This chat on spiritual ecology with Flo Scialom is a beautiful exploration of how we can use mindfulness and compassion practices to deepen and sustain our activism and relationship to the Earth.
Flo is a passionate facilitator, mindfulness teacher and community-builder. She holds an MA in Anthropology + Sociology from Leiden University, and currently works as Communications + Events Manager at a UK charity called theNetwork of Wellbeing (NOW).
She also has experience running mindfulness sessions for a wide range of people – from new mums to community activists. She loves writing and reflecting on her experiences, particularly around how mindfulness relates to social change.
TRANSCRIPT: Please note this was auto-generated and has not been edited, and may contain errors.
Flo Scialom – Deep Ecology
[00:00:00] Flo Scialom: And so it’s a tool that can be used in many different ways.
[00:00:03] And in order to embed it in a kind of social justice and social change narrative, you need to bring that ethical framework back in. And for me, a part big part of that is acknowledging the compassion element of having a practice. That it’s not just the focus, it’s also the practice of generating compassion.
[00:00:26] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
[00:01:06] Hello. Hello everyone. And welcome to this episode today of the public love project. So we are speaking with a good friend of mine Flo Scialom. So Flo is a facilitator and mindfulness teacher, and she works with the Network of Wellbeing as a communications and events manager. She’s also the co-founder of a new project called Spiritual Ecology Netherlands
[00:01:27] together with our friends and colleagues, Maaike Boumans and Annick Nevejan. Flo loves to facilitate groups and transformative processes. It is one of her strengths. And much of facilitation work is focused on Active Hope and the Work that Reconnects. She holds a MA in Anthropology and Sociology from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a BA in International Relations from Sussex University in the UK.
[00:01:53] You can find her on her blog. @mindful.Change both on instagram and online in the show notes below but welcome to the show today.
[00:02:03] Flo Scialom: Thanks so much Laura. It’s really lovely to be here.
[00:02:06] Laura Hartley: Ah, thank you for coming on. So Flo uh, to give a bit of context, we met back in 2016 in Bhutan. We were both looking at gross national happiness, and it’s been really exciting to see where our paths have traveled since then.
[00:02:19] And towards what you are looking at now, which is spiritual ecology. So can you maybe start us off with a little bit about what spiritual ecology is and how it works with environmental activism?
[00:02:31] Flo Scialom: Yeah, sure. So just to say, yeah, it’s really lovely and special to be speaking with you and be on that journey together since meeting in Bhutan and uh, what an incredible trip that was.
[00:02:43] And yeah, I think that uh, Bhutan journey was part of my own personal Journey through looking at the intersection between inner practices and how they have a kind of impact on the wider world. So what can practices like mindfulness um, how can they make a difference to work, change making and to work to try and make positive change in the world?
[00:03:07] So spiritual ecology is one like branch of that ongoing journey of discovery that I’m on, and I’m really excited to [00:03:20] be working on this new project, Spiritual Ecology Netherlands with Maaike and Annick. So in in a nutshell spiritual ecology is about really acknowledging that life is both sacred and deeply interconnected.
[00:03:34] So the sacred aspect is really like deeply appreciating the, the beauty of the natural world around us and, and, and really stopping to have a sense of awe for all that that offers us. And the interconnectedness is, is about a sense of responsibility that comes with that that we. That we don’t exist as, as individual beings on, on our own little islands, that we, we rely on each other for, for everything in our lives.
[00:04:04] And that we need to have practices that acknowledge that interconnectedness in order to empower us to take that responsibility and act in ways that, that are kind of respectful of, of that interconnect.
[00:04:21] Laura Hartley: You know, and this interconnection, I think is a really fascinating place to actually dive into a little bit because it’s something that, you know, we’re deeply missing in our culture a lot of the time.
[00:04:32] I think we’re kind of inheriting like centuries and millennial of disconnection. So how do we go about really fostering and facilitating this interconnection and what is that experience like?
[00:04:44] Flo Scialom: Yeah, great question. Just to kind of share about like the, the, the frame of spirituality and spiritual, I think that that, like many things has been a little bit co-opted sometimes to be very over individualistic that people think when I have a spiritual practice, it’s something I do on my own.
[00:05:04] And just to say I’m using spiritual in the most inclusive sense. It’s essentially practices that can acknowledge the sacredness of life. It doesn’t have to be linked to any kind of organized religion or . It can even be compatible, you know, with very secularism. But people associate that spirituality or can do in our kind of capitalist, modern society with this very individual framing that I’m doing my practices to make myself feel better in order that I can be more productive.
[00:05:38] That is a part of having an inner practice, but that’s very much like a small part of the story. And actually having a genuine transformative inner practice is about generating that energy within you to, to Experience, like you say there, that interconnection within yourself in, in your kind of inner world.
[00:06:04] So I think that the, the question of like, how, how does that work? I think you, you can have practices that explicitly focus on acknowledging that interconnection. And for me it’s also vital do these practices in community in order to be able to kind of share and reflect and experience that interconnection together as part of the wider sense of practice.
[00:06:31] Laura Hartley: What are some of these practices? You know, I know when we’re coming together, there’s a lot of different spaces that we can be working. You know, whether it’s reconnecting to the earth, [00:06:40] reconnecting to each other, reconnecting to our own hearts. But when we’re looking at this idea of spiritual ecology and this work of, you know, really healing some of the crises that we’re facing in the world at this kind of deep level, what are these practices that you’re looking.
[00:06:56] Mm.
[00:06:57] Flo Scialom: So my kind of background in practice comes very much from the engaged Buddhism so my entry point into practice was a sense of engaged mindfulness and sharing in community. And that means, you know, very simple mindfulness, awareness of breath, walking meditations and also.
[00:07:21] Sharing what’s on our hearts in community so that we can kind of more effectively handle our emotional worlds, and that helps to support our wider engagement. And we can explore that a little bit more in depth if you’d like to. And in addition I’ve been, like I say, I’m on an ongoing journey.
[00:07:40] What’s been added to my practices, particularly in relation to the spiritual ecology frame and linking in and out to change is the, the Work That Reconnects, Active hope. So the work that was inspired by particularly Joanna Macy and Active Hope is a, a book written by Joanna Macy, together with Chris Johnston, which is actually.
[00:08:02] I love it so much, and it’s just been a new edition has just been released for their 10 year anniversary. So yeah, I I’m looking forward to seeing how they’ve updated. So the subtitle of that book is How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy , And I think it’s very, very apt necessary.
[00:08:20] Yeah, very necessary. And actually there’s a whole set of practices behind how to maintain a sense of active hope over time. And that’s built on the work that reconnects, which is at its core got a spiral that people can travel through, which starts from a real sense of gratitude for, like I was talking about earlier, the sacredness and the beauty of the world.
[00:08:43] And then travels through kind of honoring our pain for the world. And then through that combination of gratitude and honoring our pain, we can kind of see with new eyes, have a new perspective and then go and take action in the world. So often in spiritual ecology practices, we’ll be drawing on that work of the spiral and of the work that reconnects.
[00:09:07] There’s other practices, but I think that that’s a really powerful and a really prominent one.
[00:09:11] Laura Hartley: I, I remember when I first came across the work of Joanna Macy, and it was actually a little before I got involved in kind of more direct activism, and I, I just saw this book on my neighbor’s shelf and I was like, Oh, this looks interesting.
[00:09:24] Can I borrow this? And it was like, Mind blowing, like every page I was like taking notes and you know, underlining sentences and like taking photographs. Cause I was like, damn, I can’t underline it. Actually I need to hand it back. But it was a really life changing book for me. Yeah. But you know, I’d love to actually dive.
[00:09:44] A little bit and hear a little bit about how you came to this work, when did you start thinking yourself about this intersection of inner and outer change? Because I know you’ve obviously been looking at outer change, looking at your degrees for a long time. So where did this intersection begin?[00:10:00]
[00:10:00] Flo Scialom: Actually, Discovering the power of personal practice. That’s where my interest really begun. So I, I began practicing, like I say, in the kind of Thich Nhat Hanh tradition and what’s called Wake Up, which is kind of the young person’s like 18 to 35. I’m, I’m just past for that young person Mark now.
[00:10:21] But you know, 10 years ago was still well in there. So I, I joined a Wake up sangha. A sangha is essentially a kind. The, the Buddhist word for community. Although the wake up sanghas and generally the Plum Village Thich Nhat Hanh tradition is very open even if you’re not kind a formal practicing Buddhist.
[00:10:40] So I joined this, the sangha, and I was just blown away by the beauty or like the beauty of sitting to practice together with people. And also, like I say, the combination of practicing mindfulness and then also being able to share with a community of people like out inner emotional world. It just really helped me overcome a sense of isolation and insecurity and fear that I was just the only weirdo that was worried about this or that.
[00:11:11] And due to the like positive energy that I generated in myself during those practices, I really became fascinated with like, okay, how does this relate to. Looking at the wider world. We’re facing so many challenges right now, so how does this, how do the two interconnect, how can we use this, this beauty of the inner practice to serve all of the challenges we see in the world?
[00:11:37] And obviously that’s a question many people have asked, you know, like, Thich Nhat Hanh the, the founder of this community that I I joined was very much about engaged Buddhism. He was a Vietnamese monk. He actually had to leave Vietnam due to his peace activism during the Vietnam War. And he was very Active, and he very much saw mindfulness practice as being a fuel for engaged action in the world.
[00:12:05] So really like delving a bit more deeply into that, that side of mindfulness, that side of Buddhism, and also that took me on the journey to Bhutan, like we’ve touched on, like looking at, okay, how could this, A kind of more systems level, you know, like Gross National Happiness in Bhutan as an alternative to gross domestic product.
[00:12:27] So they decide to measure their societal success in happiness rather than kind of constant growth and consumption. So that was a part of my journey as well of seeing. That’s a very Buddhist country, they very much focus on their inner practices, and that’s led to them saying, Let’s manage our government in a different way.
[00:12:48] So , since I started kind of really actively practicing in community almost 10 years ago, I’ve just been looking for different ways to kind of deepen that sense of connection between the inner practice and the outer change we’d like to see in the world.
[00:13:04] Laura Hartley: how has this influenced your activism now?
[00:13:07] I mean, do you think, you know, if you hadn’t found this practice or you weren’t using this practice, where would this kind of difference be? How has it influenced or shaped what you are offering today?
[00:13:17] Flo Scialom: Yeah, well I think [00:13:20] that, and I wonder how many people relate to this, but in terms of my own like activist practice, I always feel like I could be doing so much more.
[00:13:31] You know, so I feel inspired by what Joanna Macy says, You don’t need to do everything.
[00:13:37] Do what calls your heart, effective action comes from love. So I love that. Because I do, I do ,think right now, There’s so many things that , I feel like I could and should be doing and want to solve and, one person and I wanna do what is being called of me from inside out.
[00:14:00] And that means that my activism often looks like a little bit less frontline, like I go on the protest and I let my voice be heard, but often my, like more regular day to day activism looks like supporting the wellbeing of activists. So running Active Hope workshops, going into like protest groups, seeing how I can support their emotional, psychological wellbeing.
[00:14:26] In a way that is my activism. Like I say, I feel like I always want to do more, but that’s like the main way that I try and show up and support. Because at least it’s something that I can do with my skills. And I know that it’s something that’s needed actually because .
[00:14:43] Activists, changemakers, people that are really on the front lines can feel so overwhelmed and hopeless. So I think if I can help be part of that wider community by supporting emotional, psychological wellbeing, then that’s a small but significant role to play.
[00:15:01] It would look completely different probably if if I hadn’t gone on that inner journey. It
[00:15:07] Laura Hartley: reminds me, there’s a Joanna Macy quote that I love where her definition of an activist is anybody who’s active for a purpose bigger than personal gain. And you, you know, as somebody who’s been involved in lots of different forms of activism, it’s.
[00:15:22] It’s a definition that I love because I think it actually is what you’re speaking about. It gives us permission not just to show up in the way that the world dictates, or the way that culture dictates, or the way that a movement dictates, but to show up in the way that is true for us so that whenever we’re acting in whatever capacity, you know, for something larger than ourselves, that we are committing to a form of activism.
[00:15:46] But I wanna circle around to something you were talking about there. You know, this. The importance of mindfulness in what we’re doing because, you know, at the beginning we were saying, spiritual practices, mindfulness, they do seem like they’re just for us, right? We’re kind of sold to them by capitalism, by the wellness industry as things that benefit us.
[00:16:05] You know, if you just practice mindfulness or you meditate or you, you know, fill out your gratitude journal or whatever it is that you will feel better or you’ll be more resilient, or whatever it may. But how are these practices really serving the world? You know, if, if we’re an activist, if we’re trying to make a change, you know, what do they offer us when we’re working with social justice?
[00:16:27] Flo Scialom: So this is, I find this question fascinating because like you say Of course there can be a lot of critique that mindfulness can be co-opted and repackaged out as an individualistic [00:16:40] consumerist capitalist production maximization project. And that’s not what I’m
[00:16:46] hoping to engage with or talk about when I’m talking about mindfulness. So how can it serve um, a kind of wider sense? I think there’s, first of all, we need to acknowledge that mindfulness is In like in its roots where it comes from Buddhist practice, it’s in combination with compassion. So some teachers talk about mindfulness and compassion as like two wings of one bird.
[00:17:13] So mindfulness practice is the focus on the present moment, the kind of training of that focus and compassion a kind of understanding of suffering and a wish to alleviate suffering in the world. Both of those are practices. What, what has been done very much in the kind of individualistic understanding is to.
[00:17:35] Take out the compassion to strip that down and then just focus on the focus. And so, so look at the benefit, like, and that is, that can be a very individualistic thing. Look at
[00:17:46] how
[00:17:46] Laura Hartley: your concentration will improve, you know, you’ll, you’ll be so much more productive, you know, if like you stop multitasking, you actually get more done.
[00:17:54] Flo Scialom: Exactly. Exactly. And and you know, if you just really, you know, also some teachers talk about, you know, mindfulness could be used to train someone in the military to more effectively, kill essentially. And so it’s a tool that can be used in many different ways.
[00:18:12] And in order to embed it in a kind of social justice and social change narrative, you need to bring that ethical framework back in. And for me, a part big part of that is acknowledging the compassion element of having a practice. That it’s not just the focus, it’s also the practice of generating compassion. In Buddhism, you know, there’s a like kind of a metta practice where you generate compassion for yourself and for those around you and for the wider world that, that, that is part of practicing, that you need to embed that into how you practice mindfulness.
[00:18:50] So that’s a part of it. I think If you see practice in that way it can offer changemakers, but also changemaking movements, different things. So it can offer a sense of fuel in a way for activism. So it can be very easy for people to become overwhelmed and burntout out by wanting to create change.
[00:19:16] But then, You know, trying and starting, and then immediately like realizing they can’t possibly do everything, and then stepping back again because it’s just too much. So I think having a practice can help to kind of sustain activism over time. So I, I love like Angela Davis who’s like obviously a well known.
[00:19:38] Classic activist says, “Anyone who’s interested in making change in the world also has to learn how to take care of herself, himself, themselves”. And uses like mindfulness meditation as an example of that. Self care. So this is self care understood as embedded within wider movements for change and reframing it , as a [00:20:00] fuel.
[00:20:00] So that it’s not just like, Okay, I’m gonna just take care of myself in this little bubble, but I’m gonna fuel myself so that I can keep that interrelationship with between my, my own sense of kind of self and health and how I can then show up in the world.
[00:20:20] Laura Hartley: Well, I’d love to talk a little bit as well. When we’re looking at climate activism, we’re looking at environmental activism, and I’ll dare say any activism, any form of changemaking that we’re doing, but I will frame it in this kind of climate and environmental sphere- there’s a lot of emotions. That come with the work that we do. You know, there’s grief, there is anger, there’s rage, you know, and learning how to navigate these is challenging.
[00:20:44] You know, there’s a lot to hold that is too much like in my experience or in my opinion, for one person to hold. So what do these practices offer us when we’re looking at first the rise of eco emotions, rise of, you know, grief and anxiety, what the world is going through, but also then in our own work and our own spaces
[00:21:05] Flo Scialom: as well.
[00:21:06] I think this is like vital cause it, you know, we can’t see ourselves as, , machines that can just keep going and keep going , on the activist treadmill. And then we are kind of recreating this Production extractive mentality that we’re trying to get away from.
[00:21:24] So um, I think to do things in a different way, to do activism in a different way, we need to acknowledge that we’re emotional beings and we need tools to help us deal with the intensity of the emotions that come up when you are staring in the face of ecological collapse and, and feeling the intensity of, of the heat waves and reading about all of.
[00:21:47] Um, Evidence of climate breakdown that we can see already in the world. Of course, a lot comes up in your system and inner practices can help you to hold that. I think one kind of core message is to feel it I think it can feel so huge that oftentimes when those kind of emotions come up there, can we check out, Can be.
[00:22:14] Yeah, we wanna check out, we wanna repress it, we wanna put it back in a like box so that we can kind of cope basically. And that’s understandable. You know, that’s a coping mechanism. What having more kind of conscious practices, particularly in, and, and again, I come back and back to community cuz I do think, you know, this isn’t something that we just do
[00:22:35] only alone. Of course, you can have a personal practice, but In my experience, it’s so much more powerful if you embed this in, in a kind of community of practice. But I, if you are able to have that, those practices, they can help you to feel like in the Joanna Macy’s spiral, Honor your pain for the world.
[00:22:54] So really go into those emotions and allow them to be there. And also see that as, Information and energy. I think also with anger, there’s a really great book called Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens. And he talks about, and other, other thinkers. I’ve spoken about this well, about anger as a kind of energy and it’s it’s a friend, it teaches us [00:23:20] and it’s got information in it that we can use to inform us. But if we just repress it, then, then we are kind of stagnating that energy. Whereas if, but if we just. Don’t take care of it. If we don’t have kind of practices as containers to allow us to safely hold and explore and then transform those emotions, then it can kind of just spill out in a way that’s not supportive or constructive.
[00:23:48] So I think that being able to practice together, have that supportive community around, can help you to hold pain like grief for the world anger and rage for the world in a way that then allows you to, again, coming back to Joanna Macy’s Spiral, see with new eyes, like gain a new perspective on what that emotion is trying to tell you.
[00:24:13] And often it’s something’s wrong and I, and I wanna act. And that doesn’t mean you individually have to change the whole world. That means, you know, that means different things to different people. But in the broadest sense, it means you wanna take action for the world that you hope for, rather than the breakdown that you see around you, and that that’s important and powerful to listen to rather than to ignore.
[00:24:35] Laura Hartley: I think that reflection on anger is really important. I, I have a long and a complex history with anger as an emotion. You know, it’s, it’s the one that I still default to the quickest that, you know, I, I, I go to anger very, very quickly and it’s certainly one that when I didn’t have containers for it, when I didn’t have the skills to know how to work with it, it would
[00:24:58] build up until it would spill out, you know, and it would spill out at small situations at, people that it wasn’t necessarily directed at. And that was because I hadn’t really learned how to actually use anger. That anger is an informer, that it tells us things, it tells us what we care about. It tells us that we hurt, you know?
[00:25:16] And that anger also has a fascinating relationship to power, and to how it actually manifests into violence and into rage, just and into shame is really with, its link to power. Which, you know, is the link that I’m kind of curious to make here, because sometimes with mindfulness and spiritual ecology work, there’s kind of still a narrative that it’s simply about staying with long haul work.
[00:25:41] It’s simply about doing the work that we’re doing or doing activism that we’re doing, but staying with it for longer so that we don’t burnout. And I’m curious, is it that, or is there also a transformation in the way that we’re making change? Is this a different way to approach it entirely?
[00:25:58] Flo Scialom: Yeah, so it’s, it’s a really good point and I think that there is that risk.
[00:26:03] And I think that a part of finding containers for emotions is a part of doing work in new ways. Because if we are just seeing ourselves as just kind of wanting to continue on, continue on, continue on, that’s again like a bit of a machine like mentality. Whereas if we
[00:26:22] embed that understanding of us as emotional beings. That’s already starting to do like changemaking in a different way because it’s acknowledging Us and the way that we’re engaging in the work, rather than just kind of trying to extract the labor of individual [00:26:40] changemakers. And I think what you say there about anger is really interesting in your own personal experience.
[00:26:48] Cuz for me, and this might be a little bit of a Diversion from your question, but it, it will circle back, but it, it, it comes up in response to your, how much anger resonates for you because for me it’s often sadness and I’ve found that anger can be quite hard for me to tap into and hold. And I think that this is and like obviously, you know, we are both.
[00:27:13] Wow. Wow. I say obviously I, I’m female identifying and I know that you are. And so I see this as a kind of culturally embedded thing that I’ve been, and so that’s why I found it really interesting that you, like anger is more accessible for you because for me it’s been much more accessible to look at sadness and to to cry and access my grief and to access anger.
[00:27:36] And I’ve seen that as a kind of socialized thing and related back to power. I think that often there’s in power structures that are made invisible about who’s allowed to feel what, who’s allowed to express what how we should engage with things, that when we take the time to
[00:27:56] do activism work more slowly in a way. And, and I know there’s this, this tension like there’s this feeling that we urgently you need to slow down. The program that we did in Bhutan was called like slow change. There’s this tension. We’re facing urgent challenges, and part of what we need to do is slow down.
[00:28:15] But in that slowing down of inner practices, you make those power structures a bit more visible and you empower yourself and your movements to challenge those power structures that are coming up. Those power structures can very easily replicate themselves in movements where you see
[00:28:32] someone identifying as, as white male, having the most prominent voice again and again in, in discussions. And so,
[00:28:41] Laura Hartley: And do you see the women taking on the admin roles as well and more and more of all the like, Oh, we’ll do up the minutes or will you know, I’ll do the agenda this week? Absolutely. These dynamics.
[00:28:51] Play themselves out in like every circle that we’re in a lot of the time, unless we’re very conscious
[00:28:57] Flo Scialom: about it. Yeah, exactly. And that’s why I’m also really interested in um, mindfulness teachers, people of people of colour that are also sharing about the racial dynamics of this, You know, Lama Rod Owens, um, Rhonda Magee also wrote a book about mindfulness practice and racial justice, um, Angel Kyoto Williams.
[00:29:18] A lot of teachers are bringing this aspect. So I think that that’s in a sense um, helping us to create change in a new way. I like this concept of like prefiguratives. It’s a academic term for more, like embodying the change you want to see already in the world.
[00:29:38] So you, you don’t just say, Okay, we just have to power through and it doesn’t matter about the inequality in our movement. It doesn’t matter because this is the goal. You need to create change in the way that you then want to see the world becoming. So you need to embed that already in the way that your, your movements, your organizations are structured..
[00:29:58] Yeah, the way
[00:29:58] Laura Hartley: we make change is just [00:30:00] as important as the change itself. You know, the way, the way we make change is change exactly. To get a little bit meta with those levels there. Yeah. I wanna ask, you know, what does it mean for the world to be sacred? You know, how do we acknowledge that in the way that we exist in the world?
[00:30:16] Flo Scialom: Ah, yeah. Even you asking the question just makes me like, take a breath because it’s something that. This is why it’s a practice, because I can sit here with you and talk about these things and yet, like it’s a practice for me to tap into that on a, on a regular basis. Mm-hmm. . So what it means for me is slowing down and really experiencing life through my senses and .
[00:30:44] You can practice really slowly, like drinking a cup of tea or eating your food and actually really tasting the food. You know, saying a, a kind of blessing before the food, not in a, a religious way, in a way of like honoring all of the work and labour and love that’s gone into creating, putting this food in front of you on your plate and then really taking the time to like taste that and be with that.
[00:31:11] It sounds really simple, but it’s in the experience of that practice that you really can to become overwhelmed with the sacredness of life. It’s one of those things that it, it can be quite hard to verbally articulate if you haven’t experienced it. But if you had it, it can be such a surprise because you so often we go through life on autopilot, like, Oh, I get up in the morning, I get my coffee, I’m eating my breakfast quickly.
[00:31:40] I’ve gotta do this, I’ve gotta do that. Actually taking the time to honor, like all that goes into you being able to eat your breakfast, the sun shining on your face in the morning, the birds singing outside the, the plants growing around you. Like, that’s what’s meant by the sacredness. It’s actually taking the chance to just open, open our eyes and experience life through our, through our senses and, and honoring the beauty of the planet that we live on.
[00:32:09] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And the paradigm that we live in is, you know, very colonial, neoliberal, you know, western mindset.
[00:32:16] There is sometimes this idea that the sacred means, you know, that it’s air fairy or, or a nice to have, but that it lacks substance or it lacks reality. And for me, really what underpins the idea of the sacred is awe,, It’s beauty. Yeah. It’s wonder, Yeah. You know, that experience of, of being there and being open and being grateful for what it is that we’re experiencing in our physical bodies.
[00:32:42] Exactly. I wanna ask when we’re looking at this idea as well of. You know, spiritual ecology is just one example of changing the narrative around making change. You know,, what are some of the ways that new narratives and new values have been put into practice in the world?
[00:33:00] Gross National Happiness is obviously one example in Bhutan that we’re both aware of. That’s how we met, exploring a different idea of what success is, of what a successful economy is. But what are some of the other networks or what are some of the other examples that are happening in the world that you know of?
[00:33:16] Flo Scialom: So I think that this is [00:33:20] really exciting to see the different places this kind of understanding can be put into practice. And like you say, there’s so many different frames. My work alongside Spiritual Ecology, I work at the Network of Wellbeing, so I spend a lot of time looking at the kind of wellbeing movement and wellbeing understood as, you know, people and planet thriving together.
[00:33:41] Not an individualistic understanding of wellness, but a kind of embedded systemic wider understanding of wellbeing. And I, I think there’s then, One kind of concrete inspi inspiring example is the Wellbeing for Future Generations Act in Wales that really is a, a public policy in, in the country of Wales.
[00:34:03] That means that all policies have to consider the wellbeing of future generations as part of policy writing. So each policy that’s created, it’s like, okay. You wanna create this, you wanna build this new road, how is that gonna affect the wellbeing of future generations? Okay. You wanna, you know, change the, the school system, how is that gonna affect the wellbeing of future generations?
[00:34:25] And they’ve got a commissioner, Sophie Howe, who’s I’m excited. She’s gonna come and speak at one of our Network of Wellbeing events, whose responsibility it is to, make sure. That is a, a strong policy consideration. So I think that’s, you know, you see examples like that and you you realize that that this thinking is being translated into kind of concrete policy action in some cases, obviously not everywhere.
[00:34:49] And then I think in more movement building, more activism quite inspired by Extinction Rebellion Regenerative Culture aspect into the way that they do work. And kind of looking at regeneration as, as part of the changemaking. Obviously with all examples, you know, with spiritual ecology, with XR, you know, no example is absolutely perfect, but I feel inspired by seeing that type of thinking embedded in a wide, wide scale move.
[00:35:19] Laura Hartley: I feel the same. And you know, actually seeing it come to life in different structures, in different circles and different spaces, you know, for me takes it out of the individual and actually into the collective. It means that we’re starting to explore what it looks like together. And I find that really exciting.
[00:35:38] Yeah. But you know, as we’re doing that, it also comes with a lot of this territory or fear of going into new spaces, right? So, Actually, I wrote a blog on this the other week about starting before you’re ready because sometimes we have this idea that, you know, we need to be ready to do the thing and I’ll be ready once I have that degree, or once I, you know, have finished this next course or, you know, in a couple of months when I’m a little bit more practiced or whatever it might be.
[00:36:06] There’s, there’s a million stories depending on the situation, but that feeling of ready never quite comes. And I saw that you had a blog recently where you were talking about this same thing, going into spaces and not feeling prepared. So how do we navigate this? How do we, you know, work with this feeling of, okay, I, I want to do this thing.
[00:36:24] This is exciting. Yes, this aligns, but also. Oh my God, this is terrifying.
[00:36:30] I’m
[00:36:30] Flo Scialom: Yeah, so relatable. I think. It can be terrifying to try and step into [00:36:40] those spaces, even if you really feel that call um, from inside.
[00:36:43] In fact, that can be the most terrifying cuz it really means something to you. So this uh, this summer I co-facilitated a spiritual ecology retreat for the first time. I facilitated retreats before, but this Spiritual Ecology project in the Netherlands is fairly new. So it was the first time that I’d stepped into that space and it’s quite intense because going through this spiral of Joanna Macy, there’s the gratitude honoring our pain, it can be quite an intense, Um, overwhelming emotional retreat space. And that really came up for me in the facilitation role that I, I had those thoughts and feelings of like, who am I to do this and am I really good enough? And a lot of like self criticism and, and self doubt and what really helped me in In kind of being with that was I was co-facilitating with Aneke and to be able to have a space with her where I was able to kind of vo give voice to that, to like we were saying earlier about emotions, rather than pushing it away, , you know, Part of me wanted to just be like, Shut up.
[00:37:49] I’m here. I have to just carry on. But being able to give voice to and actually feel that, and then you know, through holding that together, you know, with Aneke and, and holding it in myself, being able to then transform it and be able to like tap into my inner mentor.
[00:38:05] So we all have a kind of inner critic and an inner mentor, you know, and I really love that you can, Listen and listen to and acknowledge them both, and you can try and actively nurture your inner mentor. So, you know, if it’s more my mentor, it’s like I’ve been, you know, practicing for 10 years.
[00:38:24] I’ve done so many trainings. I like, this is what I love and care about and I wanna give my heart to it. And of course more that I could learn and that’s what I’m doing. I’m learning through doing, like that’s a part of the process, you know? And that’s okay. And you know, being able to like go through that process to, to not avoid, to feel it, hold it, and then transform.
[00:38:50] It was really powerful for me because it helped me to then hold space in a more genuine, authentic way for, for those that in the retreat that were also going through their own processes. Cuz of course we all have, you know, these doubts and uncertainties that come up for us. And you know, Is, is being with that so that we can transform it.
