About Angela Fontaine | 8 ½ pieces of a Russian nesting doll, mom, coach, consultant

As an ICF Certified Coach, Consultant, and ELI Master Practitioner, Angela possesses knowledge in multiple fields and industries. She has over ten years of experience focusing on transition and managing change in various sectors. 

Angela believes that the strength of an organization lies in its ability to hold space for diverse thought and experience, as well as its ability to welcome change while staying focused on its vision and purpose. 

She is a lifelong student of philosophy and theology. Her passion for these disciplines has deepened her understanding of the fundamental questions that shape our lives. This intellectual curiosity infuses her coaching and consulting work, allowing her to guide clients toward self-discovery and personal transformation. Her family's roots are as dynamic as her professional background, providing her with many experiences and a mosaic of diverse perspectives. 

www.seraphstrategies.com 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelafontainecpc/ 
@angela_fontaine_coaching 
facebook.com/seraphstrategiesllc

Angela Highlighted Southside ReLeaf aims to educate the community on environmental justice and increase green spaces in the area and the state! Learn more at: Southside ReLeaf

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

About Anela Seliskar Barboza | She/They/ʻOia, coach, 

Anela is a Somatic, Transformation, and Leadership Coach and Mentor Coach. She is deeply committed to creating a safe and loving container for exploring questions of identity, culture, race, relationship to place/home, and resiliency as a means of personal transformation and healing. Anela’s perspective has been shaped by her experience as a diasporic kanaka maoli, born and raised away from her home, culture, and into assimilation. Impacted by cultural isolation, her personal transformation included Somatics as a means to healing the cord that connected family to land and to one another. In 2022, she returned her family back home and lives full-time on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, in the sunbelt of Keaau, Puna. Learn more at https://www.anelabarboza.com/. 

In lieu of a specific non-profit, Anela invited us all to learn about the peoples who lived on our land before colonization and find out: Where are they now and how can we serve them now?

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Anela describes herself as a human:

• Humaning in progress, constantly working to arrive in a basic outline while leaving room for growth
• Someone exploring how all the versions of self can coalesce into one form
• A multi-racial person of color with mixed ancestry and deeply rooted in her Hawaiian heritage, raised on the assimilated mainland

…what Anela is all up in:

• Two years into coming home to Hawaii and noticing who she is in this context that she’s craved for so long – including the logistics of moving and making home of a place and the intuitive/instinctive acts of connecting with place
• Navigating being invited into rooms exploring diversity while having to confront Model Minority biases and the desires of those in power for her to be somehow responsible for their emotions – to provide more in the form of soothing rather than growth-oriented challenging
• Growing a business that is inherently inseparable from Anela as a person while also experiencing the exhaustion of being in primarily white, cis-gender, heteronormative spaces
• Finding rest in community, with people who welcome her unmasked self
• Living at a time when the Hawaiian language is being revived and, along with it, the oral history of that part of her heritage

…her tools include:

• Learning, in academic settings but also farther afield, particularly experiential learning
• The longitudinal view of her heritage, into and before Hawaii 
• Being in a place where her brown skin is more “normal,” a place where her nervous system can settle more fully than when she was living on the American continent

…the non-profit she chose to highlight was:

Learn the land you’re on, who the indigenous people are who lived on the land before colonization, where they are now, and how you might serve them even in some small way. (I used this website years ago to discover that I live and work on Tutelo land.)

About Eric Larson |Coach, coach supervisor, musician, crying-on-the-inside clown

By vocation, Eric is a Mental Health Coach and a Mental Health Coach Supervisor. He's been doing this for long enough that he starts to feel old when he thinks about it. By avocation(s): Eric is a sometimes singer-songwriter, sometimes theater artist, sometimes cross-stitch enthusiast, sometimes long-distance walker, and ... lots of other stuff.

