Pause On The Play

“Charge your worth.”

It’s a common refrain, but it can carry a different weight for members of the BIPOC Community in ways that make it difficult to resonate with. And unpacking it isn’t always an easy process.

In this replay from Elaine Lou Cartas’s Color Your Dreams podcast, Erica, India, and Elaine unpack what it means to charge your worth as women of color and allies, the importance of women of color and allies working together, and how charging what you’re worth impacts how you can give back and be accessible to your community.

In this discussion:

• Why “charge your worth” gets complicated for members of the BIPOC community
• Why accounting for your needs in your pricing is about more than literal costs
• How being clear on your values supports your offers, content, and knowing when it’s time to make a shift
• How “cancel culture” misses the nuance in accountability and Imperfect Allyship®

Connect with Elaine Lou Cartas:

• Elainelou.com
• Color Your Dreams Podcast
• Join the Color Your Dreams Newsletter
• Instagram: @elainelou_

Ready to dive deeper?

Listening to conversations is passive. World-changing impact and transformation happen when you take part in the conversations, get feedback, share your stories and experiences, and get support in integrating your values and discoveries into your life and business.

The Pause on the Play® Community is a space to do just that.

Learn more at https://pauseontheplay.com/community

Sometimes it feels like you have to know everything. Or at least pretend that you do.

It takes self-awareness and vulnerability to admit that we don’t know what we don’t know. But adopting a beginner’s mindset, and reminding ourselves that there is always something out there to learn, keeps us open to opportunities and connections along our journeys.

Parker Stevenson joins Erica for an honest conversation about approaching the world, your business, and your clients with a beginner’s mindset.

In this discussion:

• Defining a beginner’s mindset
• How ego and fear get in the way of leading with a beginner’s mindset
• How balancing confidence and a beginner’s mindset can help you navigate challenges
• The positive impact of approaching client relationships with a beginner’s mindset

Connect with Parker Stevenson:

• Instagram: @evolvedfinance
• Financial Foundations Audio Course - Evolved Finance

Ready to dive deeper?

When you’re considering brand visibility or your Imperfect Allyship® efforts, your mindset will show up. Having a beginner’s mindset and being open to what’s possible really does make a difference.

In The Pause on the Play® Community, a beginner’s mindset is a focal point of our community. We’re all beginners. We’re always learning. There’s always something valuable for each and every one of us has that we can learn from, and there’s so much beauty in doing it together in community.

Learn more at https://pauseontheplay.com/community

In the United States, we live with a cultural narrative of hyper-independence. We make it on our own.

But there is nothing we do that isn’t in some way supported by someone else. The often invisible labor of others allows us to perpetuate the lie that we are independent. Humans are interdependent by nature and communities can’t exist without interdependence. 

Erica and India discuss how interdependence shows up in The Pause on the Play Community, in their work, and in their lives, from collaboration to compost.

In this discussion:

• How concepts of community, collaboration, and interdependence have shaped The Pause on the Play® Community
• The myth of American exceptionalism and the truth of interdependence
• How fostering interdependence also supports equity and inclusion in your DEI efforts
• How interdependence can show up in your community

Ready to dive deeper?

The Pause on the Play® Community is creating an environment where interdependence is fostered willingly and joyfully through community conversation, workshops, Q&As, co-working sessions, resources, and events like Collaboration Speed Dating. Our members thrive through sharing with and supporting one another on their personal and professional journeys, where their experiences and perspectives are valued, and where no one is reduced to an elevator pitch.

Learn more at: pauseontheplay.com/community

Resources:

• OfferUp
• ShareWaste
• Too Good to Go

Participating in modern society is interdependent by nature. 

But in the United States, individualism and exceptionalism are part of the dominant narrative of how we relate to success, failure, and each other. 

Erica discusses how the winter holidays can be a useful illustration of how interdependence and individualism show up for us in school, work, and in our relationships and communities.

In this discussion:

• Defining individualism and interdependence
• How the holidays provide a foil for observing these paradigms in our lives
• Three questions to help you define where and how individualism and interdependence are showing up for you

Ready to dive deeper?

Interdependence does not have to be cumbersome or heavy. In The Pause on the Play® Community, you can join us for Collaboration Speed Dating, our answer to traditional networking events where we connect the diverse membership of the community with people seeking guests and collaborators, to share opportunities with each other, and to support each other’s work.

These fun, fulfilling, and supportive events are just one way that we explore interdependence within the community. Join us for full access to events, conversations, Q&As, workshops, and our library of evergreen resources and replays.

Learn more at: pauseontheplay.com/community

Resources:

• White Supremacy Culture, Minnesota Historical Society
• Individualism - White Supremacy Culture

If you’ve taken in the last few episodes, you may be aware that inside The Pause on the Play® Community, we have a curated exploration called Create Space to Take Care of Yourself.

This month, we’re leading by example and taking some time to care for ourselves, so the podcast will be on pause until January 3, 2023.

In the meantime, dig into the archives, continue to vote with your dollars, and you’re always welcome to connect with us inside The Pause on the Play® Community.

Fall and winter holidays are steeped in traditions for many of us, from Thanksgiving turkey to Christmas lights.

Whether they came into our lives with our families of origin or through later relationships, it’s worth considering how those traditions do or don’t align with our values, and if we can reshape them, or shape new traditions that honor our values and the history behind these celebrations.

Erica and India discuss Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas in the context of history, in the lives of children, and how they’re reconsidering traditions in their own lives.