[00:39:10] So I actually found it really powerful and then it, it, it resulted in me like writing a poem that I then shared at the end of the retreat with the other participants. And it felt like such a. Powerful and transformative experience for me that came out of that kind of, deep sense. Are, are you willing to share
[00:39:29] Laura Hartley: that poem with us?
[00:39:30] Because I would love to, as we move towards the end of this conversation, I would love to hear it from you.
[00:39:37] Flo Scialom: I would love to, if that’s uh, Okay. And I appreciate you asking.
[00:39:42] Laura Hartley: I have a love for poetry, so you know, I’m always very open to having poetry on the podcast.
[00:39:47] Flo Scialom: And you know what’s ironic, like just in you asking and me preparing to read, I have the same like, oh, insecurity come up, you know, this is terrible poem, and that’s what the poem’s [00:40:00] about.
[00:40:00] So it’s a really beautiful synergy. It’s called to speak.
[00:40:05]
[00:40:44]
[00:40:45] Flo Scialom: That
[00:40:45] Laura Hartley: is beautiful. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I love that vow to use our voice to speak. And, and so much of what you’re talking about there. Actually, I love that idea of an inner mentor because that’s not something.
[00:41:00] I have really articulated before, and to have that capacity to do that I think is
[00:41:05] Flo Scialom: really powerful. Yeah, I think, I think both, you know, like not being afraid of the negative and, I saw from Sharon Salzberg another mindfulness and compassion teacher that she talks about, like sitting down to tea with your inner critic and just like hearing them out, you know, you don’t need to be like, Oh, why am I still criticizing myself?
[00:41:26] Just like, be with and ironically, or like counterintuitively somewhat, that takes away the power because you think, Oh, I can’t let it in. Uh, But actually allowing it to be there, naming it, like making light, light of it, but being with it takes away the power and Yeah, and I really love this concept.
[00:41:44] I learned the concept of being a mentor from um, a friend of mine, Adanna, who does writing coaching her name. She’s @invictawriters writers on Instagram and I love her work and she. Really like encourages people to like be with both. So, you know, be with that inner critic, sit down with them and be with that inner mentor.Like what would your inner mentor be called? Like what are they trying to say to you? How can you kind of support and nourish them, give them voice as well? Obviously you don’t wanna have too many characters in your inner world, but it’s I think it’s a helpful counter narrative to the inner critic that’s much more widely known.
[00:42:24] I
[00:42:24] Laura Hartley: think it is. I agree. I wanna ask one last question to kind of close this out today. This podcast is all about remaking the world. So if you could remake the world in some capacity, what is your vision of a more beautiful, a more just, a more regenerative world or community that you can picture?
[00:42:47] Flo Scialom: What a beautiful and huge question. So I think that I would bring us back to how we started in this understanding of life and the world as sacred and deeply interconnected. And my vision of a more beautiful world would be. A life that like acknowledges that on every level. So a world in which people deeply experience this sense of awe and beauty that we talked about on a daily basis as something that’s just kind of a given of being [00:43:20] alive on this planet and that we, that was combined with a.
[00:43:25] Deep respect and honoring of our interconnectedness. A, a real respect for the natural world, the systems on which we, or the natural systems on which we all depend, and a real kind of honoring of that in the way that we, that we live, that we eat, that we work, that we conduct our lives. So I think a more beautiful world would be built on, on sacredness and interconnection.
[00:43:51] I love that.
[00:43:52] Laura Hartley: Thank you Flo so much for coming onto the show. I’ll have your details, so your links to Mindful Change and to Spiritual Ecology Netherlands in the show notes below, if anybody would like to check it out. Is there anything you would like to say before we finish up or any place that people can find you online?
[00:44:09] Flo Scialom: Just thank you so much, Laura. I find it really exciting that you are doing this podcast project and I love these types of conversations and thank you everyone listening. I think it’s it’s really powerful to just be on this journey collectively. And, and I, like I’ve said, for me kind of community connection is so important and that doesn’t just mean like the people that are immediately living close to you.
[00:44:34] For me, that means the people that are on that journey with you together. And so, feel free to connect with me more if you would like to. Oh, I’m like, I’ve got my Mindful Change blog and @mindful.Change on Instagram as well, and I’ll share the links with Laura. So we’d love to.
[00:44:52] Laura Hartley: Wonderful. Look, everybody, thank you for listening.
[00:44:54] I do love it when you’re able to suggest guests to have on the show. So please reach out to me and let me know what part of the world you would like to remake and who you would like to hear from. So you can follow more on Instagram at @laura.h.hartley, or check out our online school for changemakers at www.Laurahartley.com and we’ll see you next time.
Here’s the thing about change and remaking the world: it requires each of us to play our role. And not just any role – the role that we feel called to.
To do otherwise plays into the paradigm of right/wrong, good/bad and urgency as rejection of needs.
With this in mind, its helpful to know there’s a framework for changemakers of 3 major callings:
1. Disrupt: to shine a light on injustice, and halt it in its tracks. Activists, law professions or journalism are just some examples. So too are disruptors within mainstream companies, who challenge them to change policies or do better.
2. Aid & Heal: to help those who are impacted by injustice. Healers, medical workers, conservationists, herbalists, nonprofits and volunteers often do great work in this space.
3. Build: to create the systems – businesses, movements, networks – that stand when the current structures fall (history teaches us that all structures do). This space is about planting the seeds of a more just & regenerative world.
The role of our inner compass (read through our body, emotions and desires) is to direct you into the area in which you best thrive.
Because none of us should be burnt out and exhausted while helping the world.
If we’re called to build, but we find ourselves in systems trying to aid, butting up against structures still resistant to change, we’re gonna get tired.
If we’re called to aid, but we find ourselves trying to disrupt, we’re gonna feel heavy, lost, out-of-place, anxious.
And while following your callings is not a magic bullet for thriving, it’s one part of what’s needed.
Are you a builder, disruptor or healer? _________________________________________________
Bell Hooks taught us that “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”. And Lilla Watson reminded us that “our liberation is bound together.”
That’s why I write Love Notes to Liberation, a weekly-ish email empowering changemakers with the skills to get free, get power and wage love as a robust, public good. Join us here.
I love to read, although keeping up with my list is near impossible. My to-read wishlist now has over 335 books (which if my math is right, means even if I read one book a week for the next six years, without adding any, I still won’t be finished. Help?!). Recently though I started the short but fascinating read, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21stCentury by Erik Olin Wright. The book is full of interesting ideas of how we can move beyond capitalism, but one line stood out to me: “In politics, the limits of possibility are always in part created by beliefs in those limits”. What a beautiful truth, right? That – at least in part – the limits of what we are able to create or experience are only bound by what we believe to be possible.
I think this truth extends beyond politics, to our lives, our change-work, and our collective future for humanity. The limits of our possibility are shaped by our beliefs about our limitations.(read that again). How often do we find ourselves unhappy with an element of life, but withstanding it anyway because “we have to”, “there’s no other options”, “it’s just a few weeks/months/years” etc (note: this doesn’t apply to grief, anger or other healing processes we have – which do come with the requirement to sit in the muck – but our every day life choices). How often do we find ourselves disillusioned with our world? Instead of actively remaking it, feeling passive, stuck or angry at those in power, but who won’t change. That this is just the way the world is. Where might we limit our very dreams, afraid that disappointment might lurk if we dare to challenge our beliefs about what is possible? Possible is an expansive phrase. It doesn’t ask what is realistic or actual. It doesn’t ask what has happened before, or what is predicted to happen in the future.
it asks what ispossible. And possibilities are endless – lest our beliefs say otherwise. It’s not just Erik Olin Wright who refuses to dwell in the boundaries of our limitations, but some of the beautiful thinkers of history. Mahatma Ghandi said “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in possibility…”. John O’Donohue, “Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than facts. We shouldn’t frown on fact, but our world is congested with them. Facts are retarded possibilities, they are possibilities that have already been actualised. But for every fact that becomes a fact, there are seven, eight, maybe five hundred possibilities hanging around in the background that didn’t make it in to the place where they could be elected and realised as the actual fact. It is very interesting to look at what you consider real and to think that it is always peopled by a background presence of unrealised possibilities.” To shift our limitations of what is possible requires a shift in our willingness. We must be willing to believe there’s possibilities & opportunities that we can’t currently conceive of. We must be willing to be vulnerable, as our (mental) limitations were often put in place to protect us from risk, failure, rejection and the like. We must be willing to be wrong. To not know it all. To practice humility. What possibilities are still waiting to be realised in your life? In our world? In our collective relationship together?
What would be different if you had infinite possibilities ahead of you? If your belief in the limitations did not exist?
“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver. “You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”
It’s a beautiful poem, one that resonates across generations and lands – I think in part because so many of us spend our lives trying to be good.
Good is a noble idea isn’t it? It’s wrapped into our fairytales and mythology, stories of good over evil. That goodness is what holds communities together, that allows for the ultimate happiness, that triumphs over jealousy, rage or violence.
But what happens when our ideas of good are in conflict with what we experience as true?
When our beliefs of what it means to be a good activist, good partner, good parent, good citizen, good worker, good person clash with our desires, boundaries or needs?
Where might good and all its weighty expectations be culture’s poor substitute for wholeness? For sovereignty?
What happens – what guidance do we follow – if we do not have to be good?
I’ve been pondering these questions as I reflect on our inner guidance system, to understand what is ours to do in this time.
Many of us end up lost, at least in part, because we follow not what is true or liberating or whole, but what we consider to be good.
We become painfully afraid to say what it is that we truly want, and what it is that we truly mean.
So today, I want to offer a few love notes to liberation, small but mighty ways we can challenge the tyranny of good, and instead, start to explore what wholeness feels like, and the power that pursuing liberation over goodness may offer us.
Pursue Pleasure. We often overlook the importance of pleasure, but as adrienne maree brown beautifully writes, “There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.”What is pleasure to you? What does it feel like in your body, heart and mind? When did you last allow yourself to feel it in entirety, and what happened when you last closed yourself off to it?Can you enjoy the pleasure of a blueberry? A bike ride? The sun on your skin? Intimate laughter with those you love?What feels like wholeness in this moment? .
Speak Truth How is your heart doing? Check in with your body as you speak this week. When you answer the ubiquitous “how are you?”, does your response feel honest? Can you imagine speaking the truth of your experiences right now?Liberation requires vulnerability, and is intimately tied with truth and feeling..
Make. Let your body put pen to paper or bowl to spoon and see what arises. It doesn’t matter what: a cake, an artwork, a poem, an action, anything. But make.Liberation is freedom. Free yourself – for even an afternoon – from the tyranny of needing your creations to be good.See if you can notice the subtle shifts – the soft animal of your body – and what happens when it acts from desire or creativity, without the domination of control.
In this episode with Elizabeth Bechard, we explore the challenges of parenting in a changing climate, as well as what framing climate as moral injury has to offer us as we navigate these times.
Elizabeth is Senior Policy Analyst for Moms Clean Air Force. She is also a health coach, author, former clinical research coordinator, and a public health graduate student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
After becoming a mother, Elizabeth became passionate about the intersection between climate change and family resilience. She is the author of Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and young twins.
TRANSCRIPT: Please note transcript was generated by AI and has not been edited. It may contain mistakes or omissions.
[00:00:00] Elizabeth Bechard: And in that paper, they made the case that, you know, young people are watching governments fail to act on the climate crisis. And that, that is a form of moral injury, which I completely agree with.
[00:00:12] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
[00:00:52] Today’s guest is Elizabeth Bechard.
[00:00:55] Elizabeth is a senior policy analyst for mom’s clean air force. She is a health coach, author, former clinical research coordinator, and a public health graduate student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After becoming a mother, Elizabeth became passionate about the intersection between climate change and family resilience.
[00:01:13] She is the author of parenting in a changing climate tools for cultivating resilience, taking action and practicing hope in the face of climate. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her husband and young twins. So welcome Elizabeth to the
[00:01:26] Elizabeth Bechard: public love project. Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here with you
[00:01:31] Laura Hartley: today.
[00:01:33] Ah, me too, because I love your work. And one of the things that I actually thought to start the conversation today is this phrase that you use, which is that you are a recovering activist. Can you tell us a little bit about what this
[00:01:46] Elizabeth Bechard: means? Ooh, what an interesting question we’ll start with. I can tell you what it means for me.
[00:01:54] I think You know, I first identified with the word activist pretty young, like as a teenager, I was, I remember being in high school and maybe even a little bit younger than that early high school. And someone handed me like a brochure for pita like the, that people for the ethical treatment of animals.
[00:02:15] And I became a vegetarian overnight. I just stopped eating meat and animal products and Anybody who’s familiar with PETA probably knows that they are pretty graphic in their depiction of animal rights abuses. And there’s absolutely the absolutely a place for that. I got very into animal rights activism in my teens and early twenties.
[00:02:38] And didn’t have. Our community of activists around me. I didn’t have a whole lot of support. You know, I had a few people in my life who were, who became vegetarian, but not very many, you know, like I could count them on my one, one hand. right. So I was kind of, I immersed myself in learning a lot about animal, right.
[00:02:59] And how that was connected to all kinds of different harms, social harms, environmental harms, and You know, I, anybody who’s familiar with like how , how dark that can get can probably understand that I was immersing myself in a lot of just really horrifying, depressing, scary [00:03:20] information without the skills, without the resilience, without the community, to help me process that.
[00:03:26] And. In my, in my late later teens and, and twenties, you know, I was definitely struggling with depressions and some other mental health challenges due to things that were not related, you know, to, to animal rights. But there was kind of for me, this intersection of, you know, overwhelming concern about this.
[00:03:46] This problem and, and feeling intersection, you know, with that and, and all of the other sort of mental health struggles that, you know, many teens would be dealing with for other reasons. And I remember at the time feeling the, the thing that was most painful to me about activism at that time was the feeling that people didn’t care about it, you know, that I was sort of walking through my life and I, it was so obvious to me that there.
[00:04:12] Huge problems with, you know, the way that, you know, our culture you know, processes food and, you know, thinks about food. But, but nobody else in my life and nobody is of exaggeration, but most people in my life did not seem to, to care or be concerned about this. And I just didn’t understand that.
[00:04:30] Right. It kind of it didn’t make sense to me. And I remember getting In my early twenties to a place where I was quite honestly, suicidally depressed. Like I just didn’t want to exist in a world that was like this. Like it was, I was too sensitive for that. And I feel really lucky that I had like family support to help me pull myself with a lot of support and therapy and to pull myself out of that sort of dark hole of like, I don’t wanna be here if the world is gonna be like this hole.
[00:05:00] I had to sort of turn my back on activism for about 10 years, at least after that point, because I just couldn’t expose myself to the kind of information that I had been taking in before, because I, I was so sensitive and didn’t have the inner resilience and, or the support structures around me to be able to cope with that in healthy ways.
[00:05:21] Laura Hartley: I was going to say, I can see how this has led to the work that you do now. This overwhelming concern we have and this inability sometimes, you know, why isn’t the world doing anything? Why aren’t people stepping up, you see this in the climate movement now a lot.
[00:05:37] Absolutely. Yeah. And having these tools and these resources and these skills to actually. Stay and process and be with long haul work and to be with the emotions of this work. I think is really what you do in a way.
[00:05:52] Elizabeth Bechard: Yeah. I, I can identify so deeply with the sort of disillusionment of youth climate activists that you hear about, you know, you know, I am no Greta Thunburg by any stretch of the imagination, but I deeply relate to the story that I’ve heard her tell of like, Going into this very dark hole related to understanding some environmental problems and then watching the, the people in power in the world, or even the people in your own life kind of go about their, their lives as though nothing’s wrong.
[00:06:24] You know, that sense of how can this be? Right? Like how can even the people that I care about, not care about this, how can they not act is very. It’s very hard. And I think especially for young people, because it does take time and self awareness and, and life [00:06:40] experience to sort of build that resilience and those skills to have perspective, you know, now I can, I can sort of track my, my thoughts when they go to dark places and have like a level of mindful awareness about them that I didn’t have when I was 16 or 22.
[00:06:55] And I think building those skills of like you were saying of being with really hard emotions and really painful and difficult truths is so critical to sustainable act activism because you know, those of us who go to dark places and don’t come back, can’t continue to, to serve the world and to show up in ways that are life giving and, and generative.
[00:07:16] And I feel really lucky honestly, to have survived, you know, that period of my life, you know, but I think cultivating resilience however people think about that word is so critical to keeping climate activism and environmental activism going for the long haul.
[00:07:33] Laura Hartley: And this is an interesting question. What would you say resilience is? Because, you know, when we are looking at climate change now and, , the impacts of climate change, both the physical impacts of actually what we’re seeing and the changes that are happening in the world. Now today with heat waves across Europe, with, you know, endless rain and la nina events through Australia and in many, many other parts of the world as.
[00:07:58] Being conscious of where I’m naming, but also just in the future of fears, you know, the fears for our children in the next generation, it’s starting to impact our mental health.
[00:08:07] Elizabeth Bechard: Absolutely. And I think the word resilience is a tricky one because it can, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people.
[00:08:14] It can be used in a lot of different contexts. I think the, the older way of thinking about resilience is that it’s just about sort of bouncing back to normal, right? Like getting back to baseline or snapping back like a rubber band. And and I don’t like that conceptualization of resilience. I think my favorite definition of resilience I’ve ever seen was actually in one of
[00:08:35] the recent IPCC reports. I believe it was the one that came out in February, although I could be wrong about that. And it, there was a line in there that described resilience as the capacity for transformation. And that felt, I love that oh
[00:08:49] Laura Hartley: my God. How have I not. Seen that I love that description.
[00:08:52] Elizabeth Bechard: It is hidden.
[00:08:53] It was like this little tucked away line, but yeah, I mean, that’s, I think that captures how I think about resilience. It’s not about getting back to a baseline or a normal it’s about, do we have the capacity to become something new, to become something, you know, more alive, more real, more authentic, more whole that’s what, that’s how I think about it.
[00:09:15] Now.
[00:09:16] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And I can see that, you know, on a personal level and also on a collective level as well, which I think a lot of climate action is really balancing these two areas of the individual and their collective
[00:09:27] Elizabeth Bechard: mm-hmm . Yeah, it is. I think Being fairly new to full-time climate activism. And within the past year, I’ve become full-time in my climate work.
[00:09:38] And I, I think there’s it can be easy within the climate movement to sort of just get, get so obsessed with the outer work, rather that there’s not enough time or space for the inner work. But I think and I know your work speaks to this too.
[00:09:53] The more that we can sort of realize that, you know, the energy that we put out into the world reflects the quality of our, [00:10:00] of our inner experience too. The more will prioritize. Mm-hmm , you know, doing our our inner healing, which there’s so many layers to that, and it’s not ever complete, but I think it’s really important.
[00:10:14] Mm-hmm
[00:10:15] Laura Hartley: so, you work for a mom’s clean air force, your book, which I loved was parenting in a changing climate. And you know, this is such a topical area right now. There’s, there’s one, there’s a lot of people who increasingly are afraid of having children afraid of what the future would look like if they have that.
[00:10:33] For those friends with young children who increasingly are concerned about what the quality of their children’s lives will be. Where is this intersection here with family resilience and what does it mean and what are we looking at?
[00:10:45] Elizabeth Bechard: That’s a great question. I, I think there’s probably not just one meaning of it.
[00:10:50] It probably means lots of different things to different people, but, , I think there’s a space for honoring what you know is being called in the academic literature or at least eco reproductive concerns. So like the very real and valid worries that people are having more and more people are having about, like, what does it really mean to bring a child into this world for, for so many reasons, not just climate, but, you know, racism is the reason, you know, just to have that question or, fear of political instability or there’s many reasons that people might sort of question bringing a child into the world.
[00:11:25] I think there’s room to, to make space for the authenticity of those experiences, but also to embrace that, that some of us are going to want to bring life into the world for, for many different reasons as well. And to be able to celebrate and support people who choose to become parents and to see how can we find ways to.
[00:11:46] Create a future that’s as good as possible for these children and, and for every generation that might follow, even, even if we don’t know what might happen, you know, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, we can’t, we can’t know. And you know, that uncertainty can be really frightening. But I know as a, as a mother myself, and I see this in my colleagues at mom’s clean air force too, for me becoming a mom has.
[00:12:09] Has deepened my investment in the future in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. Which is not to say that parents are more concerned about climate change than others. I think, you know, that’s I wouldn’t make that statement necessarily, but I would say that, you know, when you have a child, there’s this like stake in the future in a really concrete way, right?
[00:12:29] It’s it’s your children who will be living, you know, in the future that we create. And so I know that I feel just fiercely determined to, to show up for them and to try to figure out like, how can we reshape the world, right? Like how can we create a world that doesn’t repeat all of the mistakes of the past, that we’re wrestling with.
[00:12:50] So painfully right now and I really see that dedication in my, in my colleagues as well. I think. Even, even in moments when, when things seem really dark on the climate front, and there have been a lot of those moments recently, you know, the parents I know who are engaged in the climate movement are, are not gonna give up on our kids.
[00:13:11] We’re just not, we’re gonna keep going and and fight for the future that children. Our children, and all children deserve
[00:13:19] Laura Hartley: [00:13:20] yeah. and the future that we deserve as well.
[00:13:22] Elizabeth Bechard: You know, everyone, everyone deserves. Yeah, absolutely. And this
[00:13:25] Laura Hartley: reminds me that, yeah, there was a line I loved in your book.
[00:13:28] That was, that was quite interesting. That was, and while many communities have faced existential threats for generations, black indigenous Jewish and queer communities, for starters, many people of European descent have little in the way of inherited resilience in the face of the level of trauma presented by climate change.
[00:13:46] People like me will need to learn how to hold and integrate this path. You and I are obviously both of European descent. We both have a fairly large degree of privilege. We’re both living in Western nations. And so looking at. We’re not the first culture, the first community to actually face the end of our way of life or an existential threat.
[00:14:05] Right. But we are having to learn to teach this resilience, to hold it, down to our children as well.
[00:14:10] Elizabeth Bechard: Mm-hmm yeah. And it’s, it feels very awkward. I think, you know, that’s, I think that’s the word that, that, that describes the lived experience I’ve had, you know, I think not having. Stories of having survived things like slavery or genocide in my own family.
[00:14:28] Like I have to, to figure out like, what does it, what does it mean for me to be resilient without appropriating from someone else’s culture? I know I, I can think of several friends who are and also meaningfully engaged in, in climate thought and work who we’ve talked about, like, what does it mean as someone of European descent to sort of learn from the resilience of our ancestral traditions as people who are not in Europe.
[00:14:51] Right. And really are very, you know, in America and maybe Australia too, very, quite disconnected from, you know, say Celtic traditions, right. That, that got lost
[00:15:01] Laura Hartley: long time ago, long, many, many
[00:15:03] Elizabeth Bechard: generations. Right. And having to, to relearn, or even thinking about re like how do I relearn the wheel of the year, right.
[00:15:11] Or, or these things that that I do believe would help with resilience because they help with nature connection. It feels very clumsy. I’ve got this whole book on shelf of like wheel of the year books, you know how to do this. And it’s Yeah, it feels awkward. Clumsy, fumbling tender too, to be trying to learn ways of being that I wasn’t taught growing up from a book rather than a grandmother or, you know, you know, someone who’s an elder I don’t think that’s the whole answer to resilience, but it’s definitely, I think one of the ways that, that some people are trying to figure out, like how do we draw on our own ancestral traditions when we don’t have that experience?
[00:15:51] Even if it means Googling, like how do I celebrate Lamas? Right. Which is coming, what is an appropriate way to to do this one with your family? You know, it’s very, it’s funny, right? you have to laugh.
[00:16:05] Laura Hartley: It is, you know, I think this is part of healing from whiteness in a way like that, that healing and, and that reconnecting to actually, what are our ancestral roots as white people, like before, Appropriating all of the other cultures, where did our roots actually lie?
[00:16:21] And a lot of the, same mentality and same beliefs are really what I think has led to the climate crisis. Like it’s very, very difficult to separate the climate crisis and what we’re seeing today from its roots in capitalism for its roots in patriarchy, it’s roots in colonialism. So this going back to, [00:16:40] what is ours?
[00:16:40] What is ours to do? What is, what is the history of our lineage I think is so important,
[00:16:45] Elizabeth Bechard: right? Yeah. It, it’s amazing that we do at least have access through technology to information that might have been even more hard to access a generation ago, right before the internet, , you can learn almost anything, or about almost any topic through through Google.
[00:17:03] But I, I completely agree that it, that it is part of healing from whiteness. And, and so many of these ancestral traditions, maybe all of them were much more sustainable ways of being right. Like, you know, their, their nature base, they’re connected with seasons and cycles and, celebrating you know, what fruit or flowers or, or vegetables, or in season in a particular time, rather than, the culture we have now, which is that you can go to the grocery store and.
[00:17:33] Anything you want all year round and you just expect that, right?
[00:17:37] Laura Hartley: We expect start the world to always be that way. Yeah. That you can get whatever you want. Yes. Whenever you want it at any time, as quickly as possible, you know, this endless consumption, endless growth, to be satiated just means that I have unlimited opportunities.
[00:17:55] And so it is, it’s a balance. Isn’t it? Of coming back to actually no unlimited opportunities and nature is abundant. The natural world is abundant, but there is a time for things there’s a season and there’s a cycle.
[00:18:09] Elizabeth Bechard: Right.
[00:18:11] Laura Hartley: I wanna talk for a moment about this idea. Cause we had a really good conversation a month ago about this idea of climate as moral injury.
[00:18:19] What does this mean to you? What is moral injury? How would you explain this?
[00:18:24] Elizabeth Bechard: I first heard about the idea of moral injury in the context of, of climate change from Britt Wray who does he’s, she’s an author as well. She wrote generation dread and has written a lot about mental health and the climate crisis.
[00:18:37] But there was a paper that she was an author on that was published last fall, published in the Lancet. And it was this study of 10,000 young people around the world asking about their experiences of, of climate change and mental health. And the study showed just overwhelming levels of climate distress among young people.
[00:18:59] And, one of the main or the most interesting, I thought findings of that paper was the description of young people experiencing moral injury. And they described it as this idea of it’s psychological harm from, from witnessing or taking part in something that violates your, your moral or your ethical or spiritual beliefs or, or even
[00:19:23] sense of betrayal by some trusted authority. And in that paper, they made the case that, you know, young people are watching governments fail to act on the climate crisis. And that, that is a form of moral injury, which I completely agree with. And I’ve been working on a, a thesis project and for my master’s degree on on parents and climate change and mental health and It’s it’s become apparent to me from that and my own experience.
[00:19:54] I think parents experience this too, and maybe all of us, right? Like, I, I think we need more [00:20:00] research to understand this, but you know, when I think about parents specifically, we’re also watching our governments fail to act and fail to protect our kids. Right. You know, when it comes to climate change, especially those of us who are climate aware and really have a sense of kind of where we are with this crisis and, and what it means.
[00:20:19] To not act now, right. While there’s still time to avert, a lot of the, , impacts that we could see, will see in the future. But, but parents also have this moral obligation, I believe, and I think most parents would believe, to protect and care for our kids and climate change directly interferes with that and is going to interfere with, with that more and more. The feeling that you can’t protect your kid from a terrifying future is a, is a devastating feeling, right.
[00:20:52] Or just one example of how parents might experience moral injury, , is the, the climate conversation, right. I’m hearing it being called the climate talk now. Right. This used to be the sex talk, which I guess we still need to have, but the climate talk now of like, Presenting to your children information about what this means, on the one hand, you know, as a parent, you feel the need to prepare your child for the future that they’re going to have, right.
[00:21:24] You have to on some level, prepare them for the future. But on the other hand, you also. I feel this, this strong desire not to cause harm emotional harm or trauma to your children, by giving them terrifying information, which, , you can deliver it in different ways, but it’s a real, it’s a really excruciating bind for parents.
[00:21:46] It’s like, how do we, how do we tell the truth about climate change to our kids in a trauma sensitive way? And how do we tell them the truth? While knowing that we’re still using fossil fuels to get to drive to school. Every toy they have is, comes in plastic. You know, we’ve been ordering our groceries online because of COVID.
[00:22:05] So we don’t go into the store. And then, you can’t use your reusable bags because there, so there’s so many ways that, all of us are just kind of embedded in the system that we don’t, that is causing the harm. And there’s almost no way to extract yourself. So as a parent, you’re like, , how do I tell my child.
[00:22:23] And also acknowledge we’re still participating in this with really no viable way out for most families. And, and so I think those are some of the ways that I see moral injury playing out for parents. And I think the reason that, that the idea of moral injury is important to me or that I, I think it’s a useful framework, even if, maybe not every parent has the, has a lived experience of feeling injured in a moral way, is that, to me, the way that you frame an issue informs how you think about.
[00:22:53] How you address that issue, right? Like the way you frame a problem affects how you think about the solution. And when you look at the literature on moral injury, there’s not a whole lot of evidence based interventions, but you’ll see frequently recommendations for spiritual care. And I think that’s.
[00:23:10] An incredibly important idea that parents need spiritual care youth need spiritual care. Everybody needs it. And I ,don’t hear a whole lot of [00:23:20] discussion about that in the climate space yet.
[00:23:23] Laura Hartley: I love the way you kind of directed that because my question, when we’re holding this idea of what, like moral injury is, where is repair, where does healing actually occur from something like that and that idea of spiritual practices or of a spiritual kind of healing, I think is probably the direction in which, it’s kind of leading.
[00:23:43] Can you tell us a little bit more about that, about what are the, what are the practices and the tools that we need as parents to actually be holding . This pain and having these conversations and maybe a little bit about your thoughts of this, as a world, as a collective, where does repair for moral injury actually lie?
[00:24:00] Elizabeth Bechard: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I don’t feel like I’m an expert on the solution. So I think, There’s ideas and there’s anecdotal evidence. There’s not a lot of academic evidence about what will work or not work. And I don’t believe that that’s the only, or even the best form of knowledge about these things.