Eric highlighted The Mattering Movement, an organization shaped around answering the questions: What can we do to combat the pandemic of loneliness and despair that are harming our youth? How can we combat today’s widespread mattering deficit? Learn more at https://www.thematteringmovement.com/

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Eric describes himself as a human:

• Understanding himself as patterns set in motion way back then and that the more he explores the things that set other things in motion, the richer he becomes. We noticed together that this is akin to karma, the complex original version, not the snappy bumper sticker version
• He finds this exploration one that will always be a deep mystery yet still worthy of exploration
• Eric parsed out the cause from the meaning, noticing that they’re interconnected and both important yet unique from one another 

…what Eric is all up in:

• He describes himself, too, as compulsively always asking the big questions like the core question that he circles around, “What the hell is going on around here?”
• Making theater and healing from complex trauma
• The theater is maybe about an exploration of his mother’s death from Alzheimer’s in a co-creative and playful process with a creative partner; he’s not sure what this project will do for him but he knows he wants the audience to feel their hearts break while they are genuinely laughing, akin to the tradition of the tragic clown

…his tools include:

• Relationship and the coming together regularly beyond his usual habits of cutting and running
• Similarly: crawling toward what he wants to run from
• We noticed together that collaboration is counter to the popular story that creativity et al is accomplished by brilliant individuals working alone

About Sarah Hines | Firekeeper, grief advocate, parent, friend

Sarah has spent 25 years serving those that end of life. She has learned so much from the people she has served and has determined that it's not grief we need to heal but our relationship to it, that community care is self-care and that death belongs in the hands of love. you can find her work at www.griefadvocacy.com

Sarah highlighted The National Home Funeral Alliance. They support people in creating funerals and burials that are more personal, intimate, ecologically-sound, and financially accessible where legal.

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Sarah describes herself as a human:

• She’s a firekeeper, in a lodge, stirring a pot, a little inward, waiting for people to come to sit down by the fire and have some soup and have a conversation about whatever comes up
• Someone who has the ability to hold onto the space where others are supposed to be
• Until recently, she’s felt like a gatherer of wood. About a year ago, she started feeling a sense that it’s time to stop gathering and make the fire
• Who sees other people as integral to her self-discover process, that it’s in interacting with others that have guided her to what wood to gather and fire to start

…what Sarah is all up in:

• Her company, Grief Advocacy, is about building a relationship with grief such that we can see it as a reminder of what is importance to us
• Writing her love letter – her legacy – to all of the things that are super important to her and that grief has taught her. This is the fire she’s building
• Legacy, to Sarah, is how we be in the world, how we interact with others and that we don’t always know what it’s going to be. She shares a moving story of her best friend, who died unexpectedly in 2015, and how her legacy in Sarah’s life shows up
• How going to the edge of our knowledge, understanding, comfort is where we find the next learning, the next experiment
• Sarah distinguishes between the discomfort of Wrong Direction! and the discomfort of Something New through intuition

…her tools include:

• Community for the external processing including networking
• Writing
• Spending time in the past, even if it slips into rumination, including with the legacy of her ancestors
• A light touch on the future, holding onto what’s most important to her
• An expansive definition of grief
• Surrounding herself with people and ideas that are wildly diverse to create healthy adversity, focusing on having really great conversations rather than changing minds

…the non-profit he chose to highlight was:

The National Home Funeral Alliance. They support people in creating funerals and buriers that are more personal, intimate, ecologically-sound, and financially accessible where legal.

…how Kim describes himself as a human:

• Kim explains himself as a realist, someone who’s not “all that important” in the grand scheme of things – but in the same breath, it’s all about him!
• While Kim may not think himself very important, he strives to add value of his own to the world
• He may be messy, but that’s just being human!

