Handle with Care: Empathy at Work

And so it's always been confusing to me why startups don't think about their culture from day one. And because we spend so much of our wake time at work, especially on our stage and the positive vibes or feelings you get out of helping others or contributing to the betterment of your community or society or making a difference for somebody else is such an important experience I think everybody should have, INTRO Why aren’t we focusing on culture from Day 1? Today, we look at building connection in the world of start-ups. My guests are Josh Driver and Zach Rodenbarger from Selfless.ly. They have a lot to say about how to build connection AND their technology platform is also a platform for companies to give back, so this is like a double-impact interview. Zach and Josh’s origin story begins just before the pandemic, launching their platform with high hopes and ideals into a pretty brutal business environment. They are talking about how they sustained connection, built their company, and expanded the scope of influence in the midst of the dual pressures of start-up life and a bruising global pandemic. As a bit of a teaser, you will hear about the importance of taking a walk, how “hangry” can get in the way of communication, and why Nerf guns could be a good idea for your office culture. Zach and Josh are both tech guys who are from the same Indiana town of Valparaiso. The met in 2018, committed to the concept of building a platform where companies and individuals can give not just money but time and effort to support causes that matter. The website describes the platform memorably: “Selfless.ly is a unique company that was designed by selfless people to help the world become a better place.” I'd love to hear from both of you. Why do you think that that is even an important conversation to be having? And how would you define empathy work to me. There's a few tangible examples. That is Zach Rodenbarger, the COO of Selfless.ly Sometimes in our interactions, Josh will come in or I'll come in and we'll have something and go back and forth. And then one of us will say, do you need to go for a walk? And I was like. Yes, I need to go for a walk. I need a little fresh air, you. And maybe that's just because we've been at our computers for a couple of hours or longer and need to have take a pause and have a step back. And so we've had that over the year, especially when we're working hard and looking at new timelines and goals and things. And I know I've needed a walk or two here and there. We had other good practices. Sometimes it's a walk. I also find that sometimes it's a snack. I have you eaten recent links to a snack? Yes. We've encountered the snack situation as well. Yes. Hunger is a thing so much. And this is Josh Driver, fellow-hangry sufferer and the Founder of Selfless.ly That was like one of my biggest learning curves early on in my marriage. I I used to think it was just Luke. It's totally both of us be like, Is this really a thing, or am I just really hungry right now? And you can't know until you're no longer hungry, like, you can't even find out. I think that's a good follow up on empathy. It's probably easier to see in other people. And then when do we take that step back and look at ourselves and actually admit that? And I think that is really helpful to business partnership or even as we continue to onboard new employees, you know, thinking through, how am I coming across to others? But also, do you put yourself in their shoes and how are they feeling and so kind of both well and hearing that it actually takes a foundation of some relationship and trust to be able to take someone suggestion to do something like, go for a walk. I can imagine that a less mature or self aware moments. Somebody being like, maybe even the way it could be delivered. Just go take a walk. Somebody being like, I don't need a walk. You need a walk? No, I'm just making a really good point. But...

One of the I think keys to genuine empathy is through consistent one on one and how you display empathy, like, structurally inside of an organization. So, for example, a one on one is that place where as a manager, you can create safety with your team and with your direct reports and create a vulnerable relationship where you really do know what's going on inside of their world in their life Sometimes, when you hear from leaders, you are inundated with their success stories: their key tips to making your life or company just as successful as theirs has been. And the whole thing can kind of seem a little unattainable and aspirational. Which is one of the things that I love about today’s interview with Adam Weber, the Senior Vice President for 15Five. Adam is one of those highfliers whose work is marked by successes, whether that is leading HR professionals in HR Superstars or successfully growing and then selling Emplify as a co-founder. But my conversation with Adam isn’t just a series of success stories. He is going to tell you about moments where he was NOT his best self, where as a young founder under tons of stress, he created distance instead of connection…and what he learned from it. Along with a lot of other great content. Adam is a structure guy, so be ready for some really actionable suggestions. Adam is also the author of “Lead Like a Human”. Great title! He has a wife, two sons, and a dog named Poppy and he loves spending time in nature, camping, and bird-watching. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation as much as I did. Adam, I'm so glad to have you as a guest today. Welcome. It's good to be here. Liesel. Thank you so much. Yes. So a question that I oftentimes get in my work is defining what empathy looks like in the workplace. And I know that you're someone who has worked a lot professionally and written and thought about connection in the workplace. How would you define empathy at work? What does it look like? I think it work. Empathy at work, I think, is seeing your employees as whole people as their whole sales and just in recognizing that they have things that are moving in their life that are outside of work, they have aspects of things that work that are impacting them that maybe you're unaware of. And so just taking that holistic perspective of each person and the unique experience that they're having and translating that and how you relate to them. Thank you for that. I have found as I work with different companies as I meet with individuals that oftentimes when people like get it, when they feel really resonant with the importance of empathy and connection in the workplace, it comes out of a place of personal experience. They've had some touch points with either needing empathy and care or being in the position of giving it in a way that was really impactful. I'd love for you to share a story of when you've either really needed care in the workplace or when it's been really important for you to give it. Yeah. I think I have two stories that come to mind. The first is maybe how early in my career I was able to practice empathy in a way that helped me see the value in it. I started in my career when I was 22 to 25. I was the pastor of a Church, and it's a story for a different day, but basically became the head pastor when I was 25, never given a sermon in my life. Wow. And was trying to support and was really the only staff person for two to 300 people and was trying to support them when in reality, like, I was just still really young myself. And I think through that experience, a lot of people opened up to me about their lives. And you got to be a part of some of those high moments, like weddings, but also you're very much in the midst of really, really difficult situations. And so during that season, I think I learned a lot about just the value of sitting with people through hard things. It was during that time that one of my very best friends had ALS and he passed away...

That divine middle is emotional liberation, where I can be compassionate and show compassion to an individual. But I do not need to carry whatever it is that they are feeling, right, not my responsibility to. And the thing about the thing that I think this is so important for me in my life is I think this was my biggest blocker, my biggest blocker to grow like something that I may have gone through my whole life and never addressed if it were not for something like Lessonly. INTRO Is there anything that you found yourself giving time to in the pandemic, whether that's like a new pursuit or a hobby that you have particularly enjoyed? Yeah. I've given myself a lot more time to make art, and I tend to make art with Legos. I really appreciate this man named Joseph Albers, who was a teacher at Black Mountain College, right. During World War two, post World War II. And he created this series of things called Homage to a Square. And he really like color theory. So he would put basically squares inside one another. And he did about two0 of these over a series of 20 years, I think from his 60s to his 80s, if I recall correctly, so hugely inspired by somebody doing 2001 thing from their 60 to their 80s. And these squares, like I said, they're color theory. So he was trying different colors, and he said when I put a blue in the middle and I surround it with a red, that blue takes on a different cue, then it visually looks different than if I surround it with a lighter blue. Like what we put around to color changes the way we perceived that color. So during COVID, I started doing all of these squares, and they were these really great free flow activity where I could get a 16 by 16 Lego square. And I would create my own version of Joseph Albers Homage to a Square, all these different colors, and I have them all around my attic now. And it was just one of those things that I could do without thinking I sift through the Legos, I'd find the right color. I'd build these squares. It was not taxing, but it was rewarding. And so I think in general, what I learned to do during COVID was play and not have a goal. And in one way of doing that with art and just really, truly understand what playing is, because I think I spent a lot of my adult life and I think a lot of my adolescent life achieving instead of playing, and I think you can do both at the same time. But I don't think I was doing both. I think mostly achieving I love that. Well, especially with the relentless pace of work in general, but especially accelerated as a result of the pandemic to actually have spaces of purposeful rest, whether that's like actual physical rest of sleeping or encompassing it with the mental release of play is something that I hear again and again as I work with different individuals, even as being really life giving. Yeah. I love that You also have welcomed, I think, a new little person into your home in the midst of the pandemic you find that that has having a child in the home has unleashed some different capacities in you as well? Oh, yeah. So my daughter Marnie, she's eleven months old yesterday and eleven months. Happy eleven months, Marnie. Yeah, pretty special. Full name is Marina. When she was born, we didn't know she was gonna be a boy or a girl. She came out of my wife, and we had three names for girls, picked out three names for boys. Marina was the one that was clearly the winner. And then basically, as soon after that, we just started calling her money. So she came home and just changed our lives there's. Covid before Marnie and this COVID after Marnie and COVID after Marnie is excellent. You know, I think COVID before Marnie was really tough for a whole host of reasons, but when Marnie came, she brought this new life to our house, like literal new life. Right. And then just this vitality to just and I of seeing the world differently and being a dad and watching my wife be a mom. And now being a husband to a...

