Intentional Conversations

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Erica Lin Hering to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• In hard moments, it is so easy to focus on our own reactions. How do we center and love those people who are hurting and not center ourselves.
• Emotions are data, emotions are valid.
• We each contribute to how others feel silence.
• What role will silence play in our lives and on our teams?
• Voice is not just the words we say in a meeting, but how we move through the world.
• Battle hypothesis around leadership - 80% of conversations are dominated by only two people in meetings, often we code leadership potential based on the quantity of speech, not the quality of speech
• If we spend our life channeling others voices, solving others problems, we lose the sense that we could show up and engage with agency. Basically saying “Who am I?”
• Ask 2 questions - "What do I think?" and "What do I need?" This starts to recultivate the sense of self that gets lost as you move through the world.
• Where we live is just one dimension, not to discount it, but none of us are monoliths and what’s most interesting from working on 6 continents is… people are people.
• Silence can be strategic. It is part of our tool set and part of our self preservation.
• In what ways have I learned silence? In what ways is my voice worthy or worthwhile? What ways do I unintentionally silence others?
• Let's normalize there are different ways of showing up, different ways of thinking.
• People don’t intend to silence each other, but we do incline each other towards silence by making it harder and easier for people to show up as they are.
• We are enough! What if we are enough as we are? Loving ourselves is a way to show up for each other.

CONNECT WITH ERICA:

On LinkedIn

Visit her website - www.elainelinhering.com

Purchase her book - Unlearning Silence

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Tai Christensen to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM TAI:

• You can be proud to be the first, only, different person in the room and bring that perspective.
• You never know what is going to be the one vehicle of wealth ownership for your life.
• Bringing the gift that my ancestors gave I am the hope of the slave - Maya Angelou
• One decision can deeply effect the trajectory of your children, grand children and even your great grand children lives.
• Housing education through HUD is the best way to help Black / Brown community. Housing education is not telling people they need to buy a house… it’s property taxes, appraisal, HVAC, floor updates, maintenance… all these small things matter. The education component is so big.
• When we provide housing education, it’s not about interest rates or community location, it is teaching people how to care for their property adequately, so they can get the most return on their investment.
• The home is a long term asset, it will take time to increase in value to maximize it at it’s highest potential.
• Every housing payment you make, rental or mortgage, is going to someone’s bottom line. I would rather that investment be mine! At the end of the day, I want this resource for myself to use it in a way that benefits me, not my landlords family.
• Even if it’s not your dream home, not in the neighborhood you want, you have to start somewhere.
• The housing industry needs to be sure we’re disseminating trusted information to communities.
• Always trust yourself, don’t be nervous about deep thoughts you don’t want to confront, change is hard. Lean into the uncomfortability and see where the journey takes you!
• Sometimes the worst decision you’ve ever made turns out to be the best thing for you!

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

https://axis360lift.com/

CONNECT WITH TAI:

On LinkedIn

ArriveHome.org

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Daisy Auger-Domínguez to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

DAISY'S KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• We don’t get rid of marketing or product functions when the economy changes, but we do this for DEI. We need to use this time to restrategize and execute this work better, not giving up. It’s to companies detriment when you give up on DEI. 
• Acknowledge that some things didn’t go as planned, but that’s life. Use this time to make it better, that’s business. 
• DEI has always been questioned and DEI practitioners have always been devalued... this isn’t new. Ebs and flows always happen with DEI work. Society is reactive and the media plays into it. 
• Sensationalizing DEI for clicks and likes, makes light of terms that affect people’s life and how they are treated in society. 
• Simone Biles, brought to the forefront wellbeing and moving away from something you love for mental health and coming back. She represents strength and resilience on her own terms. 
• Reshaping systems is always met with push back. 
• Radical Sabbatical to deal with years of stress, chronic health problems, and burnout. 
• To lead well, we have to live well: https://www.daisyauger-dominguez.com/books For managers of people. 
• There’s only one side of DEI work... inclusion is for everyone. We need a collective and inclusive approach where everyone feels included. You can’t be on the wrong side of DEI. 
• Allyship during this election. Find your what and why? How do you leverage your power to include a Black or Brown person. 
• Allyship: Think about the stories you include/know and the ones you are overlooking because they’re uncomfortable. 
• The pursuit of DEI is a shared responsibility and business imperative.

