The Unburdened Leader

One of the biggest challenges to self-care is that it means different things to different people. 

Is it bubble baths and facials? Nice vacations and or buying a coveted outfit or pair of shoes? Or is it advocating for reasonable wages and safe working conditions? 

For some, self-care is a justification to splurge or just take a dang day off when a justification sadly should not be needed. For others, self-care is a means of survival and maintaining the capacity to keep moving forward when things feel bleak.

And all too often, self-care is now presented with an individualist lens that puts the onus firmly on us and ignores the systemic influences that get in the way of caring for ourselves, and the  very real need for community and support in our lives.

Self-care is not a problem that can be solved through consumption or a prescriptive plan but is both an individual practice and deeply relational and connected to the communal.

So when I read an article by today’s guest about how we need to stop framing wellness programs around Self Care, I reached out and invited her to join me on the show. 

Dr. Michelle Barton is an Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School with expertise in organizational and team resilience, managing uncertainty, and interpersonal effectiveness during adversity.

Drawing from wildland firefighting, high-tech entrepreneurship, expedition racing, and military operations, her research considers how groups make sense of ambiguous situations, how they coordinate, learn and share knowledge in the midst of confusion, and how they mitigate and recover from adversity. She is especially focused on the relational dynamics that enable these practices.

Dr. Barton’s research has appeared in many academic and practitioner journals and she has presented her work at venues such as NASA, the U.S. Army Medical Command, Johns Hopkins University Patient Safety Conference, and Boston Medical Center among others. 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• Why relationships and connectedness are actually the keys to resilience
• How popular framings of grit and resilience ignore our agency in the face of adversity
• Why we need to place the burden on systems and organizations for creating environments where we don’t need to be as resilient
• Why leaders who help their teams grapple with negative emotions collectively have better outcomes
• How to foster connection within organizations before there’s a crisis

Learn more about Dr. Michelle Barton:

• Michelle Barton, PhD, Faculty Page
• Connect with Dr. Barton on LinkedIn

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• "Stop Framing Wellness Programs Around Self-Care"
• The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault
• Queen - “Don't Stop Me Now”
• Dark Winds
• The Princess Bride

Conscious consumption is one of the hottest trends in retail marketing. 

We shop to make a difference, have an impact, build a better world. 

But many of the businesses that claim to be doing good are running on business models or operating principles that are hardly disruptive. 

Instead, they're counting on consumers' desire to both have their cake and eat it too. 

The more companies can convince us that shopping equals advocacy, the more we'll buy. 

With all that said, I was curious what a company would look like  - beyond the marketing pulling at my heartstrings - running with the full awareness of what it means to truly disrupt exploitation.

A company that honors transparency and relationships will have the answers to our questions without defaulting to marketing speak or trendy buzz words, and that’s why I wanted to speak with today’s guest.

Leading a fashion lifestyle brand might be an unlikely role for someone self-described as “not a fashion guy,” but that’s exactly where ABLE CEO Barrett Ward finds himself. As the visionary behind the rapidly growing Nashville-based company disrupting the fashion industry with a social conscience, Ward was inspired to start ABLE with the mission of creating sustainable economic opportunities for women. ABLE has grown into a lifestyle brand carrying beautiful leather bags, jewelry, denim, apparel, and shoes with a primary focus on employing and empowering women in Ethiopia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and Nashville, TN.

Beyond adding new categories and communities of impact, Ward and ABLE have also grown in their ambition for social justice. In 2018, ABLE became the first brand to publish their lowest wages, creating the #PublishYourWages movement and providing complete transparency to empower and protect the fashion industry’s vulnerable workers – most of whom are women.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• The impact of rapid growth on Barrett’s mental health, and why he believes it’s important to share his “face down” moments
• How toxic positivity around the normal challenges of running a business exacerbated Barrett’s fear of failure
• How Barrett and his team are fostering an environment of transparency and support at Able
• How Barrett learned to reconcile his beliefs about non-profit versus for-profit and a company’s ability to do good
• How Able manages its relationships and accountability with partner organizations and manufacturers 

Learn more about Barrett Ward:

• Able Clothing (Use promo code UNBURDENED for 15% off all full-price items through 12/31/2022)
• Instagram: @able

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Unburdened Leader Ep 22: Clear and Decisive Leadership with Founder of Frank and Eileen, Audrey McLoghlin
• The Unburdened Leader Ep 19: Defining Your Own Version Success - Natalie Borton
• Despicable Me 2 - Happy Music Video - Pharrell Williams (2013) HD
• Vivo
• Lucas

The mental load we all carry right now is next level.