…what Kim is all up in:

• After 25 years, Kim is going through an amicable separation from his partner – as a family mediator who doesn’t see many friendly proceedings, he’s glad to find his interactions throughout the process have been pleasant (though, of course, painful as well)
• It’s never too late to discover yourself, and Kim’s been relearning his identity and his feelings through resurfaced symptoms of grief
• Kim has been taking the time to reconnect with friends from previous years as he gets older, realizing time is precious and some people may not have much left
• He’s rediscovering the world by visiting places he’s been to, but viewing them in a new light as an older, wiser person
• Kim is moving outside his comfort zone for new experiences!

…his tools include:

• His “PBS” moments – pause, breathe, sense. For Kim, this means being in-tune with himself!
• His own form of meditation, which he practices at stoplights! He takes micro-moments throughout the day to notice and feel his surroundings, to be connected with himself and the Earth
• Kim notes his feelings first as a physical sensation, then dives deeper to discover the emotion associated 
   

…the non-profit he chose to highlight was:

The South West Virginia Wildlife Center, which focuses on rehabilitating injured wildlife and reintroducing them to the wild! The Center gladly accepts aid in the form of volunteer work and donations. Kim also mentions Planned Parenthood, a wonderful resource for men and women looking for reproductive services regarding reduced-cost birth control and pregnancy resources, as well as life-saving cancer screenings and standard check-ups. 

To say that Mike Childress is all up in both grief and the evolution of his business would suggest that either of those are new and novel for him. After many years of friendship, what I’ve learned about Mike – and what he shares so beautifully in this conversation – is that though he is well-versed in both (having lost his father when Mike was 13 and started his business over a decade ago), he’s always actively learning about both, and that integral to his learning is his Christian faith.  

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About Mike Childress |Christian, husband, father, professional in marketing and security

Mike Childress, a grateful husband and father of four, places faith and family at the core of his life. Founder of Agile Marketing Collective, he's celebrating a decade of steering the agency with a deep commitment to delivering client-focused solutions. Mike's professional journey began at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he delved into computer-aided design, coding, and web design. After serving ten years in the Army, Mike transitioned to corporate America, learning from industry experts at a Fortune 500 company.

In early 2023, Mike further expanded his professional repertoire by founding Shield Strategic Defense, an active shooter training and prevention consultancy. This venture underlines his ongoing commitment to protecting innocent lives and safeguarding communities. 

Though Mike remains deeply passionate about technology and elegant design, his hobbies reveal his life's true joys: quality time with his family, road biking, photography, and a never-ending playlist of music. He's made Roanoke, VA, his home and the backdrop against which he continues to explore personal growth, business innovation, and community involvement.

Mike highlighted a non-profit program in which he and his family are deeply involved, Safe Families for Children. Safe Families for Children seeks to keep children safe and families together. Safe Families for Children is rooted in faith, fueled by radical hospitality, disruptive generosity, and intentional compassion, to build a network of caring and compassionate volunteers to support families facing social isolation. Our goals are to prevent child abuse and neglect, reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system, and support and stabilize families.

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in our conversation include…

…how Mike describes himself as a human:

• A twist of a start with a 4th wall break where I introduce myself to introduce as a way to illuminate a difference between Mike and me and how we’ve navigated together in our long and deep friendship, particularly that Mike’s Christian faith is key to his navigation of the world while I identify as a secular Jew whose spiritual practices are informed by Buddhism and physics
• He is also a husband, parent, and business owner

…what Mike is all up in:

• A refined focus on the presence he wants to bring to his kids and broader family in the wake of the death of a teenager from a youth group he lead
• Deepening his understanding of the Bible which includes both finding his own meaning and seeking to understand the foundational meaning of the text, both of which help relieve him of the need to be perfect
• A fresh round of exploring the grief of his dad’s death when Mike was 13; with grief, his faith provides the underlying hope that allows him to face mortality
• How the longer road of grief is a nuanced and the sense of additional loss that goes with the fading of Mike’s memories of his dad
• The intersection of his beliefs and his business, of money/power/influence and being a Christian, and how one has to be prioritized, in his case, being a Christian and his family roles supersede his role as a professional. As such, he is vigilant to not let work impede on his family life and to be in alignment with his beliefs all the time.

