Voice Is

Julie and Casey sit down with Dani Medrano, a San Francisco based writer, community builder and sober lady to talk about all drinking, and the joy of a sober life. The pandemic has increased our collective alcohol intake pretty significantly, so if you are questioning your relationship with alcohol (whatever stage) this discussion is for you.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Women are drinking more during the pandemic, to the detriment of their health.
• Alcohol is marketed to us as a catch all for celebration, connection, stress relief, etc. etc. Yet, questioning your drinking is considered a "you" problem.
• You don't need to hit "rock bottom" to question your drinking, and questioning your drinking does NOT automatically make you an alcoholic.
• Alcohol is marketed to women in a way that takes advantage of the incredible stresses and double binds women live under.
• 12 Step programs are only one option—for women, the rhetoric of powerlessness and breaking down of the ego may be the exact opposite of what they need to recover.
• Recovery isn't a set of rules to live by; it's a process unique to you to build a life you don't need to escape from.
• Community is critical.
• Sober does not equal boring.

Resources:

Recovery options besides AA (these are just a few)

Tempest: jointempest.com

The Luckiest Club: theluckiestclub.com

Forever 35 Sober: Find them on Facebook

Book Recommendations:

This Naked Mind by Annie Grace

Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker

Nothing Good Can Come From This by Kristi Coulter

We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen

Podcasts:

Edit with Aidan Donnelly Rowley and Jolene Park

Recovery Happy Hour with Trisha

Instagram Follows:

@urbansagesf

@teedoodler

@recoveryhappyhour

@soberisthenewblack

Julie and Casey chat with Liz Hara (prolific TV writer, expert puppeteer and costume designer, citizen of Sesame Street, candy expert, all-around-cool-chick) about running toward failure, the pure magic and community-building power of puppets, what it's like to be the only POC in a writer's room (and how that world is changing for the better), and why puppets and emus don't mix.

TOP TAKEAWAYS:

• Liz fell in love with puppets while working in theater in Minneapolis as a teenager and watching a gruesome dark comedy called Shockheaded Peter. Her first love is Butoh-style puppetry, where the puppeteers actually disappear even as they're right in front of you working the puppets.
• For the last several years of working with Jim Henson studios, she's been learning the art of moniter-style puppetry, where you have to puppet while watching a reversed image on a monitor to make sure the puppet is doing what it's supposed to. Our brains hurt just thinking about it.
• Her work with puppets has allowed Liz to travel all over the world with shows and to festivals. One of those festivals, the World Puppet Festival of Charleville-Mézières, came along at a time when she was feeling some existential dread ("maybe I've just seen everything that there is to see and I don't know what I'm doing with my life blah blah blah"), and renewed her faith in everything. Couldn't we all use a dose of that?
• "For puppetry to work, the audience has to buy into the premise. By putting it up there, the artist is inviting the audience to 'come play'. You have to agree that the thing we are moving is not just a doll being wiggled—we have to agree that this thing is alive. So there's this immediate sense of community that is built, and that's what I think makes it so special and so powerful." (And isn't that the goal of every artist and every public speaker—to create community?)
• Sesame Street is "the home of [Liz's} heart"—she started out as a puppet builder and puppet costume designer and became a puppet "wrangler" (which she describes as the "pit crew" for the puppets on set.) And she's got some STORIES…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pvtcWwPVmk&t=113s
• It was actually one of the head writers on Sesame Street who encouraged Liz when she wanted to venture from writing plays and works for puppets to writing for TV. She began writing for Sesame Street, and then entered a pitch competition at the Austin TV Festival (which she won!), got a manager and an agent, and got her first staff writing position on a sitcom, and found out she had to move to LA from NY with about 17 hours notice.
• Liz has now been in several writers' rooms, sometimes diverse, and sometimes where she's been the only person of color in the room. Her experience is that being "the only" means that she was looked at as the default expert on ALL people of color, or wondered if she was supposed to be the "BIPOC police". Part of the ethos of a writers' room is that you never want to kill an idea or a joke unless you can "one up" it. This means that a lot of energy goes into "do I speak up or will this moment pass," which means you get quieter, which means you may be seen as not fully present . . . (classic double binds). A more diverse writer's room means that each writer can draw on their own personal experience instead of having to represent EVERYONE's experience.
• Why YA TV shows might have some of the best writing out there.
• If you need ideas for how to bring your community together digitally in this time, Liz has your back . . . (QUARANTEDTALKS!!??)
• "Play is a joyful approach to life without fear of failure—play and failure are extremely linked and you can't create good work or live a good life without failure."
• Puppeteering and writing is a "relentless process of learning a CRAFT"—which is why both the dedication to your own learning and the generous sharing of knowledge with others is so crucial. Institutional knowledge and the experience of/training from mentors is hugely important. Liz credits her many wonderful mentors, and is excited to now be playing that role for others.