For anybody listening, you can learn empathy. It's not something that somebody should go. You know, I'm not an empathetic. So I'm just going to stay the way I am. INTRO Human skills ARE business skills. You cannot create lasting, high-performing teams without paying attention to and caring for the actual humans on your team. This is something that my guest, Joe Staples, has seen again and again in his years of work. We are going to talk about tips and tactics to build connection (hint: nothing brings people together like food), how walking a mile, literally, in someone else’s role can build empathy, and why a group softball game was one of Joe’s biggest misses in team building. You will hear stories of high school bullies and reflections on the changing expectations of generations in the workplace. All in all, it is just one fine episode full of wisdom. Let me begin with a little bit more about my guest, Joe Staples. Joe is a senior B2B marketing executive who advises companies around go-to-market strategy and activities. He has spent decades in the business and developed expertise in building a powerful, differentiated brand and generating demand. Joe is also the author or coauthor of numerous articles on leadership, customer experience, marketing, branding, employee engagement and work management. His work has been featured in all sorts of publications from Ad Age to Digital Marketing Magazine. Joe lives out in Salt Lake City, where he gets to spend time not just working but enjoying the great outdoors. What are some of your favorite things that you get to do out in Salt Lake City? You know, we have we have a large family and so we're constantly going to parks going up in the mountains. We have we have a cabin that's kind of our getaway place. And, you know, we just we like the outdoors. The interesting one of the most interesting things about Utah is you can you can golf in the in the morning and ski in the afternoon if you hit the time of year just right. And we're 20 minutes from the closest ski resort. So a lot to do. You can you can just have a whole day of recreation at your fingertips. Right. And when you when you think of small grandchildren, it doesn't take much to entertain them, give you like some rocks and potato bugs. And there's that That's that is true. I feel like in my own family, I have four. I was going to say young children, but the eldest is now 13, so they're getting less young with each passing year. But we know 13 down to seven. And as you mentioned, the cabin, we did well. We still do a fair amount of camping. And it's amazing when you strip away some of the electronics and iPads and all the interactive toys that are so dazzling. How really entertaining a good puzzle, a little bit of mud and a pile of sticks can really be. That's exactly right. I agree completely. You know, the other thing for me, so getting to our cabin, you go through what's called the Heber Valley, which is this little old farming community, and then you go up into the mountains. And as I come down into that valley, I could physically feel the stress just kind of fall off of my shoulders. And I forget about everything that's good. There's a there's a particular power about familiar land, just that you revisit again and again. And I can think even this weekend we're going down to Bloomington, which was a meaningful place for me. I did graduate work down there. I gave birth to a young daughter who died shortly afterwards. But there was a lot of emotion that's tied up in that time. And there's a particular trail that I I ran and walked a lot during those years. And then I always make a point to come back to. And there's something too I like I can feel it in my spirit, in my body of the familiar trees and bend in the path and the invitation that ushers me into to be tied to a story that's bigger than me to think like some of these trees, you know, they they came before me. They will...

There's an awakening happening in corporations and people are now choosing their jobs based on values. And that will force organizations who aren't already inclined to that thinking to really start rethinking their approach to caring for their people and the beautiful thing. NEW INTRO Today, we talk about the awakening that is happening in the workforce as a result of COVID, change, and choice. How workers are choosing jobs based on values and what top leaders are doing to welcome and nurture the whole person at work. And I am excited to have both a colleague and a friend on the show as a guest: Tegan Trovato is the Founder of Bright Arrow, a premiere Executive and Team Coaching firm supporting clients nationally. Tegan is an HR industry veteran specializing in Talent Acquisition, Talent Development, and Organizational Learning. She has served as an executive or leadership team member for companies like Levi Strauss, Zynga, Xerox and Cielo. At Bright Arrow, she and her team offer executive coaching, leadership team coaching, and group workshops. All of Bright Arrow’s coaches value authenticity, confidence, courage, growth, and leadership and make these values a priority in every interaction. Tegan is also the is wife to Brian (a fellow entrepreneur), mommy to Athena (who is really, really bute), and mom to her two fur babies - senior kitties Pascal and Dedier (pronounced D.D.A). She loves nature and we began our conversation hearing about her recent break from work here in the Indiana summer. I would love to hear some of your favorite things that you've gotten a chance to do on your staycation so far. Oh, you know, just being outside and my husband and Athena and I all being together as a family is everything, because with the pandemic, we still don't have child care yet. We do have someone starting soon. But we've just been like ships passing in the night, just handing Athena off for for one of us, one entrepreneur to have a meeting and the other one goes and takes care of her and then we switch off again throughout the day. So just being together has been and I don't even know what the word is, heart filling. Have you have you gotten a chance to eat some good food? Are you finding your being outside a lot? It's been raining and muggy that you know, That doesn't stop us. I'm from the South, from the real South where it is always rainy and muggy and we just go do your thing anyway. So, no, that hasn't stopped us. And there's been enough breaks in the rain and we've spent a ton of time. Yeah. Walking on the trail and jogging and setting up the little kiddie pool outside for her. So, yeah, that's been that's part of what nourishes me is being outside and and yes. Eating healthy food. So we always eat relatively healthy, but we've been doing a little more of the salads because we've had time and all that good stuff so. Well, and who wants to be slaving over their oven or stovetop too much in the high heat of summer? The salad is a great option. One of the things I would love to talk with you about is how you've seen the need for empathy grow and change specifically over the last year and a half within your coaching practice. Give us a little bit of a 10000 foot view of what your typical client looks like. Hmm. Thank you for asking that. It does help set the stage a little bit for who is seeing what inside of the businesses and from where they're seeing this all unfold. Right. So the clients that we typically work with at Right Arrow are executives. So VPs and above inside the organization, they tend to be very driven, pretty holistic leaders, meaning they do want for their employees to feel good and be healthy and often at their own peril. Right. So they're not often not taking care of themselves and trying to pour out for others. The organizations they work for tend to be in either hypergrowth or undergoing major change. And that's often why we're brought in is to act as a...

