My Umble Opinion

In this episode I interview Karen Cubides, CEO of Karen Cubides Agency, saxophonist, podcaster, coach and avid educator. Karen and I became friends over the past year, meeting through her work with Calliope Brass and then working together on launching an online community called The Greenroom. The best part of this episode is you can hear how excited we are to be in the same room! After a year of meeting on zoom and talking on the phone, I traveled to Nashville and we had a whirlwind 48-hour "meeting of the minds." I think you can hear the energy we bring to each other and the delight of connecting with someone who brings out the best in us. Follow @greenroom_community on IG to stay up to date on all our big plans! 

Karen has frequently lectured on arts marketing and branding, appearing at the New England Conservatory, the Colburn School, the Curtis Institute of Music, Vanderbilt University, and Boston Conservatory, among other institutions. One of her greatest passions is serving young professionals as they navigate the tumultuous transition from student musician to professional artist. Karen created the Emerging Artists Program within KCA to meet this end. Her unique program allows these musicians to access mentorship, resources, and a thriving community of like-minded creatives at a fraction of the price. As such, their transition is much more tangible and attainable, and these young professionals can easily tap into the guidance they need. 

Karen is also the founder and host of The Musician’s Guide to being Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. This podcast interviews cutting edge, deeply personal, and wonderfully insightful professionals in the music world and serves as a platform and resource for musicians of all levels. Featured guests on the podcast include Jennifer Wharton, Christian Griego, Jeremy Wilson, Demondrae Thurman, Roxy Coss, and more. 

Karen resides in Nashville, Tennessee with her brilliant husband Nick Laufer, Killebrew Coffee, and their rescue dogs, Aldo and Reina. 

To honor Maternal and Child Health Month and Black Maternal Health week (April 11-18) we hear from birth worker Nubia Jones. Nubia is the founder of DoulaViva Births, a doula collective, and she is a certified birth doula, postpartum doula, parent educator and breastfeeding counselor. She is also a mother of five! Her journey supporting women and families began in 2000 so she has been in this field for over 20 years. After birthing with midwives, she decided to develop a working relationship at the birth center where her children were born. At this free-standing birth center, Nubia served on the board of directors and led support groups for the expectant families and breastfeeding moms. In 2012, Nubia’s career as a doula took off as she volunteered her services for many families in her hometown, Washington, DC. In 2015, her family relocated and she began serving a diverse population throughout New York and New Jersey where she is currently practicing. 

Nubia and I have a special relationship because she supported me as a doula before during and after the births of both of my children. Because of her presence I felt safe, informed, and empowered as I journeyed through labor and delivery and navigated the rollercoaster of postpartum life. It was an incredible gift to have such positive birth experiences and one that I do not take for granted. It is a tragic fact that in the US, the maternal mortality rate is far higher than other wealthy countries. 

Last week, April 11-18,  the Biden/Harris  Administration published a “Proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week” saying (among many other things),  “Ensuring that all women have equitable access to health care before, during, and after pregnancy is essential.”  I couldn’t agree more. This is where doulas come in as educators and as advocates for families before during and after birth. Listen to this interview with Nubia Jones to hear more about why and how birth workers are essential! 

Episode 6: “Hello From the Other Side” is a solo episode with some of my thoughts on parenting, politics and partnership during a pandemic...and a second impeachment trial. See full transcript here.  

Episode 5 with co-founder and CEO of She's the First Tammy Tibbetts:
YES today [Nov. 3 2020] is anxiety-filled, but today is also an opportunity for us to look inside ourselves, look around at our communities and our world and think deeply about what we have to offer to build the world we want. You may be thinking ... then what!? How do we create systemic change, not just bandaid solutions? How do we make a sustainable long term plan that won’t burn us out in months or years?

Tammy and her co-author Christen Brandt take us through a step-by-step process that answers those big questions in their book Impact: A Step-by-Step Plan to Create the World You Want to Live in.