[00:24:16] But, one aspect of this of repair that I think is really important is having community spaces or relational spaces where people can come together to express their emotions, to name things like grief or fear, that we might not talk about very openly in a lot of spaces to do that with others and really in community and, and in relationship wrestle with these existential questions.
[00:24:48] For me at the core climate change, my fear of climate change is really about my fear of death. Right? That’s a spiritual question. , what happens after we die and I don’t have the answers, but throughout human history, I imagine that people have coped with that.
[00:25:02] What do we do after? What does this even mean? Right? Why are we even here by coming together and, and talking and, and being, and, after someone dies, having ritual and ceremony, when someone is born ritual and ceremony and, and a lot of that is missing from our culture, but it’s , these deeper questions, I, I don’t believe they’re meant.
[00:25:21] To be wrestled with alone, with our laptops or our cell phones right. We need, we need each other. And I, I think that’s maybe the biggest thing is that spaces where people can, can be with others, even if it’s over zoom, because that’s the reality for many of us right now.
[00:25:39] Even better, right? Like in person could be together and, and sort of name that we are wrestling with these existential crises and through relationship to find, a sense of, of not being alone. Some of the literature that I found in my thesis project named especially for people of colour that, a sense of ancestral connection can be part of.
[00:26:02] That healing. And we were talking about that earlier is like having to learn how to find that for many of us having a sense of deep time perspective. So which again is something you can wrestle with in community, but remembering, that our, our existence in The present moment. It’s just like this tiny little fraction of of all existence.
[00:26:25] You’ll probably laugh at this, but I actually have, a few fossils on my desk to remind me of my place in time. Where is that? I find it very helpful. Its just, I got my little you know, my little, one of my little fossils right here. Fossils may not work for [00:26:40] everybody, but it helps me.
[00:26:41] But , being with each other to find perspective, to grieve together, to think about, the meaning of life, I think that’s a big part of the solution and there’s not a whole lot of spaces for that?
[00:26:54] Laura Hartley: No, I think that when you go back 50, a hundred years ago, spaces that did provide this, at least in some context, you know, rightly or wrongly were of course more religious spaces.
[00:27:05] Yes. And as we see increasing secularization, we see increasing lack of spaces to talk about the deeper issues of life, what it means to be in community, what it means to be human, what it means to live, to die, to, to grieve, to love and all of these, these experiences. And of course, the experiences that we are only just starting to name, I think there’s a new range of climate emotions and new range of feelings that we’re starting to experience and that there are now names for
[00:27:36] Elizabeth Bechard: right.
[00:27:37] Yeah. I mean, one of the ones that is often referred to as so solastalgia, right? The, sort of the idea of losing a beloved place or a sense of being homesick while you’re still at home. And I did want to name too, that there, some of the spaces that, that have emerged for people to wrestle with these, or are spaces like climate cafes, which are intentional spaces where people can.
[00:28:01] Can come in and reflect about their thoughts and feelings about a climate crisis, but many people don’t have access to them, right. Unless, unless you have happened to find them over zoom or happen to live in an area where people are doing that. And the good grief network also is a framework sort of a 10 step framework where people can process these feelings intentionally.
[00:28:21] But, but you’re right. There’s this whole new vocabulary emerging to describe, what are these experiences? And I imagine that vocabulary will, will grow. I’d almost like to see a whole vocabulary around parenthood or what, that question of like, what does it mean to be a parent like in a changing climate?
[00:28:40] Because I think We’re gonna be experiencing some new, some new things that, that, you know, maybe that maybe we haven’t, as a species before and, and language helps us to, it helps us with meaning making,
[00:28:55] Laura Hartley: Helps us with meaning making. I think that’s, that’s exactly where it is there that it helps us communicate and also helps us feel less alone.
[00:29:02] Cuz we can share what we’re experiencing. Exactly. I have a couple of last questions for you. And, one is for those listening, when we’re looking at tools of practicing and resilience in the face of climate change, we’re looking at practicing hope. What is it, what is the practice or what is a recommendation that you think that, or feel that we can come back to.
[00:29:27] Elizabeth Bechard: I would say community, right? Like, the number one thing I, I recommend to everybody is to find some kind of climate community and it could look very different, for some people, it might be an activist community for others. It might be a space like a climate cafe or the good grief network.
[00:29:45] It might even be a friend that, that you find to go for a walk with, you know, once a month or to, to who, who actually has the ability to hear you talk about your climate distress. Right. And not everybody can do that. Those friends aren’t as easy to find as probably many of us wish [00:30:00] they were, but.
[00:30:02] Being in relationship is a practice. And I would say, in a very practical resilience, I, I think people should be bringing each other more loaves of banana bread or, or, sh you know, sharing food, right? Like that, that very simple act of like, I will share my resources with you.
[00:30:23] Builds relationship. It builds connection. And when natural disasters, extreme weather hits, now those local relationships, the people that you’re sharing banana bread with are, are gonna be there when the power goes out or when a storm comes through or when there’s a wire. Your wildfire and , that kind of relationship building doesn’t necessarily require talking about climate change.
[00:30:45] Ideally you’d have both kinds of relationship, but you could still build relational resilience and have a sense of, of community support, even if your neighbour hasn’t ever, given any indication that they’re, you know, willing to talk about climate change. So I would say just.
[00:31:01] Community is a practice. It’s a skill too. Like many of us have been so isolated over the last few years with COVID that, , maybe we’ve forgotten about, bringing, sharing things with our neighbour. Some people are really good at it, but , building mutual aid networks is, is sort of part of that.
[00:31:18] That practice, whether they’re formal or informal, but we, we need each other, like we can’t do this alone. So any practice that is isolated from, from other people, I think will just ultimately be. Insufficient, , I’m sure I’m sure there’s individual practices, , somatic body practices that can help us cope with individuals, but ultimately we need each other to get through this on on both a very practical level, but also for our spiritual care.
[00:31:47] And so that’s the, that’s the number one thing I would recommend. But these are
[00:31:51] Laura Hartley: collective crisis that we face, you know, so. I think they require a collective response in collective healing. And you know, this podcast. All about remaking the world. So I often I talk about, you know, moving from the world as it is to the world, as it could be.
[00:32:06] I think that’s a really important shift that we start to look at because so often, especially with climate, we hear incredibly apocalyptic stories, far more regular than we hear actually beautiful possibilities. Yeah. Mm-hmm so what is your more beautiful vision for the world as it could be? Hmm.
[00:32:23] Elizabeth Bechard: I love that question.
[00:32:27] Hmm. And there’s so many layers to that. Right. But
[00:32:32] I’ll keep it specific to parents cause I think it would probably take, you know, the rest of the night to like describe a really comprehensive vision for the, for the whole world. But I would say, you know, I, I, I, what I hope for, for parents is that every, every parent. And everyone who loves children, right.
[00:32:49] Can, can feel like they’re in community, right? That like, no matter what may come there are people who will support them. There is a place for them to offer their support, that everybody has a sense of. Being able to contribute meaningfully to the world around them and have their, their needs met, by community.
[00:33:10] And that children kind of grow up with a sense of, of being loved, being held, having access to the resources that, that you would need for, [00:33:20] wellbeing, the truth is that we will have hard things that we’re gonna face in the future, but, you know, if together we could face almost anything.
[00:33:28] Right. So I would wish for, for people to have that sense of, of knowing that when the hard times come, they are held and loved and resourced. In community and I love that. That’s part of my vision.
[00:33:42] Laura Hartley: Yeah. This the held in community. I think that that’s a beautiful vision right there.
[00:33:47] Yeah. How can people find you online?
[00:33:50] Elizabeth Bechard: Good question. So I am on Instagram fairly regularly at Elizabeth Bechard. My website is www.elizabethbechard.com. It’s not updated very regularly these days. And you can also check out mom’s clean air Force’s work at mom’s clean air force.org.
[00:34:09] Laura Hartley: Amazing. I will make sure that the link to all of these is in the show notes.
[00:34:12] For anyone listening, Elizabeth also has a wonderful book parenting and a changing climate, which really holds this idea of pain, possibility, and practice. So anyone with young kids, I highly recommend this book. I really wanna thank you for coming on the show today and offering everything that you have.
[00:34:27] Elizabeth Bechard: Thank you so much.
[00:34:30] Laura Hartley: sorry for anybody listening. Thank you so much for joining us. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe. I also love to hear from you. I’d love to know what guests you would like to have on what topics you want to hear about. So please reach out to me on Instagram at @laura.h.hartley, or you can check out our online school for changemakers at publiclove.enterprises.
I sit down with Mac Scotty McGregor to talk about his work with Positive Masculinity.
Mac is a transgender activist, author, speaker, and educator who lives in Seattle, USA. He provides gender and LGBTQ+ diversity training for corporations, colleges, and groups all over the world. He’s the co-founder of Positive Masculinity, a project for heart led masculine folks who want to create a transformative path for masculinity in our world, and he’s also the author of Positive Masculinity Now.
TRANSCRIPT:Please not transcript was created by AI and has not been edited. It may contain errors or mistranslations of the actual interview.
Mac Scotty Macgregor – Positive Masculinity Now
[00:00:00] Mac Scotty Macgregor: So women were starting to speak up and, and talk about how the patriarchy and toxic masculinity had harmed them and held them back and been an obstacle, but men, weren’t a part of this conversation. You know, the, the masculine voice was not a part of this. Except some men that were saying, oh, you’re just trying to say, you know, all men are bad.
[00:00:25] The men that were fighting, you’re trying to take our manhood away. That was the only voice that I heard coming from the masculine side.
[00:00:31]
[00:00:31] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
[00:01:09] Today’s guest is Mac Scotty McGregor. Mac is a transgender activist, author, speaker, and educator that lives in Seattle. And he provides gender and LGBTQ+ diversity training for corporations, colleges, and groups all over the world. He’s the co-founder of positive masculinity. Uh, project for heart led masculine folks who want to create a transformative path for masculinity in our world.
[00:01:33] He’s also the author of positive masculinity now. And we’re excited to have you on the show so welcome Mac
[00:01:39] Mac Scotty Macgregor: thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:41] Laura Hartley: I have so enjoyed our conversations before this and the other week. And so I’m really excited to talk with you today. And obviously I’ve been looking through your work, reading your book.
[00:01:51] There’s a lot of things that I want to ask you about, but I wanna start first with this idea of gender and masculinity. There are so many constructs and so many stories that we’re told about it, the conditioning from a young age, and I’m curious to hear from you, what were the first experiences and stories that you were told about gender and masculinity when you were young?
[00:02:14] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Hmm. Well, I grew up in a pretty conservative area and in kind of the, the Bible belt in the south of the United States and you know, went to a Southern Baptist school and everything. And so it was very, it was very binary, gender based. It was very, there were very clear distinctions in expectations like around what men did and what women did and how you dressed and how you acted and everything, I mean, even the activities you were allowed to do or supposed to do or not supposed to do, you know?
[00:02:47] So it was it was very separated. And, and so that was very clear to me. No, I didn’t fit into that very easily myself. I’m a transgender man. So I was born female and I started changing my name playing with other kids to a masculine name at four years old. So I had no exposure at all to the LGBTQ plus community.
[00:03:10] And yet I knew that the name I was given the very feminine name did not fit me, but there was not even the word transgender [00:03:20] then, so I had no language to explain it or describe what I was feeling. Right. I just knew that the name didn’t fit and started changing my name to a masculine name and my grandfather and I, my mom had me at 16.
[00:03:35] So my grandparents helped raise me in my younger years. And so my grandfather and I had a show that we watched together all the time and our show was gun smoke. It was an old Western. You know, some of you can still see it on Nick at night. I think they have replays. And I told everybody that my name was Matt Dylan, who was the sheriff in that show who I thought was this really good guy.
[00:03:59] You know, he wore the white cowboy hat. He was the good guy in town, and I wore a little, literally wore a little Sheriff’s badge and six shooters and cowboy boots. My grandparents actually thought it was really cute when kids would come knock on the door and ask to play with Matt Dylan
[00:04:15] So that was my first experience. And you know, one of the interesting things is being born. My sex at birth being born female it’s kind of cute when a kid is little, if they’re born female and they’re a tomboy, you can get away with that. Whereas, you know, if your sex at birth is male that doesn’t work on the opposite side of that.
[00:04:36] Right? If a someone born male, wants to play a girl or a princess that’s not acceptable. Right. But then of course, when you get to the age of puberty in conservative areas like that, you’re supposed to snap to, and, and put on your dress and go to church and
[00:04:55] I did what I had to do to get through that. And I started martial arts at six, so that helped cuz that gave me this outlet, this place to be more who I was, more masculine and I could be more physical. And the uniform is a uniform, right. It’s pants , you know, and so by the time I was 17, I was on the US karate team.
[00:05:19] I won the US fighting title. So I did very well, and that put me on a different journey as far as my experience with gender. Because that was a really rare. Of course only the top 100 athletes in any sport get an opportunity to be asked to be on a team on a country’s team, for a sport.
[00:05:39] And so I knew how rare that opportunity was. And I had worked many years for it, very hard, and I happened to have really good genetics as an athlete. So I, my body held up to that kind of hardcore training and competition really well for a long. So the last time I competed, I was 39 years old and I was in the world championships on the US karate team.
[00:06:06] And I had some 18 year olds on the team calling me the grandparent of the team, cuz I was the oldest one on the team, male or female at the time. Right. And I won two medals in that world championships. And I looked at my clock and said, this is probably a really good time to retire. well, I retire on top, you know, as the grandparent
[00:06:27] and see the us, they wouldn’t have allowed me to compete had I started medical transition earlier. Cuz they weren’t sure what to do with transgender athletes and especially in a contact sport like I was in and they’re still trying to [00:06:40] figure that out.
[00:06:40] Right. It’s it’s complex, especially when you’re talking a contact sport, but I was still allowed to coach and referee, which I’ve done. I’ve coached 59 national champions, but a lot of the lessons even I talk about in this book, Are from my many, many years of martial arts. So this is, you know, my 51st year as a martial artist.
[00:07:03] And there’s so many lessons in the martial arts about grounding and about, being centered and, and about inclusivity and about seeing the bigger picture of things. So I think, a lot of the things I bring into this are actually from and balance and about balance in life.
[00:07:23] You know, come from that, all that training I’ve had in the martial arts.
[00:07:27] Laura Hartley: You know, and this is an interesting topic here because your work now is all about positive masculinity. Yes. I’m curious again about your experiences in, when you were looking at masculinity, kind of, as to how does this apply to me, where do I fit into this?
[00:07:43] And also, we’re seeing a lot of toxic masculinity is a really common term that we see. What was this like when you were looking at it kind of from a different perspective and then into actually, how do we make this into something that’s a little bit healthier and better for us and better for the world?
[00:07:59] Mac Scotty Macgregor: you know, I’ve had such an interesting ride of this because as, as what the world viewed for a long time as a female athlete, I definitely put up with a lot of sexism, and so I’ve experienced that. And then when I was ready to start my medical transition, I went through a period of time of questioning.
[00:08:17] Do I really want to be a part of this group of people who’ve caused a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people. and that’s when I actually heard my grandfather, who was a great role model to me in a lot of ways. He wasn’t perfect by any means he was very traditional, but my Papa was also , came from a poor farming family and owned his own business.
[00:08:37] And, , he could tell a story like nobody’s business. He was a very social person. He was an extrovert. And so I learned a lot from him, but I heard his voice in the back of my head when I was questioning this, cuz he always taught me that the best way to create positive change is from within a group.
[00:08:56] So he taught me don’t stand on the outside and point the finger at a group and complain, get in there and be a part of making positive change. And he became a city Councilman. He ran for local office. He did all kinds of things in the community to better the community. And, he taught me that I think very valuable, viewpoint and skill.
[00:09:19] And so I heard his voice when I was questioning and then it came to me, it was like, yeah, what we need is more good masculine people to step up and speak up and get involved. And so, and there are. Of course, there are a lot of good masculine people and men in the world, it’s just that right now, they’re not the loudest voice, unfortunately.
[00:09:41] Laura Hartley: So what is positive masculinity? How would you define it?
[00:09:44] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Ah, well, I think I’m gonna take it right from the back of my book. It’s a heart led guide toward growth and conscious emotional intelligent and inclusive masculinity. So when I say inclusive [00:10:00] masculinity, one of the things to me about toxic and traditional masculinity is it’s been very exclusive.
[00:10:07] So it’s even been exclusive to some cisgendered men. And when I make cisgendered, I mean, people who are born with their mind and their, body matching in, how they feel they are, how they feel their gender. It’s congruent. So traditional and toxic masculinity excluded men that were more tender.
[00:10:28] Maybe more artsy, right? They weren’t the physical prowes kind of, you know, tough guy. So all those kind of guys were excluded in that and have been for a long time. So even cisgender men have been excluded and sometimes. This has also been a good old boys club in a way that excluded some men of color.
[00:10:52] Right. And anybody who was a little different, and of course it’s also excluded the LGBTQ plus community. So men that were bisexual or gay or trans men, or any, anybody on that spectrum at all, any, any of the letters of the queer alphabet were excluded as well. Cuz it was very heteronormative.
[00:11:11] Right. So excluded a lot of people. . And so when I talk about inclusive, I mean, not only including all the forms of masculinity that I call masculinities, cuz there’s not just one way to be masculine, but it’s also inclusive of women and people on the gender spectrum all the way across. Why should we think there’s has to be a competition?
[00:11:36] I don’t. I mean, the one thing the binary does is it pits one against the other, any binary system does this so in, in other words, in that system, in order to define manhood and masculinity, I need to say I’m opposite of something and that’s femininity in women, And that’s how the binary does the rich, the poor, right?
[00:11:58] The black, the white, it’s all, you have to have the other to define yourself .
[00:12:03] Laura Hartley: And the thing that I find really interesting in what you’re saying here is that, our traditional definition of masculinity really plays into these systems that a lot of us are trying to change around patriarchy around capitalism, around white supremacy that, that binary and that rigidity is the same construct there.
[00:12:22] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Right? Totally. Yeah. You got that, right? Yeah. It, it, it limits us all. And one of the things when I started the group, so I’ve been running this men’s group, positive masculinity discussion group for going on three and a half years. And when I started this group, the #metoo movement had been going for a while.
[00:12:42] Right. So women were starting to speak up and, and talk about how the patriarchy and toxic masculinity had harmed them and held them back and been an obstacle. , but men, weren’t a part of this conversation. You know, the, the masculine voice was not a part of this. Except some men that were saying, oh, you’re just trying to say, you know, all men are bad.
[00:13:08] The men that were, you know, fighting, you’re trying to take our manhood away. That kind of, that was the only voice that I heard coming from the masculine side. Why do you think
[00:13:17] Laura Hartley: that is?
[00:13:18] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Well, because I think [00:13:20] men have been taught that I have to hold up this man mask, which means I have to, you know, be all these things.
[00:13:27] I’ve been told what it means to be a man. Like I have to be in control all the time. I have to have all the answers. I have to be strong all the time. All these things. I can never show weakness. I have to have all the answers all the time, which none of us do. I mean, that’s ridiculous.
[00:13:44] But that’s the man mask. That’s the thing we’re taught, you know, in order to be a man, if you do any of these things that are considered feminine, then it shows weakness. Which again, goes to why men don’t talk about their feelings and show any emotion, why they’re stoic and rigid. And you know, it’s this, it goes back to all of that.
[00:14:05] So that’s why, and what I wanted to do was invite men and masculine people into this conversation and say, Hey, first of all, we need to talk about how the patriarchy and toxic masculinities also hurt.
[00:14:17] Laura Hartley: It reminds me of that bell hooks, quote, you know, the first act of violence that the patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women.
[00:14:24] It is to engage in, in psychic self mutilation like that. Yes. That killing off of the emotional parts of
[00:14:30] Mac Scotty Macgregor: themselves. That’s right. That’s right. And, and that’s why the, the suicide rate is so high among middle aged men, I believe, is because, and why do we see all, almost all the violent crime, right.
[00:14:41] Is men because they stuff that emotion down so much, it’s gonna come out in some way. And sometimes it comes out in self harm, whether it be substance abuse or suicide, or, and sometimes it, of course comes out in, in, violence, domestic violence. And sometimes, , it ends up these people going out and doing mass shootings, unfortunately, and harming, you know, innocent people.
[00:15:08] You know, because they just don’t know what to do with all this, because men have not been given the emotional tools . To deal with. Cause they’ve just been told to shut it.
[00:15:16] Laura Hartley: Mm. And you know, this for me, the expression of our emotions through anger and violence is, you know, to say it’s not just men only, but it is a very kind of masculine feature.
[00:15:28] And it’s kind of the definition of what I think we use the term toxic masculinity. But I also, right. I think I remember reading that you said the term toxic masculinity was kind of a dangerous term to use. Was that right?
[00:15:42] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Well, here’s what I challenge people to do. I think there’s a difference between toxic and traditional masculinity.
[00:15:49] And I think we need to save the word toxic for the things that are really toxic. You know, like that extreme violence is toxic. Rape culture is toxic, right? There’s no doubt about that, but there’s also some of this. That is what I would call traditional masculinity. It’s not healthy, but it’s not toxic. So to.
[00:16:11] It may be toxic to the individual, but not toxic to everyone out there. For instance, if you have more traditional belief systems, right. You know, like some people even, I would go as far as say, as some people that believe marriage is, is strictly between one man and one woman. So they don’t believe in, you know, any other type of union.
[00:16:34] Right. Well, if that’s their personal belief and they keep that to [00:16:40] themselves and that’s the way they run their own life, that’s one thing. But the minute they try to push their beliefs, this is where I think the line crosses of something becoming traditional to toxic is the minute I try to force that on other people or bully other people due to my belief or my way of thinking.
[00:16:59] And that’s, I think, I think we have to, you know, I just think sometimes the word toxic is thrown around really easily. And it makes men feel like people think that just all men are toxic, you know, or the masculine is toxic in and of itself. And that’s where I just think we have to be careful.
[00:17:16] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And I like that distinction that you’re making that it’s not masculinity itself.
[00:17:20] It is these aspects of masculinity that involve the violence that involve the, the force and the pushing of harm. Mm-hmm onto others. Yes. You know, I love a lot of your work because it is about breaking free of social conditioning, you know, and I think a lot of what, you know, my school is about as well, is this idea of culture detox.
[00:17:40] How do we break free of systems? And when I was reading your book the other week, there was a quote that stood out to me that. You know, I’d love to hear a little bit more from you about, about these intersecting systems, because you said that capitalism also supports this patriarchal idea to the point where systems have been set up to applaud the survival of the fittest, no longer caring who they hurt or how devastating the hurt may be.
[00:18:04] You know, where does capitalism play into this? Like
[00:18:08] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Well, it’s the hoarding of resources, right? It’s it’s the guy who has the most toys win. , you know, we, we make a joke about it. Like it’s toys, like it’s a kid hoarding the toys, but when it gets to the point where it’s adults hoarding all this wealth, when we have people starving on the, you know, on the other side of the road that is toxic and the, and that the guy with all the toys doesn’t care, the guy that’s hoarded up all the wealth doesn’t care, because all he cares about is getting more and more and more.
[00:18:41] and I think unfortunately capitalism, unchecked or out of balance has turned into something that has become very toxic. And it, I think it’s definitely at that point in the United States you know, and in other places too, in the world, but it’s, it’s become the point where we just cheer on the guy he can get, he can also get away with awful behavior because he has all these resources.
[00:19:06] Right. Whereas another person would never get away with that. Same behavior, you know? So that, again, it just, it just, the, it, the toxicity just is like a ball rolling, downhill, getting bigger and bigger, like the more, the more wealthy gains. And then, you know, he also thinks he’s beyond the law. Right.
[00:19:26] Which some of them are, some of them are , you
[00:19:29] Laura Hartley: know, I think capitalism was born out of patriarchy. I often say, yes, capitalism’s only 500 years old, or so it’s not been around as long as these patriarchal structures, but they kind of prop each other up.
[00:19:42] Mac Scotty Macgregor: They sure do prop each other up. Yeah. And, and it’s also, there’s nothing about being collaborative in this uh, Way of thinking right in this belief system around capitalism, it’s more, I will step on whoever I have to, to get what I want to be the guy at the top of the hill.
[00:19:59] And I [00:20:00] don’t care who it hurts, right. Or how many it hurts or how many are without I don’t care. And, and of course the men that have been in power all these years, they then create systems that support their power. like tax breaks for the rich, right? like they end up paying less taxes than the middle class.
[00:20:24] How is that? Because they create the systems
[00:20:27] Laura Hartley: this kind of leads into another quote of yours that I loved, which was, you know, that it’s important to understand that what we associated with male and female is all connected with what we’ve been taught, that there are social constructs for the purpose of keeping us all in our proper lane.
[00:20:41] You know, what is our proper lane? Like, where is, where is this taking us? What, what is it supporting these ideas that we have?
[00:20:49] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Oh, well it supports those, those old white guys that have the money staying in charge. Honestly. I mean those old, straight white guys, it, it really does. It supports that. You know, I often bring this up when someone says to a little kid to a little boy, Hey man.
[00:21:06] up, or toughen up.. What are they, what are they actually saying to you? You know?
[00:21:12] Laura Hartley: Just be like that person just, just hold it all in
[00:21:16] Mac Scotty Macgregor: that’s right. Yeah. And, and show that you, you know, act like you’ve got it all together, even if you don’t. I remember hearing the thing, fake it till you make it, you know, just put on the face, right.
[00:21:27] Put on the mask act like you’ve got it all all together. When someone says to a little girl act like a lady, what are they saying to her? You’re not staying in your lane. You’re not doing what we tell you you’re supposed to do to act like a little, you know, sweet girl that has manners and doesn’t speak up for herself enough.
[00:21:45] Right. Don’t be too assertive. That’s not acting like a lady, right?
[00:21:50] Laura Hartley: Yeah. It’s funny, I’ve been creating some work around perfectionism and you know, this, this imposter syndrome that especially so many women struggle with and, you know, bringing this back to this idea that actually culturally, as women, that we are, we were supposed and conditioned for thousands of years to stay obedient, to stay quiet, to, you know, to look dainty and clean.
[00:22:11] And then of course, We’re loud or we’re messy, or we make mistakes that it feels like this massive shame, because we’ve never been conditioned to believe that that’s acceptable.
[00:22:22] Mac Scotty Macgregor: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. And I love that there are so many women out there breaking this cycle. Now. I love it. I mean, my wife is one of ’em she’s in, in school getting her doctor degree right now and transpersonal psychology.
[00:22:36] And I love, you know, here we’re visiting our grandchildren right now. And. Young granddaughters are getting to see their grandmother go back and get her doctorate degree right now, which I think is, is so powerful, right. For them to see those examples. Right. And she’s a strong woman and I love that more women are speaking up and not apologizing for who they are and that’s, and, and men need to support.
[00:23:00] ’em one of the things I loved I went to a women’s March yesterday here in the United States for women’s reproductive. Right. and there were a lot of men there marching and supporting women. And that was really good to see.
[00:23:15] Laura Hartley: Yeah. You know, and, you know, looking at this idea, right. So we know that the [00:23:20] binary kind of falls into this idea of supremacy culture.
[00:23:22] We know that it props up these systems. We know that, you know, gender comes with these constructs that keep us in a certain lane, what are the tools that actually create this though. How do we police these systems? Ways that maybe we don’t realize that we’re holding this system up and these ideas in place
[00:23:42] Mac Scotty Macgregor: well, here’s the interesting thing is even with toxic and traditional masculinity, a lot of women even perpetuate these messages because they’ve been socialized the same way.
[00:23:54] Right. And I, I tell this story about my stepson. He, when I teach this stuff, he’s, he’s a, he’s a college, you know, age kid now, but he was 13 and going to get prep for braces and he had to get a tooth pulled and he was really nervous about. And he’s a tall kid for his age. And so we go to this pediatric dentist, his mom was working, so I took him and he’s like the, the dental assistant gets us in the room and he’s giving the chair, the death grip, cuz he’s very nervous.
[00:24:26] And she looks at him and says, because he is a tall kid, right. For his age, she looks at him and says, you need to toughen up. You’re a big boy. So she had been socialized the same way right now. What I did was I stepped up and said, excuse me, ma’am his mom and I don’t raise him like that. We raise him where he can express his fears and talk about his feelings.
[00:24:46] She was just like, oh my goodness. You know, I’msorry and hopefully that made her really go back and think through some things, but we’ve all been socialized around this whole idea. He’s 13 years old, but because he’s tall, he’s supposed to be, not feel afraid of getting a tooth pulled. I mean, I know adults that’d be afraid of getting a tooth pulled.
[00:25:07] Right. I’m probably one of them. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Nobody likes the dentist, right. but you know, that was her socialization. And I hope that what I said to her made her go back and think through it, you know? So we’re always policing each other. It’s not just men, men police each other all the time, because if a guy shows tenderness or emotion at all, a lot of other guys will jump on him right away.
[00:25:35] You know, what are you doing? Being a wuss. You know, you’re, you’re being a sissy. You know, that stuff starts very young. But also I think we need to be honest and look at it that women also perpetuate it because women have been socialized the same way. You know, I’ve heard a lot of women tell their little boys not to cry.
[00:25:52] and their sister is allowed to cry right next to him and the boys don’t understand this when they’re little. That doesn’t make any sense. Right?
[00:26:00] Laura Hartley: it’s this containing of our emotions, right? So like this, this idea that, you know, we use shame or guilt or right. This, you know, obedience to say, you shouldn’t feel this, you know?
[00:26:10] Right. Make it something
[00:26:11] Mac Scotty Macgregor: else. Yeah. And then we have to go back and try, you know, the work I’m doing is to peel back these layers of shame, and reexamine our socialisation. And say, Hey, you know, we were created to be emotional beings, all of us. And so is this really healthy for us? Is this serving us well?