LIZ HARA writes television for little kids, big kids, and even bigger kids. She currently writes for Sesame Street, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in 2018. She has also written for CBS' Life in Pieces, Apple+'s Helpsters, HBO's Esme & Roy, and Nature Cat and Odd Squad for PBS. Her newest gig is writing for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, the newest Marvel superhero cartoon for Disney. Liz is also a puppet and costume builder, winning an Emmy for Best Costume Design in 2015 with her team for their work on Sesame Street. She has worked on several other theatrical and film productions, including Avenue Q, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and The Lion King.

Liz is also a fantastic dancer, is super fun at weddings, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of candy.

Julie and Casey sit down with Brittany Gooden (founder of the Good End) to talk about changing the way we think about business, why we can't make change using the same tools that can hurt us, questioning tradition with truth, the surprising healing journey of entrepreneurship, and measuring success by lives changed, not dollars earned.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Effective leadership requires you to slow down, get vulnerable, stop comparing yourself to others, and most of all to heal yourself first.
• Trust yourself: Your life experience is wisdom waiting to be deciphered
• It's okay not to know everything.
• Not all advice is good advice—get curious where they are coming from to see if it fits with your journey
• Success can be measured by all kinds of metrics, not just monetary ones.
• When you don't know what people need, ASK and then LISTEN to what they tell you.

About Brittany Gooden: The idea for Good End came to Brittany when she realized how often friends of small businesses approached her to help them create digital content to support their brand marketing. But with her experience in content creation working on large-scale productions in TV, media, and advertising, she knew the ins and outs of creating just one piece of content would require a thought-out strategy and a sizable budget that almost always wouldn't guarantee a significant return.

Most of these knowledge seekers happened to be trailblazing women and people of color whose businesses are centered around a cause, so Brittany sought to help them create the marketing and digital tools they need on their own so their companies can continue to thrive. With an eye for engaging visuals and a passion for supporting the entrepreneurial community, Good End was formed.⁠

Find the Good End at good-end.com

Julie and Casey chat with community leader and NYC City Council District 27 candidate Nantasha Williams about her journey into public service, her experience helping to organize the women's march, looking young in an arena that doesn't exactly prize youth, intergenerational translation and mediation, creating coalitions, and what it takes to engage everyone in the political processes that affect their daily lives.

TOP TAKEAWAYS:

• When people asked "What do you want to be when you grow up?", Nantasha's answer was "I want to be a judge" because of Thurgood Marshall. "I was really moved by this idea that someone could live a life in service to others in making conditions better for all
• The necessity (and challenges) of creating coalitions—how can we come together around common goals and values even across difference . . . and how can we know when we CAN'T "come together"?
• What would it look like if we spent as much time and money on educating people about the actual process of government as we did electing candidates? We have to broaden our attention beyond the "big" races to the local races (city council, sheriffs, police commissioners, judges, DAs) that profoundly affect our daily lives and the issues that we care about.
• As a person with a great deal of knowledge and expertise in an era where some people distrust that expertise in government (and prefer "outsiders"), Nantasha's strategy is to meet people where they are and LISTEN. "It goes back to collaboration and collective organizing." She sees herself as the mediator between respecting history and past innovators and bringing fresh ideas—we need that intergenerational exchange.
• Of all the communication challenges she faces as a young Black woman in politics, ageism seems to be the most "in your face"—as in, everyone feels very free to comment on it. Because ageism for her shows up as doubt in her level of experience, she often feels like she has to recite her resume . . . She then reminds herself that sometimes it comes from people who, for whatever reason, don't believe that she ought to be where she is, but she's THERE. (We call this the "if you're in the room, you belong in the room" principle.)
• "Running for office is like a rollercoaster ride" emotionally— Nantasha keeps herself grounded and present by not allowing herself to get on that ride.
• Sometimes our heartbreaks or "failures" are the catalysts that lead us to something better or more important that we could imagine.
• Nantasha is learning to trust her voice every day - "lean[ing] in to how I really feel about something[…]and allowing myself to follow my own voice and not the voices of others."

Nantasha Williams is a community leader, social justice advocate, and organizer committed to affecting real change in her community.