But at the end of it, you know, you can't be listening to the reality. It can't be you can't be talking about how fantastic things are when things don't feel fantastic because then you lose all credibility and that's what people want. I think in leadership these days. I can get really snarky when technology is not working well for me…just ask my family. Chromecast under functioning, the link refusing to load. All of it can seem like a lot. But the biggest frustrations come when the technology that I need for work isn’t WORKING. So, when I call the support desk, I am bringing a lot to that interaction. My guest today is Nick Smarelli, he is the CEO of GadellNet Consulting and a big part of what his team does is troubleshoot those complex, frustrating tech calls. Nick is talking today about how he keeps his staff engaged, supporting their well-being in the midst of a pandemic, giving them what they need so they can give the customers what they need. Nick is open, insightful, and has great tips for anyone who is leading through a time of crisis and I anticipate that you will get as much out of the interaction as I did! First, a little bit more about Nick. Nick joined GadellNet in 2010 after working with Ingersoll Rand. He studied psychology and finance as an undergrad and, I love this line from his bio, “Nick views all business decisions from the lens of blending both humanity and fiscal responsibility to achieve incredible outcomes.” And I think you will hear that impulse in his interview. GadellNet grew over his 10 tenure, from 4 employees to 150 across three states. GadellNet has also earned honors as an Inc. “Best Places to Work”. Nick is an ultramarathon runner, a father of three, a spouse of over 12 years, and an avid supporter of the community. Nick has a podcast, “Zero Excuses”, where I had the pleasure of being a recent guest, where he speaks to guests on the power of the human potential – and how to live a self-accountable life. He is currently pursuing his Masters Degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Harvard University. We began our conversation talking about early morning workouts. Nick is often up in the wee hours of the morning to exercise or to get work done, which feel slike a necessity at this stage of life as he is also a parent and a husband. I was I was a rower in college. I was on the crew team. So I'm no stranger to like the four. Forty five am waiting approval. I'm getting up in the morning. Yeah. Were you always a morning person or did you come to that with your like athletic pursuits. I would say I am never been a morning person. I, I don't know if I am right now. Frankly it is not, it is not my default by any stretch. But I think by virtue of athletic pursuits, work commitments, usually speaking, there's just a lot of work to process and I find mornings to be really solid for that. It's again, after having kids, that is my lone moments of reasonably energized solitude. You know, certainly the kids go to bed, but by the time bedtime happens, I'm spent. I'm not enjoying that moment. So carving out that morning space has given me a little bit of of time to have and be, I would say, selfish. That's my selfish time. That's my how. Take care of my body. Take care of my mind. Take care of a little bit of work so that when the kids wake up and my wife wakes up, I'm in a place and they're going to get the best of forty five minutes of me before the cycle starts again with, with kind of a normal workday. So that's, that's really where I use that selfish time because I feel like the rest of the day is kind of committed to your pursuits outside of just myself. Totally. Well and I like that turn of phrase and the differentiation between energized versus depleted solitude, because I deeply resonate with that as a parent at this stage of life. Like by the time I'm finally alone and everybody is mostly in bed, although they're never completely in bed, there's...

And sometimes we forget that at work. We forget that in other scenarios. And at the end of the day, work is important and matters. But but it's work. And we are we're humans and we're people. And we were feelings and we're joy. We're sadness first. And that ends up having a huge influence and work at the end of the day and not recognizing that it's a little bit naive and dismissive of it makes us better workers if we actually are a little more self-aware about how we're feeling, our emotions in general. NEW INTRO Today’s conversation is wide-ranging. We explore the importance of engaging with your own emotions, the absence of one-size-fits-all solutions to emotional and social health, and the particular challenges of empathetically managing multi-national teams. I learned so much and I know that you will too. My guest today is Jorge Alejandro Vargas. He works at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports our favorite research tool, Wikipedia. There, Jorge leads Regional Partnerships, engaging with teams across the planet to leverage both private and public sector partnerships. Jorge calls San Francisco home. He moved here seven and a half years ago from Bogota, Colombia where he was born, educated, and worked as a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property and Copyrights. He recently moved to the Lower Height neighborhood from the Mission. I love walking around the city, a good friend and colleague said the San Francisco is a collection of neighborhoods rather than a single city, and each neighborhood has its own vibe and its own thing. And walking around is really nice. I also enjoy tennis a lot, so I try to fit a game of tennis at least once a week. Not that I'm very good at it, but I am trying my best to get that time out in the tennis court. And as we ease into our conversation, perhaps there are some listeners that will remember the evolution of Wikipedia with me. I remember when Wikipedia was looked down upon. I was DEFINITELY never, ever allowed to use it as a source in high school or college. But somehow, over the years, we have all come to rely upon the shared knowledge that the platform represents. Even the turn of phrase, it's almost like like Kleenex, like you Wikipedia something, because that's where you would go for trusted information. And even as my children use it, how much of a go to resource, which as it relates to your work, I feel like, you know, just in the span of my adulthood, I've seen readership grow, you know, participation, access. And it sounds like that sort of movement of building acceptance, you know, getting stakeholders together is what you're doing in these regional partnerships in a way to continue like moving there. The influence and the participation of Wikimedia and Wikipedia is that is that like an accurate enough summation of some of the things that you're doing? I realize there's probably way more to it than that. One hundred percent. And I think that it's been very interesting that so this year we're celebrating our 20th anniversary, actually. Happy 20th. Thank you very much. And it's been 20 years human and we call that. And that's kind like the the tag that we've been using for this big milestone of a birthday, because we really acknowledge the fact that Wikipedia is built by humans. It's because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world that we have what we work with. They are volunteers. And the movement as a whole, as we call it, is the fuel and the magic that actually keeps Wikipedia alive with a foundation. What I do and the partnerships team as a whole tries to do is support that mission that is highly built by all those volunteers in the world and work with those partners that want to help us in many different ways further that mission and pretty much reach that vision that we have as a movement of imagining a world in which every single human being has access to the sum of all knowledge, which is an ambitious...

My guest today is Scott Shute. Scott is the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion at LinkedIn, which is this great role that sits at the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions and a technology company. He is also an avid photographer, a musician, and, most recently, a published author. His book, “The Full Body Yes” launched in the middle of May. His mission is to change work from the inside out by “mainstreaming mindfulness” and “operationalizing compassion.” We began talking about his book. I got to read an advance copy and enjoyed a passage so much that I called my 13 year old daughter into the room one morning to read it aloud to her. It was that spot-on. I was saying what you just said about response is what has been typical, like what I'm not getting is I send the book to my friends and they're like, oh, hey, cool. Got your book. Thanks. Not getting that. What I'm getting is like, oh, my God, Chapter eight, like, we got to talk about this because blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And and there is at least one story in there for everyone that's been super meaningful and has moved the needle on their life just a little bit or something that resonated with just a little bit or a lot. And so that's been super gratifying. Absolutely. Well, and as someone who prizes the craft of storytelling, I enjoy just all the places that the full body. Yes. Took me from Japan to Kansas to dealing with bullying in your adolescent years and back again. So I enjoyed both the wisdom but also the delivery of it. And I I have some questions to ask about certain sections of the book. I can't wait to jump in. What is your personal connection to why empathy matters and why it specifically matters in the workplace? And thank you for that question and thanks for having me. It matters because we don't work in isolation. We work with others, we live with others. And so to me, empathy, I talk a lot about compassion and I'll separate the two a bit. So I define compassion, is having an awareness of others, a mindset of wishing the best for them, and then the courage to take action. And some people say that compassion is empathy plus action. And so if you're talking about these first two pieces, it's first being aware of others and then having a mindset of wishing the best for them or a mindset of kindness. And why that's important in the workplace is, yeah, we don't work by ourselves. We work in teams. And what we've discovered, what science has shown us Project Aristotle at Google has shown us is the number one factor in creating a high performance team is, well, it's not their IQ, it's not what school they went to. It's not even the level of diversity in technology or overall diversity. It's psychological safety. This ability to say, hey, can I can I be myself in front of you guys, can I can I fail in front of you and know that you have my back, but actually even harder? Can I succeed? Can I win in front of you and know that you have my back? So if we're on a sales team and I just made two hundred twenty percent a quarter with two weeks to go and my friends at eighty five percent of quarter, are they really going to help me out. Are they going to look at me the same way. Am I going to look at them the same way. So this idea of empathy, this idea of being aware of others and having a mindset of wishing the best for them, really putting ourselves in their shoes builds powerful work environments where we end up being more creative. We end up with better solutions. We end up delivering something much better for our customers. I love that. Just touching on the data points, some of the business case that's there, I'd like to dig a little deeper. Would you tell me about a time in your work experience where you think, man, I was not OK? I was really going through a hard time and this person's care, attention, what they did or said really made a difference and paint that picture for us. Sure. Great question, I think for me, I'm...