CONNECT WITH DAISY:

On LinkedIn | X

Visit her website

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Dr. Erica Wallace to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. The juxtaposition of the Kamala Harris and the murder of Sonya Massey shows the Black experience in America. 
2. Holding space for the joy and the tragedy is the Black experience. 
3. DEI hire sounds like the affirmative action discourse. Ask people what they mean... then you can identify the coded language and know where they stand.
4. Peer mentor programs for students of color on predominately White institutions helps retention. Those programs help students feel like they belong. 
5. The "Superwoman myth" means creating an environment where Black women feel like they have to do it all, do it well, and do it on their own. 
6. The superwoman role can be taken on by Black women to survive. 
7. Women of color experience the Superwoman myth just like Black women. 
8. Many people learn the Superwoman myth behaviors from family members. 
9. The Superwomen phenomenon can be a blessing and a curse... navigating the tension points can be difficult. 
10. But when we have needs sometimes they’re overlooked 
11. Suppressing your emotions has an emotional effect but also physical effects, such as higher auto immune diseases. 
12. When combating the Superwoman myth, make sure you do it out loud so others know it’s okay to practice self-care. 



CONNECT WITH DR. ERICA:

On LinkedIn

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Dr. Sayantani DasGupta to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• We all have the power and responsibility to tell our stories.
• Narrative erasure is a type of psychic violence, when her own children were experiencing it, she couldn’t stand back and let it happen.
• Human beings make sense of ourselves through story. They’re particularly powerful in moments of transition, deep personal or cultural change. In medicine, there has been a kind of belief, that although stories are a part of central healing, we can’t train for them.
• The ability to attend to story is not mythical or magical, it is trainable.
• It isn’t the teller's job to educate on the story, it is the listener’s responsibility to listen to learn.
• Be ready to live in a way your children are safe is health. The ability to be free from violence, is health. We are all in the work of improving our communities, personal and national health.
• The person seeking healthcare is to speak, speak often and speak loudly. If something feels wrong, even on an intuitive level, it is time to seek another opinion.
• Do healthcare in community.
• For those going into a profession of listening, it requires you to be on a constant journey of education. It must be approached from a position of humility, not mastery. Every human being has elements that are unknowable, but we can approach with humility and ask “What do I need to know about you?”
• Stories are good medicine!
• We have to dream something into existence before we can make it.
• Actively, together, dream for a more healthier world. We are deeply powerful in community with one another.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

TedTalk - Narrative Humility

Docs With Disabilities Podcast

The Nocturnists Podcast

CONNECT WITH DR. SAYANTANI:

On LinkedIn

Visit the website

Her Books

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Jad-Évangelo Nasser to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Identity and lived experiences are very important. Intersectionality is different in different countries. 
• Some people use intersectionality to brand themselves and advance in DEI spaces. Intersectionality should be used for education. 
• Use intersectionality to understand the interconnectedness of the world. Dig into the history of the country that shapes your identity. 
• When someone says they don’t like a specific word, even if you don’t agree, respect it. 
• Global leadership requires you to break down walls and challenge previous boundaries and thoughts... you must immerse and decenter yourself and learn things we don’t know.
• You don’t have to travel to learn about other countries and become a global leader, you have to take the time to learn about global narratives.
• Becoming a global leader takes time, questions, and conversations.
• Global leaders are curious. 
• Adapting business culture uses inside research, unbiased data and surveys...however, it’s limited... lived experience is needed. 
• Global events help us to look at local events from another angle that maybe we haven’t thought about before. 

Article shared in this episode: A Multicultural Manager or Boss of the World Gives Companies An Edge in the Global Marketplace

CONNECT WITH JAD:

On LinkedIn | Instagram

On his website

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Dr. Jade Singleton to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. Black women are burnt out at work!
2. One thing I’ve never done is sat back, listened to a stat, then just went on with my day. There is something I can do.
3. Corporate gaslighting - Power struggle and the tactics that are used are done to manipulate and confuse your reality. Socialogists have found is it is even more painful in the workplace, because corporate gaslighting brings in other’s to confound this.
4. Attributional ambiguity - this is NOT imposter syndrome - it is the question and hyper-vigilance you have that is “What is causing this?”
5. Corporate gaslighting is deeply rooted within systems, so much so, that if we are victims of it, we don’t even realize we are.
6. It’s really important to understand where we pick up behaviors.
7. How are folx getting feedback? It’s a push-pull effect, instead of fire-hosing.
8. People will have the same issue over and over because it is what they know and they don’t have the opportunity to heal it.
9. Survivorship bias - when someone has a reaction to someone saying they went through a work trauma. They can be incredibly destabilizing.
10. More organizations should have clearer communication on how to be promoted.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Subscribe to the Ikoni Newsletter