But just because this load is invisible does not make it any less important.  

Kids, pets, aging family members, school, work, the economy, democracy, access to safe and affordable health care, chronic health issues - the list goes on and on, and feels like it keeps piling on without relief or end in sight. 

On top of this, we carry past pains and difficult life experiences too. 

And most of us don’t realize how much pain we carry until we end up on the brink. 

Many people face systemic barriers that make that load heavier, and don’t have access to time and resources to find relief. And we’re also bombarded with messages like, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” that make carrying a lot a badge of honor.

What if our places of work cultivated spaces that supported healing instead of perpetuating over-functioning and over-working?

If you want to cultivate spaces that have a greater capacity for discomfort, then you need to start with an audit of your own current capacity and all you are carrying. 

Today, Natalie Gutierrez is back for part two of our conversation about her book, The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color, and a deeper dive into the impact of carrying pain because of unaddressed trauma, toxic culture, and unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others. 

Natalie Gutierrez (she/her) is a Puerto-Rican psychotherapist, author, and speaker who grew up in native Lenape land, now known as New York City. Much of her work is dedicated to providing trauma-informed psychotherapy to Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color/Mixed race. She works with adult individuals struggling with Complex PTSD.  She is a proud mother of two, and a growing equestrian.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How the imperative for urgency - fueled by supremacy culture -  makes rest feel uncomfortable or even threatening
• How rest creates a “thaw” around our exiled feelings that can make us want to retreat into busyness
• How Natalie has learned to approach feelings of “not enough,” imposter experience, and self-criticism in a healing way
• How Natalie has cultivated a healing relationship with herself and her body
• How Natalie is redefining success through the lens of authenticity

Learn more about Natalie Gutierrez:

• Mindful Journeys Marriage & Family Therapy
• Instagram: @nataliegutierrezlmft
• The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Unburdened Leader Ep 29: Frank Anderson, MD - Challenging the Fear of Rejection and Leading with Vulnerability - Part 2
• The Unburdened Leader Ep 27: Frank Anderson, MD - Challenging the Fear of Rejection and Leading with Vulnerability - Part 1
• Espiritismo: Puerto Rican Mediumship & Magic, Hector Salva
• Bad Bunny

There is a difference between nice and kind.

Niceness is appeasing and complacent. Kindness is loving and generous.

Niceness, in IFS terms, can be experienced as a strong protector shielding us from vulnerability and risk by over-accommodating others. True kindness, on the other hand, connects us to our compassion and our values.

We sacrifice our integrity to play nice, to go along to get along. When we lead from niceness, we sugar coat and people please. While this may offer some relief, this posture usually creates more stress and internal dissonance.

To lead with kindness, you need the capacity to receive and navigate the responses of others. Kindness stirs up vulnerability because we do not know how we will be received, how we will be perceived, or how others will respond.

And these fears are especially common when navigating conversations and feedback around race, gender, ability, and so much more. 

My guest today helps me dig deep into the intersection of niceness, whiteness, and standing against racism.