I mean, it's just so private and so painful and so isolating at so many levels. And that's why I said grief isn't tame, because part of the viciousness of it is its unpredictability. Yeah, something can remind you, something can be a trigger. And it's just it's it's not controllable. It's not tameable. And I think understanding that is actually really helpful INTRO If you have been that grieving person, feeling so very alone with no one to listen or respond to your cry of pain, or if you have been that awkward friend or colleague, fumbling around for the right words and finding none, than this episode is for you. Because this episode is all about lament. Lament is a language of pain, of giving voice to the sorrow. And my guest today is no stranger to lament. In fact, Mark Vroegop has written a book on the topic called Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy. The book is borne out of his life experience and the death of a daughter. But I will let him tell you more about that in the course of our interview. Mark Vroegop is the Lead Pastor at College Park Church, a church on the northside of Indianapolis. And, on a personal level, Mark has powerfully intersected with my own journey of pain and grief. He was the one who stood graveside when our daughter, Mercy’s, body was lowered into the ground. Sharing our pain and giving voice to our grief. His honest reckoning with his own struggle and, ultimately, hope has ripple effects into my work as a Workplace Empathy Consultant. So I am glad to welcome him to the show today. And, just to note, Mark’s story is deeply intertwined with his Christian faith. For those of you who do not share his faith, there might be language or concepts that are foreign to you, I welcome you to listen, as we listen to all of our guests, with a welcoming curiosity, embracing the concepts and wisdom that finds resonance with your spirit and letting anything else pass along. And for those of you that are rooted in the Christian tradition, I believe that Mark’s writing and story could deepen your understanding of how the language of lament allows you to hold both grief and sorrow without having to just plaster a happy, religious platitude over your pain. A little bit more about Mark: he has taken up roasting his own coffee beans in the midst of the pandemic. He loves the outdoors, although his is quick to clarify that he and his family no longer sleep in tents. Yeah, we love the outdoors, love anything exercise related outside of a big park nearby. Here you go. Creeks, my favorite place to go, kind of my happy place. And we are big campers. So when I say camper, think glampers. So we have a travel trailer that we now have that we've upgraded from a pop up. And we love just taking that thing out on a Friday, Saturday and enjoying the outdoors and some quiet. And we're looking forward to more opportunities to do that here soon. Mark is the father to four living children. Yeah, so we have four children. We have three boys who are adults, twin boys. Our number one number two are out of college and one is married and two others are getting married soon. We have a daughter who's in high school and mother in law that lives with us and a dog named Stella. So we have a really full and vibrant home with people coming in and out all the time and just love the opportunity to be in their lives and are thankful that they live in close proximity here to Indianapolis. So we can see them quite often. Yeah, what a robust household and what a number of transitions you guys are collectively standing on, on the brink of. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we are in the middle of all kinds of transitions, that's for sure. Yeah. Tell me a little bit. We're going to be talking about disruptive life events, the comforters that come alongside as poorly and the moment. And I know that your journey into that, both as a writer, pastor, speaker began from a really personal place. Would you set the scene of that...

We are we have been dealing with a crisis with with the disease of addiction. And again, I think that we can see that because we're talking about it more than we've ever talked about it. And that's because we're seeing so many people affected by it. But it is a it's a huge health crisis that we're living in right now. It's just gigantic. And I don't think, quite honestly, we've seen the worst of it at this point. INTRO And my guest today has a ton to share. That is because this is Wendy Noe’s work. She is the executie director of the Dove Recovery House in Indianapolis, which is a recognized residential program for women with substance abuse disorders. But Wendy doesn’t just talk with us as a professional who works with women dealing with substance addictions, she talks to us as a woman who has been directly impacted by addiction. She walked with her brother as he spiraled deeper into addiction. She helped check him into and watched him leave treatment programs and she has really, really good words to offer if you are just feeling at the end of your rope as you try to help someone you love who is grappling with their addiction. As we dive in, a little bit more about Wendy. She is from central Indiana, lived here her whole life, although she has a love for Michigan, particularly South Haven. I just love the area. I love the peace of it all. I love the little bitty towns up there. I love the winetasting. I just feel like, you know, to be able to drive two hours, two 1/2 hours north and it's just such a peaceful getaway for me. Quiet's I love the nature. You know, her house is just a perfect space for me to retreat and just calm down from life. I just love it up there. Yeah, I love that. Well, in the Great Lakes are their own national treasure. I mean, they are these sweeping landscapes that really when people talk about the Third Coast, my my in-laws are from northern Minnesota. So when we encounter the Great Lakes, it's usually from the western side driving through Wisconsin and into Minnesota. But my sister has recently moved to Michigan and it's beautiful. We hadn't really done Michigan in the same way because we'd always been on the other side. But it's charming. And you can drive in Michigan forever like we we did a day coming through that Upper Peninsula and then all the way down to Ann Arbor. And I was like, it's been like, you know, eleven hours all in Michigan. I was stunned at how large it is. It is. It's huge. And my husband and I always talk about retiring. And I mean, we're too young yet. But He loves snow. He loves the winter. So he's always said he wants to move to Montana and snow and all cold things. And even though Michigan has a winter, I'm like, we could move to Michigan when we retire. You could have, you know, the cold and the snow. And yet I still get beach time in summertime. Yes. So I don't know, maybe one day we'll find our way into Michigan as residents Michigan, Montana, those states. Not that to the north. Well, it's it's a certain thing if you've grown up with snow and ice, like I grew up in the Midwest and it's you know, I similarly, I think about like it's like eight months of winter up in northern Minnesota. There's just a lot of winter. I mean, summers are great, but there's a lot of winter soon. So you have to have a hearty constitution. Yeah, definitely. Well, which is probably why whether it was, you know, people of Dutch descent, you know, colonizing Michigan or the Scandinavians in northern Minnesota have been like, oh, yes, it was like this in the old country. You weren't shocked to come and find these brutal winters. That's true. That's all you know. So you are married. You also have some teenagers in your home, is that right? Yes, I have two daughters. OK, are they getting ready to graduate? Lower high school that have have I have a freshman and a senior. Oh yeah. Yeah. So they're both June babies, so I have one getting ready...