Preorder your copy at: planyourimpact.com 

"We talk about in the book the difference between intent and impact. It comes from a good place… I think a lot of people overcommit. I hope this book gives them permission that it’s ok to say no. You don’t have to throw your hat in the ring for every volunteer opportunity and every fundraising ask, because that’s not sustainable and having focus is so important to being effective. 

You can care about every social injustice out there, and you should frankly, but it doesn’t mean that you have to… distribute the bulk of your resources everywhere. You can find ways to practice allyship as a lifestyle, being an ally and an advocate for many different causes, but when you’re making decisions about where to put your time and your money … there’s a finite amount that you have to give. So if you don’t over-distribute that then you’ll be able to find more fulfillment personally because you won’t feel like you’ve scattered yourself so that it’s hard to really know what it all added up to. If you go in with an actual plan, (this is what you walk away from the book with, an actual one page plan of your goals ranked by effort) that you can come back and check in with yourself on, and be honest. I have an impact plan too, there are goals that I’ve set that I just keep not hitting and I’ve had to recognize that “ok, this is just not the time in my life that I’m going to be able to do that but I want to make sure I’m doing this other thing really well.” So, scaling back and not feeling bad about that." 

Think back to the teacher or the mentor who first ignited the spark inside you and showed you to the “trailhead” of the career/life path you find yourself on today. When I was 9 years old starting out on cornet it was Doug Albert who first showed me how to hold the instrument, how to make a sound, how to stand on stage and go for it and most importantly how much FUN performing can be. What a gift to be able to sit across from Doug almost 30 years later and be able to say THANK YOU! This episode has some fun strolls down memory lane, but we also focus on the present, discussing Doug’s second career as a nutritionist. 

Doug has always led by example, possessing that quiet knack for including and team building that make him such an effective educator whether he’s talking about how to finger G sharp or what to eat for breakfast. In his second career as a nutritionist he continues to orient himself around teaching, lifting others up and a philosophy of lifelong learning. In the image-driven and impatient world of dieting and weight loss, it is so reassuring to hear from someone like Doug who simply wants to help people build healthier life habits. It’s also encouraging to hear his own health journey and how his study and learning has brought him to a much healthier place than where he was in his 30s. 

Some universal wisdom from Doug that can be applied to many aspects of life, not just nutrition: When asked, "What do you tell clients when they feel discouraged about falling back into bad habits?" he replied: First I want them to know that we all have that week or we all have that day, and they are not a bad person because of it. I actually will often just say, that’s the power of the addictive foods. I don’t want you to always say to yourself, “yeah I’m lazy and I’m eating too much food.” That’s the message we were [already] told ... that did not work. So I think instead it’s just accepting the fact that you need to avoid the foods that push your buttons. I just come at it from compassion and say, let’s start again. 

For all intents and purposes, Turning Points President Dr. Kristen Albert was living a life many aspire to live. She had earned a doctoral degree, was working as a professor in a University setting, was a leader in her work and in her church, was well liked, and was an inspiration to many. Her work was excellent, but not wholly satisfying. She was highly successful in her field, yet she knew she had gifts to explore. She had created a success story, yet things didn’t feel right.  What was going on and what could she do to figure it out? Our conversation covers this journey from then to now, where Dr. Albert is finding new creative outlets to use her skills fully, owning her own business where she can coach people through the same "turning point" she reached when she decided to leave academia and strike out on her own.

So often people are asking us: “What do you want to be? What do you want to do?” So often we don’t dwell on the questions: “Who am I? What are my gifts? What are my passions? How can I contribute to this world and how am I going to do that?” We say, “What job can I get so I can make a living?”...  That big lie that you get a PhD … and once you get it life is going to be this imagined thing. … I was there [teaching] for 12 years in the institution of higher education and realized that it was confining. … There were lots of great things about it and lots of opportunities but the creator that I am, the dreaming and the positive spirit that I am … was snuffed right out. It was what they wanted me to be and do in that position and it was not … allowing me to offer what I had in that domain. It was the difference between what they thought I should be and what I knew I could be.   