[00:26:30] What happens? You know, men, they get into relationships as they become adults. And. A lot of men get told you’re not emotionally available to me in their relationships. Well, why is that? [00:26:40] Well, the whole world’s been telling me to shove my emotions down and not talk about anything, you know, my whole life.
[00:26:46] And now I get into a relationship and somebody wants me to be emotionally available. They don’t even know where supposed to be intimate
[00:26:52] Laura Hartley: immediately.
[00:26:53] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yeah, that’s right. They don’t have any idea where to start, you know, and then they end up empty. They feel very empty. You. So, I mean, that’s in, and that’s in romantic intimate relationships, much less friendships.
[00:27:06] Men have such a hard time, you know, developing healthy friendships where they can actually talk about something other than work and sports, you know that I know men that have been lifelong friends and I’m talking known each other since elementary school and feel uncomfortable giving their lifelong friend a hug.
[00:27:29] or comforting them. If they have someone in their immediate family pass away, they don’t know how to, they don’t know how to be there for their friend. You know, it’s so sad. It really is sad. You know, that there’s this big disconnect because they can’t be in touch with their own emotions. Of course. How can you be there for a friend that’s going through something like that.
[00:27:49] If you can’t be in touch with your own emotions. So.
[00:27:54] Laura Hartley: What does unraveling that shame look like? You know, because as you said, we’re so conditioned to it and, and that’s, you know, it’s men, it’s women, all of us are conditioned, I think, to kind of use shame and even within change making and activism circles, you know, there’s a big thing around shame culture and how we gonna shame this other person into change, right.
[00:28:13] And interchange. Right. And I’m a big believer that shame actually doesn’t really lead anywhere. Positive shame generally only leads to toxicity. So like where do we start to peel that back?
[00:28:24] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yeah, I think we have to all go back and examine reexamine, the messaging and modeling we had. And this is not an easy process.
[00:28:32] I mean, because you, you really have to go back through layers of, and you know, I think you and I had talked about this before. The unlearning there’s so much more unlearning to do than learning. Oh my. I mean, literally, you know, it’s like Shrek peeling, I’m, you know, I’m made of layers, right. Peeling back the layers and, and you know, it, I think one of the obstacles is some people think if I peel back these layers and go back and look at my modeling and, and messaging and socialization, am I saying that the people who taught me this are.
[00:29:08] I think that’s an obstacle, right? Because people don’t wanna look at their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and coaches and teachers, and think they were bad people. And one of the things I let people know is I don’t think that they were, most of them were not bad people with bad intentions.
[00:29:24] Nobody was having these conversations with them. They were just passing along with the way they had been taught and socialized. Right. Nobody was, unfortunately they didn’t get the, the chance to have these convers. And they were harmed by their socialization too, and limited by yeah. You know,
[00:29:42] Laura Hartley: you know, I can relate to that.
[00:29:45] Yeah. That fear that sometimes, you know, when I was looking at things in my past, you know, I love my family. My family’s amazing. It’s helped shape me into who I am, but also then looking at maybe some of those unhelpful beliefs and ideas and constructs that were passed down that [00:30:00] don’t actually serve me was right.
[00:30:02] It felt guilty a little. , you know? Yeah. Like, is it a betrayal to them to like be free of this
[00:30:08] Mac Scotty Macgregor: right. Or, you know, to your faith or your, you know, a lot of people have those community ties too, that they feel it’s a betrayal too, you know, but I mean, healthy faith traditions, even they want us to grow and thrive.
[00:30:23] Right. Mm. So I mean, you know, I always think of that, you know, if, if, if we’re really supposed to grow and thrive, we want to do things in the healthiest way and hopefully for goodness sakes, hopefully we evolve and get better each generation. That’s the hope, right? yeah. It’s not just to stay exactly the same.
[00:30:44] Hopefully we learn some things that we can do better and, and teach our kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews to do better as they come up, you know? And and that’s, that’s the thing of this work now. It’s not easy to find people that are willing to do this deep dive because this is deep interpersonal.
[00:31:01] yeah. You know, I had one person tell me you’re looking for unicorns. because it’s not easy to find. As you know, you’re doing some of this work too. It’s not easy to find people that just wanna jump right in and really deeply examine all of this. Right.
[00:31:18] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And so a lot of this, you know, cuz it’s funny when we’re talking about culture, we’re talking about systems yet we’re coming back to work.
[00:31:26] We do as individuals, right? We’re coming back to work. We do inside ourselves.
[00:31:30] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yeah. Well, you know, I took a, I took a I had the privilege of taking a seminar several years ago as a college professor. I got to sit with the Dai Lama for four days and he taught us. How to have world peace through each of us working on our own individual inner piece.
[00:31:52] It was amazing, but he said, we cannot just look out there and talk about world peace without working on our own inner peace. And so that is exactly what I’m doing. We can’t change the view. Of these limiting ideas and beliefs out there in the world until we look within and do that introspective work.
[00:32:16] Right?
[00:32:17] Laura Hartley: Yeah. You know, system change has its inside job as well because ultimately like, you know, we’ve created these right. Humans created them, humans perpetuate them. That’s right. So we need to kind of, as humans start to like look within and what am I holding up?
[00:32:33] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yes. And then you start to have conversations about it with people in your life and that’s how it starts to trickle out.
[00:32:39] Right? Ah,
[00:32:41] Laura Hartley: yeah. So you create spaces, right? You create groups that men can come along to you and start to explore this idea. Yeah.
[00:32:48] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yeah. So here’s a beautiful thing. So about three and a half years, I’ve been running this men’s group where we can create a safe container. We make agreements at the beginning that.
[00:32:59] Nobody will share anybody else’s story or, you know, what they share without their permission outside the group. It’s consent based, you know, to share anybody else’s story. And we also make an agreement that will be supportive of one another’s growth within the group. So we’re there for a unified, you know, [00:33:20] reason to help each other learn and grow as we go along and.
[00:33:26] even if somebody says something, you know, because as you’re peeling back, these layers, sometimes things come out, right. Even if someone says something like really off color, you know, about their thoughts or beliefs, we, we do an, a keto technique. I would say we redirect gently. You know, to . I like I, keto is the way of harmony.
[00:33:49] It literally means the way of harmony. So you take the energy in, you blend with it and you gently redirect it. And so, instead of just telling, you know, someone, if they say something like really off color, like why should we support women and women’s rights, you know, like that kind of a thing. We don’t just come, you know, down on them, you know, like a lot of guys would in the regular traditional toxic world.
[00:34:12] And say, you know, you’re an idiot, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you see this? You know, like , you know, we say, have you thought of this perspective? How about look at it from this angle over here? And are there women in your life that you love, right. Are there women you care about? Well, you know, do you, why would you want hold them back?
[00:34:32] You know? And if you’re secure in who you are, well, then why would you feel the need to put anyone else? Right. .
[00:34:40] Laura Hartley: What I like about this is it’s not just changing the beliefs. It’s not just like, you know, okay, now we’re gonna support women or now we’re not gonna do this. It’s actually kind of changing the framework in which you’re approaching it to begin with, like the very foundations.
[00:34:54] Mac Scotty Macgregor: One of the things we really encourage is curiosity. I think curiosity is the key to everything. And, and I, and I say that because. even like when I’m examining my own thoughts and feelings around something, like when you mentioned rigidity earlier, you know, I talked a lot in the book about rigidity and that it’s nothing to celebrate.
[00:35:13] For one thing as an athlete, you know, I can tell you that rigidity is something that will cause injury in you as an athlete. It’s agility and flexibility that helps keep you from getting injured, not rigidity. Right? So anytime I feel like that we’re rigid in anything, like somebody says something and I feel my body tense up.
[00:35:38] I’m sure we’ve all had that happen because it brings up some reaction in you. I think curiosity is the way to approach that. This is what I teach the guys in the group. This is how I coach them. Get curious about why am I feeling my jaw tight? Why am I feeling tense when somebody talks about this?
[00:35:59] You know, get curious, start asking yourself questions. What is that bringing up in me? Where is that coming from? You know, what is that triggering in me? That’s bringing up that reaction. And I think that curiosity is the key to us. You know, not learning about ourselves. Like the first thing is learning about ourselves and it, and it’s, you know, this is a, I think a deeper dive for the masculine because we’ve been taught to ignore feelings.
[00:36:24] Yeah. And so we’re, I’m asking them to get curious and dive into why this brings this up. And if you feel sad, dive into what is it that’s bringing that up and right. You know, and this helps us work through this in a healthy way. [00:36:40]
[00:36:40] Laura Hartley: You know, and again, like bringing this back, you know, I, I completely see what you’re saying, but I also, I see it in our work lives as well.
[00:36:47] You know, even for those of us, you know, who aren’t men or identify as men, then, you know, we go into the office and this is a professional space. You’re not supposed to have emotions here. This is your working life. And this idea that there is a disconnect in parts of our lives, from what we’re actually feeling.
[00:37:02] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Right. And that’s it doesn’t work. It does it really doesn’t work. I mean, the best, the workplaces where people thrive are the workplaces where you can bring your whole self to work. You know, they’re the workplaces where if you are, for instance, you know what you’re dealing with with, at home, if you’re taking care of a sick elderly parent, they’re the workplaces that you can actually talk about that.
[00:37:29] And people say, how can we support. At work, you know, you can’t ignore that kind of thing at work. And how many people are dealing with heavy things like that in their family, they may have a sick child or a sick, you know, family member they’re caring for, or, or people going through their own like cancer illness or something.
[00:37:49] And they feel like they can’t talk about these. These are life altering things, or going through a divorce or a separation, you know, all of those things affect every part of us. So if we can’t bring our whole selves to work, we’re not going to also, we’re not gonna be able to do our best work. We’re not gonna be able to thrive.
[00:38:08] Laura Hartley: And we can’t then bring our whole selves suddenly at home either when we’ve just like been disconnected from ourselves for eight or nine hours somewhere else. . So I’m really curious. If we’re looking at this, like we have this individual lens of unlearning of, trying to get curious about what we’re feeling of trying to let go of shame. From a cultural or from a community or change maker lens,
[00:38:29] what can we be doing to kind of change these structure?
[00:38:33] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Some that takes a little work. Right. And that takes us being willing, not only like to do our own introspective work, but to go out and challenge places that we gather, like workplaces and, faith communities and any group that we’re in, and challenge them to open up and have these conversations.
[00:38:54] I. people are tired of being silent. And if one thing I think is the silver lining from the pandemic is people realizing that they’re not willing to spend their life, for instance, working at a places where they can’t bring their whole selves to work right. Or that aren’t supportive of who they are ?
[00:39:12] And I think, you know, people have taken more seriously, like the what’s important to them. They reevaluate it? And so if a place doesn’t do that, they don’t want to be there anymore. And I think , it’s a bit of a revolution that’s happening. People, , waking up and realizing, Hey, my family and my own health and mental health and wellbeing is important.
[00:39:33] It’s important enough for me to speak up. Right. yeah. And maybe change where I work or change where I spend my time or who I spend my time with. Right. It makes you even choose your friends differently.
[00:39:46] Laura Hartley: absolutely. And the question I wanna leave you with today, and, you know, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation is, what is your vision of masculinity or, or masculinities, cuz you know, I love the, the plurality there in a [00:40:00] more just and regenerative and loving world.
[00:40:03] What’s your best vision for the future of how we start to view masculinity?
[00:40:08] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Well, good men need to be a louder voice. Good men have to speak up and stand up and, and embrace masculinities and embrace women and embrace people that are non-binary and talk about it. Not just stay off to yourself.
[00:40:27] I think we have to start speaking up and standing up. There are a lot of good men out there, and I also think we have to challenge each other as men to do your work. to do our work. I mean, one of the things I challenge the guys to do in our group is, Hey, if you hear, you know, somebody make an off color comment, a racist comment, a comment about against women, don’t just stand there.
[00:40:53] Don’t think you’re still the good guy, because you just stood there, say something and there’s ways to say it and not like start a fight. Mm-hmm , you know, and I actually teach that skill there’s ways to say it. One of the things I suggest to people is call the, is wait till you’re alone with the guy who said it, because one of the things that’ll start a physical confrontation with guys is if you make them lose face in front of a whole group, right?
[00:41:19] So there’s ways to do it in a healthy way where maybe you’ll actually get through and he’ll open and listen to you because if you, you scream in his face or shutting down in front of others, he’s not gonna be open to really hear what you say. He’s gonna get defensive. So I think the good men need to speak up.
[00:41:37] I think that’s the big thing. And I also think, I think women need to make it clear to guys I’m tired of being your only emotional like crutch. , I think you need to get out there and get some healthy friendships and go get in a men’s group. You know, I will tell you a lot of the guys in our group, the women in their lives.
[00:41:55] Told ’em about our group. ,
[00:41:58] Laura Hartley: they’ve been sent there by women.
[00:42:00] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yes. Yes. And that’s okay. You know, whatever, whatever gets in there and to start doing this work, and then they’re much healthier and happier. One of my favorite stories from our group and the, and the three and a half years have been running the group and we do it virtually so people can join from anywhere.
[00:42:17] My hope for the future is that we end up with these groups all over. And one of the beauties for, from the book being out is that I’ve had men contact me from all over the world now saying I wanna learn. And so I, how to run a group like this here. And so I’m gonna be doing a facilitator training for, for folks to be able to have groups, but one of the best stories that, that from that’s come from our group is a, a father and an adult son that had been coming to our group together.
[00:42:48] And prior to being a part of our. They were not very close. The dad’s a very kinda masculine man’s man, a hunter Fisher work on cars, kind of guy, you know, and the son’s more tender, more artists based, you know, , they’re very different. Right. And so they didn’t talk about much of anything.
[00:43:08] They had very surface conversations and they started coming to our group together. The dad started actually coming. and the son then started coming. And I will tell you that the [00:43:20] son wrote a beautiful blog that we’re getting ready to release on our website about the fact that this group has transformed their relationship, that now they feel comfortable hugging each other.
[00:43:33] They didn’t even feel comfortable hugging each other before father and son. And now they talk about real things. They can actually talk to each other when something’s going on in their lives. And they feel comfortable like actually calling each other or, you know, sitting down and having a conversation about real stuff.
[00:43:50] And that’s just so beautiful to me. And that makes me feel like all the work is worth it. Right. Because that’s what it’s all about. Right. It’s about, I think we will, the violence we’ll stop. I think we can literally transform the world if the masculine could open. and, and just have healthy relationships and have a health healthy relationship with their own emotions as well.
[00:44:14] Right.
[00:44:16] Laura Hartley: I like this idea, this open up, and I think as, as we do that, and as we learn to work with what’s inside of us and what we’re actually experiencing, that is where a change comes. That’s where real transformation starts to.
[00:44:30] Mac Scotty Macgregor: Yes so much. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:44:34] I have loved this conversation. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Everybody listen, Mac has a wonderful book called positive masculinity now. There is a link to that, a link to all of his details in the show notes. So you can find all of that below anybody who wants to check us out. We have an online school for change makers at publiclove.enterprises, and you can follow me on Instagram at @laura.h.hartley otherwise, we’ll see you again in the next episode.
Join us for one of my favourite conversations on the Public Love Project as we interview Veronique Porter on turning our values into action.
Veronique is a Black, with a capital B, cis-gender woman who founded Ampersand Workspace to turn race and gender theory into actionable steps.
She speaks on the nuances of race and gender in American society to help shape our mindsets and enact anti-racist and gender-inclusive values within our daily lives and communities. Veronique capitalises on her years of experience as a Black American woman, background in International Development, and research in American studies and culture.
She loves horror, reality shows, & pop culture, her wanderlust is real, and the loud laugh is definitely hers.
TRANSCRIPT: Please note transcript was generated automatically and has not been edited. It may contain mistakes or errors in transcription.
[00:00:00] Veronique Porter: We manifest how we wanna change the world in different ways, but everybody has their role and it all interplays off of each other. So find your thing, that’s like, this is what I wanna offer. This is my energy and expertise that I have to give. This is my superpower. This is the lane that I want to be in.
[00:00:16] Veronique Porter: And then in that lane, You gotta lean into the discomfort.
[00:00:20] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners.
[00:01:00] Laura Hartley: Today’s guest is Veronique Porter. Veronique is a Black with a capital B cis-gender woman who founded Ampersand Workspace to turn race and gender theory into actionable steps. She speaks on the nuances of race and gender in American society to help shape our mindsets and enact anti-racist and gender inclusive values within our daily lives and communities.
[00:01:23] Laura Hartley: Veronique capitalises on her years of experiences as a Black American woman, her background in international development, and research in American studies and culture. She loves horror, reality shows and pop culture. Her wanderlust is real. So is mine. And the loud laugh is definitely hers. So welcome Veronique i am so excited to have you on the show
[00:01:45] Veronique Porter: thank you so much, Laura. It is really cool to be here and I feel low key honored
[00:01:49] Laura Hartley: So turning race and gender theory into actionable steps. I love this because you know, it’s so clear about what it is and for so many of us, , we hold these values, but turning them into reality and actually using our values to remake the world is.
[00:02:08] Laura Hartley: It’s a struggle sometimes. It’s how do we take it off the page and into real life. But, before we kind of dive into this conversation, I’d love to hear a bit about you and how you came to be doing this work.
[00:02:19] Veronique Porter: So I often say that I’ve been doing this work for some time now and Ampersand workspace is me trying to launch a larger platform that
[00:02:31] Veronique Porter: allows more people than just like those who encounter me or my intimate circle to experience this work that I’ve been doing. Right. So going kind of from, you know, intimate referral base to like, all right, let’s do this officially. Let’s do it full time. And let’s launch this bigger platform. And so I, I do identify with that.
[00:02:50] Veronique Porter: I’ve been doing this for some time now. Whether it’s through formal or informal means but a lot of what I was hearing after George Floyd’s death was [00:03:00] that people were ready to kind of make change. Right. They were reading the books, they were listening to the podcast. They were trying to listen to their BIPOC friends, their queer friends.
[00:03:10] Veronique Porter: And they still were like, I don’t know how to do this. Like what now? What, how . And I get that because across the board, Theory and practice. There’s a gap. There’s always a gap. You know, when we were talking about what you learned at the university, what versus what you do when you go out into the professional world or what you learn at home versus real life, there’s always a gap.
[00:03:32] Veronique Porter: There’s always a learning curve. And I think people feeling like they’re ready to make moves. They’re ready to make change. They’re ready to transform. They’re ready to be better, but not knowing how is a, is a real place of authenticity. And I wanna help with that. I, I wanna share what I’ve been learning.
[00:03:48] Veronique Porter: I wanna share what I’ve been doing. I wanna share the work that I’ve been doing to kind of help bridge that gap and. There’s clearly a big need in that regard. So I really wanna kind of move the needle and kind of mix impact from this is just something we believe in versus this is something we live. Mm.
[00:04:06] Laura Hartley: I love that. That resonates so much as to how do we, yeah. How do we take it? Just from our vision and our minds, and actually embody the change that we want to see. Where did your background come into this? You know, I know you have a background in international development. You mentioned that, you know, friends used to come to you for this kind of advice, where did this interest first spark for you?
[00:04:26] Veronique Porter: I mean, honestly in America, right. You know, I can say I went to, I grew up born and raised in Chicago and Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in America, but also one of the most segregated . Everybody’s in their own little pockets. And so I didn’t experience the fullness of Chicago when I was there.
[00:04:45] Veronique Porter: And so I went to school in the middle of nowhere, Iowa in America, and it was an eye opening experience. Right. And so literally just trying to navigate the world of this is who I am. This is where I come from versus the world that I’m in now. And all these people from all over, I went to this really cool liberal arts institution.
[00:05:03] Veronique Porter: And there were folks from literally everywhere. And so what I’m learning in class versus what I’m seeing and the experience that I’m bringing in, I was trying to reconcile that. And I was, you know, having these deep conversations about what it was like to be a deeper minority than I even was before. And maybe didn’t realize.
[00:05:20] Veronique Porter: When I was in Chicago in these all black neighborhoods and these neighborhoods that were at least of color and, you know, would sporadically interact with white folks. And so that’s kinda, I think where it was born is just kind of reconciling my own experiences, my own identity, trying to mesh, you know, the book learning and my experiences and other folks experiences and how we relate it to each other.
[00:05:41] Veronique Porter: And it’s just, it, it continues to build like this is ironically enough, something that I enjoy. You know, when I was in college, I literally studied American studies. So really digging into the cultural intersections and all these ways in which things play into our history, our present our future and it’s [00:06:00] even, you know, when I was in international development for like almost a decade, those are the things that I was doing on the side.
[00:06:06] Veronique Porter: These are the conversations that I’m having about race and gender. These are the books that I’m reading. These are the articles that I’m reading. It was a lot of what I was posting about all over social media, particularly Facebook, cuz that was the social media of the day. And so I was literally, this is what I was engaged in.
[00:06:21] Veronique Porter: And so yes, of course I was like full on about this international development life. But when it was time to pivot away and I was thinking about, what do I enjoy? What do I do really well? What can I sustain? What can I offer the world? It’s not just my experience as a black woman. It’s, it’s literally all of, you know, this research that I’ve done informally and formally, right?
[00:06:41] Veronique Porter: It’s all the conversations that I’ve had. It’s all the events that I might have moderated or panels that I sat on. It, it, it was the culmination of that. And I was like, you know, now I have something to give. . And I know that I have these skills of being able to navigate and meet people where they are, cuz you know, we’re all on this journey in one way, shape or form, whether we’ve acknowledged it or not, or whether we’re stagnant or not.
[00:07:03] Veronique Porter: And so I’m constantly working on my journey. I’m constantly having these conversations with others about their journey. I’m constantly reading and researching about that. Why not? Relate that information to folks in a way that hopefully speaks to them that resonates to where they are in that journey.
[00:07:21] Veronique Porter: And hopefully help get them moving in a direction that they feel not only good about taking, but actually like putting it into practice. Cuz it’s not something you just arrive at. It’s it’s something that takes time. It’s constant. You’re not just woke and that’s. It’s done. And so I can acknowledge that in my life.
[00:07:38] Veronique Porter: This is the work that I’ve been doing with those that I know. And I just really want it to kinda alter the world. I think that is part of me in service to the world that we’re living and me as a global citizen, this is what I have to give. And I think I see everything literally everything through the lens of race and gender all the time.
[00:07:55] Veronique Porter: I can’t turn it off. And so let’s use this expertise. Let’s give this expertise to those that might not be as keen or might not be as sharp. With their lens on race and gender.
[00:08:05] Laura Hartley: I think I, I experienced something very similar that a lot of the world, I relate back to the ideologies of capitalism and patriarchy, you know, and how, how are they playing out in the systems and the beliefs and the structures that we have today.
[00:08:20] Laura Hartley: I wanna dive right in here with, you know, this question of what does gender and racial justice have to do with,, causes or. Actions like the climate crisis, , very often when we’re going into things like climate activism is a really good example. You know, we tend to think of these issues as separate somehow, but they’re not they’re interconnected.
[00:08:43] Veronique Porter: Right? Yeah. I agree. there’s so many different levels in how they play in. And in part, even the idea of like climate justice, it’s not just like, oh, let’s talk about climate change. Let’s talk about the ways in which the environment is moving along.
[00:08:55] Veronique Porter: The justice part of it is really speaking to the idea of like, there’s [00:09:00] something that is imbalanced and we need to correct it. And so for me, that’s really. When I’m speaking of climate justice, I’m speaking of the ways in which there are communities that are more deeply impacted by the environmental changes that we’re experiencing.
[00:09:16] Veronique Porter: Have been disrupted from their commune with the earth and thus are causing deeper and more harsh impacts of the ways in which the climate is changing. And because of the way in which our societies are set up and more often than not discriminate against oppress, systemically, keep black, indigenous.
[00:09:36] Veronique Porter: Other folks of color women, femmes people who are under the expectation of conformity of gender, especially female gender. The ways in which our societies usually oppress these folks means that climate is also going to like be a multiplier. It’s gonna have a multiplied effect against what they’re already dealing with.
[00:09:56] Veronique Porter: So to make it more concrete, for example, when we talk about these are the effects of climate change, or this is what’s gonna come, you know, food is gonna be harder to grow. The sea levels are going to rise. Temperatures will rise. These things already right now disproportionately impact indigenous folks and women, or those that are supposed to be under the expectation of conformity towards female gender.
[00:10:23] Veronique Porter: Right? So non-binary folks, trans folks, anybody’s gender expansive, if you will. They are already experiencing more of those things right now. So it’s already there in that level, right? But then on top of that, those sorts of communities, those folks, they’re concerned about climate more so than I think some of the other folks who don’t feel it right now, like the urgency, the anxiety, the angst
[00:10:49] Veronique Porter: is bigger, more pronounced, more at the top of the mind for those communities. Cause they’re already feeling it. They’re already experiencing it. And then to make matters worse in an American context, I can’t speak for the world, but I imagine it applies black folks, indigenous folks, other people of color.
[00:11:07] Veronique Porter: They are literally experiencing more impacts from environments pollution, sea levels, rising, all of that. They’re experiencing more of that than what they actually produce. So not only are they disproportionately feeling it, they’re disproportionately feeling it relative to how much they’re actually polluting the environment or relative to how much they’re producing co2 emissions.
[00:11:34] Veronique Porter: So it’s, it’s just unfair. It’s, it’s unfairly stacked against those folks. And we can’t talk about how do we move forward in a better way. We can’t talk about how we, you know, fight this, how we fight climate change, how we get everybody on board. If we don’t get everybody on board. So we have to listen to those that are most impacted.
[00:11:53] Veronique Porter: We have to listen to those that are it’s top of their mind. We have to listen to those who have unique knowledge like indigenous [00:12:00] communities of the land to see how we can get back into commune with the land. So for me like it, this is not something you can talk about climate justice without, including how race and gender play in because of the ways race and gender play into our societies.
[00:12:16] Veronique Porter: But the way those communities are automatically more deeply impacted.
[00:12:21] Laura Hartley: The way,, we can often see, you know, these, these systems of patriarchy and white supremacy playing out very much in the voices that we listen to in who we prioritize. That the very fact that we need to have a conversation about, including other voices kind of says that there is one mainstream voice and one mainstream ideology through which we view the
[00:12:42] Veronique Porter: world mm-hmm
[00:12:45] Veronique Porter: And I think too, we’re coming up with solutions. If we’re not inclusive. And like you said, who we’re listening to, who’s in the room, who’s doing the talking. Then those solutions also don’t meet the needs of the folks who are left out. So if the only folks that are in the room are more privileged, then the solutions are more technologically advanced and more privileged and might do more harm than good.
[00:13:07] Veronique Porter: As opposed to folks who are already trying to navigate those impacts. Without the resources without the knowhow or, you know, the book knowhow, right? Without the recognized authority, cuz they have authority without the recognized authority. And so if we’re not including everybody, then we’re really leaving all these voices out of the room who can provide us realistic cost effective solutions for their families, for their lives, as opposed to the ones that are doing the speaking, the ones that are giving themselves the authority to.
[00:13:39] Veronique Porter: To be the authority all that matter, you know?
[00:13:41] Laura Hartley: Before we, we look at how we translate, these ideas and knowing these voices matter into action, you know, it reminds me that. This is a very US context, but I’ve heard this same conversation in Australia and this same conversation elsewhere, , I think it was Hillary Clinton was asked question a couple of weeks ago around whether activist causes such as trans rights should be prioritized on a Democrat platform.
[00:14:06] Laura Hartley: You know, and her answer was basically, well, if it’s not gonna help us win the election, then no. And this is a really common experience. We see the same thing here. But coming back to this , idea that somehow trans rights or women’s rights or whatever it might be is different to democracy.
[00:14:24] Laura Hartley: Just wondering if you could like talk a little bit more on this intersection and , how important it is to address.
[00:14:32] Veronique Porter: Yeah, for me, the, the root of like trying to move towards climate justice or to solve some of the issues that like we’re seeing pop up over and over again, around capitalism, around .
[00:14:44] Veronique Porter: Our policies and our politicians not aligning with the people is leaving out the people, right? Like they think like Democrats in the US, for example, think that capitalizing on identity politics as they like to call it, which is just, you know, people’s lives and their intersections. [00:15:00] They think that capitalizing on that.
[00:15:02] Veronique Porter: only around election time is going to get them to win. And then they forget about it the whole time they’re in office. And then they come back around to it. We have to be in alignment with each other. So like your example of a politician saying this doesn’t help me in this moment, in this moment. So it’s not helpful.
[00:15:19] Veronique Porter: They it’s so myopic, they’re not seeing the bigger picture, right? It has to be community based and we have to be in alignment with each other. including the needs of each other. So as a politician, for example, if I’m a politician, I serve the people that is literally the goal is to serve my constituents, to serve my area who voted me in to serve them.
[00:15:46] Veronique Porter: And so to dismiss part of those people who I serve and say like, well, that’s not gonna help me in this moment and that’s not necessary. That’s why I think our society as a whole, our global society is in the situation we’re in. We’re only thinking as far as we can see, we’re not having vision for the future.
[00:16:08] Veronique Porter: And the future literally has to include us all. If you start leaving people out or you only include them when you need them, you only include them in the moment. Then you really lose sight of this like holistic picture. So climate justice, even if America is the only one who’s putting out all the, the pollution, it affects everybody.
[00:16:25] Veronique Porter: And so we all have to be, it just can’t be, I want my things and I want this life because not only does it come back around on me, The effects from the rest of the world. Also come back around on me. Tenfold. We’ve seen that with the pandemic and like vaccines. We’ve seen that in the ways that you know, we’re so interconnected and our financial markets, if one financial market’s having an issue sooner or later, we see other
[00:16:50] Veronique Porter: financial markets, having issues. We see other people going into recessions or having inflation we’re we’re all, especially this day and age, more than ever, we’re all interconnected. We’re a global society. We’re global citizens. And so we can’t just say like, well, because I can’t see how I think what really, what here Hillary Clinton is saying is I can’t see how trans issues are going to help me in the moment.