In this discussion:

• Why we need to consider the histories behind holidays like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving
• How schools perpetuate holiday myths and Christian narratives
• Balancing childhood wonder with transparency and honesty in our relationships with children
• Giving context to Indigenous People’s Day and Thanksgiving

Ready to dive deeper?

When you’re in the process of reconsidering your normal and questioning how your values show up in your life and work, it’s always helpful to have support. The Pause on the Play® Community was designed to foster these kinds of conversations and considerations with office hours, Q&As, community conversations, and resources available to members on the Imperfect Ally® journeys.

Learn more at: pauseontheplay.com/community

Creating space to pause is vital to our well-being and to the ability to make the impact we want to create by participating meaningfully in change.

But pausing isn’t accessible in the same ways to everyone. In many ways, the ability to pause is a privilege.

Erica and India discuss the intersection of pausing and privilege, with some key examples of how those concepts have shown up in their lives and in the lives of people around them.

In this discussion:

• Why the word “pause” is central to the Pause on the Play® brand and podcast
• What it means to pause in our lives
• How privilege shows up in the ability to pause
• The intersection of pausing, privilege, and generational trauma 

Ready to dive deeper?

Join The Pause on the Play® Community for our newest curated exploration, Create Space to Take Care of Yourself. This evergreen collection of resources and workshops, including Ixchel Lunar’s “Decolonizing Time: Centering the R.E.S.T. Recipe,” journal questions and prompts, and the Allyship Meditation Sound Bath to help support you in taking care of yourself. 

Creating space to pause and care for yourself is a privilege, but it is so important when we do have the ability to create it. Learn more about this curated exploration and all the benefits of Community membership at: pauseontheplay.com/community

Many of us struggle to give ourselves time and space that isn’t taken up with work, family, friends, television, music, anything to distract us from silence.

But reconsidering your normal, and living with your values and the impact you want to create, takes time. It requires that we learn how to get comfortable with stillness, and to care for ourselves.

India and Erica discuss how they make space to reconsider their normal and to care for themselves, and share their thoughts on handling their schedules, getting comfortable being by themselves, and honoring your nervous system when things are tough.

In this discussion:

• How India and Erica approach taking real time off for rest
• Why doing nothing and staying in the present with ourselves is so hard
• What the culture gets wrong about our nervous systems
• How to build in time to live your values

Ready to dive deeper?

In The Pause on the Play® Community, members have on-demand access to Ixchel Lunar’s workshop called “Decolonizing Time: Centering the R.E.S.T. Recipe.”

Ixchel shares how our concept of time has been colonized, stolen, commodified, and outsourced, and how we can liberate our flow and create conditions to partner with time rather than getting caught in the hustle.

This workshop is just one of the evergreen resources available to Community members, along with live workshops, Q&As, co-working hours, and conversation with others on their journeys of Imperfect Allyship®.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community

While many of us are familiar with discussing consent in the context of sexuality, consent shows up in so many other areas of our lives.

Consent may seem like a simple yes or no, but there are layers to what makes up true consent, and access to it can be a privilege. 

Shannon Collins interviews Erica about how consent shows up in everything from health to hair to raising kids, even in our entertainment.

In this discussion:

• How Erica defines consent in this moment
• How Erica is reprogramming consent in her life and in the lives of her kids through modeling imperfection and accountability
• When consent is an illusion or a privilege
• How consent shows up in DEI work, entertainment, and in the salon

Connect with Shannon Collins:

• www.shannoncollins.com
• www.youthphoria.org
• Instagram: @shannoncollinsphoto

Ready to dive deeper?

Members like Shannon Collins make The Pause on the Play® Community what it is.

Community members have on-demand access to the replay of Shannon and Stacie Lampkin’s workshop, “Sharing about kids online: Do you have their consent?” 

In this workshop, Stacie and Shannon cover the basics of consent and boundaries when posting about kids online, and encourage participants to re-examine their approach to how they share about children in online spaces.

This is just one of the evergreen resources available to community members, along with our conversations, screenings, Q&As, co-working hours, and more.

Resources:

• Read Don't Touch My Hair!, Sharee Miller
• Read You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, Phoebe Robinson

Many of us are accustomed to viewing time as a resource we never seem to have enough of. The pace of our lives pushes us to constantly “make the most” of our time.

That pace has a profound impact on us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But other ways of relating to time, outside the colonial paradigm, are possible.

Ixchel Lunar and Erica discuss decolonizing time, relearning Indigenous cyclical time, and how to build a relationship with time where it is a friend, rather than a pressure.

In this discussion:

• The four categories of colonial time
• How colonization and dominator culture separate people from place
• How to begin to build a friendship with time through prioritizing joy, pleasure, and connection to the natural world
• Why we have to accept the discomfort of liminal spaces as we journey toward decolonization

Connect with Ixchel Lunar:

• Ixchel.Love
• Subscribe to Dragon Letters
• Instagram: @ixchel.love

Ready to dive deeper?

Actions that create the impact you seek happen when you are in community, when you are in conversation with others, and you allow yourself to be open and willing to discuss what's possible. It’s not always easy, but it is necessary.

Having conversations where you are learning, unlearning, and relearning alongside your community are why The Pause on the Play® Community exists. 

And sometimes on your journey to Imperfect Allyship®, it’s also necessary to pause and take care of yourself. That’s why we offer resources like our Allyship Sound Bath Meditation to help rest and soothe your nervous system.

Resources like this and our whole library of evergreen replays and workshops are accessible on your schedule as part of your membership in The Pause on the Play® Community.

Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/community

Resources:

• Watch Dr. Brittney Cooper on The Racial Politics of Time, and read Eloquent Rage
• Learn more about Australian Indigenous thinker Tyson Yunkaporta