That has been so supportive of me, is just knowing that I'm not in it alone, not alone individually, but then not even alone as as a Korean American, as an Asian-American, but that there are others cross ethnic, cross racial who who care about this and who want to learn, grow and who want to take action when necessary toward toward the this hatred and this anti Asian sentiment of this past year plus. INTRO Anti-Asian hate crimes have skyrocketed over the last year. There have been disturbing stories of violent attacks on California street corners, accusation from the highest levels of government, and, last week, a devastating slaughter in Atlanta, Georgia. How do we talk about the painful experience of Asian Americans living in the United States? Does their story even get told? What does it mean to create space to hear from your Asian friends or coworkers? What are ways that you are subtly discounting their experience and creating a forced culture of silence? It is vital that we make space to listen, grieve, and create meaningful societal change in partnership with Asian Americans. My guest today is Tara VanderWoude. Tara is a Korean-American. She is a social worker, advocate, and educator. As an adoptee, she writes and speaks often about the complexity of adoption as well as the Asian American experience. She is married to a Dutch man who was her high school sweetheart and they have adopted two children from South Korea. She is also a founding board member of Korean-Focus Indiana. She speaks with power, insight, and eloquence about her experiences as an Asian American woman. As always, I like for you to know my guests as people as well. Tara is an educator who is really excited about the coming break. What are some of your favorite things to do in central Indiana? You will not be going anywhere for spring break. What will you do to enjoy the time there? So my favorite time of day are the mornings. And so for me, I work full time outside of the home on a schedule, a school schedule. So you can imagine I have to be out the door decently early. So in central Indiana, in my own home, I will just be thrilled to wake up and to be able to stay at home during my favorite part of the day. Whether that means a slow morning, whether that means just being in my home and being able to cook and clean and do my dishes, connect with my kids, one of whom will be on spring break next week, I will just be really, really pleased to do that. As simple as it sounds, I love being home. And, you know, we do a lot of walking and a lot of running and a lot of outside backyard front porch. So during covid times, that's kind of where we find ourselves, you know. Do you have a favorite breakfast that accompany your favorite time of day? Like, is it wrapped with food at all or a cup of coffee? Because I'm also a morning lover and if I'm talking about mornings, breakfast has to be woven somewhere in is my favorite meal. Yes, it's funny you ask, that is an important part of my life. So coffee and I am very fortunate. My husband does not drink coffee, but every single morning he brings me coffee in bed. I know every day of the week, of the month of the year. So definitely starting with some coffee and then I eat a little bit later. But when I'm at school, I can not have this. But when I am home, I do have this breakfast I wake and it is sauteed brussel sprouts with a couple of eggs and some pickled onions. And this this dip that I get at Costco, it sounds very eclectic, but I just really like it. And I eat it many days of the week. That sounds actually very tasty. I like the pickled onions as well being thrown in with that. I have read some of your bio, but would you give me just like a ten thousand foot view of your vocational trajectory, some of the things you've done and been involved with? Sure, sure. So after college, I spent a very short time as a medical social worker and I worked at a large hospital in...

Do I have value? Do I have skills? Am I ever going to get a job again? Is am I worthy? Am I worthy? I mean, it gets down to this idea of shame and worthiness. It gets really deep, right? This idea that I'm not worthy because I don't have a job. My guest is Jon Tesser. Jon is a husband, the father of two boys, and he doesn’t have much time for hobbies these days. I'm a dad with two kids home during the pandemic. I watch them all the time. So hobbies don't really come by. Most of the stuff that I do for mastery is just ways to relax. So I'll play like an online video game on my iPod and try and master that. But is that something that I care to talk too much about or that I think is interesting? Not necessarily. It's something that I do so that I can maintain a sense of sanity in a world where I'm constantly bombarded by people. Stimuli is the way that I put it. So, I mean, mastery for me is is is this it's this idea of human to human interaction and how can I how can I handle that? And what does it mean? And what is my place in the world? That's actually what I do for fun. You you share on LinkedIn, you share on Medium. How would you define the content that you share? Oh, it's a I have a great way of describing it, it's my crazy thoughts vomited onto a piece of paper essentially is what I say it is. I'm like, I'm thinking something and I have to write it down. And for some crazy reason, I also have to share it with the public, which includes my one hundred seven thousand followers on LinkedIn and on my blog. And depending on what the content is and how I describe what it is, is it's just my thoughts and subjective opinions about the world and how I feel within my place, within that world. So, for instance, I just put out a post that said, you know what, being in the spotlight in social media and interacting with people has made me paranoid because I believe that no matter that, that who's the next person who's going to trash me? Right. I literally just put a post out about that. And I said very candidly, I'm actually quite paranoid that if I talk to somebody, they're going to be the next one who's going to spew some hate. Right. And this is actually coloring the way that I chat with people and has put me on guard. It's content like that you don't see very often on on on social media where I'm putting it out there about how I feel. And you may or may not respond well to it, but I'm not putting a sheen of code over it. Right. It is. It's purely how I feel. And there's that's that's what I think people connect to. Jon is also a career whisperer for early processionals, helping them grow in self-awareness and clarify next steps in their vocational journey. This capacity for insight and care is borne out of living through some really hard stuff. In the language that I use in my consulting, Jon has lived through disruptive life events. I think the biggest disruptive life event was getting laid off three times within a period of five years while having children daycare to pay for a mortgage to pay for. That was a real sort of critical moment where I needed to essentially redefine my identity. Life had been fairly easy up until that point. I'd done all the right things. I got my MBA, I bought a house, I got married, I had the right careers. I was making a lot of money and everything was very easy and very upper middle class. And I never really had major adversity in my life. When you get an MBA, you go to MBA school, you are trained to believe that your career is your life, that your identity is wrapped up in what you do and how much money you make and the things that you buy. And this was this was my my idea, right, Liesel? That that life was about, you know, career and finding meaning in work and treating that as what you're supposed to do in life and the disruptive major event where all of that could be taken away and it's literally a snap of fingers and say, nope, that's that's your...

Jill Harding Whenever I share those stories, people like you look so, so optimistic and you're so bubbly on life with what you've been through. And I said because at the end of the day, my kiddos fortunate, they have taught me a lot about life in ways that I don't know if we didn't go through those experiences, one, I could have taught them as a parent. And secondly, I learned a lot by their endurance, resilience and what they all went through. INTRO Jill lives with her husband and three children in small-town Indiana, in Morgantown. She has known her husband since the mid-90s and they always said that they would never live in Morgantown or own minivan or live in a log cabin. But things change. We live in a little town which we love and adore Morgantown. But I laugh when people ask that question because my husband and I have known each other since the late 90s and we always said no log cabin, no minivan and no Morgantown. And guess what? We have a minivan and we live in Morgantown and we pass a log cabin to get to our house every day just on the irony of those early and that we don't even think of at our place like it's perfect. All of the cup holders, the door is right, minivan, they're great. And I love it. You go out and you're grabbing food on the go and they ask you if you need a cup holder. I'm like, Are you kidding me? I got a million in here. Jill is a marketer, a high school basketball coach, an entrepreneur, and a small business owner. She is raising three children with her husband. And when it snows, Jill and her family love to ski and would do it all day, every day if she had the chance. When you and I realize at this stage of life, it can be a precious commodity, especially with COVID. But when you have time to yourself, do you have any hobbies or like ways that you really like to fill your discretionary time? And we do and I actually my husband and I, we like to just chill out and we have a pretty heavily wooded area that we live in. So we just like to take hikes. And and I like to do them by myself or my husband or even the kiddos. But I really feel like that just rejuvenates all of us. Jill is also an avid reader; she loves books on leadership and entrepreneurship, but she also makes time for other genres. And then I also my son is a huge, huge, avid reader, breaking school records, even with his reading accounts while he was in elementary. So he and I kind of share books, too, with his love for reading. In The Land of Stories is a new book series that we started getting into. So reading is another obsession of ours. Ada, my eldest, loves Land of Stories and I know what that is like. It's its own kind of distinct pleasure. I also love to read but a track with one's children. And so Ada and I are just reading together right now. Oh, it's it's a keeper of the Lost Cities, which is a fantasy sort of romp into the land of elves, ogres, et cetera, et cetera, that it's like they're big like 350 page books and there's like eight in the series. So I was reading far too much heavy non-fiction and I took a divergence over the last month and a half. And now just reading elves now at see that. But I fact that you can talk about it like my sons always like where are you at in the book? And, you know, I asked him the same thing and it's cool to kind of chit chat back and forth on where we're at and live that dream happy together for sure. Well, and I also resonate with I, I feel like I say often that our family is everybody's at their best when we're like outside in the woods. Sometimes it can be a battle to get there with fussing, but it's always so I don't have any gloves or, you know, what have you. What an amazing. But once we get out there, it's so amazing. We're fortunate to we have a little creek that runs in the bottom of our woods. And just to sit there, I mean, obviously right now it's kind of cold and frozen, but it's still cool just to watch it because, you...