[00:17:16] Veronique Porter: and because of that, she dismisses trans folks when trans folks have literally not only the same issue she does and then like 10 times more. So being able to see trans folks in their issues actually helps propel her more and not to mention they are people who she would serve if she were moving forward.
[00:17:34] Veronique Porter: So it’s, it’s very limited view to only think of right now, this moment, me, my family, my community. We have to go broader than that. We have to think of who’s excluded and why, and how is that going to relate to the world, bigger communities later. And even if we don’t wanna see bigger communities, it will come back around to you and your family and your community.
[00:17:57] Veronique Porter: So I have to look beyond [00:18:00] me in this moment to make sure that I’m gonna be okay, 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, that my children are gonna be okay. That my community’s gonna be okay. So I have to look bigger cause either way it still comes back on. So I have to do that work.
[00:18:12] Laura Hartley: That, that we’re separate and that our issues are separate and that we can deal with your issue down the line. Once we’ve dealt with this one.
[00:18:18] Veronique Porter: Yeah. You just wait.
[00:18:19] Laura Hartley: You said there that identity politics is really just our lives and their intersections. I think that’s really an such a, such a unique and important way to frame it. .
[00:18:30] Veronique Porter: Yeah, cuz I think we’ve made again, totally American context here, but like when we talk about American politics. They love to say identity politics
[00:18:39] Veronique Porter: when they’re talking about literally elections. There’s Americas and Americans, and then there’s black voters and then there’s Latino voters. And then there are trans voters, and then there are LGBTQ+ voters as if there’s no black, LGBTQ plus voters as if there are no, you know, we’re all Americans.
[00:19:01] Veronique Porter: But if we’re segregated out in our minds, then American is code for a white American, and then everybody else has their own little group. And that doesn’t work because everybody has intersections. I’m not just black, I’m not just a woman. I’m not just an American, I’m literally all of those things and more.
[00:19:19] Veronique Porter: And so, yeah, we have to realize that it’s just, we’re all just people and we all have various intersections. We have women of educated status. We have women that are educated informally. We have men that make a lot of money and are this, you know, income tax bracket. And then we have non-binary folks that are in that same tax bracket.
[00:19:40] Veronique Porter: Like there’s more that connects us than not, but we can’t like put ourselves into neat little boxes. it has to be the intersections because we all have them. We literally all have various intersections. That’s what makes us unique. But it’s also the things that connect us to each other. So we’re just people, you know,
[00:20:00] Laura Hartley: this can also, you know be overwhelming when we’re starting to look at you from, from an activist perspective when you’re trying to work and you have this cause that you you’re really passionate about, you’re trying to get past to then also work with all the layers and nuances and complexities that we’re now aware of.
[00:20:18] Laura Hartley: It can be challenging, , in recent years is this idea of performative activism. It’s a really common topic. And I, for me, I actually think a lot of what we call performative activism isn’t necessarily meaning to be performative.
[00:20:29] Laura Hartley: I think it is the lack of experience in translating values, from thoughts and knowing to actually living and doing and being I’m curious, like, do you hear it more from you? How do we deal with that overwhelm of doing all of this? While also translating it into action.
[00:20:47] Veronique Porter: Yeah, I, I love that you brought that up, cuz I think that is a key thing to keep in mind that people are trying, right.
[00:20:54] Veronique Porter: Even when they’re being, we consider quote unquote performative it’s cuz they’re trying [00:21:00] right. And sometimes it’s a win and sometimes it’s a fail and sometimes it’s somewhere in between. For me personally, one way I, I try to navigate this is I always have meet people where they are. Right. So I’m not expecting you to know.
[00:21:14] Veronique Porter: Things that I know, or I can’t like be like, well, you don’t know these things, so clearly you haven’t done enough work. There is a difference between someone expecting other people to do the labor for them, other people to do the research for them, and then just regurgitate to them what they need to know in that moment.
[00:21:32] Veronique Porter: That’s completely different than this person just doesn’t know, or this isn’t a part of their vocabulary. This isn’t a part of their experience. They haven’t encountered this yet. And I think it’s just hard to know that if you don’t know the person. So the second part for me is where I, for me, the magic happens in individual conversations or group conversations, because you can really start to like dig into this.
[00:21:54] Veronique Porter: so like when you’re on Facebook or any social media at this point and like fighting with folks in the comments that like you don’t know, and like you couldn’t read their tone and you don’t know their experience and you don’t know where they’re coming from. Then this just becomes like an arguing match, as opposed to like we’re sharing information, or I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from, or I’m not judging you.
[00:22:14] Veronique Porter: And I think not only is that easier to read in tone and body language in conversation, but the point is. The point is different than like I’m gonna shut you down or I’m gonna check you or I’m gonna make sure you know, that you need to come correct. Next time nobody benefits. Nobody wins. Nobody grows. So interactions, whether they be professional, whether they be in an organization, a sports team in your family, those sort of like more intimate settings is where the magic happens.
[00:22:45] Veronique Porter: People can be introduced to things online, but like real transformation is not gonna happen in the comments in the DMS even right. So that’s the other part. And for me too, even in this this interview, Of course, I think these big picture things I’m always trying to like give an example. I’m always trying to make it concrete.
[00:23:03] Veronique Porter: I’m always like I can talk these big picture things with you because we’re on the same page about a lot of this. We do have a lot of the same background. We’re doing a lot of the same work, but to everybody listening, like they might not be on the same part of the journey. They might not have some of that shared language that shared experience.
[00:23:19] Veronique Porter: And so if I’m doing a training or workshop, like it can’t just be generally, like, let’s talk about race because that means nothing, right? Like I have to dive in a little bit more, . It has to be more specific. Let’s talk about the language and communication we use about race and new terminologies.
[00:23:36] Veronique Porter: Let’s talk about how to be an ally and what that can actually look like. Let’s talk about this thing that just came up in pop culture and how people have all these opinions about it. What’s yours. What experience are you bringing? What lens are you looking at that through? . So when I say meeting people where they are, it’s those intimate connections.
[00:23:53] Veronique Porter: And it really is saying, let’s talk about this specific thing, because then that can start like the wheels turning [00:24:00] when you can apply it to other things. So across the board, I think it’s really hard. And, and again, this is why I started Ampersand workspace about theory towards action, because we can take these big picture ideas and people are like, yes, I know racism is wrong.
[00:24:15] Veronique Porter: Yes. I know that like the gender binary are really restricting even for me as a CIS woman or a CIS man, so we can acknowledge those things. But then when, soon as we start to get into the nitty gritty, we get lost and you’re right. It’s overwhelming. It’s uncomfortable. So it’s really about digging into the details, specific examples, specific experiences to unravel and unpack some of what we’ve been taught.
[00:24:38] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And you know, a lot of this unlearning, it feels really uncomfortable when we’re doing it bad. Mm it’s not always a fun experience.
[00:24:46] Veronique Porter: Definitely not. definitely not. And I say to people all the time, like, of course it feels counterintuitive, but you have to lean into the discomfort if you’re doing it right.
[00:24:56] Veronique Porter: It’s gonna be uncomfortable. You know, you and I talked about how, you know, no matter how many times we’ve spoke in front of other people, you know, we, some of our intersections are like speaking at a summit together and that sort of thing. So it’s not like we’re brand new to this and yet. There still can be nerves.
[00:25:10] Veronique Porter: There still can be apprehension. There still can be a little angst. And that’s just how it goes. So if you’re doing something for the first time in an environment like we have today, where like everybody is on display, everybody’s being judged. Everybody’s being called out, canceled, evaluated on how good or bad they are.
[00:25:29] Veronique Porter: You just wanna freeze. Or you don’t wanna do anything at all. And if you are coming from a place of privilege, and this is not to make excuses for like people and privilege, and I have certain privileges as well, we all do. But in a situation where you might be coming from privilege, If the alternative is to be canceled or to be called out or to be, you know, like called a Karen or whatever, you don’t wanna do it.
[00:25:52] Veronique Porter: You’re like I could just keep doing what I’m doing. I’m fine. I’m trying to be good. And again, I’m not making excuses for those folks. I want them to do better, but we also have to provide full feedback and not just CR like full out surface level critique. We have to call people in sometimes we have to give people grace, we have to give ourselves grace.
[00:26:11] Veronique Porter: That you gotta lean into the discomfort and sometimes you’re gonna make a mistake and hopefully you learn from it,
[00:26:17] Laura Hartley: which you know, is a great question that you led us into there, is, what is the impact of your cancel culture and call out culture when we’re looking to turn our values into actions, because as you were saying, , when you have privilege and then you’re like, well, if I say the wrong thing, I’m going to be canceled or people won’t like me, or I’ll be judged or I’ll be excluded or whatever else.
[00:26:35] Laura Hartley: It’s really hard to do that. Yeah. Is there a place for cancel culture and call out culture? And if so, how does it intersect with this?
[00:26:44] Veronique Porter: Yes and no, there is a place for it, right? For me, I’m always more nervous about doing my work with my friends and family, cuz I’m gonna have to see them again. So I’m invested as opposed to somebody, I just meet on the street if they like don’t like me [00:27:00] or don’t like my work or have critique.
[00:27:02] Veronique Porter: and like, for me, that, that holds less weight. However, in a public context, I can see how that’s definitely more pressure. And, and it’s not the same as like, oh, well, I don’t have to see them again because you feel like your, your public image has been tarnished. And so I think what needs to happen is we need to take in.
[00:27:24] Veronique Porter: What’s useful to us as far as critiques, as far as feedback, and always be open to it. Right? Even if it’s hurtful, even if it doesn’t land the right way, even if it doesn’t sit the right way, I’ll often say you have to sit in it. So I’m gonna give an example, cuz again, I feel like I’m talking to you like up in the air, but like if you throw around, if you call somebody a racist.
[00:27:43] Veronique Porter: It is gonna hurt them to their core. And people will be more offended about being called a racist than whatever they might have done to evoke such a title. Right. I’m gonna tell you right now, I think all people are taught white supremacy, are taught patriarchy and we have to all and learn it. Women non-binary folks include.
[00:28:05] Veronique Porter: right. And so I too have included in that, even though I’m a black woman, I was taught white supremacy. I was taught these tenants and I have to unlearn. And so if somebody called me a racist today, tomorrow, the next day, I’m gonna say, oh, what do I do? Because to me the power of the word, if we’re thinking about an anti-racist world in that we have to acknowledge, we’re all racist to a certain extent.
[00:28:30] Veronique Porter: Cause we’re all taught. So it is not to remove blame, but it’s to say, this is what we’re working with and we have to unlearn it and learn something else. We have to learn the anti-racism. So knowing that I am on that journey, knowing that it is a journey and I never arrive. Even with the work that I do, even with, you know, me immersing myself in this, even in me, constantly trying to invoke this journey.
[00:28:52] Veronique Porter: If somebody calls me a racist, I’m not gonna be like, I can’t be a racist. I’m a black woman. I can’t be a racist because you know, I do this work and clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about now. Reverse racism doesn’t exist, but not to go on a tangent. The idea that like, I can’t be racist or that I can’t perpetuate the tenets of racism
[00:29:12] Veronique Porter: is not quite true. And so if somebody says that to me, I can acknowledge that, you know, reverse racism isn’t a thing. And also say, where is that coming from? Is there anything in that that hurts that, that place that they’re coming from? Is there anything in that, that my behavior actually did dictate that was aligned with something that was racist.
[00:29:33] Veronique Porter: I can sit and evaluate. as opposed to just being like, oh, how dare you? I would never, look at all the work that I’ve done. Look at my resume, look at my skin. So, I mean, I think we really do, when I say lean into the discomfort, when I say we have to like, hear what is useful and throw away the rest that’s with any critique that is with any sort of feedback that you get.
[00:29:54] Veronique Porter: And I’m not saying open yourself up to attack, but when things happen and that’s the kind of feedback that you’re getting, [00:30:00] that’s the kind of conversations that are happening around. And I’m also not saying people are fair often either, but you have to evaluate it to know if they’re being fair or not.
[00:30:09] Veronique Porter: You have to evaluate it to know if the critiques are landing or valid or something you can change or update. And if you automatically go on defensive, you close out any of that helpful feedback, regardless of what form it comes in, regardless of if it was gentle, regardless of if it was educational or helpful.
[00:30:28] Veronique Porter: If you’re defensive, you shut all that. . And so I don’t think that there’s ever a place for, you know, rape threats and death threats. I don’t think there’s ever a place for folks to just generally attack people and comfort people because they disagree with you. But when you’re being called out or called in, there’s nuance there, but they’re kind of the same thing.
[00:30:49] Veronique Porter: If you’re being called out or called in, if you’re being canceled. You really gotta listen. And one more example, not me, but Lizzo. Recently Lizzo released an album, a song, both. There’s definitely a single that was out there. And she used a word in the song that she did not realize was a slur or at least derogatory towards disabled folks.
[00:31:12] Veronique Porter: And folks called her out and not very like, oh, Lizzo, could you change this word? They’re like, yo Lizzo. I thought you was my girl. And you coming for my community. Like you used this word and you said that you were like for the people, what is this? Like, they very much said like, you need to, like people literally said to her in exact words, do better.
[00:31:31] Veronique Porter: And so instead of her saying as an artist, like, oh, I poured my heart out into this and my intent wasn’t to do X, Y, Z. She was like, oh, I didn’t know. Let me change that immediately. She literally went, she issued an apology, a heartfelt apology, not talking about her intentions, not talking about how she’s a good person, not talking about how she really is for the people she says, of course, I’m.
[00:31:54] Veronique Porter: because I’m for the people. Let me just say right now, I’m sorry. And know, I didn’t mean that in the offensive way. And because of that, let me show that in my actions, she rerecorded, rereleased the song after the apology. So even though she got harsh critique and immediate swift call out, she was like, that’s not in who in line.
[00:32:13] Veronique Porter: I wanna be. She listened and didn’t critique the tone of how they said it. She didn’t say, oh, my intent XYZ. She said, Let me change that real quick. I am sorry. Let me change it. So she listened to that feedback and then put it into action.
[00:32:31] Laura Hartley: I think that is the perfect example. Actually, I was reflecting on her doing that not too long ago.
[00:32:35] Laura Hartley: And she did that so well, but it really, it requires us to have this sense of, , that our, our worth and our identity is not necessarily based on other people’s approval, either. Because if it is that’s immediately where we’re like the whole reasons we shut down, we go, oh my God, I’m not a bad person.
[00:32:54] Laura Hartley: You know, I, I’m not a racist. I’m not. We need to have that separation and to be able [00:33:00] to say, actually, oh, you’re right. Okay. Where can I, you know, separate my identity and my wellbeing, my worth from this comment and go, okay, I’m learning, I got this wrong. Where did I mess up?
[00:33:11] Laura Hartley: And that’s exactly what she did, but that separation is sometimes challenging,
[00:33:15] Veronique Porter: Think. Mm. Yeah. And I think, especially for somebody like Lizzo, who literally. She is at the whim of the public, right? Like if we buy her albums or go to her concerts or repost her stuff or whatever, our interest in her gets her paid.
[00:33:31] Veronique Porter: And so she does have to, to a certain extent say, yeah, I do care what these people think, but not for the sake of like, like you said, like separating herself, right? Not for the sake of me personally. But for the sake of like, I want to be in alignment with who I say I am. And I think there’s where the distinction really lies.
[00:33:49] Veronique Porter: Right. And you’re right. Instead of not looking at like, this is my external view and I wanna make sure it’s pristine and perfect and I never make a mistake. So you all see me this way. And I think social media trains us to like do that more than ever, but this is what we put out into the world. This is what we’re showing to people.
[00:34:06] Veronique Porter: Instead. I think it’s really about alignment. Am I living in the integrity? Am I showing the values that I say are important to me? Am I doing the things that I say are meaningful? And that includes the community that you’re in, right? Like, are you respecting that community? Are you keeping that community in mind when you’re doing these things?
[00:34:26] Veronique Porter: So it’s less about like being perfect and like this public image of yourself versus like an alignment and in your integrity and your values. Mm.
[00:34:36] Laura Hartley: So how do we do this? Where do we start? If we are in a leadership position, in a movement, in an organization, in a company, and bearing in mind, the term leadership has, , so many connotations to it, of hierarchy and these things that we’re probably looking to break down How do we start translating these values into tangible actions? Where do we begin and how do we also reimagine and redefine leadership while we are doing that away from, you know, the kind of patriarchal structures we’ve been sold. .
[00:35:05] Veronique Porter: I think I’m gonna tackle the second part of this question first in that, like, we have to reimagine leadership first in a way, because for me, for example, I think a parent is a leader, right?
[00:35:17] Veronique Porter: You’re literally shaping at least one, if not multiple young minds to be adults global citizens in the world, that’s literally your job as a parent. So that also is a leader, right. And I think oftentimes we think of leaders in this very small box things we associate with men, we look at those sort of things as leaders and what we want out of a leader is not aligned with how we see them.
[00:35:42] Veronique Porter: So I think we need to start seeing the ways in which we are playing roles in our community. And which one of those are leadership roles, right? Are we parents, are we leading organizations, in church, in our communities? Are we the ones that take the lead in [00:36:00] directing our friend group to events and cultural activities?
[00:36:03] Veronique Porter: There are so many ways that leadership attributes, we all have them within us and that we’re all doing it. And we just have to recognize that. And so if we do that, then that means we’re talking about all of us and how to start is really about how you see yourself as a leader. So if I’m a parent, for example, I wanna start and how I’m raising my child. What kind of tenants do I wanna manifest into them?
[00:36:28] Veronique Porter: What do I wanna teach them? What do I want them to show up? As in, at, in the community, at school, with my friends and is that allowing them to be who they are is that allowing them to see others for who they are is that, you know, so it’s, it’s really about picking your thing that you feel passionate about, that you wanna put your energy into.
[00:36:51] Veronique Porter: And again, in the ways that you show up as a leader in your life and then unpacking how you want to be in alignment with that and what that might look like, and that’s different across the board, which is why it is hard to give, like, For me, I always find it hard to give these blanket statements. Like, well, just listen to the like queer people in your, in your life and just listen to the black people in your life.
[00:37:11] Veronique Porter: Of course you wanna listen to their experiences. Of course you want to understand where they’re coming from, but what if you don’t have those folks? And what if you have been, or you think you have been listening to them and still not doing enough? It really is about saying, in what ways am I a leader in my life, in my community, in, in my job.
[00:37:29] Veronique Porter: And. Am I aligned with what I think and feel am I putting that into action? And I think that’s where you start. That’s where the research starts. That’s where, you know, the, the small tweaks in your behavior starts and it can be big or small. It’s probably should be small, cuz that’s how we make habits.
[00:37:46] Veronique Porter: But it’s, it’s really about digging into what does my life look like and what are the changes that I wanna see.
[00:37:52] Laura Hartley: I love that. And It always reminds me when I was growing up my mother who was big on values and living our values in different context, but same principles. And she used to talk about our thoughts, our words, and our actions that the three have to be aligned.
[00:38:07] Laura Hartley: I love that. Cause I think that’s kind of what you’re getting to there.
[00:38:10] Veronique Porter: Absolutely. Absolutely. One thing. It was one of my new year’s resolutions. I’m still working on it. Is that. I often say you guys, we all do we say dudes, we say, bro, bruh, you guys. And I think we don’t even put any worth into the idea that like everything that is general can be masculine, but not the other way around.
[00:38:32] Veronique Porter: I can walk into a room full of folks that I know are CIS women who identify is she her hers and be like, Hey guys, and that is normal. But the reverse could not be true. I could not walk into a room that I know, identify as CIS man, and go, Hey girls, how’s it going? Hey gals, they were looking me crazy.
[00:38:58] Veronique Porter: So this idea that we automatically [00:39:00] default all things, male and everybody else, everybody else is other. So for me, I was like, I gotta put that into action. Right? This is what I’m talking about all the time. This is literally, you know, I say I’m manifest in the world. I’m trying to be more inclusive, even in my language.
[00:39:12] Veronique Porter: I really gotta stop saying you guys. I don’t say bruh. I don’t say dude, but I do say you guys. And so I. I definitely say it less now, but when I do say it, I also of course, correct. Right. And that’s what you gotta do. You gotta course correct every time until you just take it out. What do we
[00:39:28] Laura Hartley: say instead?
[00:39:29] Laura Hartley: Cause I’m the same. I say, Hey guys, a lot. And I’ve also been trying to work on this and there’s certain things, you know, Hey folks, you know, I’ve definitely found, but like it is so intrinsic to how we speak and to,
[00:39:39] Veronique Porter: and to our language. Cause it is been ingrained for so long. Right. And so this, when, I mean like unlearning, I have to unlearn how to say something else besides you guys, because literally that’s.
[00:39:49] Veronique Porter: I’ve learned to do over, all this time that I’ve been on earth. Everyone is always a good one, right? Hey everyone. Folks is also a good one. One I love the most, it’s a very American one. But it’s a y’all because , I
[00:40:03] Laura Hartley: love y’all and I’m really, it is so American. It’s so niche, but like
[00:40:07] Veronique Porter: it, it’s a great term.
[00:40:09] Veronique Porter: Let’s make, y’all a thing, you know, how other languages like French, for example, French has the vous. So the Spanish. There is a way to refer to group you and in English, we don’t have a group you do, y’all have a group you,
[00:40:23] Laura Hartley: when I was learning Spanish, I was like, group you, what is group you, like, I didn’t understand it.
[00:40:28] Veronique Porter: Mm mm. In English, we don’t have a group you that I know of. At least I’ve asked a lot of folx. And I’ve lived in a couple places. We don’t have a group you. And so I love a y’all. I really am trying to make y’all a thing.
[00:40:40] Veronique Porter: I’m gonna
[00:40:40] Laura Hartley: join you in that. I have a couple of last questions for you the first one, you know, this show is called the public love project, but I really believe that, when we’re talking about love in public spaces, what we’re talking about is justice.
[00:40:54] Laura Hartley: What we’re talking about is regeneration. What does justice mean for you when
[00:40:59] Veronique Porter: you said all of those things? I was literally like in community. It has to be in Community. It has to be. And we saw that in the pandemic in America where we struggled with this because we’re such an individualistic society. It’s all about me and mine, me and my family, what I feel and that community view we can do any of that change any of the love without the C.
[00:41:26] Veronique Porter: So I really see in order for us to move forward in justice, we have to always ask, who’s in the room, who’s excluded, and why? Because you always miss out on a richness when you don’t have diversity. We see it in cooking. we see it in our community.
[00:41:48] Veronique Porter: Like you need a diversity of folks to offer perspectives and experiences and viewpoints and lenses different than yours. And so we’re talking [00:42:00] about justice. We can’t be just towards anyone if we’re still actively excluding folks, we can’t create a new and better world if we still haven’t aligned the ways in which we’ve messed up in the world we’re in now.
[00:42:16] Veronique Porter: So it always has to come back to community. What does your community look like? What does that mean to you? Who’s excluded and why? And one thing you, can’t, it’s a question to ask, but you can’t ever know fully is what are you missing by not having them there. And I hope that like, fear of missing out keeps us asking who’s excluded.
[00:42:35] Veronique Porter: And why, what are we missing?
[00:42:39] Laura Hartley: FOMO, but in a good way. Exactly.
[00:42:41] Veronique Porter: Yes, yes, yes. .
[00:42:42] Laura Hartley: And as we’re looking to really remake the world from, as it is to, as it could be, what would be the one piece of advice or the one, which is so hard to do, it’s so hard to translate our work into like one piece, but what is the offering or the piece of wisdom that you would want to give to help us remake the world .
[00:43:01] Veronique Porter: Yeah, I think in some ways we’ve hit on it, but I do wanna reticulate it. And for me, in a nutshell, it’s really about finding your own lane or superpower. or whatever way you want to offer your energy and expertise to the world. So you have to find that first and figure out, you know, people manifest our, our work in different ways.
[00:43:24] Veronique Porter: We manifest how we wanna change the world in different ways, but everybody has their role and it all interplays off of each other. So find your thing. That’s like, this is what I wanna offer. This is my energy and expertise that I have to give. This is my superpower. This is the lane that I want to be in.
[00:43:40] Veronique Porter: And then in that lane, You gotta lean into the discomfort. It has to be about constant unlearning and relearning, which we’ve already said is not fun. Doesn’t feel great. It’s not comfortable, but it is so necessary in order for us to kind of break some of these unhealthy habits that we have in order to be more inclusive and to realign for something better, we have to realign for something better and being in alignment with yourself and your integrity and your values.
[00:44:09] Veronique Porter: you’re always gonna need that input from community and the support from the community in order to change the community. So, yeah, that’s the thing. Find your lanes. Okay. And then constantly grow, learn radical growth and learning, and never forget that it’s not an individual journey. It’s all in relation to what’s happening in the world.
[00:44:30] Veronique Porter: What’s happening in your community. Use that love and support and sometimes critique in order to move the chain.
[00:44:37] Laura Hartley: Okay. I love that and I love your work. So thank you very much Veronique so much for coming on to the public love project. I’m gonna have your links to your Instagram, your LinkedIn, your website, all in the show notes.
[00:44:48] Laura Hartley: So please everybody check them out below. Thank you for coming onto the show.
[00:44:52] Veronique Porter: Thank you. It’s been an honor. Really. I appreciate it. I love your work as well. So I, this is great being here and being in [00:45:00] alignment with you and in community with you for this bit of time. I really appreciate.
[00:45:04] Laura Hartley: Right back at you.
[00:45:05] Laura Hartley: Everybody, I do love it when you’re able to suggest guests or topics. So please, you can check out our website at publiclove.enterprises. Send me an email, or you can find me on Instagram, @laura.h.hartley.
Today we speak with Amanda Louisa on leading from the feminine.
Amanda is a sustainability specialist, feminine leadership coach and recovering lawyer. She helpscorporations and women harness the power of feminine leadership to create thriving and resilient organisations, paving the way for a better future.
When she’s not trying to revolutionise how we treat the planet and women, you can find her withher two cats or cooking up a feast for family and friends. If you like this episode, you can download her free cheat-sheet to regulate your Nervous System.
Amanda’s Course, Ditch the Overwhelm, has a 10% discount code using PUBLICLOVEPROJECT.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW: Please note transcript was transcribed by technology and has not been edited, therefore may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Amanda Louisa: And if they’ve been under stress and duress, which a lot of our parents have been our nervous system gets calibrated at a level that is
[00:00:07] Amanda Louisa: finding stress kind of natural and normal and being still feels very disruptive. It feels uncomfortable because we’re not used to it. We’re not used to understanding that stillness is safe. I think nervous system work is such a key part of being able to recalibrate as a society to be okay with the stillness to be okay with not keeping up with the Joneses and to start shifting that mentality of thinking we need more in order to be successful.
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[00:00:34] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
[00:01:14]
[00:01:14] Laura Hartley: Today, I’m speaking with Amanda Louisa. Amanda as a sustainability specialist, feminine leadership coach and recovering lawyer. She runs a coaching and consulting firm that helps women in corporations Harness the power of the feminine within themselves, their structures and their systems. Her passion and purpose is to create a more holistic corporate culture where the feminine is integrated into how we do business and political systems.
[00:01:40] Laura Hartley: She’s currently writing a book, which is not only a call to action for the next generation of female leaders. It is a step-by-step guide to sustainably transform the current paradigm so welcome to the show amanda …
[00:01:51] Amanda Louisa: Thank you for having me on Laura.
[00:01:53] Laura Hartley: So I, I love what you say there in your bio about transforming the current paradigm.
[00:01:59] Laura Hartley: And I’m curious to start our conversation here about where you would say we are as a world. What is the current paradigm? That we’re in and that you’re talking about.
[00:02:10] Amanda Louisa: When I talk about the paradigm that we’re in, we’re in a very colonial patriarchal kind of culture. So our social understanding, our social societal norms, our cultural practices are very much based on the patriarchy where the masculine is favored as the predominant energy are not necessarily healthy masculine because a healthy masculine integrates some of the feminine energy into it.
[00:02:35] Amanda Louisa: And. What we have now is a social structure. The way our institutions are organized, the way our politics are organized, the way our legal system is organized very much favors the energy of logic, strategy and just driving forward, but not necessarily with an integrated understanding of the collective.
[00:02:56] Amanda Louisa: So it’s a little bit more on the [00:03:00] internally facing kind of selfish side. So. Everything that we do is under this umbrella of you know, if, if it doesn’t fit into this certain box it’s ostracized. It’s the other. So a lot of the feminine qualities I’ve noticed, especially working in very male dominated fields are Kind of not demonized necessarily in some cases they very much are, but they’re definitely devalued.
[00:03:27] Amanda Louisa: So things like our intuition our understanding of our collective wholeness. Aren’t prioritized in the way we make decisions and the way our political systems function is very much about the individual more than the collective as a whole. So there’s, there’s a lack of balance currently.
[00:03:47] Laura Hartley: And of course, I imagine this.
[00:03:49] Laura Hartley: What leads to some of the crises that we see today, like the climate crisis or some of the issues we have with our environment with ongoing discrimination, with unjust policies, you know, where would you say this is leading? Because you’re a sustainability specialist. So I imagine there is a link here.
[00:04:04] Laura Hartley: Would I
[00:04:04] Amanda Louisa: be right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the way we make decisions at the moment is so focused on keeping the status quo as it is that we’ve kind of lost sight at the, of the fact that, , in the last, probably 50 years, we’ve lost 60% of our biodiversity. And when I talk about biodiversity, I’m talking about various species that enable our ecosystem to work the way it works.
[00:04:26] Amanda Louisa: And this means that, you know, we get clean water, clean air, food that’s actually nutritious soil. That’s able to produce. But we’ve homogenized a lot of our food and that impacts the way the soil works and it impacts the way biodiversity works. It means we’re using more chemicals. It me, it it’s such a we look at things in boxes and we categorize everything at the moment.
