PowerPivot

Why we’re doing poetry right now, and not prose....

Starbucks, Redwoods, love, work, community, and everything: the key to being served well is to being known. And rather than take our strengths for granted, we need to we need to play to our strengths and then allow ourselves to be in community, in collaboration, with other people where we need help, where we need support, where we're not as strong.

Find Monica Scantlebury here: https://www.monicamonfre.com/

Recorded on May 18, 2022. Leela responds to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and elsewhere.

I am a prison abolitionist, I do not think prison should exist. I think that we need to come up with other options for our culture. However, I am aware that most people are not there, that most people are not able or willing to consider prison abolition. And I swear this is connected to business, you've got to stick with me for the whole thing, though.

We need to move our entire society toward a new expectation of institutional kindness, from all of our institutions, and create alternatives to shitty working conditions. And when we create alternatives then we give people choices, and when we give people choices, they realize that more is possible. They become less constricted, they become more creative, they become more interested in what else could happen. Something different could happen. And when they realize that something different and more and better is possible, you know what happens next? They change. They become more generous, they become more community oriented, they become more interconnected. They recognize that it feels different to be treated well because they're having this experience of being treated well. We can make the world different by how we do things in our own organizations. One of the things that we can do is be really radically inclusive of everybody. And when you start to think like that, then your kindness just levels up massively, you're enacted kindness.

CB Beal and Preemptive Radical Inclusion: https://justiceandpeaceconsulting.com/preemptive-radical-inclusion/

It's important to have a small space, and a place where time stops for a moment. Whether that's a Sabbath or whether that's a room where you close the door and there are no clocks.

In "The Sabbath World," Judith Shulevitz talks about the way that time became standardized over time; it didn't become standardized right away, it became standardized in chunks and bits, until finally, we had a global sense of time. And with that global sense of time came a global sense of immediacy, a global sense of something happening everywhere all the time at once. And with that sense of everything happening everywhere all at once comes this sense of overwhelm. How much time can you let go of, to find the rhythm, to find the space where you can just be yourself?

The Instagram reel I mention is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CczR7bljUNQ/

Judith Shulevitz's book "The Sabbath World" may be found at this link.

…Okay, everyone, I'm probably going to piss someone off with this. This is your heads up. Ethics are a long game and flipping houses is not it. Pick a business that doesn't make people homeless.

In Russia and Ukraine right now, this incredibly powerful thing, which is storytelling, which goes back to the beginning of the beginning of humanity, has captured people because somebody has bent this thing to the will of an evil force. Where the storytelling of Russian propaganda is so powerful that parents do not believe their own children when the children say they have been bombed by the Russian military.

Which, of course, brings us back to ethics and power and the stories we tell. How do we make sure that when we tell a story, we're using storytelling well?

And if you have a dominant voice where you're accustomed to being the most powerful entity in the space, what happens when the story you tell, even if it's technically true, is undergirded by a lie? Who do you harm? And by contrast, what if you tell the truth? What if you tell not just the factual truth, which is important, but also the emotional truth? What if you carry that emotional truth out into the world? What if you shout it from the rooftops?

As owners of businesses, as people in charge of departments, as people in management roles, we need to be proactively meeting the needs of our people. And that includes the need for continuous rest at work, for space and time for us to have more original thoughts, to have deeper thoughts, to have more complex thoughts.

Judith Shulevitz's book "The Sabbath World" may be found at this link.

We, as business owners, have a lot of control over people's experience of their lives. And it is our job to make sure that we know as much as possible to understand and move through and interpret those experiences. We have more power. It is on us to do more work.

The @JRC_theslp TikTok video that discusses African American English and the trial of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin can be found here.

How do we create space in our lives, our businesses, our workplaces, for nourishing rest, so that everybody, every single person, gets to feel fully human?