In 2014, she was appointed the Executive Director of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus. Today, she serves as a member of Community Board 13 where she was appointed Chair of the Special Initiatives Committee. Nantasha also serves as board member of Life Camp Inc. – a cure gun violence program. Nantasha is currently the Project Manager for Minority Women Business Enterprise Compliance, and helped initiate community outreach efforts for the JFK Redevelopment Program.

Nantasha is currently in a PhD Program for Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center with a research focus on Social Movements, Public Policy, and Racial Justice. She acquired her undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Virginia Commonwealth University and holds a Master's in Public Administration from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.

As a candidate for District 27 New York City Council Race, Nantasha's key issues are creating new economic opportunities, youth development, housing, and protecting our seniors.

Julie and Casey sit down with Nitika Chopra (founder of Chronicon) to talk about building a platform and community to celebrate and elevate the lives of chronically ill folks. Along the way, they talk about the medicine of feeling all your feelings (including grief), why "you can fix your problems via your THOUGHTS!" can be abusive, hearing the voice of the divine (whatever that looks like for you), and the revelatory power of Idina Menzel's voice.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Nitika's journey - from running a beauty and self-love publishing platform to talk show host to community creator for people dealing with chronic illness
• Nitika saw chronically ill folks as being in the same boat the people of size were years ago: being ignored by the fashion and beauty and fitness industries because they assumed they wouldn't want or didn't need products and services built for them. "Oh, you're sick now. Bye."
• It's estimated that 133 million people in America have a chronic illness.
• When it comes to living inside American hustle culture (particularly as a founder), Nitika is "not interested in conforming".
• Just as curvy folks want to be celebrated for who they are RIGHT NOW AS THEY ARE (not for losing weight), the lived experience of chronically ill people deserves to be celebrated in all its fullness.
• The mission of Chronicon is not to make a case about the worthiness of chronically ill people or about "fitting in" to a wider culture—it's about owning and honoring the full experience and the superpowers of chronically ill people. What does it look like not just to survive, but to thrive?
• What can we learn from the lived experience of chronically ill folks? Perhaps the benefits of what Nitika calls "spiritual surrender". After spending so much time working and striving to heal her body, she was brought to a point where she finally accepted what WAS and could be truly present. "This is our body, and it is doing the best that it can, and we can love it no matter what. And from THERE, we can live."
• Part of the subtle and important difference between that spiritual surrender and feeling like a failure is allowing yourself to grieve. Grief allows us to process the sadness of losing something you wanted without the shame of wanting it in the first place.
• Spiritual surrender doesn't mean that you stop striving, learning, fighting, etc.
• So often, we teach the things we most need to learn (Casey, Julie, and Nitika all have experienced this). For Nitika, teaching self love has helped her to address many, many years of self-hatred.
• Who gave Nitika permission to fight for herself? God, and her spiritual practice. At 15, at a serious low point, she heard a message that carried her through: "It's not about you."
• So much of "wellness/spirituality/self-help" culture spreads a message of manifesting your way out of your problems—as so many do, Nitika found herself trying to heal herself via belief, and felt like a failure when she didn't heal. To be clear, this "you can get rid of your problems by repeating mantras and changing your mindset" (and its dark mirror, if you still have problems, it's because you didn't believe hard enough) version of "wellness" and "spirituality" perpetuates abuse.
• We've been conditioned by American culture to numb out and avoid feeling our pain, but according to Nitika, "Dealing with our pain, our truth about our pain is one of the greatest medicines in our life. There's so much wisdom and medicine inside of our pain and suffering. It's not a place I choose to stay - I don't want to marinate in it or bring others down by spreading my pain everywhere, but when you give yourself permission to FEEL it, you allow it to be released and to move and take shape and move ON."
• Singing feels like home to Nitika. Seeing Idina Menzel in Rent on Broadway was a revelation to her—"Women can SOUND like that?" Her programing was that women should be neat and poised and small and tidy and not "flaunt their spirits". And NOW, she's part of the Resistance Revival Choir, and on their debut album!

