Provoking Your Greatness - Misti Burmeister

During the Q&A session of a panel discussion I was a part of recently, a woman stood up and asked, “Is it okay to cry at work?”   Previous to that moment, I would have said, “Of course, it’s okay to cry.” But I held my tongue because of the words I’d heard Freeman Hrabowski, President of UMBC, say during a speech just a few months before.   “We teach our female students not to cry at work,” he said.   At the time, I remember thinking, “You’re a guy—what do you know about women and emotions?” I found myself irritated with the fact a man of great influence was actively teaching women to hold back their emotions.   Clearly, he didn’t get it. Or, did he? Am I blind to something that he, along with several prominent women in history, sees?   Waiting for my panel-mates to share their own version of, “I’m a crier,” my mind went back to a few years ago when I listened to a speaker share about his mothers approach to emotions. “I watched her,” he said, “in the heat of difficult business conversations. She held her