…his tools include:

• Conversations with people who are good listeners, including his wife Faith and his close friends
• The Bible

…the non-profit he chose to highlight was:

Safe Families for Childrenseeks to keep children safe and families together. Safe Families for Children is rooted in faith, fueled by radical hospitality, disruptive generosity, and intentional compassion, to build a network of caring and compassionate volunteers to support families facing social isolation. Our goals are to prevent child abuse and neglect, reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system, and support and stabilize families.

https://safe-families.org/

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About Dr. Hoda Kilani | Career literacy expert, podcaster, educator, mom

Dr Hoda Kilani is a Certified Professional Career Coach and the President of Right Career Fit, a career coaching practice that focuses on education and career guidance. Hoda’s continued lifelong learning, career, research and volunteer involvements provide her with up-to-date expertise in career and educational project design. She holds a Master of Education and a Doctor of Education with a focus on youth learning. Hoda strives to be a spokesperson for the importance of career education and works tirelessly to create awareness of its value including career conversations on YouTube and two podcasts, Hoda’s Musings and Hoda’s Career Info as well as a radio show, Career Buzz.

Learn more at https://www.rightcareerfit.com/

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Key moments in our conversation include…

Knows herself as a human who:

• Pushes others to know themselves so that we can find our best-fitting careers
• Keeps happy by focusing on gratitude in which mindfulness is baked in
  • She tries to name 5-10 things she’s grateful for each morning
  • Helps her give back more to her community and family
• Makes a podcast and has a YouTube channel
• Loves to travel
• Speaks Arabic and Spanish
• Has a mission of worldwide career literacy

She’s all up in:

• Trying to take her career literacy work into other languages and the challenges of interpreting rather than translating the messages
  • She committed, right here in the conversation, to publishing in either Spanish or Arabic in January 2024
  • She feels that part of gratitude is stretching outside of our comfort zone
• Dad would say, “If you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’d better go check it out. You can always come back.”
• Hoda described an uncomfortable moment of awareness of cultural differences when presenting in Dubai and how it’s reinforced her concerns about moving into another language
• She also fears that it would sound like she’s less of an expert in career literacy than she is
• That she was born and raised in Lebanon made the cultural gaff stir in the inner critic all the more: “I should have known that!”

The tools she’s using to move through this time include:

• Planning though she understands they are flexible and meant to not always work
• Daily language practice including reading books about careers in Arabic and Spanish
• Reminding herself that it’s okay to fail
• Her value of democratizing info and skills of teaching

For her non-profit spotlight, Hoda suggested local food banks. As she said, we think of ourselves of living in the land of plenty and yet there are so many people experiencing food insecurity. 

About Karen Chase | author, speaker, brand designer, lover of cats and all four seasons

For nearly three decades Karen has worked as a professional designer creating brands for national and international organizations, non-profits, and authors. She has spoken with nearly one hundred historical, corporate, and trade audiences in the US and Canada—both virtually and in-person—about history, branding, and business.

Her first book, Bonjour 40: A Paris Travel Log, garnered seven independent publishing awards, and her first novel, Carrying Independence, was a nominee for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Historical fiction focusing on  the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the novel was awarded #12 of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2019.

She is a member of the Albemarle Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Born in Canada, Karen now lives in Richmond, with her spouse Ted, and 3 scrappy cats. She bikes, gardens, fosters kittens, travels for research. 