Jenny Booth Potter is a creative producer, storyteller, and co-host of The Next Question, a web series about expanding our imagination for racial justice. She has co-led racial justice trainings across the country for churches and organizations, and is a founding partner of HerSelf Media, a company that aims to create stories that empower and bring joy to Black women. Jenny’s first book, Doing Nothing is No Longer An Option:One Woman’s Journey Into Everyday Antiracism will be released October 25, 2022. Jenny and her husband make their home outside of Chicago with their two boys and one wild puppy.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• The connection between niceness and defensiveness, and how it prevents real growth
• How niceness inhibits self-reflection and reflecting on the systems we uphold and are a part of
• The moment when Jenny realized that doing nothing was not an option
• Why white people have to grapple with their roles as oppressors
• How perfectionism and supremacy show up when we approach anti-racism work

Learn more about Jenny Booth Potter:

• JennyBoothPotter.com
• The Next Question
• HerSelf Media
• Doing Nothing Is No Longer an Option: One Woman's Journey Into Everyday Antiracism
• Instagram: @jennybpotter

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood, Jessi Klein
• The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
• The Greatest Showman Soundtrack
• HAIM
• Only Murders in the Building

We all carry pain. All of us. 

We navigate the vice grip of the pains from our past along with the pains from the present while trying to keep it all together. 

And when things break, we often carry the blame and responsibility for our pain because we’ve absorbed the messages that our struggles are our sole responsibility; neglecting to see the systems, the business practices, and the cultural norms that weigh us down, too.

As a result, the desire to control our emotions and our environments runs deep.

And our protectors are often on high alert editing our words, our tones, and how we express emotions–especially the difficult ones. 

But when we seek to control both our inner world and our external world as a means of creating safety, we end up having the opposite effect. 

To counter these toxic messages and systems, we need to do our own inner work and set the foundation for the capacity to make changes in the spaces where we live and work.

When it comes to talking about the pain we carry, I could not think of a better person to have a conversation with on this topic than Natalie Gutierrez, author of the new book and aptly titled book, The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color.

Natalie Gutierrez (she/her) is a Puerto-Rican psychotherapist, author, and speaker who grew up in native Lenape land, now known as New York City. Much of her work is dedicated to providing trauma-informed psychotherapy to Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color/Mixed race. She works with adult individuals struggling with Complex PTSD.  She is a proud mother of two, and a growing equestrian.

Content Warning: Discussion of childhood abuse, neglect, racism, and traumas. Listen with care and if listening is too much for your system, don’t push through. Honor the messages your body is sending and respect the need to pause if that is what’s needed.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How a formative experience in elementary school impacted Natalie’s relationship with approval, assimilation, success, and hustle
• What happened for Natalie when her survival and coping mechanisms finally weren’t enough to keep her going
• How Natalie’s relationship to both her ancestral rage and personal rage have evolved from explosivity to friendship
• The importance of acknowledging and naming the shame behind our burdens
• Why we have to accept external conflict in order to honor ourselves

Learn more about Natalie Gutierrez:

• Mindful Journeys Marriage & Family Therapy
• Instagram: @nataliegutierrezlmft
• The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Quick-fix solutions abound for mental health challenges. 

As leaders, we’re fed the same advice over and over again. Generic one-size-fits-all “thought work” designed to alleviate our gloom and get us back on the road to success.

But that generic advice comes up short. And much of it further stigmatizes mental health struggles, failure, and doubt to the point where people fake it until they make it and then end up face down in a serious mental health crisis. 

We as leaders and business owners have a responsibility to offer something other than quick fixes or bandaids. We have to do the work to create spaces for the nuances of life to show up. 

We need to make mental health a priority in our businesses. How we all approach mental well-being can shift the stigmas around struggle while honoring the whole person with as much care as our bottom line. 

Today’s guest joins me for an important and nuanced conversation about the intersection of entrepreneurship and mental well-being, from his perspective as a long-time entrepreneur and someone who has had to reclaim his relationship with his mental health.