[00:04:48] Amanda Louisa: So the way our science. Works the way our understanding of the world is structured. The way we’re even taught at school is put everything in a box and categorize it. And when we do that, we compartmentalize everything. But that takes away from the feminine energy, which is one of oneness and integration.
[00:05:07] Amanda Louisa: Everything is connected. So if we look at things in certain boxes, we can’t see the bigger picture, and when we can’t see the bigger picture, we can’t see where we need to go. So we’re shooting forward in a very linear direction, instead of understanding this integration of how humans are connected to the entire world that we exist in.
[00:05:26] Amanda Louisa: We think we are separate from it, but everything impacts everything else. It’s all interconnected. So as we’re witnessing, you know, biodiversity collapse and the climate crisis increasing. We’re witnessing this in, in so many other areas, we’re witnessing it in societal collapses. We’re witnessing it in, in increasing wars, based on resources, look at Ukraine, right?
[00:05:52] Amanda Louisa: Like it’s all integrated. And the more we understand that the more we can make decisions on wholeness and on, [00:06:00] on integration, which is it’s so vital so that we can actually survive.
[00:06:04] Laura Hartley: Everything is connected. I want to step back and understand a little bit about how you came to work in this space because you call yourself a recovering lawyer.
[00:06:16] Laura Hartley: So what is a recovering lawyer and a sustainability specialist. And, and how did you end up working in the space of feminine leadership?
[00:06:23] Amanda Louisa: So by recovering lawyer, I used to be a lawyer. I was working in the corporate sector. I started my career as a lawyer and it was one of those careers where it was work hard, play hard.
[00:06:35] Amanda Louisa: I was working 80 hour weeks. I was caffeinating to survive and I was coming home and drinking half bottle of wine just to wind down cause of the stress of the, of the job. It was very competitive. And I noticed that I just didn’t like who I was becoming working in that field. And a lot of my outside of work hours, the little that I had, I was spending on environmental issues, environmental causes.
[00:07:00] Amanda Louisa: I felt I always have been very connected to mother earth, nature. I’ve always had a very spiritual connection to the land and I’ve it was where my passion lie and from there. I thought, okay, well, if I’m spending all this extra time, the little that I have outside of the law focused on sustainability, maybe I need to, to work in that.
[00:07:24] Amanda Louisa: So I, I requalified, I did my master of science and sustainability management. And started working in in environmental sectors. So I started my like environmental career in the mining and resource sector, which was very interesting cuz I live in, in wa and wa is just a mining culture. It’s a, it’s a mining community.
[00:07:43] Amanda Louisa: So That’s where I started and it grew from there. And as I, as I, grew my career in the sustainability field and the SDGs started coming out and I started looking into that. One of the key aspects of achieving the 17 U N sustainable development goals is empowering women. Women are the key to unlocking the 17 UN SDGs.
[00:08:08] Amanda Louisa: That comes from the UN. And, you know, we live in a world that we’re in 2020 and they there’s still a lot of gender. inequity and you, we still have so few countries with female representation. It’s a, and this is the case,
[00:08:26] even
[00:08:26] Laura Hartley: in boardrooms, right? I mean, we’re not seeing equity.
[00:08:30] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. No, there’s I think 5% of CEOs globally that are women. And there’s so much so much research that demonstrates that when women are in leadership roles, when women are allowed into spaces of decision making power, the decisions that are made are far more integrated and whole, and the actual, commercial aspects, the return on investments are significantly bigger than when it’s just predominantly male or homogenized boardrooms of, you know, [00:09:00] the 1960s.
[00:09:01] Amanda Louisa: So. It’s smart business, it’s smart decisions, but we’ve got such a, a misogynistic culture. It’s so integrated into our thinking into the way our systems work, into the way our promotional systems work, that we don’t actually have a lot of diversity coming through and it’s from the, the recruitment point all the way to the promotion point, you’ve got these systemic issues that are unconsciously biasing women, and then women of color on top of it are even more biased.
[00:09:31] Amanda Louisa: So we don’t actually have the diversity that we need to create the decision making skill sets that will allow for a more sustainable, just and equitable world.
[00:09:41] Laura Hartley: I, I remember reading this stat. I wish I could get it right. I think I’m gonna get it wrong here. But I think that there are more men at a C-suite level or at an executive level called John than there are women overall.
[00:09:53] Amanda Louisa: I remember that stat. Yes.
[00:09:55] Laura Hartley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s more, there’s more men called John with corner offices than there are women full stop. Yeah. So, you know, this, this is an incredibly male dominated world that we live in. Ah, and you know, coming back though, to this idea, I’d like maybe to understand a little bit more about, you know, you’re talking about the UN sustainable development goals and women being at the center of this and particularly, , equity, gender equity.
[00:10:19] Laura Hartley: So. We often see this as work for someone else, you know, it’s it, that is something that the government creates. It’s something that big business creates, , what is our role? What is our role as individuals? What is our role as employees or participants in a community? How are we all supposed to be creating this.
[00:10:40] Amanda Louisa: When we empower women to regulate their nervous system. So in, in my work, what I’ve seen is so much of the time we’ve integrated these beliefs about ourselves as, as women from childhood about our place in the world and, you know, see her be her, right. We don’t see a lot. Women who embody feminine qualities and leadership roles.
[00:11:04] Amanda Louisa: So we see a lot of men as leaders, but we don’t see the, the same I guess strength of women coming into leadership roles. So when it comes to ensuring that we embody this energy as we go up the ladder. If we can do the self work, if we can really focus on integrating our own energies, integrating our shadow aspects, learning to love the parts of ourselves that society has told us are not worthy.
[00:11:32] Amanda Louisa: Shameful don’t have any place in a board room or in a decision making field, if we can really embody and integrate that and then step into those leadership roles embodying that energy. We’re not only showing other people that This energy has the power to make strong decisions, and we don’t need to become masculine in order to be a leader, but we’re also enabling us to make decisions in those, in those settings.
[00:11:57] Amanda Louisa: From a point that is more [00:12:00] connected to wholeness, to integrity into to ensuring that there is a better outcome for the whole in those decision making rooms.
[00:12:10] Laura Hartley: And what is this, you know, we’re talking about masculine and feminine energy, right. But obviously that is not necessarily dependent on gender, but what exactly is the qualities of feminine energy.
[00:12:21] Laura Hartley: So when you’re talking about embodying feminine leadership, what is different about that to traditional leadership that you see today? So
[00:12:28] Amanda Louisa: traditional leadership is often characterized as focused, determined probably a little bit more domineering. When we think of leaders, we think of these like really strong masculine types that you know, show no emotion.
[00:12:43] Amanda Louisa: They walk into the boardroom, they’re forceful. They might be a bit aggressive, higher on the risk taking side. And the feminine will be more vulnerable, more honest, more integrated, more intuitive more compassionate. You’ve got qualities of community and collaboration as opposed to competition.
[00:13:05] Amanda Louisa: And it’s not that competition or strategy or forcefulness is bad. It’s about integrating and balancing that with compassion, with vulnerability, with honesty, with humility. And when you have a leader that balances both of those qualities, we make decisions that are more integrated and whole, because we are whole.
[00:13:27] Amanda Louisa: So we are not making decisions based out of fear or out of our ego. We’re making decisions from a place of connection.
[00:13:36] Laura Hartley: Do you know Jennifer Armbrust and SIster? Okay. So they have amazing work. It’s essentially a feminist business school. And their idea is around reimagining the kind of masculine capitalist economy that we have, which has so many of these traits.
[00:13:52] Laura Hartley: Capitalism is an ideology as much as it is an economic system and into a more feminine and feminist system and what that would look like, you know, with these traits of collaboration and cooperation and sharing and gratitude. So there is this work, it sounds like both at the individual level of how we’re approaching this, but also at the collective.
[00:14:14] Laura Hartley: Yes.
[00:14:14] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. Yeah. At the individual level, it’s really about healing the intergenerational trauma we have as women. It wasn’t until the 1960s that we really started stepping into into the workforce in a more integrated way. And even then we were so Kind of belittled as we came into the workforce and we’ve been told that we need to play the game according to masculine rules, in order to get ahead, we need to, you know, just own parts of ourselves that are feminine in order to be taken seriously.
[00:14:42] Amanda Louisa: So being able to heal that intergenerational trauma of being silenced for so many centuries. And there’s so much research that demonstrates that we inherit trauma for at least three generations. And even if we’ve not experienced the trauma of, let’s say grandmother, That [00:15:00] trauma runs through our system is in our DNA.
[00:15:01] Amanda Louisa: It’s in our genetics and it’s activated. And obviously with epigenetics, we know that we can activate and deactivate our genes and we can heal and integrate that in a way that makes sure that we don’t pass that trauma on, but we are also not operating out of that trauma when we step into positions of leadership, when we are seen, when we are, asked to use our voice, because for so long women, haven’t been allowed to use our voice.
[00:15:25] Amanda Louisa: So that’s on the individual level. When we go into a collective level, as feminine beings, being able to , lift each other up instead of tearing each other down. You see so much of , our TV and our, our social cultures, that kind of pit women against each other. Think of things like the bachelor, right?
[00:15:42] Amanda Louisa: Like women are always kind of pitted against each other and breaking out of those social constructs, being able to say no, you know, I rise by lifting others is such an empowering mindset shift. And it takes a lot of work because even as I was coming up through law school There was such an element of competition between the, the women that I was working with.
[00:16:05] Amanda Louisa: And, and you could see that because again, You have so few women in leadership roles that you almost feel like you need to step over each other with your stiletto heels to get to that, to that level. And that’s not true. So, you know, there was this whole kind of mentality of you need to pull the ladder up behind you because it’s a competition.
[00:16:26] Amanda Louisa: But what I’m seeing now, working in the field that I’m working in, working in, you know, as a, as a feminine leadership coach, as well as in, in my sustainability role, We’re lifting each other up more, we’re collaborating more. We realize that by paving the way we’re enabling a, a mass movement of, of, of women to come through and make the changes that we need to see in, in the world at the moment where we’re, we’re such a tipping point of change.
[00:16:53] Amanda Louisa: And we can see that there’s such a, a resistance from the old patriarchal structures. You can see the decisions of the Supreme court in the us as a part of this like suppression movement. But change does mean a little bit of chaos before we can get to that re calibration. So yes, the, the old archetypes of the patriarchy are trying to claw us back, but there’s such a movement forward and we’ve got so many allies as well in the, in the masculine and in men coming forward to support the openness of women into businesses, into politics, into decision making roles.
[00:17:26] Amanda Louisa: So , that’s also important to note and to celebrate.
[00:17:29] Laura Hartley: And you know, what, what I’m hearing in, in that description there of, we’ve gotta pull the ladder up behind us, that there’s not enough opportunities is of course this scarcity. Oh, you know, that, that there’s not. And the, the scarcity is so embedded throughout our culture.
[00:17:46] Laura Hartley: It is so embedded throughout society. And to me, I, I think it has so many roots in patriarchy. It has so many roots in capitalism, but where is this link between, you know, scarcity and we’ve gotta get ahead, patriarchy, and then [00:18:00] of course, Productivity and overworking because, as a recovering lawyer and you and I both work in the burnout space, we both had our own experiences here.
[00:18:09] Laura Hartley: Burnout is very real and this sense of overwork is very real. It’s like, where are the roots of this? Where do we start to unpack this?
[00:18:17] Amanda Louisa: It’s such a shame based culture, right? Like we keep seeing. And I think it’s, it’s gotten worse with social media because we see everybody’s curated life and all their win
[00:18:28] Amanda Louisa: plastered everywhere on our feeds. And we’re constantly be show being shown people, living a life. And obviously we internalize this, this as, oh, we’re not doing enough. So we need to do more to get ahead. We need to keep striving and we need to keep pushing. We need to keep doing, and if we’re not doing it, we’re not living at that kind of point of, the Joneses. We’re not keeping up with the Joneses. We’re we’re not good enough. It’s it’s about us. It’s about how we’ve come across. And you see that in a lot of cultures, right? Of the whole idea that if you are not getting ahead, if you’re not living the life you want it’s because you are doing something wrong.
[00:19:05] Amanda Louisa: Not because it’s a systemic issue because the actual reality is we don’t all start off at the same, start line. People of color, women , marginalized groups transgender people we all have different starting lines and to be honest, white men are privileged. They have a head start in the world already.
[00:19:30] Amanda Louisa: Acknowledging that and being able to say, okay, well, we don’t actually all have the same starting point. We’re all starting from different points. And there is no, there’s no equity at the moment. We can’t say it’s somebody’s fault that they’re not where they wanna be.
[00:19:44] Amanda Louisa: It might be because they’ve started like three steps behind and they’ve had more barriers to get ahead because of the unconscious bias that’s riddled within the system. Mm,
[00:19:56] Laura Hartley: knowing that we’re all starting at different points though. How do we still start to unpack this? Because you know, let’s say you or I recognize, or somebody else recognizes that perhaps they’re not like that.
[00:20:07] Laura Hartley: Number one, starting gate, . So they’re, they’re not gonna be necessarily, in the same place. Once we understand that still, where is one, the mentality that’s still driving in that sense of, okay, I’m still, I’m still in this race I’m just further behind. Yeah. And kind of getting out of it altogether.
[00:20:26] Amanda Louisa: Well, I really think it’s about allyship. So when it comes to, working in businesses for people who are perhaps a little bit more on the privilege side and they can recognize their privilege, whether it’s, you know, white women or white men or, women who’ve, who’ve gotten ahead in their industries.
[00:20:45] Amanda Louisa: Being able to recognize those microaggressions, the unconscious biases, they might be in the boardroom in the meeting rooms and being able to call it out, but also facilitating and advocating for other colleagues [00:21:00] who might be from more marginalized communities and groups. That’s really important.
[00:21:06] Laura Hartley: And, and for us personally, with overwhelm and stress, and it’s so hard to, to kind of step out of these cycles of I’ve gotta be working, I’ve gotta be doing more. And particularly anybody who’s in business, anybody in activism, you know, activism like, these crises are so urgent.
[00:21:23] Laura Hartley: So we get caught in this hustle mentality, where do we still start to go actually how do I still do the work? But step out of this completely. How do I step out of the race myself?
[00:21:37] Amanda Louisa: , I think it comes back to understanding that rest is part of the productivity cycle and we’ve forgotten that we think that to get ahead, we need to constantly be striving.
[00:21:45] Amanda Louisa: If we look at nature I think that’s one of our biggest teachers, everything is in cycles, especially feminine energy. Cause we have a 28 day cycle for the most part it’s around 28 to 35 days. And the masculine energy has a, a 24 hour cycle. So the masculine energy testosterone based people have an energy that lasts for 24 hours.
[00:22:09] Amanda Louisa: And so they have a productivity system that’s able to output quite steadily, whereas the feminine energy or people who menstruate, we have 28 to 35 day cycle. We Follow nature cycles a lot more. We have four seasons and rest is part of that season. Being able to just have the time to recalibrate to go into our rest cycle is so, so, so important because it gives us the time to process.
[00:22:37] Amanda Louisa: And it’s amazing when we do take time for the pause The ideas, the energy, the movement that comes out of it is incredible. Like, even if you think about winter, the fellow season, that has a place in the cycle, right? Like if we didn’t have winter and give the land rest, it wouldn’t be able to be as productive.
[00:22:54] Amanda Louisa: And we can see that happening now in an earth based way. We continuously use the soil and it’s to the point where the soil’s been stripped, bare barren, and we have to use all these chemicals to try and renourish the soil, but we’re still not getting the same nutrients out of the soil and into our food system as we were before.
[00:23:13] Amanda Louisa: So if we think of that as human beings, we’re so productive constantly that we’re filling ourselves with alcohol, with TV, with all these external things, to try and fill up our depletion. But it’s not helping us be more productive. So we were very similar to the earth. And, and if we can compare that and understand that, and again, this comes back to indigenous cultures and understanding, and their understanding of the, that ancient wisdom of our connection and our mirroring of the planet we live on.
[00:23:42] Laura Hartley: So how does this look for you? Right? Because you know, it’s, so I think so many of us more and more are aware that you’re right. We are cyclical beings and we live cyclical lives and there are seasons and there is a time.
[00:23:55] Laura Hartley: And I think part of that is acceptance. Of that, of [00:24:00] accepting that there is a season and yet there’s also the contrast or the tension with living in a world that is not designed for that. . So how do we navigate that? How do we hold that tension there?
[00:24:13] Amanda Louisa: I think finding safety within our own nervous system is a key part of that.
[00:24:17] Amanda Louisa: So being able to rewire our nervous system to be okay with the pauses, we’ve grown up in a society and with parents whose nervous system you know, we feed up as children until the age of seven. We’re very much, you know, mirroring our parents’ nervous system. And if they’ve been under stress and duress, which a lot of our parents have been our nervous system gets calibrated at a level that is.
[00:24:41] Amanda Louisa: Finding stress kind of natural and normal and being still feels very disruptive. It feels uncomfortable because we’re not used to it. We’re not used to understanding that stillness is safe. So I think nervous system work is such a key part of being able to recalibrate as a society to be okay with the stillness to be okay with not keeping up with the Joneses and to start shifting that mentality of thinking we need more in order to be successful.
[00:25:08] Amanda Louisa: We’ve got such a wasteful society. We’ve got so much waste, especially in the Western world. If you think about our food systems and the amount of of food that put into landfill, even think about your own fridge and the way we kind of discard things so easily. You know, do we actually really need as much as we think we do?
[00:25:29] Amanda Louisa: Probably not. And I’m hoping in a lot of ways that forced us to slow down a lot and to see that we don’t need to always be out there doing things find happiness sometimes just that stillness, that ability to connect with our own family and our own people is so much more nurturing and re-energizing than, you know, being out at various cocktail bars, doing whatever the life was before, before the pandemic hit.
[00:25:56] Amanda Louisa: So hopefully it, it showed a lot of us who experienced that stillness isn’t necessarily a bad thing and that we don’t need as much as we think we do.
[00:26:06] Laura Hartley: And where do we start with that safety? Creating safety in our bodies and our, in our nervous systems, you know, our body is really the unconscious, right?
[00:26:13] Laura Hartley: It’s where our unconscious lives. So how do we start
[00:26:16] Amanda Louisa: creating safety? There it’s a lot about tuning into our bodies. A lot of us are very disassociated. I think especially the feminine is dissociated because our bodies have become our enemies. We kind of grew up with this idea of what our body is supposed to look like.
[00:26:32] Amanda Louisa: And as feminine we also carry the trauma of past generations where our bodies have been used against us in a lot of ways. You know, being in our body can feel really unsafe. So one of the key aspects of reclaiming the feminine power is being able to befriend our body and to really step into our, full body.
[00:26:52] Amanda Louisa: A lot of us live from the head up, right. We don’t really connect into what’s going on in our own self, in our own body. So [00:27:00] part of that is, a lot of work that comes down to tuning into various parts of our body and, and tuning into what feeling lives within those parts.
[00:27:09] Amanda Louisa: So how often do we actually sit still and, focusing on. From our toes up, up through our, through our whole system and tune into, the energy that’s sitting there. Do we feel tension? Do we feel sorrow. Do we feel a bit of numbness and what does our numbness tell us? It’s a slow process.
[00:27:28] Amanda Louisa: And I think a lot of us go into this work or looking for a quick fix because that’s just the way we’ve been programmed. But we have to remember that we’ve got centuries worth of trauma and conditioning that we’re undoing. And it just, it is, it is not gonna happen overnight, but it is a process of like really falling back in and reconnecting with the various parts of ourselves that we’ve lost touch with everything from our womb to our stomach, to the energy that moves in our heart space.
[00:28:01] Amanda Louisa: It’s really, really about just befriending slowly, those parts that started to ignore or kind of demonized or yeah. Made the enemy.
[00:28:11] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And when we’re talking about leadership, You know, I know a lot of this conversation, here we’ve talked about structures as they are. We’ve talked about the corporate world and, business as it currently exists.
[00:28:24] Laura Hartley: But a lot of this audience also, are change makers or way finders and people looking for a different way, or they’re people working already in slightly different spheres, but we still have this idea of leadership that carries through. And so when we’re starting to, To do this work, to connect with our body, to understand that there are cycles to look at what a more feminine or feminist leadership might actually look like.
[00:28:50] Laura Hartley: What, what is their bringing opportunity for? What actually has the space to emerge out of that?
[00:28:57] Amanda Louisa: I think a lot of that will be First in understanding that leadership doesn’t mean your title. So your job title, doesn’t make you a leader. It’s how you influence the energy of the room around you.
[00:29:10] Amanda Louisa: So, a good example I have of this is in my previous role, I had a manager who was very highly stressed. She was overworked and we were under resourced, which, you know, is, is the norm and sustainability, especially. It’s one of the most under-resourced departments. And she started micromanaging me, which I don’t do well with.
[00:29:33] Amanda Louisa: And I could have easily internalized that moment or that energy, and it could have become a big confrontation and made the relationship very uncomfortable. And. Which is an old trauma response. Instead I recognize because I’ve done the inner work that she was coming out of her own trauma and that the micromanaging was her sense of safety and control and how she was managing me.
[00:29:59] Amanda Louisa: Wasn’t a reflection [00:30:00] of my performance and my work. It was her own internal monologue that gave her sense of safety by trying to control every aspect of the work that was happening in, in our team. And just that shift of me looking at that as, okay, well, it’s not about me. It’s about her shifted a lot of the energy of that relationship.
[00:30:20] Amanda Louisa: I was able to not come at her from an energy of aggression or frustration. I was able to hold a space because I’d done the inner work. So understanding that when we start doing this work as individuals, whether we are you know, a manager or a team member, We can really shift the energy in rooms and it really comes back down to us.
[00:30:43] Amanda Louisa: So imagine if we had change makers and leaders and you know, people coming into, you know, entry level roles, who’ve done this sort of work who really understand themselves their own triggers, their own nervous system and how they react to people and are able to come in to the organizations they’re working in from that place of real.
[00:31:05] Amanda Louisa: Integration and understanding and how much influence your energy can have on the people around you, because it doesn’t matter what level people are at because that’s a social construct, right? It’s imaginary, we’re all human beings. We’re all equal. And the only thing that influences things is our own energy.
[00:31:23] Amanda Louisa: So we can create massive change by just shifting the way we come into, into situations, how we come into meetings. And I think that’s really powerful and something that we need to talk about more. It’s not about your title. It’s about your energy.
[00:31:39] Laura Hartley: So this is really relational work that we’re talking about.
[00:31:42] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely.
[00:31:42] Laura Hartley: Yeah, because a lot of the time when we’re experiencing conflict or politics or any of these things in an organization that kind of gets seeded between people, these tensions or these kind of micro violences that, that we feel between each other. You know, there does seem to be this sense that we don’t feel safe.
[00:32:01] Laura Hartley: You know, we don’t feel a sense of belonging that we felt very often a sense of our identity attached to what we are doing or what we’re worth. This constant need to be producing. Would you say this is kind of potentially where it’s coming from as well, so that this lack of safety is related to this always need
[00:32:18] Amanda Louisa: to be producing.
[00:32:19] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely we feel so. Pressured to constantly be on. Even though we have a lot of talk about flex work arrangements, the reality is the people that are promoted are still the people that are sitting at their desk from, you know, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM or 7:00 PM. So even though there’s a, there’s a lot of lip service paid to rest and mental health in, especially in the corporate.
[00:32:44] Amanda Louisa: Sectors nowadays how this translates in terms of promotion and ability to earn more on your earning capacity is still very old school patriarchy. It’s still very much like, no, not really. Like if you are not working at the desk, [00:33:00] then. If you’re not online, if you are, if you’re working from home then the reality is you, you don’t seem to get ahead as fast.
[00:33:10] Amanda Louisa: So we are pressured to continuously produce or to continuously perform. it’s a very, very integrated part of, of I think how we function and how we think we’re supposed to. Mm. So,
[00:33:25] Laura Hartley: When we’re looking at this paradigm of the world as it is, . This podcast is all about remaking the world, how can we remake the world together?
[00:33:34] Laura Hartley: So I think to almost remake it, and I think what you’re articulating here is this vision of a different way. And actually there’s a different form of leadership. There’s a different form working that we could embrace one that is much more regenerative and much more embodying of nature, but I’d love to hear a little bit from you about this vision.
[00:33:52] Laura Hartley: You know, what is your vision of a more, just a more regenerative, more equitable
[00:33:56] Amanda Louisa: world? Oh, I I would love to see a world where no matter your gender identity, no matter your cultural background, you’re treated as, as valuable to the decision making spaces that, that exist. I’d love to see a more holistic way of making decisions, ones that really allow for intuition ones that take into account, not only the economic viability of an option, but also the environmental and social impacts.
[00:34:38] Amanda Louisa: We have a model where we pay lip service to the triple bottom line in sustainability, which is environmental, social, and economic. But the reality is the economic decisions, the economic outcomes of that decision still takes a lot of weight. And I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that we haven’t really Valued ecosystem services that are, are given to us from, the environment or from social connections, those aren’t valued as highly.
[00:35:05] Amanda Louisa: So a world that I would love to see is where we really understand the importance of connectivity for human beings, for our mental health, for our own wellbeing, for our soul. And that things like talking about our you know our values or talking about things like our, our respect of the earth, our integration with the earth, our connectivity to the earth isn’t considered root because it it’s such a Western paradigm where we see ourselves as separate.
[00:35:37] Amanda Louisa: And it’s so integrated. All decision making that we devalue anything with Eastern medicine or indigenous cultures that, that see this interconnectedness. So how beautiful would it be to be able to make decisions that are holistic, that integrate the indigenous, the Eastern ways of, of understanding our our place in the world, as opposed to only [00:36:00] looking at it from a in a Western kind of aspect, I would love to see.
[00:36:06] Amanda Louisa: Holistic decisions, decisions that really take soul into account. Because I think we would make such a difference. We would see the world, not as a competition, not as a resource, not as a a thing, but a living being .
[00:36:21] Laura Hartley: Mm, I love that. You know, I, I think one of the things that you’re articulating there is that there’s more than one way to be human.
[00:36:29] Laura Hartley: And, very often in our culture, we, we tend to think there’s only one way to be human. And you know, the world is the way it is because humans are inherently bad and this is just what it means to be human, as opposed to actually, this is a complete cultural paradigm that doesn’t actually apply or hasn’t historically applied to large swaths of the world.
[00:36:47] Amanda Louisa: Absolutely. I don’t even know how to articulate this at, at this point, but we are so programmed to, to see the world in a certain way. And because I was raised in, in Western culture, in Western society, I didn’t realize how integrated and how different other cultures were in their view of where humanity sits.
[00:37:10] Amanda Louisa: In the context of the earth. We kind of have a pyramid right in the west where humans are at the apex and then everything else falls underneath us and where the hierarchy and the hierarchy is everywhere in society. Right. Whereas I think a lot of indigenous cultures are really more of a circle.
[00:37:26] Amanda Louisa: You see humans at the center of this interconnected ecosystem, interconnected web of life. And if we could integrate that belief system, that understanding more into how we make decisions into how we view the world. If we see ourselves as just one small part of an in incredible web of life. How much more powerful would our decisions be?
[00:37:47] Amanda Louisa: How much less would we be prioritizing selfish outcomes as opposed to holistic outcomes?
[00:37:55] Laura Hartley: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a reframe of our mindsets away from the, the colonial paradigm. so many of us have inherited.
[00:38:03] Laura Hartley: Amanda, I know you’ve got some workshops coming up.
[00:38:06] Laura Hartley: Where can people find out
[00:38:08] Amanda Louisa: more about you? Where can people work
[00:38:09] Laura Hartley: with you? What are you currently offering? What would you suggest?
[00:38:13] Amanda Louisa: So you can find me on Instagram. I’m @theamandalouisa. And I’m also quite active on LinkedIn. So you can find me the same name, Amanda Louisa. I have a new offering coming up in September.
[00:38:27] Amanda Louisa: It’s called ditch the overwhelm. So if you’re interested in some of this nervous system work that we were talking about today about, how leadership can really be about how we show up. This is the perfect workshop and it really dives into understanding how our nervous system works.
[00:38:45] Amanda Louisa: Understanding the four states of overwhelm that we go through, which is fight flight, freeze, and fawn, and how to actually work through those with like really easy to do exercises that will rewire your nervous system to a sense of more [00:39:00] safety and calm. And when you’re in that space of safety and calm, it’s so much easier to make decisions not only in your personal life, but in, in your business life.
[00:39:08] Amanda Louisa: I would love to, to offer a 10% discount any of your wonderful listeners who would like to join me on that workshop. That is
[00:39:16] Laura Hartley: wonderful. I thank you so much for coming on the show, Amanda. It has been really great to have this conversation.
[00:39:22] Amanda Louisa: Thank you so much, Laura, I have loved having this chat with you.
[00:39:25] Amanda Louisa: It’s it’s such an important, issue at the moment and it’s such a turning point. So I love the work that you are doing and the influence you are creating as well.
[00:39:34] Laura Hartley: Thank you so much. And for anybody listening, who wants to join that workshop, all the details will be in the show notes. You’ll also find a discount link in there for 10%.
[00:39:42] Laura Hartley: So please go check out Amanda Louisa. That is all we have time for in today’s episode. I do love it when listeners suggest topics or guests. So please head on over to our website. publiclove.enterprises Send me an email. Otherwise you can reach me on @laura.h.hartley.
Brian is a wellness coach and facilitator, who has helped hundreds of people around the world lead more balanced and meaningful lives.
With a background in neuroscience and more than 15 years of experience teaching and practicing yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and different healing modalities, Brian is able to synthesize modern scientific knowledge with ancient wisdom to help his clients get the results they desire. Brian has empowered people from all walks of life to realise their full potential and enable them to live a stress-free and meaningful life.