Learn more at https://karenachase.com

Karen highlighted two organizations that are particularly meaningful to her:

DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution): https://www.dar.org/

and

James River Writers: https://jamesriverwriters.org/

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at 

https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moment in out conversation include:

• As a human, Karen is an extrovert who has discovered she contains more introversion than she had previously realized and that alone time is important to her creative process. She’s also:
• Creative and curious on a deep level
• Gnashing her teeth more than she expected on feminist topics
• More than her work
• In her 50s and feeling enriched by this decade already
• She’s working in a marketing capacity in women’s healthcare while also researching Eliza a woman who went West before Lewis & Clark and kept a journal for Thomas Jefferson; Karen has a mission of lifting her from the footnotes of history
• Karen did all the paperwork for Eliza’s living family to join the Daughters of the American Revolution which was truly a community endeavor which is still only “one percent of one percent of what the project could be”
• She’s pursuing the history without knowing what she’ll do with the info that she’s surfacing; she’s treating it as an atomic habit, doing the steps that she sees and trusting that it will take her somewhere
• Karen referenced Flourish: The Extraordinary Journey of Finding the Best in Yourself which introduced her to the idea of wu-wei which is about creative flow that is inclusive of the wider community that contributes to creations
• For example, Karen’s French teacher neighbor helped her translate an 18th century will
• This collective of expertise is part of the fuel in her fire
• She touched on how qualities like introversion/extroversion are like a clothesline and the important part isn’t that we are a way but that we’re able to zoom  back and forth as serves us
• A recent experience of hosting a couple for several months brought showed her that her home is her cozy place and that the routines she and her partner have are in support of her creative process and sense of well-being
• Seasons are important to Karen, that there are all of the seasons
• Here, she referenced Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
• She adjusts her projects and schedules based on the seasons and what they are to her
• An author who has self-published and published traditionally, she’s feeling particularly dispirited about the current publishing industry which is why she’s not sure where her research is going
• We touched on the inherent meaning of her work instead of attaching the meaning to its outcome
• This is tricky to her as a marketer accustomed to seeing every choice needing to contribute to the bottom line – and she’s learning to see some actions as what is needed to recharge
• Her key tools are the ones that are often the first to go on the backburner, what she called the basic human needs like sleep, movement, eating healthfully
• Her external tools are a newly-hired research assistant, so many volunteer historians she’s met through the DAR.
• The DAR is both her spotlight and one of her external tools
• Though they’ve had a reputation of being stuck up and she’s found great generosity and volunteerism there as well as being impressed by all of the community service work they do
• https://www.dar.org/
• James River Writers, a vibrant writing community in Richmond, Virginia, which creates support, brings in speakers, and has been key to Karen’s education around diversity and inclusion: https://jamesriverwriters.org/

About Jennifer O’Grady | she/her, coach, mom, white-skinned, multi-racial, cis-gender, hetero, neuro-typical

Jennifer is a life-long Chicagoan, human raising 3 other humans and a lover of office supplies. Her oxygen is creating connection and collaboration which she cultivates through one-on-one coaching, facilitating The WELL (Women Engaged in Life) and offering safe space for all of life to be experienced, shared and elevated.   

Learn more at www.alifeallin.com

Jennifer spotlighted It’s a place for women and non-binary people to be witnessed; Anne's Haven provides unconfined space to women, girls, and nonbinary people of all ethnic, racial, sexual, and religious identities. Our center offers a vibrant environment through which people can learn from and support one another through their spiritual, physical, intellectual, financial, emotional, professional, and social development journeys. 