Jason Van Orden helps authors, academics, and speakers turn their “intellectual equity” into new streams of scalable income and a business model that amplifies their work. As a consultant, trainer, and strategist, he draws from more than sixteen years of experience, including creating multiple successful brands, launching over 60 online courses, teaching more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, earning seven figures in online course sales, and generating 8 million downloads of his podcasts. His mission is to help visionaries with impactful ideas to connect with the people they serve best and the problems they can most uniquely solve.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• What Jason discovered when decided to get vulnerable about his struggles with mental health after ten years of hiding it
• What he realized staying silent was actually costing him in his life and relationships
• Why it’s important to acknowledge that mental health is a journey, with no magic bullet solutions
• How the emphasis on mindset and positivity in entrepreneurship spaces negatively impacts mental wellbeing

Learn more about Jason Van Orden:

• JasonVanOrden.com
• Connect with Jason on LinkedIn
• Instagram: @jasonvo
• Facebook: @jasonvo

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Future of Humanity: Our Destiny in the Universe, Michio Kaku
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
• Particle Fever

We often look at the results of quizzes and personality assessments for language to help describe ourselves to others. And to better understand ourselves. 

These assessments can help us manage how we hire, date, and even want others perceive us. 

The language of these tests can fuel connection and belonging within and with others–to an extent.

But it can also be used to sort, judge, or even shame aspects of another’s personality. These assessments can be used to silo an aspect of how people show up or experience the world, into something that becomes polarizing or seen as “good” or “bad.”

We react to judgments of a trait in someone else instead of being present to someone’s full identity.

Yet, used with self-reflection and curiosity, assessment systems like the Enneagram can further a deeper understanding of ourselves, so we can in turn lead ourselves and others from a place of health.

My guest today is shaking things up around how we experience and use the Enneagram. And I am loving how she integrates the Enneagram into her anti-racism work and writings.

Jessica Denise Dickson (she/her/hers) is a life empowerment coach who believes that when Black women heal, the world heals. She believes that the path to personal and collective healing comes through examining the systemic issues that impact each of us, and unraveling oppressive systems from our personal, internalized, and collective worldviews. She utilizes the inner work of the Enneagram with the context setting of antiracism to create healing environments for her clients in one-on-one work, group work, and with organizations so that every human can live more authentically with self-trust, self-safety, and fully embodied freedom that is collectively sustained and celebrated.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How shame, fear, and scarcity lay the foundation for the culture of whiteness and how it impacts how white people engage with anti-racism work
• How systems like the Enneagram give us language to describe and understand our experiences
• How the Enneagram helps us understand our motivations and reactivity, so that we can approach growth and expansion with more self-awareness
• Why the goal of Enneagram work is not to overcome your type or exile your reactivity
• How embodiment builds resilience and connection

Learn more about Jessica Dickson:

• JessicaDDickson.com
• Instagram: @JessicaDDicksonCoaching

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert
• All about Love: New Visions, bell hooks
• Hamilton
• Everything Everywhere All at Once

How you talk to yourself often reflects how you lead and how you talk with others. 

The harshness of your inner conversations seeps through into your conversations with others.  The vice grip of judgment, resentment, and out of aligned expectations you’re holding combined with the burdens from difficult life experiences make it loud between the ears. 

We navigate our internal conversations while simultaneously engaging in conversations with others. It gets messy and the inner conversations eventually spill out to our external conversations. 

But our inner conversations of doubt, shame, and judgment are not a moral failure but a reflection of our past pain plus the world we live in and the thousands of messages we get everyday focused on questioning our health and our worth. 

The message that we are the problem when we are struggling with how we talk to ourselves leaves out the responsibility of our history, our current culture that conflates beauty, power, and confidence in a way that fosters more hubris and masking. 

We need to learn to befriend the parts of ourselves that are hyper critical and judgemental instead of exiling them or power-over them. 

My guest today specializes in conversational leadership. The tools and practices he offers help us design conversations that matter.

Daniel Stillman designs conversations for a living and insists that you do, too. He's an executive coach for leaders who want to facilitate real change. He's also the host of The Conversation Factory podcast and author of Good Talk, a handbook for changemakers and innovators.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How creating the conditions for a transformational conversation opens the door to possibilities and new understanding
• How paying attention to space, place, and time sets the stage for transformational conversations
• How your internal conversations directly impact your ability to communicate with others
• Why conversational leaders need to focus on intrinsically motivating others
• The elements of a “conversation operating system”

Learn more about Daniel Stillman:

• DanielStillman.com
• The Conversation Factory
• Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter
• Twitter: @dastillman 
• Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Donald A. Schon
• Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, Norman Ohler
• Amália Rodrigues
• Obi-Wan Kenobi
• Three's Company

When you experience something that elicits an emotional response at work, you respond according to the extent of the emotional burdens you carry.