Nitika Chopra is the founder of Chronicon, a media and events company, dedicated to elevating the lives of those living with a chronic illness. Nitika was diagnosed with psoriasis at the age of 10 and psoriatic arthritis at the age of 19 and lived over 17 years of her life being defined by her conditions. In 2010 she decided to take all of the lessons her health journey had taught her and use it to help others with the creation of her online magazine Bella Life. Since the start of her entrepreneurial journey Nitika has hosted her own TV talk show on Z Living called Naturally Beautiful, hosted over 40 events with hundreds of guests in attendance and has created dynamic partnerships with over 150 brands in the wellness space. After 10 years in event creation, Nitika launched Chronicon in the fall of 2019, focused on those living with a chronic illness. The event sold out, had over 2,000 livestream viewers, high-level brand sponsors and has been growing ever since. Now, Nitika is excited to announce that Chronicon is expanding online with The Chronicon Community, a new, accessible online space with inspiration, advocacy, and empowerment for chronically ill folks across the globe to connect. Follow her for daily inspiration @ChroniconOfficial.

Julie and Casey sit down with Six Degrees Society founder Emily Merrell to talk about building communities, the best way to network, and how to host an event to foster connection. Along the way we get the epic stories behind how she met her husband in New Orleans doing everything wrong, and what happens when your dream wedding gets evacuated 30 minutes before the ceremony.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Show up as a human, not a human representation of a brand
• Take the awkward out of networking situations by providing structure.
• Be a good host by thinking of what your guests' needs are—they're simpler than you think!
• Our adult lives all come down to summer camp skills.
• The lessons we learn from jobs like retail, hospitality and babysitting are treasure troves of information on how we human.
• More volume does not equal better networking. You can make deep connections even if you don't have access to as many events as say, NYC.
• Take care of your communities! Offer first, but don't be afraid to ask either.
• Sometimes doing the wrong thing is the way to make a memorable connection.
• Use what you have on hand to come up with small talk . . . seriously anything (even penis straws).
• Lesson: How to "Host"

About Emily Merrell:

HEY, I'M EMILY

I'm Chief Networker and Founder of Six Degrees Society. People also (lovingly) refer to me as "20 questions" because I've always loved figuring out people's stories.

While working in the fashion industry, I dreamt up a place where individuals could come together from all industries, all backgrounds and show up who they are —unapologetically. Nothing makes me happier than connecting people who could mutually make each other's lives more enjoyable.

In addition to Six Degrees Society, I also work with companies, founders, and more who are looking to build a strong community of their own, plan retreats to inspire their own teams, or need a mentor in their own business journey.

Julie and Casey sit down with Stephanie Dalfonzo, AKA "Stevie Knox" (80's-era celebrity radio DJ) and one of the very first automated voices, to talk about her amazing career trajectory and her work now as a hypnotist, coach, author, and expert in combatting anxiety.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Following your dreams: pre-The Secret/manifesting culture, Stephanie grew up KNOWING she was going to be a radio DJ . . . and she made it happen.
• How Stephanie became "Stevie Knox": alter-egos are a powerful way to access energy, intention, and different parts of ourselves when we need to.
• The importance of listening, presence, and "tuning in" to the person we're communicating with—even (and especially) when we can't see them.
• We are not wired to be looking at ourselves looking back at ourselves while communicating with other people—our brains find that EXHAUSTING (not to mention weird). There is a convenient feature on zoom called "hide self view" that is a game-changer!
• The Power of the Pause - especially right now, try practicing small moments of presence many times an hour. Conscious breath, sitting in silence, etc.
• Create a better soundscape for your life! Why are you waking up to an alarm clock that shocks your system? Are notifications driving you batty? Use the technological tools available to you to reduce interruptions and anxiety.
• Check out Stephanie's book, Goodbye Anxiety, Hello Freedom, filled with practical tips for managing anxiety and building resilience.

Stephanie Dalfonzo was the very first automated voice back in the 1980s when she was Celebrity Radio DJ "Stevie Knox," Back then, she "hypnotized" her listeners to come back day after day. For the past 15 years, as an Integrative Hypnotist, she's been using her voice to literally hypnotize her clients into making incredible life changes. One fear of flying client now has a successful business as The Five Foot Traveler, she's helped countless female entrepreneurs create a life and business they love! Stephanie is also the author of Goodbye Anxiety, Hello Freedom, available on Amazon.