Lean more at http://www.anneshaven.net/

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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• Jennifer O’Grady is finishing a program in somatic coaching
• She’s exploring her cis-gender, heterosexual, white-skinned, woman, multi-racial, neuro-typical container in this world as a politically liberal person navigating and using her privilege as a coach, mom, friend… (whew!) – and she’s all up in how this awareness and action is unfurling in her life
• A recent beautiful and hard conversation with one of her kids (who is neuro-divergent, like her siblings and father) helped her see both she’s been unconsciously inviting others to call her out on her unconscious biases
• Jen tells a story of a coaching session with a woman of color that cracked open for Jen how her white skin can actually be a tool for helping others feel seen and witnessed – and how she could have chosen to leave the space but that her client couldn’t
• We explored the different flavors of words like “ally” and “collaborator” and “co-conspirator” and touched on the experience of having the privilege that comes from being able to pass if we so choose (Jen as white-skinned, me as straight) and also the desire to be seen for the fullness of our intersections of identity
• Jennifer spotlights Myisha T Hill as a person she learns from and from whom she first heard the idea of being a co-conspirator as a white-skinned person
• Connection – real connection – is a huge part of what drives Jen and that often that connection comes not from speaking but from consciously not speaking
• What she’s all up in – the thick of her learning curve – is having her eyes open to all of these areas of privilege and moving from safe space to brave space
• I brought in my thoughts about how being in the middle third of my life has given me an unexpected bonus privilege of seeming innocuous as a white, middle-aged woman
• Jennifer speaks a bit about having been raised by a Scandinavian mom and Puerto Rican dad and seeing her dad experience micro-aggressions that she, until recently, reactively downplayed
• We touched into how the importance of centering connecting in her life means giving up her trauma-based grasping of belonging… which leads a lack of greater belonging and connection (I referenced Ubuntu which I invite you to learn more about in this TEDx Talk by Getrude Matsche)
• Jen added on this beautiful image of belonging/connection related to trees and their inextricable, absolutely necessary interconnection, by way of mycelium, underground)
• Tools that are helping her navigate this learning curve include radical honesty and radical compassion when she gets it wrong; and especially leaning into the connections she has to create more connection
• She noted that we don’t know how to be witnessed (though we crave it) and so we are lacking the tools to fully witness others in their grief and pain
• Anne’s Haven is the non-profit that Jennifer spotlighted. It’s a place for women and non-binary people to be witnessed; Anne's Haven provides unconfined space to women, girls, and nonbinary people of all ethnic, racial, sexual, and religious identities. Our center offers a vibrant environment through which people can learn from and support one another through their spiritual, physical, intellectual, financial, emotional, professional, and social development journeys.

About Rachel Winstead | a writer, educator, community builder, late-bloomer, and queer creative

Rachel Winstead is a writer, educator, community builder, late-bloomer, and queer creative. She’s happiest when she’s researching, listening, and LEARNING. After spending most of her career in marketing roles and copywriting gigs, she recently accepted the position of teaching high school English.

“Over the years I’ve learned where my strengths are when it comes to wordsmithing, but these days I’m focused on refining those skills and sharing what I’ve learned with other creative people—and now high school students,” she explains. 

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Show Notes

• Rachel (she/they) describes themself as a teacher of teenagers leading to a feeling of being a partner in the students’ creative journey – and a tired human, recovering from being in that intensive energy after having been a solo freelancer for many years
• They have been thinking about how we help each other tell their stories, stay curious, and discuss new or conflicting ideas
• They’ve also been deepening their exploration of boundaries in the context of the high school
• We discussed the intersection of losing our childhood ease with creativity as we buy into the story of what being good at creating means to our creative process – plus what Rachel is seeing in terms of creative potential in their students
• If Rachel had their druthers, they’d call all of their classes Creative Expression because their priority is for each student to figure out what creative expression looks like to them as an individual
• We also discussed the intersection of “proper” English, colloquial English, and a focus on form over function (or communication over grammar)
• How Rachel made an effort to start their class semesters with references to demonstrate the great big space available for the students to express themselves as a foundation to their efforts to create safe spaces for their voices
• Students experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity is part of the landscape Rachel is navigating as they create space and measure expectations of the students
• Rachel likes to think of themself as a partner in their education and that though they use the language of “teacher” in their school, Rachel prefers the title of “educator” which is something they’ve been for a long time as a professional writer
• Tools Rachel uses as they traverse this learning curve include their gut, self-care by way of breathing and tuning into their body, empathy, listening, school resources, and perpetually experimenting to find out what works for them

Rachel spotlighted Youth on Their Own, a dropout prevention program that supports the high school graduation and continued success of youth experiencing homelessness in Pima County. Learn more at https://yoto.org/