll be a full transcript on the webpage at the nonprofit exchange.org. So there’ll be all those quotes. You can find them there. She didn’t lose anything. So, Rhonda, thank you for inspiring us today. What do you want to leave people with today?

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
I would like everybody to really realize that if you wake up every day with intentionality, and with kindness, and you close with compassion every day, those helping behaviors can help you bloom, and it can help you become a better person. But also, if you’re in those times of trial, no matter whether your business is being successful or whether you’re still in the beginning stages, just picture yourself like sea glass. When glass is broken and falls at the bottom of the sea, the ocean shapes it into a beautiful smooth gem. So now you’re sea transformed into sea glass. Your organization can be sea glass. If you’re out there doing good for others, then good will come back to you. So always know if it’s meant to be, It’s up to you. And those little scars that you feel, those little triumphs that you feel, those little successes and failures are all part of the journey that make you see class.

Hugh Ballou:
Rhonda Parker Taylor, you’ve been an inspiration today. Thank you so much for sharing today on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Rhonda Parker Taylor:
Thank you. Thank you for having me and I really appreciate you.