Committed to conscious lifestyle practices, Brian founded Conscious Action, a movement of people inspired to live more intentionally.
TRANSCRIPT: Please note this was auto-generated and has not been edited, and may contain errors.
[00:00:00] How do we work with the systems when we are the systems? And we are the ones that are perpetuating that system?
[00:00:07] If I change, if I don’t want to play by those rules, and then slowly we all start to do that the system changes by itself.
[00:00:17] Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the public love project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one reqAuest head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners.
[00:00:59] Today’s guest is Brian Berneman. Brian is a wellness coach and facilitator who has helped hundreds of people around the world lead more balanced and meaningful lives. With a background in neuroscience and more than 15 years experience in teaching and practicing yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and different healing modalities. Brian is able to synthesize modern scientific knowledge with ancient wisdom.
[00:01:23] He has empowered people from all walks of life to realize that full potential and enable them to live a stress , free, and meaningful life. Committed to conscious lifestyle practices brian founded conscious action and movement of people inspired to live more intentionally
[00:01:38] Welcome Brian.
[00:01:40] Brian Berneman: Thank you, Laura so much for having me here and a pleasure to be speaking with you again.
[00:01:45] Laura Hartley: one of the things that I’m really excited about with today’s conversation and that I love about your work in general is that you work at this intersection of inner and outer change, but before we dive into what this space is and how we begin to work with it, I’d love to know a little bit about your story.
[00:02:03] And what’s brought you here into the work that
[00:02:05] Brian Berneman: you do today. Definitely. Thank you for that. I always think that it’s really important to know a little bit of where we’re coming from on, on our learnings. So. I’m going to go first a little bit back towards the beginning. So I was born in Argentina. I grew up there.
[00:02:23] I was. Part of or I am part of a family that is Jewish and all of my family escaped at different times from, Europe. The latest was my grandpa. Escaping from PO on the second world war. So I grew up in a Catholic country, but already within a different culture. So that was always an interesting thing of my childhood and little by little, my parents started to get interested more in spirituality and that meant that they were starting to get into the esoteric teachings of Judaism.
[00:03:04] And then through that, they started to get interested in energy and Tibetan Buddhism a little by little, by the time that I was a teenager. My mom and my dad, they were starting to live differently, or we would do things differently at home as an example. We stopped having dinners with a TV, and we just went to only like just talking and small few different things like that.
[00:03:31] And then little by little, my parents would recommend us to read some books around spirituality or what self-help books would be. And then they would invite us, me and my siblings, if we wanted to go to any kind of the classes or to a healer or anything like that. , I was.
[00:03:52] Quite a regular kid. I was into sports. I was watching way too much TV. I was like on internet back when it was dial up. And none of that, I was all the time online. And I was super shy and super stressed out,. And then. I started to say yes to these things, that my parents were inviting me and my siblings to go.
[00:04:17] And I think I was the only one that was really going to everything . I was like, why not? I’ll I’ll try this out. There was something in there that I felt drawn to. I remember as an example, the first day that I went to a Tibetan yoga class, Felt so different than anything else that I have ever experienced in my life.
[00:04:38] And for the first time I was able to feel my feelings. I was able to feel energy in a different way. And also I had a recognition that I knew this. And that has been a huge part of my path, the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. And at the same time, I started to get more into energy. I was feeling the energy and I was like interested in it.
[00:05:03] So my mom asking if I wanted to have a Reiki healing. And he went and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I want to learn this. And I ask the, the person that was the healer that ended up being my teacher. If he would teach me how to do it. And he had some connection with guides and angels and he just closed his eyes and he said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:29] I’ll teach you. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. How does this work? Like how much is it? And he’s. I’m just being told that for you, it’s for free, because you’re going to help a lot of people in the future. And I’m like, okay. wow, cool. So I, I start to get into all of this parallel to everything that I was doing.
[00:05:48] So I was still, like last few years of high school then university started working as a journalist. And then I decided at one point. That I wanted to move away. I wanted to explore the wall, but also I was a little bit tired of living in Argentina and everything align. The relationship ended.
[00:06:11] I finished all of my studies. And then I decided to finish working as an journalist and I bought a one way ticket to New York and I was like, let’s see what happens. I’ll see you later, you know, start off when you adventure.
[00:06:26] And so. To make the story a little bit shorter. I lived for a while in New York and then in Miami and then I moved to Germany and when I was living there, I finished my contract.
[00:06:40] All that I was doing there was working in marketing and expert in the world and experiment myself. I was like 22, 23 years old. And I was like, okay, I don’t wanna do this anymore. They wanna go to an office and have to work during. Selling like something that wasn’t aligned to, to who I felt I was.
[00:06:59] And I was doing my Tibetan yoga practice as I was doing by myself. And I remember that the first class ever that I did my teacher, she told me about this retreat center in California, where part of the money that was. That we paid for the classes was going there to support these teachings. This is the only place where they taught this in the world.
[00:07:25] So I was like, oh, I wonder, you know, how does that look like, can I actually live there? So I contacted my teacher, in Argentina and she said , oh yeah, you love it. But the process is not that easy. They don’t take in anyone. So I was like, okay, what do I do? And she was like, just message them.
[00:07:41] And I will message them as well. I ended up a few weeks later, living there in the middle of the mountain in a Tibetan booth retreat center. And that was a pivotal time in, in my life because I was able to a, for the first time in my life living in nature. Because I have lived in big cities all of my life.
[00:08:04] So I started to get a lot more connected to nature. I had the time and the space to practice and to go deep into my understanding of the teachings as well as the work that I was doing there. So we were practicing and working and the. Was all about the veteran Buddhist culture, keeping that culture alive.
[00:08:27] So we were making books, we were running retreats and running workshops and classes, and a lot of different things, both in person there at the retreat center and online. And one of the biggest things for me during that. Besides my own personal understanding, that was huge. Like those years that I lived there, my understanding went like so quickly because I was able to have so much time and space.
[00:08:56] And also because of all of the work that we were doing and the way that we were doing work as a way of bringing the teachings alive in every day. It’s one of the biggest things that I took from there to them being able to, to share with people how we can actually be during our everyday life, regardless of our circumstances, regardless if we are working nine to five in corporate, something that we love, something that we don’t using every single moment of our day, as a way for us to be present connected and to be able to.
[00:09:30] To deepen our awareness or to expand our awareness and to be able to, to understand more about ourselves and others. After a few years living there, my. Visa renewal wasn’t accepted. So I had to live from one day to the next and I ended up here in New Zealand where I’ve been now for the last seven years.
[00:09:53] And it’s been wonderful. Just being able to now share all of this. And one of the things that I remember so much that one of my teachers told me one day is what do you love? You want to share? And I love doing this. I love. All of the learnings that I have, I learned the different tools and the techniques that I’ve been able to learn throughout all of these years.
[00:10:18] And it’s, it’s so beautiful to be able to share them with the world and with whoever resonates, because I feel like everybody should know. These things and not everybody will resonate with each of the techniques or each of the tools, but just to be able to have a way of connecting with themselves so they can connect to others.
[00:10:42] So that’s as short as I could make, like 35 years of life. , there’s
[00:10:47] Laura Hartley: a lot to fit into 35 years of life. One of the things that’s really standing out for me, there is just hearing how much that time at the retreat center must have influenced your work now that sense of how do we take what is inherently inner work and actually embody it and bring it to life in the real world, which I think.
[00:11:06] Where, you know, real spirituality kind of comes into practice, but I’m curious to step back a little bit and to just also look at what were those teachings that you were looking at, what was it that you were bringing to life through that work at the center?
[00:11:18] Brian Berneman: Mm, so we had a few different things and I think that not only the way that we were working, but the purpose behind it as well was for me really big.
[00:11:29] And one of the things that I resonated a lot in terms of. Connecting with the inner and the outer. Because we, for the first while that I was there, we were making books for the Tibetan to give back to the Tibetan, bud monks and practitioners. In the Himalayan region. , a lot of the teachings were lost when the Chinese invaded and a lot of the books were burned.
[00:11:59] So a lot of people didn’t have access to teaching. So one of the ways to keeping the teaching alive is to actually have the teachings available and to do that and to work with all of the techs and to the energy that they had and to be able to. Work. And this was just , my way of, saying this.
[00:12:16] So we are making millions of books and, a small team of people with old machines that in a publishing company nowadays, they would have modern machines with a team of, I don’t know, 60, 70 people. We were making that same amount just by being like, sometimes during the year seven people. 20 people like for short period of time.
[00:12:42] And for me having the awareness that every single page that we were putting into those books needed to be perfect. Like they couldn’t be any dog ears, they couldn’t have any like smudges or anything because someone will be reading that book. and for that person, the experience is going to be different.
[00:13:06] , and for me having that awareness of having to be so present to be able to understand how can I actually be so focused and so aware that I’m looking, even though this is millions and millions of pages, I am aware of every single page. And, and that level of, of awareness with the speed that things were going and expanding my, my understanding of time to actually be able to look at every single page and of that with the purpose of what we were doing was so amazing that that is part.
[00:13:50] Of the, the work that, that I was doing that brought me into an understanding that also everything that I’m doing for myself in my inner work is for others. Like there’s no separation, even though. Before I thought that things were separate. And that brought me to a place of understanding this illusion that I still, every single day, like, I’m, I believe like I’m here talking to you and you are there.
[00:14:16] And it’s like, well, like from one perspective, yes, we are separate. But from an another one we aren’t, and that is one of the biggest things that I, that I took from there.
[00:14:25] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And I can also. the level of awareness you need, but also the level of care that needs to be embedded into how you’re choosing to act into all of your decisions.
[00:14:35] I can imagine as well, but, I think this is. A really important topic because very often as individuals, it’s so easy to feel powerless, right? When you’re looking at the world and you’re looking at the enormity and the scale of problems, like things are broken in the world. Things are not working the way that they should be.
[00:14:56] Or in many cases, they are working the way that they should be, but they’re not working to benefit the. how do we hold space for that? How do we hold space for the emotions that come with that, with the grief, the despair, but at the same time also actually feel empowered to do something because sometimes, you know, the problems are so collective.
[00:15:16] What can I do as one individual?
[00:15:19] Brian Berneman: Yeah, definitely. And I think that is one of the ways that, that most people. That powerless and, and, to be fair, and this is not coming from a conspiracy theory perspective, like the fact that we are separated and we have gone towards an individualized sense of experience.
[00:15:43] That means that we feel that we don’t feel as connected. We feel like what we do doesn’t matter, but everything that we do matters like both from an energetic perspective, And physical perspective here, because this is, I, I always love this. Like if 7 billion people would believe that what they do matters, then it will matter.
[00:16:04] And it just takes each and every single person to do that. But I think one of the, the key things with, with this for me is the understanding that and I took this from the Tibetan Buddhist teachings. There’s a big difference. Of how we understand our experience. So we are all, even though, as I said, we are not separate.
[00:16:27] We all have a unique experience or perspective of what is happening in the world. So for each of us, we might be looking at the same thing. And we are all looking from such a different place that we are looking at something different. Therefore, we are all experiencing it in a different way. And also if we have a different understanding how to feel our feelings and our experience, that changes the way of how we approach things.
[00:16:58] So. I, I started to get a lot in, in these teachings into the difference between feeling and sensations and emotions, and the emotions are so tied to our head, to our judgment categorization and labeling of experience. Good, bad, positive, negative. This is frustration. This is anger. This is happiness.
[00:17:22] This is whatever it is. and on the much closer and direct experience, what we are feeling is a sensation in the body, which is there’s some energy moving. And I know that there are times the emotion can be that. So for the way that I learned it, in terms of the language. Emotion is not energy. Motion.
[00:17:43] Emotion is a labeling of the energy emotion. So the feeling sensation is the energy emotion. And if I can stay with the fact that there’s some feeling now in my hand, so there’s energy moving there or there’s energy moving in my chest or in my belly, then I can actually look into. , that’s not too much.
[00:18:06] That’s not something that I want to either push away and not look at it because I cannot handle it. Or it’s not something that I don’t feel like I want to, because it’s too uncomfortable if I can stay, which is what I’ve been doing now for the last half of my life. If I can stay with there’s a feeling there, can I feel it?
[00:18:28] Can I integrate that? And can I not get stuck in the story that I’m telling myself, that is what society has been telling me or my past experience? Especially my childhood and all of my trauma and unprocessed feelings, feelings are telling me based on the same type of experience. So if I can get in that space, Then my response to life is so much different than my reactions.
[00:18:57] That if that’s automatic, that’s, I’m processed. I don’t want to look at things when I can get to that place. I feel so much more empowered because a, I am, I am completely conscious , of my experience. I am processing. I am integrating, I’m not pushing down. I’m not pushing away of my experience. And I’m able to see.
[00:19:17] Not in a sense, the false positivity, but I can see the positive side of things from, one other of the, the perspectives or the teachings that I learned and that I shared that is family constellations. We see everything that has happened. Something to be grateful for because everything that has happened brought us to this place.
[00:19:41] So my teacher used to tell me about this story of a person that they were creating. This is many years ago when sustainability, wasn’t such a big thing in terms of products. And this person was creating a company that wanted to introduce sustainable eco products and they weren’t selling. and then he said that they deal with this company.
[00:20:08] They did a constellation work. And what happened was that this person, the leader of the company, the CEO has so much negativity towards all of the companies that were creating all of this bad products for the environment that there was a block. And as soon as they were able to include that, that is what’s happening and that they were grateful that that existed.
[00:20:33] Cause now that can show us a different way. Then suddenly that company started to grow and started to sell a lot of the products that are better for our environment. And I think that when we can start to see things from a different perspective and in a different lens and to be able to be more present and to be able to choose more wisely with information with trusting our feelings, with trusting our own experience, then how things are happening in the world.
[00:21:05] Doesn’t have to be so, so challenging for us to be able to, respond in a way that is going to be of benefit.
[00:21:14] Laura Hartley: Mm. You know, which is such a big thing, but I’m really, you know, I love so much of what you’re saying, but I’m really curious what you would also say to somebody who says, how can I be grateful for this?
[00:21:23] What is there to be grateful for? Or, you know, to change my perspective on this doesn’t mean that the thing itself changes. It doesn’t mean that my pain or my hurt or my trauma. Or the injustice changes. Where is that line as well? Between acknowledging and working with the actual pain that happens.
[00:21:43] Yeah. And then not just, you know, as you kind of said this false positivity of like, oh, it’s fine. It’s like taught me to be a better person and you know what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. And no, it doesn’t kill me sometimes just hurts. Mm. So where is that balance?
[00:21:57] Brian Berneman: Yes. And, and, and, and this is always a very subtle work.
[00:22:01] This, this is something that, and this is so individual as well. Like for each of us, it’s different. One of the biggest things for me with that is that if I’m hurting. I need to acknowledge that and I need to feel it. I need to actually feel the feeling, not the idea of that. I’m hurting the story that I’m telling myself about why that’s there.
[00:22:24] I need to feel that because that’s the way that I’m going to integrate it. , and the gratitude, I think there’s of course we all believe different things are, are the meanings of words are different for me. The gratitude is not about not bringing into the space that, yes, that’s not positive or that’s not good for the environment or that’s not good for people.
[00:22:49] The gratitude is about bringing awareness and a different energy to something that has already happened and that I cannot change on one level, but I can’t change it in the way that I relate to it. And what happens with that is that, and this is one of the things like working with trauma and working with whether this trauma from my childhood or ancestral trauma that I work with is being able to integrate that.
[00:23:18] Being able to, to include that. Not to exclude that, not to push it. Why not to push it down to include that, and then how I’m behaving and how to tackle things then might look different. And that doesn’t mean that whatever is that based on my own view is wrong. That that’s not longer there, but my relationship with what happened is what changes and my relationship with.
[00:23:51] I can tackle that whether I’m paralyzed or I’m freezing or, or I want to fight it or whatever it is, like those reactions that we usually have, that is what changes being able to, to be triggered by those things. And that doesn’t mean that now it’s like, I don’t care about anything because any, everything is energy.
[00:24:10] So like you just go and destroy the earth. You just go and kill people. You just go, no, no, no. Like there’s an honoring of people, there’s an honoring of others, knowing that what happens to me happens to others and understanding that I don’t know people’s stories. They don’t even know who they are. So how can I know and how can I judge anyone?
[00:24:34] and as well, everybody that is doing something that I believe that is not positive or that is wrong. Understanding they have their own shit that they are bringing into this space. And, I don’t believe that anybody in the world is a bad person. I believe that everybody’s doing the best that they can with what they are.
[00:24:57] In this moment. So if someone was traumatized, most likely they will traumatize others. If someone is hurting, most likely they will hurt someone if someone was so suppressed or so focused on trying to going back to. Individualized life to take care of, of themselves and to be able to gather as much as possible because they’re going to die or nobody’s going to give them anything, you know, like all of this trauma that is completely unconscious, those people might be trying to do something from where they are something that is positive for them and not realizing this is actually destroying the earth.
[00:25:39] So when I can hold everyone from that lens of being compassionate towards them, it’s much easier to be able to have a dynamic there. Now that might mean that with some people it’s like, ah, I hold compassion for you, but I’m still going to hold you accountable.
[00:26:05] Laura Hartley: Compassion and accountability are, are two separate things, right? Yeah. That we can kind of hold both at the same
[00:26:10] Brian Berneman: time. Yeah. And I think that, that is one of the things, in the more conscious or spiritual world, like not everything is love and peace, not everything is, ah, it’s just energy.
[00:26:20] It doesn’t matter. As I said before, or that I feel compassionate towards all beings, therefore, you know, like do whatever you want. I have a sense of, I am living in all of these different walls, dimensions, perspectives at the same time. and my own personal work is how can I expand my awareness to hold all of those positions at the same time, all those perspectives, to be able to see you with compassion.
[00:26:51] And also if you’re doing something that I feel like it’s either crossing my boundaries, or doing something towards someone else’s boundaries, whether there is a person animals or the environment, mother earth. Then I might be holding you accountable for that. I might point that out and then I might see if you’re ready to make a change, or if we all as a collective need to make the change as well.
[00:27:20] Laura Hartley: What does justice mean to you? Oh,
[00:27:25] Brian Berneman: great question. I, I don’t believe in the punishment system as we have it. I do believe in self responsibility. I do believe in being able to own our experience and our past and to be able to, to do that inner work of forgiveness first. And if necessary during that seeking forgiveness. Not necessarily need to receive it, but seeking it.
[00:27:58] I think that that is closest to justice than a system of punishment and ostracizing people pushing them away and creating an even worse. Cycle of what we see a lot with certain communities and certain ethnicities that they’re just in, in that cycle of poverty and not education. And then going to jail and, and all of that, I, I think that that is not working.
[00:28:29] So for me, just, this is more taking responsibility and then doing something about.
[00:28:36] Laura Hartley: Yeah. And you know, this, this sense of taking responsibility, I’m really curious as well. If you can elaborate a bit more because you know, this conversation, there’s been two things that stood out to me. You know, one, we are all products of a toxic system, you’re right.
[00:28:49] There are no bad people per se. We are all products of our environment and with different conditions and different circumstances, it’s difficult to say how we might have been shaped differently. and then there’s also this issue that you mentioned of ancestral trauma, and I’d love if you could talk a little bit more on this of like, what is ancestral trauma, how does that pass down?
[00:29:09] And then, we’re looking at issues of responsibility and justice today. How does this come together? Mm,
[00:29:17] Brian Berneman: yeah, so like from a ancestor trauma perspective, I come to it more from an energetic perspective. Something that is hard to, to touch. But as well, I know from a DNA perspective thing, information gets passed down through DNA.
[00:29:36] And actually like you were in your, in your grandmother’s womb when your mom was actually in her belly, like as, as an egg. So we do have a physical connection and everything that happens to a person that they don’t process, that they don’t integrate, that they don’t feel that gets what I call it an energetic blockage, and that gets passed down.
[00:30:08] And until actually someone looks at it. then that will continue to play itself in that dynamic. So, as an example, I see a lot of of my clients with something that they are carrying that is not theirs and they are playing certain aspects. So, for example, like one of my clients that she was always getting into relationships with addict.
[00:30:32] She didn’t know why, but she was always drawn to people that ended up like the relationships ended up breaking because they were addicted to whatever substances or alcohol or whatever. And those relationships were never working. And then through doing this work, we realized that in her family, like some generations ago, .
[00:30:52] what came up during the, the session was that someone in their family was an alcoholic and because of what they were doing, they were excluded from the family physically. And what that happens is that they never dealt with it. they actually is kind of like we’re shutting the door and we are never talking about this.
[00:31:15] So that gets passed down through generations. The fact that something was excluded and not dealt with. And now few generations later, someone is actually dealing with the consequences of that. So one of the biggest things with this is that different aspects of our lives are tied to this and. I know, like there’s a lot of people that don’t believe this.
[00:31:40] Cool. Like I believe it. I have done my own personal work with this. And I do connect with it and I resonate with this. And I know from a lot of my clients that whenever we’ve done this work changes them their lives in terms of whatever was blocking. So the interesting thing with this is as well, owning that.
[00:32:05] Every single family. Like if, if we look back like we have like, so we have like two parents and like the four grandparents and then eight. And we started going back and back and back generation generation, there’s thousands of millions of people behind us. so we all have someone in our family that was a murderer, someone that committed a rape someone that was an alcoholic.
[00:32:28] We have everything in our lives, in our ancestors. So starting to see if nobody before me did any of the integration work, I need to be the one. If I choose to, I need to be the one that breaks this cycle of things continuing to be pushed forward and I can take responsibility of doing that integration and healing work so that nobody else in my family needs to deal with this.
[00:33:01] Now, the thing with how this place in, in, in the world and how everything is actually happening is really interesting. Most of our behavior is automatic it’s reactionary and it’s based on what helped my ancestors survive. So , for example, I did a lot of work with my dad’s dad.
[00:33:25] Because I didn’t have a good relationship with him and I wanted to heal that. And during those constellations that my teacher was doing what came up as well, was that by me doing that also, I wasn’t including the fact that he was a survivor. He escaped from the second world war. There’s so much resilient, you know, and to be able to take on also those qualities is so important.
[00:33:53] So when I take into account everything, then it’s so much easier to be able to see that what most people are doing. They’re just using survival mechanisms. As I was mentioned before, someone that might be a billionaire now and is destroying the earth because they’re taking the resources, all that they are doing is that unconsciously or subconsciously, they are trying to survive.
[00:34:25] They are doing that in the way that their ancestors did it. Even though now we don’t need to do those things. Even though now we know that for example, we don’t need to use the same type of systems that were set up in 200 years ago. 500 years ago is 1000 years ago. We’re still playing them out because we believe that we are surviving now because most people.
[00:34:53] Are completely living unconsciously and we don’t have enough awareness to see things differently or to do things differently. And this is where a lot of those systems that used to be how people survive. Well, we don’t need them now. So how can I take responsibility to heal that and to become more present now with what is, and not what it used to be, and to be able to move forward with that.
[00:35:22] Laura Hartley: And do you see this at a collective level as well? Like, not just for us as individuals, but some of the crises that we’re facing today is this, perhaps this collective experience of systems that no longer service.
[00:35:34] Brian Berneman: Yes, definitely. Like we, like when, when I work with this, when it’s interesting, because my teacher used to say, even though this is called family constellations, this a dynamic.
[00:35:46] Constellations or systemic constellations work. So , for example, I did a lot of healing or a lot of integration sessions with Judaism because that is what my heritage comes from. And there’s been so much trauma for Jewish people, as well as a lot of positive stuff. So I need to do the work for that.
[00:36:06] Now, a lot of the the cultures that are still going through trauma. That is still being lived nowadays. So not only they cannot even heal. What’s been before they are still playing that out now. So we, as people we need to understand, we are part of systems, whether that is our own culture, our own groups, our own ethnicity, our own country, from this perspective, we can work on so many different levels.
[00:36:35] To integrate and to heal healing us becoming whole. It’s not that we’re going to change the past. We are going to go towards a place of wholeness that we can integrate what is, and when we can see that and we can actually acknowledge it as people, then we can move forward. And, going back to what you were saying earlier with justice, for example, How does that look like?
[00:37:02] When in a sense, we all feel like we are always the target, because at some point my family was persecuted. At some point, your family was persecuted at some point. , so everybody that wants justice, even the ones that are supposed to be the ones to make reparations feel like they are the victims . So we all feel like we are the victims.
[00:37:27] From a very deep level. And therefore we are always wanting to point fingers. And if I stay in victim mode, then I’m always going to want revenge. I don’t care to who I’m always going to want revenge. That is one of the biggest things that my teachers to tell me that if you stay in victim, You’re always going to want to have revenge.
[00:37:52] If you integrate that, if you heal that, then you’re going to be able to move to a place of meeting others where they are now and not where their ancestors were.
[00:38:04] Laura Hartley: Hmm. Which when we’re talking about, you know, remaking the world and reimagining the world, I think that sounds like a powerful place that we have to start to look, are we coming at it from a sense of feeling.
[00:38:14] Victimized powerless or are we coming up from a place of actually, okay. I have agency here. Mm-hmm and I’m curious, cuz you’ve talked here about systems at the level of, you know, families, nations countries, you know, by changing our participation in a system, do we change the system? How does that
[00:38:31] Brian Berneman: work?
[00:38:32] Mm. So what, what’s a system. I, how have we internalized systems as well? Because we play to the systems, the systems are agriculture. They are, they are, they don’t exist. Like countries potentially do a little bit more, but How do we work with the systems when we are the systems? And we are the ones that are perpetuating that system?
[00:38:57] If I change, if I don’t want to play by those rules, and then slowly we all start to do that the system changes by itself. And the funny thing is that we have this sense that things don’t change and that things are permanent. From a Buddhist perspective, but also from reality, everything changes, nothing is permanent.
[00:39:22] Everything is in permanent. Therefore even though what seems to be rigid and what seems to be done permanently will change. Every system will crumble. When I don’t know how can we accelerate some things? That’s the point, but everything will change. So for the better or the worst, it will change how we can use our own experience to be part of the change.
[00:39:52] I think that that is. Being able to, to bring that sense of self responsibility, that sense of being connected to the fact that I’m not alone. And even though there’s know seven, 8 billion people, there’s lots of people. That are in different parts of the world that are taking self responsibility that are doing their own work, to be able to create the world that we want or that they want each individually.
[00:40:20] And a lot of that will actually be connected to what I want, what you want or brothers in the world want. The only thing is that because we are in such different places and geographically like age, whatever it. We don’t have as much connection. So we feel a lot of times that we are alone in this. We’re not alone.
[00:40:39] There’s so many of us, we just haven’t yet connected. So for me, from. Energetic unconsciousness perspective. We are doing the work just by me doing my own personal work. I am helping to change the system. The more people that change it, the faster that that will start to happen. The same with.
[00:41:02] Even a company when they start, there’s a few people that are going to buy the products and suddenly, there’s a point, I think now, even the experts know it like a point when there’s enough people that are buying into this product that suddenly like everybody starts to, to buy it. And. when we do this energetically, it’s the same.
[00:41:22] If I do my work, if you do your work, if lot of people do their work slowly, we’re going to change it. And the more people that are doing it, the faster it will do it. And we don’t need everyone to change because there’s so many people in the world that they are just going to do. What’s out there for them to survive today.
[00:41:39] So the ones that we are privileged enough to not have to survive today. To be able to live our lives and to be able to decide how we want to live, it’s our responsibility to be able to do something, to change things, because those other people, they are just surviving today and they might need us in a sense to do something that is going to be of much more benefit to them so that they can stop surviving and they can live their lives.
[00:42:09] Laura Hartley: Taking this responsibility for coming back to our own actions and our own experiences. where do we begin with this? I know you mentioned at the beginning, this coming back to the body, coming back to sensations and feelings. And I think we’ve actually had this conversation on your podcast that I started my work in a very similar place that I remember.
[00:42:28] I, I must have been in my late twenties when I first discovered that emotions actually had like corresponding sensations in my body. And I was like, oh my gosh, what is this? Wow. It was like, this is liberating. That’s all it is. But where do we begin this? If we are looking to start. This idea of the inner work for outer change, this inner work to help guide us into a more imaginative and more beautiful, a more just and regenerative world.
[00:42:57] Where do we begin within ourselves?
[00:43:01] Brian Berneman: Mm. We begin where we are. For everyone that is listened to this, where you are, is the place to begin. How it will look different to every single person, because I do recognize for me, it was coming back to the body, coming back to the feelings. And as you just said, coming back to the recognition, wow, there’s this other thing there for some other people, it might be actually.
[00:43:24] Connecting to their community, connecting to their family, learning about their lineage, even though they might not be working on it from an energetic standpoint or from a , feeling standpoint, just acknowledging that when, when we start to take that responsibility for our own experience, then.
[00:43:47] That is the first step when we feel like we actually matter. And what we do actually matters to the collect. Because from that place, we start to make the change for me. And this is I was recommended because it is my path. It’s coming back to the body, using that somatic experience, working with people that understand and how to actually deal with, with these things, because this is always one of the biggest things for someone that hasn’t been in touch with their feelings and with their body.
[00:44:23] It’s not that easy to come back to it. If that has been our mechanism for protecting ourselves and for surviving. So it’s not always like the go and do a yoga class and you will start to get more in touch with your feelings or YouTube something and do it. Sometimes we need support.
[00:44:41] Sometimes we need someone that is going to be able to, to guide us or to support us in our own work. I always say to all of my students at universities, of all of the things that I share, find the one that you resonate with and take that first step and start to actually live through that.
[00:45:04] And little by little, then you might be able to realize like, oh, now I can do this other thing. Now I can actually look at that feeling. Now I can go and have this conversation. Now I can actually stand in front of my parents and tell. No, these are my boundaries or stand in front of my parents, or stand in front of my housemates and tell me like, Hey, when I’m doing this, , I need to communicate your boundaries.