Julie and Casey sit down with Kellie Wagner (founder of DEI consultancy and research lab Collective) to talk about the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion, creating "brave" spaces for growth, navigating the fuzzy line between discomfort and pain, and what we have to gain when we prioritize healthy, authentic, inclusive workplaces.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Kellie's founder story begins as many do—with the desire to solve a problem that she herself was experiencing: that across industries, many people (especially women and people of color) spend too much energy dealing with the feeling that they don't belong and aren't seeing themselves represented in company culture
• Too many people feel that to be seen as competent, they need to act like someone else . . . and it's so socialized into certain people that even in environments that support authenticity, they still try to conform to an outside standard.
• What could you create if you weren't spending your time and energy being palatable to other people and trying to be heard?
• When it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion work, sometimes the focus is on "what do I have to lose": i.e., I don't want to lose good employees, I don't want to get it "wrong", I don't want to be publicly shamed. Which is fine . . . but it's only the start. What do companies have to GAIN? We don't have to view DEI work as something that takes time away from the vision and business goals and objectives - but something that can be layered on TOP of those things to make the business even more successful and impactful.
• AND ALSO - beyond the compelling and well-researched business case for DEI work, founders have two opportunities when starting a company: 1) solving a problem in the world through your product or service, and 2) an opportunity to build a culture and workplace where people feel inspired and support and WANT to come. How do you want people to feel when they spend time in a place that you created? What you have to gain… is a LEGACY.
• Do you care about diverse representation in your company or in media? When recruiting, make sure you are treating the person as an INDIVIDUAL, not a representative of a certain group. Also, sometimes companies have a tendency to focus so much on recruiting that they forget the necessity of creating a culture that is welcoming and inclusive to all. Basically, if you build it, they will come.
• There's no easy, consistent line between productive discomfort and actual pain when it comes to digging into complex issues. Kellie's mentor has a helpful framework: sameness is safety, and difference is growth (and possibly "danger") - and there's a spectrum of where difference feels like growth and when it feels dangerous. Especially for the facilitation of tough conversations, it's important to monitor the room for when we may need to pull people back into a place of safety so that they can recharge their batteries to go back into growth mode.
• There's no such thing as a fully "safe" space that leads to growth. Instead, we aim for brave spaces (for growth and leaning into productive discomfort) and healing spaces (for recharging and processing).
• In a difficult year that also saw explosive growth for her company, Kellie had to process guilt over success seeming to come out of the suffering of her community—but ultimately she was reminded that this has been her mission since the beginning, and that it took tragedy for the world to wake up to the problem was not her responsibility or fault. Entrepreneurs solve problems they see that often many others don't.
• VVT Lesson: What happens in uncomfortable conversations? Sometimes, we go "primal". Understanding our goals when fear enters the picture is key to making difficult conversation work better.

Kellie Wagner is a consultant, speaker, and the founder of Collective, a national diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy and research lab focused on shifting how companies build, grow, engage, and retain diverse teams in today's world.

After nearly a decade working at fast-paced tech startups like Meetup and DoSomething.org, Kellie helps high-growth organizations address common culture problems hindering their diversity efforts. Having worked with dozens of startups as they evaluate issues of DEI from the ground up, Collective takes a human-centered, research-driven approach to building inclusion and equity into the foundation of organizations. Kellie's cornerstone research and practical work is centered around three objectives– understanding how to best engage effectively across difference both interpersonally and as a team, how to engender trust on diverse teams, and how to empower diverse perspectives and backgrounds to foster a culture of belonging.

Kellie has been featured in Forbes, AlleyWatch, and VentureFizz, and speaks regularly at businesses and conferences, including Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Culture Amp's Culture Conference, HR Redefined Conference, The Muse, Deloitte, and The Wing. She's a graduate of NYU's Managing Workplace Diversity & Inclusion program, holds an MFA from The New School, and sits on the board of Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids who have experienced loss.

Casey and Julie sit down with Eva Jannotta, founder of Simply Put Strategies, to talk all things thought leadership, influence, social media, legacy, and the real secret to successful marketing.

TOP TAKEAWAYS:

• Your thought leadership is your legacy
• Decide what you are creating FIRST before you start to figure out how to market it.
• Figure out your likes and dislikes! Thought leadership doesn't exist in neutral.
• Your thing will be constantly evolving- how you speak about something today will be different than the future, but that is no reason to keep quiet NOW.
• Fill your cup with what is meaningful to YOU to sustain yourself.
• You DON'T NEED TO DO ALL THE THINGS. When it comes to social media, subtraction is better. Choose the channel that best suits you, and let the rest go.

Eva Jannotta helps women leaders defy the status quo, amplify our influence and expand our wealth and power through thought leadership strategy, advisory and marketing. Clients have included women entrepreneur's mentor Ali Brown, diversity and inclusion advisor Stacey Gordon, women's leadership speaker Selena Rezvani and more. Her Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to end gender and racial discrimination. Eva grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and now lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her partner.