But it's been. A really meaningful way to to change a lot of things about myself that were the underlying cause of like kind of what I went back to before, like I didn't I I didn't know why people would like to be sober and the reality is, is because they don't hate themselves. If you don't if you don't hate who you are, then just existing in your own skin isn't a miserable state of existence and finally learning to come to peace with those things. Is what really navigating recovery has been all about. Indiana Workforce Recovery is a partnership of the Indiana Wellness Council and the Indiana Chamber and I will let Mike tell you a little bit more about it in his own words Indiana Workforce Recovery is a program of the Wellness Council, operated in partnership with the chamber and the administration of Governor Holcomb here in Indiana that really works to mitigate the impact of addiction on employer environments by equipping them to support recovery. And I think that that's an important distinction. There are not a lot of initiatives. Well, there are a lot more now than when I started. Not a lot of initiatives out there really focused on recovery in the workplace. But Mike doesn’t just work in Recovery. He is also a man in recovery himself. He has been sober for five years. Yet, you know that I want my guests to be more than just their story of hardship, so let me introduce you a little more fully to Mike. Mike is the father of a little girl, Hazel, and he and his wife have another little one on the way. And we're we're just really excited to have her kind of join our team, as it were. It's all healthy. All good. I don't know. Unfortunately, I don't know too much about her yet. That's kind of, I think, a good thing at this point. But we're yeah, we're just really excited to have that addition to the family. Mike has lived in Indy for the last eight years, he considers himself a Hoosier and roots for the Colts but he was born in metro Detroit. He and his wife met through a mutual friend, post-college. But this story, you know, did you know, like right off the bat that you guys would be a good fit? Was it a chemistry from the start or did you have to both come to that realization, kind of like in your own time manner? We definitely had some chemistry kind of to kick things off. And we actually started hanging out the year that in the last time Indianapolis was hosting the Final Four and we were watching. Those those basketball games, and coincidentally enough, that first month together was the time that Michigan State and Duke faced off in that Final Four game. Wow, you're going to have to confront that one early. But but we definitely knew there was some. Some chemistry early on, and I think that that actually fully manifested itself when she became aware of of the struggles I was having in life and still kind of stuck it out because she hasn't only been around for the. The good parts of the last few years, she she saw. When we got together, slowly but surely, she got to the veil, became lifted and she got to see some of me at my worst. So I think that that chemistry kind of spoke to. Her ability to be resilient in those times and. Support an individual who clearly was in need of some help. Yeah, you know, that's a that's a very appropriate segue into, you know, some of what we want to discuss in today's podcast. You talk about yourself. You know, when you sent me your bio as a person in long term recovery, you unpack that a little bit for me. What does that mean to you? And then I'd love to go deeper into some of your story. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I, I, I now publicly before privately identify myself as a person in long term recovery from substance use disorder. And that means that I have not used a drink or mind altering drug aside from those prescribed by a doctor as prescribed in what for me is now over five years. And so I also I think within that is the dedication to living my...

It was four or five different nurses came in one at a time and just held my hand and looked me in the eye and told me her story of loss was a miscarriage. And and I don't remember I don't remember their faces. I don't remember their names. But I just remember each each time it was like this wave of relief. And I'm still feeling it now talking about it like hearing I lost two and then I had to. I had to and I lost one and I had two more. I lost three and I had just. It was just a different expression of you're not alone. You're not alone, you're not alone. And I couldn't have been more grateful and I didn't know that I needed that at the time. I just had no idea how much I needed that. My guest today is Danielle Ireland. She is a speaker, actress, ballroom dancer, licensed therapist, recovering perfectionist, a wife and a soon-to-be-mother with her second child, a little girl. And we spend time in this episode talking about her work, her pregnancy, and the miscarriage of her first child, a son, who would have turned one at the close of 2020. Danielle shares on the importance of empathy, how partners can grieve differently, and why it really bugged her when people kept telling her, “I’m sorry”. Danielle and I began our time together reminiscing about the toys of our childhood. We are both children of the 80s, what was one of your favorite toys from that era? Oh, this is a great question. Oh, my gosh. One of my favorite toys from that era. Well. Let's see, I was really big into my little ponies and I was really big into Care Bears and Jem and the holograms and also Barbie, I had the my favorite Barbie. There were two that were my favorites. One was the nineteen fifties Barbie. So she had like the Lucille Ball, like hair cut and bangs and have like this like old school 50 styles, black and white bathing suit. I just loved her. And then there was also gymnastics Barbie and yes. So she had like bending working joints so I could make her do backflips and front flips and she was flipping everywhere. But actually a funny story about my Barbies. I loved playing with them, but I hate addressing them because I didn't have the patience for all of the little snaps. But I really loved all the shoes. So Barbies were always naked in high heels. And so that was my mom said she got some fun looks with me holding my naked Barbies with her. As a Barbie-loving child, Danielle thought she might want to be a marine biologist. Then an archeologist. And so it was either like swimming with dolphins every day, digging up dinosaur bones. And then of course, once I got the first full length movie I ever watched, this is all through. My mom's telling of it, I don't actually remember was Cinderella. And so but I remember when I started getting into live action movies and when I started to understand the concept of, oh, like, those people are pretending, especially when things were really intense, I would get nervous. My parents are really good about explaining. You know, this is a make believe world. These are the characters in this world and this is what the performers do. And I was like, that's a job. And so I, I that's I think when my obsession with film and performance started and because I realized, oh, I can pretend to do all the things I want to do, I don't even have to pick one thing. And so that kind of got me on the, I think the performing arts track at the young age potentially. Danielle studied theater in college and then worked teaching dance. She auditioned in places like Chicago and Louisville and Cincinnati. But it it felt like a gamble. And I'm not a gambler at heart. I think that that's a large part why that wasn't you. I think you have to have that willingness to accept the risk when you when you pursue a career like that. And I never fully took the plunge, but yeah, I still got some paid acting work up until I was, I think, twenty nine. When Danielle started dating the man that is now her husband,...