[00:45:26] You know, when we’re able to get to that place, then every single little step that, that we can take actually is positive. And for some people, things go like this. And for some people it takes time and it’s about being true to ourselves and to be able to be kind and compassionate towards to ourselves, to do the work in the time and the space that works for us, not comparing us to anybody else, not looking at others.
[00:45:58] Just looking at others for inspiration, just looking at others for things that I want to awaken in, in my experience, qualities that I want to embody, but not in comparison that I think that is one of the biggest things that is underway for us. So coming back to the body, coming back to the breath, coming back to more simple life like slowing down, it’s like, where are you going?
[00:46:22] To do all of these things to get stressed and not be able to eat well, not be able to move one, not be able to have good conversations, not be able to listen when we are able to slow down that changes so much.
[00:46:37] Laura Hartley: And is this the same when we’re looking to find our best actions in the world, when we are then looking to take this work out to actually help and to remake things, is that the similar process there of finding what is right for.
[00:46:51] Brian Berneman: Yeah. I, believe that everything is what resonates. so I’m going to do what resonates with me and I don’t care if other people think that that’s good or bad, I’m just going to go with what resonates. Now, I got to a place of understanding what resonates with me because I’ve done this, this work of feeling.
[00:47:08] So now it’s so much easier to recognize this resonates, this doesn’t and I’m just going to follow this now. I think that as well, To, to do this outer work, we need to recognize our interconnectedness. So your life has an impact on my life, even though I might not realize that we all have an impact on each other’s lives, we all have an impact on environment and the environment has an impact on us.
[00:47:39] I think that now there’s much more awareness, but if, if we don’t have any bees, then we cannot pollinate a lot of the food that we have. So therefore, our food system will change and therefore how we survive might change and, When we start to understand how interconnected we all are, that changes.
[00:47:57] And from a family constellation perspective, we are so much closer than we believe. Like, just think back, we might have someone in common like a hundred generations ago. So, if I can see everyone , As a member of my family, then how does that change my approach to how I treat others and how I see others and how I understand that.
[00:48:24] So whether I want to see them as family, or just the fact that we are all interconnected, then how I approach things. It’s very different and not every, not only everyone but everything. So if I connect to the waters, if I connect to the land, if I connect to the animals, then my behavior changes because I’m much more aware of my impact or our collective impact on.
[00:48:54] Laura Hartley: Okay. I mean, Brian, you have offered so much today, so I really wanna thank you for that. But I do wanna ask you one final question as well. You know, that if there is one piece of wisdom that you were to kind of succinct into a message to help us transform the world from, as it is to, as it could be, what would that be?
[00:49:15] Where would you start us to look for social healing?
[00:49:18] Brian Berneman: I would reiterate a few of the things that I mentioned in terms of coming back to the body, coming back to the feelings, integrating work from slowing down and being able to do that integrated work of our experience and our ancestors experience. As well, I think that it’s really important to be able to understand and do the work of understanding our values and the things that we stand.
[00:49:42] And then seeing if our actions are aligned to that. So if I can start to behave in a way that aligns more with what I believe in, then we are going to get to that world. We’re going to be so much closer to a thriving world than where we are now that.
[00:50:04] For some people it’s beautiful. And for some people it’s not at all. And for a lot of our animals and our earth, it’s not. So if we want to create that change, we just need to look and understand how that inner work that we’re doing has an impact out.
[00:50:22] Laura Hartley: Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show and for everything you’ve offered.
[00:50:26] Brian Berneman: Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for keeping on doing your work to be able to, to spread this. Not only like doing your inner work, but sharing with so many as well. So thank you. Thank
[00:50:38] Laura Hartley: you everyone. Please go check out Brian Berneman and conscious action. New Zealand. All of the details will be in the show.
[00:50:45] I do love it when topics and guests are suggested. So please feel free to reach out via my website. publiclove.Enterprises. Otherwise you can reach us on Instagram @laura.h.hartley
We chat with Rebecca Weaver, the Founder and CEO of HRuprise, an employee advocacy organization that supports employees and companies with flexible, independent HR for the new world of work.
After 20 years in HR leadership at Fortune-50 companies and startups, she became disillusioned with her own profession in the wake of #MeToo, and realized just how much is stacked in favor of the company.Thus, HRuprise was born to help level the playing field for employees.
Rebecca advises fast-growing companies on how to build equitable HR practices from the ground up, and provides cutting-edge thought leadership on HR disruption as a public speaker, writer and as host of the Problem Performers podcast.
TRANSCRIPT: Please note this was auto-generated and has not been edited, and may contain errors.
Laura Hartley: I’m Laura Hartley and welcome to the Public Love Project. This podcast is all about re-imagining and remaking the world, creating the conditions for social healing and collective thriving. Each week, we dive into topics around resilience, social change, birthing, and more just, and regenerative world and how we can use our head heart and hands in action. Before i introduce today’s guest and topic though i have one request head on over to apple podcasts or spotify wherever you’re listening and hit subscribe rate and review it helps us work to reach new listeners
Today’s guest is Rebecca Weaver. Rebecca is the founder and CEO of HRUprise, an employee [00:01:00] advocacy organization that supports employees and companies with flexible, independent HR for the new world of work. After 20 years in HR leadership at fortune 50 companies and startups, she became disillusioned with her own profession in the wake of #metoo and realized just how much is stacked in favor of the company.
Thus HRUprise was born to level the playing field for employees. Yes. Rebecca advisors fast-growing companies on how to build equitable HR practices from the ground up and provides cutting edge thought leadership on HR disruption as a public speaker, writer and host of the problem performance podcast
Welcome Rebecca. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Rebecca Weaver: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be. ,
Laura Hartley: this podcast is all about social healing and about how we can remake the world. And I so love what you do. , I’m really hungry for a change in the way that we work. And to me, this is all about, what you do and what your business is about.
But I would love to hear from you a little bit about HR [00:02:00] Uprise and how you came to be doing this work.
Rebecca Weaver: Sure. So I guess it was about five years ago now, five or six years ago, it was in the wake of #metoo, going viral. As we now know, it was not the first time that hashtag had been used, but these conversations that emerged globally sounded really different from anything that I could remember in my professional career.
I hear all these women standing up and talking about the experience they’d had. I myself was looking back at my own experiences and understanding those with new language and understanding them in a new light. And at the same time, I was also looking back as a career HR professional. At that time, I had about 15 years of HR experience.
So I’m looking back at multiple decades of HR. And I was thinking to [00:03:00] myself, my God, we have been part of the problem. HR has been part of the problem that has part of the system that was created that allowed. Misogyny harassment discrimination to take root in the workplace. And why, why aren’t we talking about that?
Why aren’t we having conversations about that within HR? I was seeing plenty of headlines at the time. That would say things like if you’re harassed, don’t go to HR or HR is not your friend. And here’s why, so there were plenty of people talking about HR. But I didn’t see any of that conversation coming from within, and at the time I was the head of HR for an advertising agency.
And so some of the creatives came together and we talked about it. We kept having these conversations at work. And so they came up with the logo and helped me come up with a [00:04:00] name. And I called at HR uprising because I was calling for an up rise within HR. And I just kept saying to the team, I just have a lot to say, I have a lot to say, and I need a place to say it.
And we decided Instagram seemed like the best place to do that. There was a lot happening at the time, especially within advertis. Advertising was having its own sort of me too moment at the time. And so Instagram seemed like the best place to do it. So I launched this Instagram account with a partner of mine from work and it just exploded.
And so the initial response, we had like a thousand followers in the first week and the initial response was so far beyond what we had expected. You know, we, we started posting, you know, pretty non HR kinds of things. We were swearing and doing all kinds of fun stuff. And, you know, calling on HR about, these are all the [00:05:00] ways that we really need to do things differently that we need to get our act together, et cetera, et C.
And what was really fascinating is almost immediately, we started hearing from non HR people in direct messages. So they were employees who started to reach out and they would say, I witnessed someone being harassed. How can I be a good ally without getting myself into trouble with HR? Or I just found out I make a lot less than my male counterparts.
Is there anything I can do about. Or I was asked to sign an NDA. What should I know? Like, although these questions that we realized, well, if you had a trusted HR partner, you wouldn’t need to reach out to HR or to someone who essentially is a complete on the internet. And so it really sent me down this path of looking at how can the question almost from the very beginning was how couldn’t I use my experience, my [00:06:00] decades of experience in HR and flip the tables, how can I use my experience to help support the employee in the workplace and pull myself out of that double bind of.
And the double bind is essentially this. You ask most people what’s HRS role in a workplace. Right. And they would say they most likely would say company culture. They’re there to be there for the employee. Right? Most of the time people would say that even HR would tell you that a lot of the time employee development, things like that.
The reality is, first of all, all of that is well intentioned and in good environments is absolutely the case. However, the reality is if ever there is a conflict between what’s best for the employee and what’s best for the organization, the organization’s gonna win out every single time. And the role of HR is there to [00:07:00] support the organization first.
And so. What I kept asking from the very beginning with HR Uprise is how can I use the experience that I have, because it is so helpful, you know, friends or family would reach out and they would say, Hey, I’m dealing with this issue. And I could step out of my obligation of the company in that moment.
And I could say here’s some questions to ask. Here’s some things to be aware of. Here’s how to protect yourself. Right. I could give them that completely unfettered advice. And so that became the question of how can we provide that on a broader. So that is ultimately what turned into where we are today with HR app price, we offer coaching.
So we have a network of coaches who have experienced very similar to mine but lots of different industries lots of different experience, types and levels can give that advice and employees don’t have to ever worry about it, getting back to their employer because it’s completely dependen.
And then in addition, we’ve started working with [00:08:00] companies because we want companies to do better. We need, we need companies to do better. And so it’s really kind of both sides to the business, but that’s, that’s where we are today.
Laura Hartley: Yes. I mean, I wanna celebrate this so much because I think this is so important and having this dual approach of working with companies as they are, but also kind of supporting people when they don’t have that access.
But I wanna step back a little bit because they found it really interesting when you said that, HR at the time, wasn’t having these conversations. And again, when you started on Instagram, that it was non HR people who were actually resonating with your message and who were reaching out to you.
do you think that has changed, but also, what was holding back those conversations within HR? Was it a lack of awareness or was it a more systemic issue?
Rebecca Weaver: That’s a great question. I, I mean, I think it’s probably a multiple things, but. What I, what I experienced I will say, like that was a [00:09:00] surprise.
You know, when we first launched and started hearing from employees, I was not anticipating how much the message would resonate with employees. And what it told me and what I have seen over and over again since then is just how hungry people are for a different approach. In the workplace. Like I would love to have a great relationship.
I would love to have someone there who truly is there to advocate for me as the employee. They’re very hungry for that. And yet the system that we have today and certainly the way that HR is structured in most organizations, doesn’t support that. In addition to that, what I would say is I was anticipating a bit of pushback from, from HR as a broad community.
I mean, I certainly knew that there are plenty of other HR professionals who would view things similarly to how I did. , I had tons of conversations with them as, or come as we’re getting ready to launch [00:10:00] HR up rise and lots of aha moments in those conversations. And. But I, but I still anticipated some pushback and I would say as a broad profession, we still have so far to go.
So, so far to go. What has been amazing is how quickly we amassed this incredible network of HR, vice coaches. So we have 80 plus coaches who signed on the majority of them signed on in the first couple months. And we’ve had to have a waiting list ever since then. That’s incredible. And so, yeah, and, and I will say it’s I wasn’t anticipating that either.
And that’s been a really pleasant surprise, and again has really shown just how much. There’s a desire within the HR community to do things differently. You know, all of these HR, upright coaches have been attracted by the [00:11:00] idea of being able to do things differently. To be able to look at their practices as policies, how we do things, give advice based on their experience that that’s really what’s drawn them into the experience.
So that part has been really wonderful.
Laura Hartley: Yeah, I’m curious as well. You know, we’re recording this interview at a really interesting moment in time. Obviously only a few days ago in the us, Roe V. Wade was overturned and. It feels like we’re possibly on the brink of, another form of revolution that we need here.
Yeah. Given your business, an HR uprising was born out of me too. Another really pivotal moment in time. I’m curious about your thoughts about this around whether companies should speak out on this issue, how we support employees, what is the role of organizations in this space that we’re facing at the moment?
Rebecca Weaver: The past couple of years? [00:12:00] Have been, it feels like one massive social movement after another. Me too feels like it was maybe the beginning of that. And then we have black lives matter and the pandemic of course affected everyone, but the social movements with black lives matter.
And now, now we’re looking at reproductive health and how that is impacted in the workplace. What I’ve said for years is that there is no such thing as an apolitical workplace. It just does not exist. And it’s really, really disheartening to me to see was I believe last summer there were a couple of companies.
That came out and basically said we’re banning all political conversation within the workplace. We’re just here to do a job and blah, blah, blah. And it’s, it’s so disheartening to me because number one, I don’t think that’s even possible, even if you wanted to. I don’t think it’s possible. [00:13:00] Number two is certainly not the ideal that we should have for the workplace employees.
There are so many employees, especially those who are coming from a marginalized identity. that their very existence is political. And now as a woman, I am experiencing that as well. My very existence is political. My definition of healthcare is political where I might be able to seek the rights that I have are now determined by which state I live.
At a fundamental level that is political. And so I think we are starting to see, I have been encouraged by the number of organizations that have come out in the past few days. And even before that, there were some organizations that came out even before the official ruling to say that they are now adding that they will pay for [00:14:00] travel.
For anyone, any of their employees who need to travel to another state for an abortion, that they will pay the travel costs for that that they’re ensuring that abortion care is covered in their medical benefits, things like that. I’ve been encouraged by the number of companies that we’ve heard from.
And also there are so many more to. So many more to go. And part of what’s really, really concerning, especially based on the, the clients that we typically work with at HR up rise. What I am very fearful of is that we will quickly get to a place where We essentially have two realities for employees in, in the United States.
And if you work for a large organization where putting those kinds of benefits in place is very easy for them to do structurally versus working for a smaller business, where they tend to see many more barriers or they have more fear. [00:15:00] Around putting something like that in place. What I wanna tell businesses is it’s absolutely possible.
Even if you’re a small business, it’s absolutely possible to do it in a manageable way. And so , we could talk about that for days. It’s absolutely possible, but again, it really does require it’s gonna require so much more conversation it’s gonna require so much more education. And that will be honestly the.
The crux of the work that we will be doing in the near future with all of our clients. Yeah.
Laura Hartley: And I can see that this is one of the challenges when healthcare becomes political and is linked to employment, and then employment says, well,, this is not a political space and this is where we don’t discuss this.
You there’s a real barrier there. And I loved one of your, your quotes, which was talking about, professionalism is dehumanizing. This very way that we go to work and we’re supposed to kind of shut off our other identities to turn off all the other things that are happening to us in our [00:16:00] life.
And I’m wondering if that plays into that conditioning that, there’s a space for politics. There’s a space to talk about these difficult things and it’s
Rebecca Weaver: not here. Absolutely. It’s absolutely true. Professionalism, you know, what we have tended to view as professional in the workplace tends to do with what you wear, how you do your hair, how you show up, how you communicate, the things that you value the written word above all else.
For example, like all of these things that we tend to to say are characteristics of the professional are all rooted in white supremacy. And we don’t talk about that enough. So these idea, this idea that for black men and women that wearing their hair in a natural way is considered unprofessional. and I bet you’d be hard pressed to [00:17:00] find a black man or woman who works in a corporate setting who hasn’t been told that at least once in their career.
Right. And it, and again, I mean, think about it on its surface that we tell somebody that the way that their hair naturally grows out of their head is considered unprofessional. I mean, It, it just boggles the mind. and, and yet that has been the quote unquote wisdom right. Of the, of the professional world for decades, even things like Worshiping punctuality and, worshiping individualism over community focus or collaboration.
All of those things are, are rooted in white supremacy. And, and we have to be willing to talk about these things. We have to be willing to talk about how, whether out, whether it’s been. Intentional or not the impact, what the impact has been on our employees for, for [00:18:00] all of these years. So, yeah. Cons concepts about professionalism or executive presence.
That’s another phrase that’s used frequently, right? That’s this nebulous. But really what it means is, you know, are you showing up like a white male typically would in the workplace, right. It’s powerful, aggressive, right. And, and all of these things that we hold up as being ideal for a white male in the workplace, we punish women and people of color for showing those same ideals in the workplace.
Laura Hartley: Oh, I, you know, I’ve had that experience myself, this idea that to, to lean in, or to kind of claim your space that you need to act in, a manner, very similar to how men act and I’m particular to how white men act that you need to obey. And, at the same time, the double standards that, if you act in that way, you’re often seen as pushy, you’re seen as bossy, you’re seen as controlling, and it’s not really leadership material.[00:19:00]
Right. You know? Right. One of. The things that I love, you have a podcast. It is called problem performers. Yes. And as soon as I heard that title, I was like, oh my God, that’s
Rebecca Weaver: me. Because I,
Laura Hartley: I was labeled at problem performers so many times, like I could do my job incredibly well. I was very efficient.
I was very good at what I did, but I bucked the status quo a little bit, you know, I challenged the norms within an organization and I thought, Hey, we could do this better. We could do this differently. And very few places, even the ones that liked to label themselves as innovative were really like, oh yeah, let let’s try that out.
It was, oh, you know, Laura is wonderful, but perhaps a little bit difficult to manage her a little bit outspoken. Yes. So I’m wondering, what do you think of this? You know, how did you come up with this title?
Rebecca Weaver: that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. It’s another one of those concepts that I think we, we have to blow up entirely.
I named the [00:20:00] podcast problem performers because all the most interesting people I know have been called a problem performer, at least once right. They’ve been, they’ve been labeled that and I too have been given that title. It’s because the, the people who are, who are pushing back on that status quo, the people who are pushing for change within the workplace.
I mean, the status quo does not appreciate that. You know, the, the folks who have retained power and I, I mean that more structurally than I do even individually, right. But the, the, the folks who have retained power for so long. Don’t like people attempting to disrupt the system you know, attempting to buck the system in any way.
And so labeling somebody, a problem of performer is one of the most classic tools that is used. All of a sudden it’s oh, well, their, their performance is not meeting standard. And here are the [00:21:00] four reasons why. And so part of it is I wanna call attention to that as well, because I know far too many people who have fallen into that trap of being labeled problem performer and thinking that it actually has something to do with them.
Yeah. This
Laura Hartley: internalization that I’m bad, or I’m not good for what I do. There’s something wrong with
Rebecca Weaver: me. Exactly. And I would say. Now most likely there’s something wrong with the system, especially if , you are fighting the good fight speaking up when you know you should , listening to that internal voice of yours.
Yeah, it is the system and that is the part that we have to continue to work to bust it down. However, we.
Laura Hartley: yeah. , and so many of us, I think, who were labeled problem performers, certainly listening to this podcast have kind of pivoted into entrepreneurship, into mm-hmm , , I run a program business for the revolution, which is about [00:22:00] how do we create a feminist business beyond capitalism, beyond patriarchy, and really disentangle ourselves from these systems, including white supremacy as well.
But one of the challenges, , we face in entrepreneurship, I think this idea that we have to do everything and we do at the beginning. Yeah. , you, you wear every single hat, but then knowing how to actually create the environment and the culture that we want can be challenging. So I read, and I wanna quote you here and sorry, I love doing this, but visionary organizations have to run on passion for years before they turn a profit.
This means that all kinds of emotional and interpersonal compromises that get made in order to keep. when the company finally gets traction and begins to grow. Many of these early benign issues morph into deep rooted toxicities. And, , I think both you and I probably run a visionary organization that runs also on passion as well as profit mm-hmm.
so curious, like [00:23:00] where do we start with this? How do we stop that from happening?
Rebecca Weaver: I think part of it, part of it is, is having to be intentional from day one. And part of what I was trying to get with that piece that you quoted is that it can be very, very easy. And we work with a lot of organizations that are at this stage too.
Very, very easy, because there are so many demands on your time. So many places, you know, you’re, you’re really trying to boil the ocean. , when, especially in the early days of entrepreneurship and what we find is that. when especially when an organization gets to maybe it’s funding opens up opportunities for hiring and they start to get to the place where they.
Engaging hiring new team members on that it can be very, very easy to go back to. Okay. Who have I worked with before? Who do I know? [00:24:00] Right. Who can come in very quickly and hit the ground running, right? These are all the phrases that we hear frequently. And the challenge with that is that by definition, you are not building a diverse team.
If that is your sole. If that is solely what you’re relying on for hiring a team. And I think it’s important to recognize how frequently this happens and acknowledge that so that we can then do better going forward. And so my, my recommendation, especially for very early stage entrepreneurs is start from the beginning.
Look, there’s a one thing that I recommend super simple. But a game changer in your mindset, which is as you’re thinking about bringing other people on board. So whether it’s team members, whether it’s contractors that you might be working with, maybe it’s a consultant you’re gonna bring in to work with you.
[00:25:00] What will this person who’s the culture add? Not the culture fit. Oh, I love that. Great. So again, very, very simple, but it can be really, really profound in just shifting your mindset to thinking about how can I bring this on? Who, who has a perspective that I don’t have, who has a skill set that I don’t currently have, who you know, has a lived experience.
That’s nothing like mine, you know, all of those things are going to add to your culture. And this is the part I don’t know that we talk about nearly enough. When you’re building a diverse team, it’s by definition, not going to be the, oh, we just slide in together. We come together and it just all fits, right.
It is not going to be that, that type of environment because who are you most likely to have that? Oh, we just slide in together. We finish each other’s sentences. Right? Those are gonna be [00:26:00] people who are very much like yourself.
Laura Hartley: Yeah. And people who uphold the status quo then as well of an organization exactly.
Are not really challenging anything.
Rebecca Weaver: Exactly. And so if you’re looking for that culture add, it will by definition be potentially more challenging communication wise. It may be more challenging for you to come together and to find your goals. It may be more challenging. Like those things may take just a little bit longer.
But it will be infinitely worth it, and you will create a much, much better product, whatever that is for your business, you will create an infinitely better product down the road. If, if those are the things that you are super intentional about from the very beginning, Hmm.
Laura Hartley: And what are these myths that we need to let go of, , in order to have more diverse hiring and to be conscious, , in contractors team members, in whatever we’re doing, because you mentioned one of them that like, we just need to hit the ground running.
, I think another one is that,[00:27:00] , it’s easy to hire within our network. It’s just, it’s so much easier. Yeah. What else, what else comes up? What are some of these thought patterns that keep us stuck in hiring, , culture fits versus
Rebecca Weaver: culture? Yeah. One that I hear frequently is, well, we’d love to hire more diverse candidates.
There just aren’t that many in our profession and, and I hear that. in just about every profession, just about every industry across the board. Well, we would love to, we just, it’s a pipeline problem. I just don’t exist here. Yeah. It’s a pipeline problem or yes, it’s a geographical problem. This is not a super diverse city or things like that.
And to that, quite frankly, I say bullshit. Is it okay if I said that on your podcast? Absolutely. Go ahead. I do. I mean, I. Throw the bullshit flag on that. Again, you just, you have to be intentional about where you’re seeking out your candidates. Again, you do have to go [00:28:00] beyond your personal networks. You know, there are tons of studies that say for those of us white people that it’s really, really min minuscule percentage of white people who have one or two true.
Friends who are people of color, like a minuscule number, shocking number, actually. And so you think about that again, playing itself out, over and over again to your personal networks. If you were going back to your personal network in who, you know, if that’s solely who you’re relying on for your hiring will what kind of culture do you think that you’re gonna be creating?
So the, yeah, the pipeline. issue is probably one of the biggest myths that I would like to debunk.
Laura Hartley: What do you think of, , the workplace as a family, as we’re often sold as well, especially when we’re looking at this diversity, right? Is it a family
Rebecca Weaver: [00:29:00] workplace is not a family and I quite honestly, I find it a huge red flag when companies use that term.
I’m not saying that. It’s funny. Cause I, I posted about this not too long ago and I don’t know that I, I think it’s probably the most comments I’ve ever gotten on a LinkedIn post. And I had quite a few people disagreeing with me, which was interesting. I even got a couple of D DMS on this one. I don’t know why they didn’t wanna be like notified or identified publicly in public.
Yeah. Yeah. I’m not saying that companies don’t have coworkers who are very supportive of each other who go above and beyond to support one another who work very well together, who collaborate well together. I think all of that is obviously the ideal and what we wanna create. However, that’s not a family.
And also I think when you [00:30:00] use the, the trope of. Our workplace is a family more often than not. My experience has been, those are the company cultures that are pretty toxic. They’re coming from pretty toxic family relationships. Many people do not have a positive connotation with family. And so I think being aware of all of, all of those things, like what I have seen is it’s far too often been used as an excuse to it’s been used to excuse really bad behavior within the workplace.
So what I would propose that companies think of instead is I would love for us to think of ourselves as a high performing sports. And so we are looking to recruit other super hyper performers. Each person has a role to play on the team. They know what that role is. They’re really clear about that.
They’re really clear about how their role, if [00:31:00] affects others on the team, we all have a singular goal that we wanna win together. Like that, to me, feels like a much healthier metaphor for the workplace than a family.
Laura Hartley: Yeah. And this feeling that, you know, how your role actually influences and supports others, cuz that’s something that I’ve also found, working in organizations is departments and roles are very siloed and sometimes you’re just kind of doing your thing, but I’m like, well, how does this fit into the broader picture?
You know, what would happen? Absolutely. If this role
Rebecca Weaver: stopped. . Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that’s really the role of a good leader. You know, is that communication bridging, bridging you know, one department to another one division to another, whatever the appropriate structure of the workplace is.
But that’s the, of a good leader you know, is really to, as I teach companies about company culture, one of the questions I get frequently is like, what is the side of a, a [00:32:00] good healthy culture? And what I would say is if you were to ask any person within your organization, what their role is and how does it contribute to the company’s success.
And if every person within the organization can re reasonably reliably answer that question. That’s the sign of a healthy culture. To me, it’s from the janitor all the way to the CEO, right? If everybody along the path can say, here’s my job. Here’s how my job contributes to the success of this organization.
Here’s how I contribute to. You know, the mission of the organization, our goals that we’ve set, whatever that is, right? However, your company defines that if each person can do that, then that’s the sign of a really healthy comp company culture. To me,
what [00:33:00] would you
Laura Hartley: say your boldest? Most beautiful vision of HR could be.
Rebecca Weaver: Mm
I love that question. I think my boldest biggest vision honestly, would be seeing the entire profession changing really dramatically. I like to say like blowing it up entirely. Not everybody shares that being a beautiful vision, but I think that sounds beautiful. Really, and truly the structure of HR has not changed.
For over a hundred years. And, and I’m speaking specifically about the us, but I think this is the case for, for many Western countries. The role is not the, the structure has not changed in over a hundred years. And , I see study after study, after study there was one in just a few years ago that estimated that 80%
of [00:34:00] employees do not trust HR. And we go back to, and I, I think that’s probably pretty accurate depending on your industry or your company. You go back to our earlier conversation about that double bind. I think that’s why the other part of the problem is that we’ve continued to heap on these expectations of our HR professionals.
And I will say as much as I love to beat up on the profession, I am not here to beat up on the professionals, the people who are in the role, because they’re working harder than they ever have by and large, we’re seeing massive amounts of burnout within HR. And I think part of the problem is it was already heading this direction.
We’re continuing to heap on more and more expectations that are quite frankly really unrealistic. So we expect in many organizations, the same person who investigates misconduct in the workplace to also be the person who helps [00:35:00] decide who’s ready for the next promotion, which is an inherent conflict of interest.
No wonder nobody trusts HR, right. When we have that kind of system set. And yet now we’ve also heaped on top of that chief mask compliance officer and chief medical officer for the organization. Right. And like we we’ve now heaped work from home or work anywhere. Chief come up with our remote work policy officer for the organization as well.
And so, you know, it’s just gotten worse over the past couple of years. And so really, and truly, I would love for us to see a completely different structure. That that really separates out the, how do we support employees in the workplace and the, how do we ensure compliance? And the inner workings, the operations of the organization continues to run smoothly and we just see a complete separation of those two things.
That would be my dream.
Laura Hartley: I love that, you know, I think there’s [00:36:00] so much. More space and more opportunities and more possibilities that could come from actually, you know, separating out those roles. I want to really thank you for coming on the show today. Is there anything, any last piece of advice that you wanna offer your, our listeners who might be thinking about starting a business or running that their post capitalist, feminist, you know, business, what can they do to take something away from this
Rebecca Weaver: conversation?
I love that my best advice. I think for someone who’s just starting out honestly, is to pay attention to everything. And I , that, that sounds a little counterintuitive in a, you know, we must also be mindful, but what I mean by that is there’s so much that I think of now that has had direct impact on.
My views about the world how I run my business, the things that become really critical that started [00:37:00] as a kernel of something, you know, many, many years ago, or maybe it was someone I, that I met with who now introduces me to someone else who becomes a really key business partner ally for me.
I don’t think there’s any wasted. When it comes to following the path and the pursuit of passion it may not always be entirely clear what that will look like and how that might turn into an actual business for you. But I come back to the quote, I think it’s Howard Thurman that says Oh, shoot.
I’m gonna butcher right now. It’s a quote that says don’t ask what the world needs ask what makes you come alive because what the world needs is for more people to come alive. Did I completely, no, no, I think you right.
Laura Hartley: Okay, good. By the quote as well. You know, I agree. We need a, we need everybody in [00:38:00] creating a more beautiful world, the revolution calls, but every.
To look within and to find new ways of doing things. So I wanna thank you again so much for coming on the show today. Everyone, please go check out Rebecca Weaver and HRUprise. All of the links Instagram LinkedIn website will be in the show notes below. I love when listeners suggest topics or guests.
So please head on over to our website. publiclove.Enterprises and send me an email. Otherwise you can follow me on Instagram @laura.h.hartley thank you everyone.
“You do not have to be good,” writes Mary Oliver. “You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”