Dr. Albert and I also explored the journey she has been on over the last several years that led to her new awareness of our racially divided society and the racism that BIPOC face on a daily basis. This prompted her to say to herself:

“Stop reading the books Kris! Get going and do something! And so I created, in collaboration with her, [Lana Jenejev] Introduction to Power, Privilege and Leadership. … I believe that each and every one of us has the responsibility in leadership, whether you are the burger flipper at Burger King (which I was, so that’s not a pejorative statement) … no matter where you are, everyone has a responsibility for leadership. … So, [white] people have an opportunity in this private setting to unpack what is whiteness and what it means to be white, implicit bias, racism, white fragility, allyship, all brought together within a leadership framework with actionable steps and accountability. At the end of the 7 day challenge a 90 minute unpack with others who have been through the 7 day challenge to name your learning and to declare your intentions going forward... I’ve been offering it to hundreds of people at no charge. … The next step for people who want to take it a step further… is to come up with actionable ways to respond within their organizations. That’s an 8 week group coaching where they work individually but have the accountability each week and can work with each other, talking through the challenges. The third [step] becomes an ongoing affinity group … where those folks who completed the second level can continue to have these conversations and hold each other accountable.”

Some of the people and orgs Dr. Albert mentioned:
www.dramandakemp.com
www.bethebridge.com
https://episcopalchurch.org/beloved-community
www.liveworksatisfied.com
https://www.facebook.com/pg/QuintEssentiallyBrass/about/ 

Sarah Yukie Gingrich is a yogi, yoga teacher and founder of Create Karma, an organization with a mission to empower individuals to become embodied leaders. In our conversation about how she structured the curriculum of Create Karma, she explored with me her philosophy of yoga and why she decided to start the program in the first place.

“I wanted this to be a space where people who would not traditionally come to a yoga training would come, get these skills to radically transform their ability to hold space, to down-regulate their own nervous system, to be someone in their leadership who could balance and heal their body. I think a lot of the people that do this incredibly powerful work have sensitivity and are motivated to be of service because of their own history. It can be generational trauma, it can be race, class, gender, whatever it is, there’s something in their own upbringing, in their own story, that has them be moved to be of service in this way. And I think a lot of people who get moved to be of service, energetically they are better at moving almost outside of their bodies to help other people... For there to be sustainability and longevity for us as leaders you have to learn to create … about yourself a container that will support you. If you’re going to create a movement and a revolution you need to be able to sustain a HUGE container for yourself to have that change be enduring. With the amount of people we move with and work with and the amount of energetic change that happens through our organization, I need to be able to be grounded in my leadership...Those are the skills that occur for me to teach. That is what I think there is about yoga at the core essence of it, but that’s also not always what shows up at yoga teacher trainings necessarily. For me I took yoga in some ways out of the title because I wanted to bring all of those leaders in. I wanted to bring the leaders of churches, I wanted to bring the leaders of the Black Lives movement into our organization. I wanted to impact people that were working in community benefit organizations or the non-profit sector. The people that are moved to be of service, tend to be the people that move outside of their own self interest, frequently in a way that’s not sustainable...How do we get people first inside of themselves, leadership internally and then partnership and community. … Why are you doing what you’re doing?...It’s not superficial. The types of things that occur in our training and the things we’re asking people to do are profound. … I hope it comes through that we make it powerful and compelling to be vulnerable in our work.” 

Episode 1

COVID-19 has forced us to take a pause and reevaluate. I wanted to share my experiences and talk about how what I thought I wanted and who I thought I was changed as I recognized where my ego and the expectations of others were dictating my choices and where my heart and talents were actually leading me. The Black Lives Matter call to action of June 2020 is an opportunity for all of us, but especially white people, and especially anyone in a leadership role (including parents!) to pause and reevaluate these big questions about how we use our time and energy: why we work/how we work/and who we are working for? The leaders and thinkers I interview on this podcast will help us all muddle through these big questions. Find out who will be our first guest for episode 2.