Julie and Casey sit down with speaker, author, top LinkedIn Learning instructor, and expert in how organizations can support women at work Selena Rezvani (who they met while working with her on her award-winning TEDx Talk "Interrupting Gender Bias Through Meeting Culture") to talk about the necessity of bringing the "full color" version of yourself to work, dealing with Imposter Syndrome, and deeply practical strategies to make your presence felt. Along the way, they talk about the necessity of knowing what is and what is NOT the individual's work in creating more inclusive work culture, and rewriting the prevailing "hero narratives" at your office.

TOP TAKEAWAYS

• Selena spent lots of time in rooms where she was one of the few, or the only, woman of color. So often, the response to this is either to try to Rubik's Cube ourselves into fitting in, or step back and disappear. Selena finally realized that to make the impact she wanted to make, she had to SHOW UP.
• Who is a leader? It doesn't depend on your title, age, seniority, or experience. Are you bringing your full spectrum of contributions to solve problems?
• Especially because we know that the pandemic is disproportionately affecting women's careers (caregiving, etc), we need more than ever to make sure we're not "muting" our presence in an organization. Where are the decisions being made? Am I in those meetings? What is important around here today, and how can I tie some of my voice, my contributions directly to that?
• The better you know your environment, the easier it becomes to ask "what are they craving right now? What's at the top of their minds?"
• As long as we're all isolated working from home, we have to CONSCIOUSLY reach out to connect with people.
• The cultures where people can truly show up and do their best work are "low-assumption cultures" - where we remain curious and don't assume that we know what other people want, need, or think.
• High assumption cultures often reward certainty as a leadership quality, which tends to lead to over-confidence being adopted as a path to leadership. What if we adopted a beginner's mindset instead?
• Individuals can show up with awesome, progressive leadership values, but the culture ultimately decides what is valued. What are the hero stories in your workplace? If companies want to incentivize particular behaviors, those behaviors need to be part of the narrative too.
• Imposter syndrome can feel like driving with a nervous, doubting passenger who is constantly second-guessing your every move and decision. Sometimes, that can lead us to never take risks at all—but what if instead, we valorized the "face-plant" moments as an integral, beautiful, necessary part of the journey?
• "You can't overestimate what everyone else can do, and chronically UNDERESTIMATE what you can do."
• There is no question that, for many people, it can feel or BE unsafe to be fully authentic at work. This is part of what makes the "Diet Pepsi" (diluted, small, safe) version of ourselves seductive—it makes us feel like we can't be punished or fail. But if your presence isn't felt, it also won't be MISSED.
• The work of finding and implementing that "full color" version of ourselves requires self-knowledge and continual exploration—like cultivating a garden, it's never "done".
• Connect with what REALLY lights you up, and evaluate whose opinion matters and on what scale it matters.
• You don't always have to be the "inconvenienced one" in order to keep the peace or be the good girl. Look at those sub-optimal situations and ask yourself what would make it better. Asking may be easier than you think!
• Power comes when you feel like your 400% belong. Selena believes in creating those conditions in herself: "I know this. I prepared. I can do this."
• Even for someone as poised and polished as Selena, she believes that the moments of vulnerability onstage are usually the most powerful.
• Lesson: Creating a ritual around showing up with your full presence - what to do before, during, and after a big presentation or other presence-intensive moment.

Selena Rezvani is a recognized author, speaker, and consultant on leadership. Her debut book, The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School (Praeger, 2009) identifies the need for Generation X and millennial women to be seen as a viable talent pool and leadership pipeline.

Her newest book, Pushback: How Smart Women Ask — and Stand Up — for What They Want (Jossey-Bass, 2012) focuses on the unmatched power of negotiation skills in women's career advancement, and was recognized with an Axiom Business Book Award.

She is a Philadelphia Magazine and Forbes.com blogger and former commentator on NPR's nationally syndicated 'The 51% Perspective'. In addition, Rezvani wrote an award-winning column on women and leadership for The Washington Post. In 2018, she gave a TEDx talk entitled Interrupting Gender Bias Through Meeting Culture, which was recognized with a Croly Journalism Award.

Rezvani's professional speaking credits include the following organizations, among many others: SAP, Microsoft, Harvard University, The Clinton Foundation, eBay, Accenture, Johnson & Johnson, GoDaddy, Princeton University, and the Forte Foundation Conference.

Selena also provides strategic consulting for clients who want to implement inclusion strategies with a focus on the advancement of women. She received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Social Work degrees from New York University, and has an MBA from Johns Hopkins, where she received the Edward Stegman CPA Memorial Award for Academic Excellence.