And I and I remember being on my hands and my knees rocking back and forth, screaming at the top of my lungs. I just was so devastated. And I think I was breathing all of it. I was breathing the fact that I had had cancer. I was grieving the fact that I had worked so hard and that I had left so little for myself INTRO My guest today is Cari Hahn, a breast-cancer survivor and the founder of Karma Candles. Cari talks about the challenges or breast cancer, the stupid things people say (like telling you all about their friends/relatives that died from cancer, losing her job after treatment, and the journey through darkness that has led her to create literal and figurative light for others. Cari and I recorded this conversation last fall, in the midst of breast cancer awareness week. Cari is warm and engaging, she talks with her whole person, leaning forward with the intensity of the story. And you will notice that there was a small problem with the recording, a bit of a hum in the background. I didn’t realize the hum until it was too late but decided that the content was so good and helpful that I wanted to run it anyways. Cari is married to Matt, a firefighter, and they have twin high school girls. Well, here you are, married to a firefighter with firefighter when you met him. How did you guys meet? So he was he was a volunteer firefighter when I got home. So I was I was a senior in college. And I actually met him in Florida, of all places, at a wedding. And he came back from the wedding and our friends got married, sent him a postcard to call me. So he proceeds to start calling me and he has my phone number. And I'm like, why is he calling? But their relationship grew from that postcard and phone call…and Matt has been with the Indianapolis Fire Department for twenty plus years. Oh, so we have two identical twin girls that are seventeen years old. So they are doing years at Carmel High School this year. We have Carly and Grace. They are they are delayed drivers. So they will actually they will be driving in about a week thankfully. So they waited for that. And then we have a Great Dane named Ellie who was a rescue, and then we have a little dog that we had for oh gosh about Peekapoo. He he he's a little guy. It's hilarious to see the two of them next to each other and he's got a really bad underbite. And then we have Monkey, the cat that I referred to as my chemo cat because I got Monkey when I was going through cancer treatment. Well, that's a great segue, Monkey. Yeah. And so it was 2016 at your initial diagnosis. Had you and you had a lump that you found or what led you to your. Diagnosis? My dad, so I I have the order, I have turned 40 that year, I have the order safely placed in a kitchen cabinet where I was going to where I kept forgetting about it. And but I just so happened to be sitting at the computer and my husband and I owned a business at that point. So I was doing some selling for him. And I just I had to get under my arm. And when I ate, like, I felt then something in my to outside of my breast. And I thought that that's very strange. So I proceeded to then go upstairs and I still felt it. I then thought I took my shirt off and to see what was happening. And as I did that, I saw something there. It looked like it looked like a grape. It was the size of a grape. And with this lump, Cari’s journey with breast cancer began. I And for someone who has not walked through that sudden emergence into the world of tests and things like that, I mean, was what was the most overwhelming part of all of that? You know, I I think in the beginning it's extremely the amount of appointments. You couldn't you can't believe how many appointments. And I actually tried to total it the other day from the time I was frightened for my diagnosis when the diagnosis process started. So mid-March until the end of December, when I was done with treatment that year, I probably went to the...

I have no problem having everybody know that I had COVID. I don't I don't feel I don't feel that that is a reason for shame. After all, we are literally in the midst of a global pandemic and tens of millions of people have this and often through no fault of their own. INTRO Today, we talk about leadership and COVID, how the virus gives us a chance to model a different openness and acceptance-without-judgment and how throw-away comments can trigger cycles of shame and judgment. My guest today is Arwen Widmer-Bobyk, She is Canadian, living in Los Angeles on assignment with the Canadian government as the Consul for Political, Economic, and Public Affairs at the Consulate General in Los Angeles. I first met Arwen in that most 2020 of ways: over a Zoom call. I was kicking off a year of intentional trainings, teaching about empathy in relation to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the North American Candian MIssions. Arwen was part of an organizing task-force. She was a warm smile and lots of red hair on the other side of the screen. A few weeks later, Arwen was diagnosed with COVID, the first person in her consulate to get the virus. Her story is one of poor responses, missing email links, uncertainty, and ill-considered comfort. Yet, through it all, Arwen has seen the diagnosis as a tremendous leadership opportunity, to model a different way of engaging the virus. Her perspective has take-aways for leaders everywhere. But first, a little bit more about Arwen. Tell me about the origins of your name and like the Arwen. Oh, so my name has become legendary even within my organization in which I work, which is Global Affairs Canada. So my name are when comes from the book The Lord of the Rings. When my mom was pregnant back in the mid 70s, she was reading The Lord of the Rings and she kind of had this feeling that she wanted to name her daughter after an elven princess. And so she chose ah. When the story at work, though, goes that there's a very, very senior manager in my organization who is actually now an adviser to the prime minister. And we were on a work together a few years ago. And he asked me he asked me, ah, when you know such an interesting name, do you have any siblings? And I said, Yeah, I have a younger sister. And he's like, Oh, does she have an interesting name, too? And I said, Well, no, I think my parents kind of gave it all to me because her name is Rebecca Sarah. And he just thought that that was the funniest thing I've ever heard. And so he often tells that story like on national stages about how he had this colleague who had this great name and who was just Rebecca. And my my middle name actually has a very, very funny story, too. So my middle name is Ganessa and Ganessa is spelled G-A-N-E-S-S-A and my mom always said to me, well, you know, so we had an elven princess as your first date. And, you know, your middle name is is the name of a Greek goddess, the remover of obstacles and the goddess of wisdom. And I was like as a young child, I thought that this was just the greatest thing ever. And when I got older and the Internet became a thing, I kind of tried to, you know, look that up on Ask Jeeves and didn't I didn't come up with anything else. I was like just kind of weird. And then when, when I was a brand new mother. So, I had just given birth to my eldest daughter. And it was the first time I left the house without her kind of to go on my own after I think she was probably a month and a half old. I left her with my husband to go see a movie. And I saw Eat, Pray, Love. And I don't know if you remember in the movie, but it was really like quite an outsized role for the Hindu God, Ganesh and the remover of of the God of wisdom and the remover of obstacles. And I just had this, like, crazy epiphany in the movie that my mom just misspelled my middle name and got three completely wrong. And so I was like, oh, my goodness, that is a huge mistake. But I'm really glad my...