Our burdens come from our past traumas combined with the real-time heart-wrenching news–on repeat–we are moving through right now in our country. 

And our places of work can also be ground zero for some really painful experiences or where we relive difficult life experiences. 

When we can connect the impact of our traumatic and difficult life experiences to how we lead, that builds the foundation for a trauma-informed culture. 

It also moves us out of an individualistic lens to a collective approach to healing and change.

And when we can name the traumatic experiences that happen in our places of work without retribution and move to accountability and repair, this also builds a trauma informed culture that moves us beyond pathologizing pain and struggle to normalizing. Even healing it.

When the whole community is moving forward together guided by principles that foster safe and brave spaces, this is where we can cultivate change individually and systemically.

My guest today has an approach to leading that supports workplaces to be thriving businesses that build the kinds of communities that heal and push back on the power over approaches so many of us were raised in and trained in.

Pamela Slim is an award-winner author, speaker and business coach who works with small business owners ready to scale their businesses and IP. She is the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, Body of Work, and The Widest Net. Pam and her husband Darryl co-founded the K’é Main Street Learning Lab in Mesa, Arizona, where they host scores of diverse community leaders and regular small business programming.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• What her years as a management consultant taught Pamela about over-identifying ourselves with the organizations we work for
• Why leaders need to cultivate cultures of safety, trust, and openness in order to respect their employees’ needs
• How leaders can engage their employees in transparent, participatory decision-making
• Why an ecosystem approach to entrepreneurship is more sustainable than empire-building

Learn more about Pamela Slim:

• PamelaSlim.com
• K’é Main Street Learning Lab
• Twitter: @pamslim
• Facebook: @pamela.slim
• Connect with Pamela on LinkedIn
• Instagram: @pamslim

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• What is Trauma-Informed Care?
• Lizzo - Grrrls
• Sanditon
• Moonstruck

When we spend most of our time trying to prove our worth, our proving shifts to looking for safety and validation from external sources and delegates our worth to others.

When we engage in this kind of proving, we end up in what I call the “not enough” loop.

The not enough loop is rooted in the belief that if you can change or fix yourself based on these external metrics–the standard of enough–you’ll get relief and feel more secure and capable.

But it only deepens our feelings of insecurity, comparison, and scarcity, which loops back to looking outside ourselves for validation. The not enough loop counts on us to externalize our worthiness.

When we fall into the not enough loop in our work, we often hear blanket labels like “imposter syndrome” that place responsibility on the individual and shut down conversations about the biases and pressures that make imposter syndrome and the not enough loop so much more prevalent for anyone who doesn’t identify as a straight, white, cis male.

My guest today has been through the grind of toxic environments, gender biases, and all of the things that can feed the not enough loop.

Wendy Collie is a former Fortune 200 executive with a passion for triple bottom line organizations who are customer-focused while having employee-oriented philosophies as a cornerstone for transformative, sustainable, and profitable growth.

Wendy believes that organizations have a responsibility to improve the lives of their customers, employees, and their communities, and that success is measured by both stakeholders and shareholders, no matter the size of the company.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• What happened when Wendy was struggling to prove herself on all fronts
• Why living her values meant stepping away from a job she loved
• How Wendy evaluated the deep roots of her need to prove herself, and decoupled her identity from her title
• Why Wendy believes in intentionally crafting company culture and how that impacts hiring and management practices
• How Wendy reframes proving and perfectionism in her work now

Learn more about Wendy Collie:

• WendyCollie.com
• Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey
• The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM, Joan C. Williams
• The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells
• Florence and the Machine
• The Great
• CODA 
• When Harry Met Sally...