The Phenomenon Of Institutional Betrayal by Dr. White

Center for Institutional Courage

CONNECT WITH DR. JADE:

On LinkedIn

Visit her website

Visit ikoni.org

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Dr. Nicole Price to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. Everyone has an opinion about race. But hardly anyone has an informed opinion.
2. I think about DEI the same way that I think about engineering, you do not put someone in calculus class who has not had pre algebra. Yes, you can, but they will fail miserably. You don’t put someone in calculus class, just because they're married to someone who knows calculus, or just because their grandchild knows calculus, you only put someone in calculus class because they've had the prerequisites.
3. I learned that there were five different types of empathy. And pretty much there's, some of them cannot be taught. But cognitive empathy, or the mental ability to understand or put yourself in another person's shoes that can be taught.
4. How do we mobilize the woefully ignorant?
5. What if we truly understood the people in the middle? The people who are dangerously indifferent, the people who are influenceable. What if we weren't focused the most hateful in our society? And what
6. If we were able or to mobilize the people who are just silent, either because they don't know or because they have great shame.
7. Ashamed adults are not learning adults.
8. Reading fiction builds our empathy muscles.
9. Tactical empathy doesn't create a liberated society. We need cognitive empathy.

CONNECT WITH DR. PRICE:

Visit her website

On IG | LinkedIn | Facebook

CONNECT WITH NIKA WHITE CONSULTING:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Abi Adamson to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Being a DEI consultant was born out of survival.
• In the US we can see the problem, it’s not visible in the UK.
• Black people are not allowed to be less than.
• Allyship is like “brushing your teeth”. It is a muscle you have to train all the time!
• Everyone has some kind of privilege.
• Allyship and micro aggression - all the ism’s flow into the same river.
• You will never combat microaggressions if you have no concept of the privilege that you hold.
• One of the reasons leaders aren’t doing what they need to through being invested in equitable practices is the notion that vulnerability says you’re weak.
• Leaders that will say “I don’t know”, I can work with them.
• Leaders need to unlearn that confrontation is bad. The level of toxic niceness will be the death of everyone.
• Toxic niceness is worse than being passive aggressive.
• Healthy conflict is something we don’t value and appreciate as much as we should.
• Just ask the question.
• Organizations need to understand that DEI isn’t a tick the box exercise, you will always have people... be proactive, rather than reactive.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

How Privileged Employees Can Help Protect Victims of Microaggressions

Leaders, Are You Ready To Unlearn? Here Are 5 Lessons To Unlearn Today

CONNECT WITH ABI:

On LinkedIn

The Diversity Partnership

CONNECT WITH DR. WHITE & NWC:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!

Welcome to Intentional Conversations, where we intersect diversity, equity, and inclusion with leadership and business.

This week we welcomed Nirupa Netram to Intentional Conversations!

So, grab your headphones 🎧, press play, and let the conversation begin!

** Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our channel because we're all about keeping the great conversations flowing. **

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Model minority - high achieving, hard working, very ethical - lots of pressure that comes with this but we still face barriers in the workplace.

Bamboo ceiling - the barriers that Asian Americans face in the workplace in achieving the top leadership roles, despite the fact they are more than well qualified and have the skills. They can be visible or invisible.

57% of Asian American women say the “bamboo ceiling” has effected their careers.

Conversation is the key, including men, with moving forward.

Treat people how they want to be treated and recognizing the individual preferences because they matter.

Every day we need to strive to inspire, uplift and encourage another human being. As a human being, we have a duty to help each other. Whether you’re climbing or whether you’re falling, you can do it.

DEI is about doing something simple every day.

How are you doing? Going off agenda and having a moment for everyone to share what’s going on with them and what do they feel. When you make the space for people to share their opinions on things that are impacting them. And asking how can we support you?

Reading articles, attending webinars, listening to podcasts, connecting to thought leaders, staying informed. Read papers from people who are positive.

I stay away from people who are filled with hate and incivility.

Be vocal about why DEI matters to you.

CONNECT WITH NIRUPA:

On Nirupa's LinkedIn

Lotus Solutions LinkedIn | Twitter | Tiktok

LotusSolutions.biz

CONNECT WITH DR. WHITE & NWC:

Connect on LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X

Subscribe to the NWC YouTube channel (New videos and more weekly!)

Visit the NWC website

Get your copy of Inclusion Uncomplicated

Get the weekly newsletter!

Want to be the first to know about upcoming events, tips and more? Sign up for our SMS list. We promise no spam, just the good stuff!