And so I. I felt like when people were able to say to me, you're not just like something to be fixed, but we can actually learn from what you're going through and what you have to offer as someone who is suffering is valuable and actually may be central to our human experience, is not marginal in something that we just put on the aisles. INTRO My guest today is Liuan Huska. Liuan is the speaker and the author of a tremendous book, just released this month by IVP Press called Hurting Yet Whole, Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness. Today, she is going to talk with us about living with chronic illness and the turn that life took for her in her early twenties, upending what she thought about the world and faith and the body. Our conversation is far reaching, Liuan is Chinese American, we dive into intersectionality, the dark side of capitalism, and why weakness invites us deeper into our shared humanity. But first, a little bit more about Liuan. Liuan lives in West Chicago with her family. Is my husband and our three kids, and we just adopted a couple of feral cats who live outside to get rid of our mouse problem. How has that gone as you hoped it would go? So far we've only had like one or two mice since they've been outside catching mice for us. So I think it's going in a good direction. Liuan’s children are 1, almost 4, and almost 7. During COVID, finding outlets for fun has been complicated, so Liuan and her brood have started to forage. So we started going I made a point to try to go to least one new forest preserve every couple of weeks. And we picked up what we downloaded an app for plant identification. I also picked up a book from the library about foraging, and that became just this lovely adventure that we had over the summer of identifying all these new things out in the woods and some of them even edible. So we really enjoyed that. Yeah. It's just a great way to pay attention. Right. Like we're so caught up in the the macro level of what's going on in our world and it can feel really disorienting. But I read an article about how like naming and paying attention to what it's like their local flora and fauna is a way of loving, like what's right in front of you. So the foraging was like my way of doing that was saying I'm here and yes, I'm present to this world right here, right now. I can love this place in a really attuned way. So one of my the books I read most recently, one of my favorites was called An Elegant Defense, and it's a New York Times science writer who basically looks at the immune system and all the new developments around the research of how the immune system works. But he tries it in four different people, stories who have autoimmune disorders or have different experiences related to like cancer or things like that. So that was just really fascinating to me. And it's something I try to do in my book as well. Mm hmm. Well, and I hear in that. Connections to your own story and your journey with pain and the embodied experience, would you set up for me what your life felt like in in college, in your early 20s and then. Then the moment when things started to change and you had the first like a, you know, flickering of what would become a much larger part of your story. Yeah, well, I come from a Chinese immigrant family, and my family has always been kind of like we get things done. I think of that Hamilton quote, like immigrants, they get they get the job done. That's totally my family. So my parents owned a Chinese restaurant when I was growing up. And I, I also had two younger siblings that I took care of a lot while, you know, doing school and extracurriculars and working at the restaurant. So a lot of my growing up years was just kind of plowing through everything that needed to get done and felt like was my responsibility. And I felt pretty good about that. Like I felt like I was a very capable and responsible and competent person...

We're going to tackle topics that are hidden in the crevices, that are a lot of times filled with shame and no one wants to talk about. But in order for us to get to where we need to get to and to heal from those pains and traumas, we are going to cover those topics and this being our first film, we couldn't be more pleased INTRO Their film features candid, compelling stories from Black workers across a range of industries telling their working while Black stories. Both Cedrick and Tosca hope that it resonates powerfully. I would have to say, To Be Us, To work the movie, the film that we did was made to help liberate and to heal. Tosca and I always talk about the healing element of To Be Us: To Work and that we knew we made this movie specifically for Black people. We know that everybody is going to see the film and take away from it what they want to take away from it of all different ethnicities and races. But we also know that this film specifically was made for us, was made for black folks to be liberated and say, I can identify with what is going on here. I didn't know what microaggression meant. I didn't know that this is what it's called. And and we believe, like Tosca says, in naming things. And once you're able to name things and pull the scab back, that is when the true healing begins. And so the authenticity of the storytellers in the film, which at some point we hope everybody gets to see the film because we're currently in film festival mode right now and it's not in distribution and we're looking for a distribution deal. You know, that that was the the crux and the intent of making this film. And as we move forward, To Be Us Productions, that is the. The force behind what we do is that we're going to tackle topics that are hidden in the crevices, that are a lot of times filled with shame and no one wants to talk about. But in order for us to get to where we need to get to. And to heal from those pains and traumas, we are going to cover those topics and this being our first film, we couldn't be more pleased about the outcome. We couldn't be more pleased about the storytellers and the courage that they had in telling the stories. But there was a particular challenge to carrying all of these stories. Early on, I would have to go out and talk to people and get their stories, write them down. And then, as you can imagine, the next weekend I went out and talked to people. I would kind of regurgitate some of the other stories so they could understand what I was talking about. And then the next weekend, I was telling some of those stories. Right. So invariably what was happening to me was, you know, even when we were having our business meetings with To Be Us Productions, you know, putting our production schedules together to map out how we're going to make this happen and so forth, I was becoming very irritable. I was, no, not becoming, I was irritable. I was I was depressed at sometimes. I was very on edge. And I literally had to tell Tosca one day. I think I probably called her late one night. It was like, "Hey, Tosca, you know what it is? I have internalized these stories." I had nowhere to diffuse them, so as you can imagine, I had these 40 stories that I had inside of me that were angering that you just sat there and you said, how could somebody be that cool to somebody? And one one story, this the guy in particular was there's a young lady who told me the story of she had changed her hair. She had made it instead of, it was straight, it was curly. But maybe she wore natural that day. And she's on an elevator getting ready, going to work. And there's a white co-worker that's with her get ready to go into the office with her. And the white co-worker goes up to her and grabs her hair and starts touching the hair. Literally, this is what happened to her. And she's said, hey, look, don't touch my hair. What are you doing? You know, like, no, don't touch it. Oh, it's not a...

So the disruptive part for me is the white supremacy, the white supremacy, and the microaggression is the microaggression of outright racism, to be quite honest with you, that I've had to deal with and I think that's what people don't realize is what we're bringing to the workplace before we even hit the door, before we even have to deal with some of the I want to say normal disruptive events that we all have. INTRO This is the first in a two-part series about the challenge of working in a world where whiteness is supreme. And if you don’t know what that means, if that previous sentence put your teeth on edge, then this episode is probably one that you especially need to hear. My guests are Dr. Cedrick Smith and Tosca Davis, two Black activists, professionals, and, most recently, filmmakers. Their film, To Be Us, is making the film festival circuit, receiving accolades for telling the stories of Black professionals whose primary disruptive life event is living and working in a world that does not value divergence from the norm of whiteness. The question that they ask all of their interviewees is, “What is your working while black story.” I am giving it two episodes not because it is easy listening, but because it is essential listening. I’ve seen the film; it is both powerful and necessary and I am eager to be a part of exploring the themes in our next two episodes. We began our interview during election week in November of 2020. The whole nation was tense, but I was especially struck by the physical uncertainty for Cedric and Tosca in Texas. Friends walked into the apartment building and this white guy said, what are you doing here inward? And, you know, I was like, OK, it's already starting. So regardless of who wins as a black body, there's going to be terrorism stuff. We're going to feel it. So it doesn't have to be physical. I'm always going to be very protective of my body and I'm already conscious of where I am as a black person. I've already been socialized to be conscious of my body at all times, regardless of where I am. This is Tosca Davis, an activist, mystic, a storyteller, and the co-CEO of To Be Us Productions. We will hear more from her soon. But as far as feeling safe, I wouldn't say you would find too many black people who are going to feel safe in either. In fact, back then to that, we already won and family members are still like that, we have text groups that are like, hey, look, if you are by yourself, be very aware where you are. Be very aware of your surroundings. You know, go with somebody, gas your car up in the daytime. These are literal things that we're texting to one another during this time. So, yeah, like Tosca, we don't never feel safe. This is Dr. Cedrick Smith, he is an activist, an athlete, a writer, a comic book collector, and a physician. Very much a Renaissance man and a co-CEO of To Be Us Productions. I just don't think that I was at my country club the other day hitting balls and we have a practice area and there was a guy's house and he's always trying to police. And I put that in quotes, police the practice area. So every time I come out there, he's always like, hey, you replace the divets? Are you doing it? I'm playing golf since I was seven years old. I'm fifty. And so I'm like, yeah, I'm doing all of that. But he's he's like surveilling and policing. So he he comes out of his house when he's walking toward me. And I was like, OK, who wants to do walking toward me? So I just kind of moved away from it, first of all, because the would not want to be close to him, but he was going to get one of the golf carts. And I said, I hope not coming out here, police me like you always try to do with people that have the driving race. And I'm not really trying to please you. So that's what you always kind of do when I'm out here just trying to get golf balls. And so we kind of got into it and it ended up this kind of a back and forth ended up with him at...