CLASSIC EPISODE: The Small And The Mighty with Sharon McMahon

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil

Episode: CLASSIC EPISODE: The Small And The Mighty with Sharon McMahon

Airdate: June 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the power and importance of “the small and the mighty”—ordinary individuals whose contributions have shaped history, yet whose stories are often left untold. Host Nicole Kalil is joined by Sharon McMahon, acclaimed government educator and author of The Small and the Mighty: 12 Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, to discuss why we should reconsider where we direct our admiration, how everyday people can leave an impactful legacy, and how to redefine what “woman’s work” means today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Obsession with Power and Celebrity (01:07–04:24)

• Nicole Kalil: Opens with a reflection on election year fervor in the U.S., questioning society’s intense focus on presidential politics and celebrity figures.

“Why have we become so obsessed with celebrity influence... I worry that we become more concerned with being an influencer than actually having a positive influence.” (02:56)

• Nicole suggests we may overlook the significant contributions of everyday people because we over-rotate toward those in positions of traditional power.

Defining “The Small and the Mighty” (04:27–07:42)

• Sharon McMahon: Shares her criteria for selecting “small and mighty” individuals for her book, describing them as “the auroras of history. The people who… our view of them is eclipsed by these dominant suns of the wealthy and the famous.” (04:52)
• Example: Virginia Randolph, a groundbreaking educator whose methods transformed thousands of schools, yet remains largely unrecognized by the public.

“Virginia Randolph came from nothing... She goes on to develop an incredibly important educational system that is adopted throughout the entire American South...” (05:29)

Gender, Power, and Historical Invisibility (07:42–09:09)

• Nicole: Asks whether women are disproportionately overlooked due to gender.
• Sharon: Affirms this, citing historical structural limitations on women’s legal rights and participation, and notes that “history has been written by the men with the most ships... the most dollars...” (08:29)
• Women’s achievements are often omitted because record-keepers valued the stories of the already powerful.

Why Ordinary People Matter Most (09:09–12:20)

• Sharon challenges the notion that greatness requires fame or high office:

“Would you say George Washington? …John Adams is the person I would name. But in terms of the number of people … who would say, because of her or because of him, my life was changed... those are the people who deserve to be recognized.” (09:51–10:13)

• Nicole emphasizes that personal family histories show the impact of people whose names aren’t preserved in textbooks; she calls on listeners to seek out these stories in their own lives.

Agency, Hope, and the Myth of Powerlessness (13:32–15:55)

• Nicole: Voices common frustrations: “Okay, my vote doesn’t matter... those of us not in power ...can often feel powerless.”
• Sharon: Counters this mindset, explaining:

“Hope is not a feeling that we wait to experience. Hope is a choice that we make... That choice... is what has allowed [the small and mighty] to impact the course of history.” (14:40–15:38)

Taking Action Without a “Master Plan” (19:35–22:57)

• Nicole: Asks how to start making a difference when the “big picture” isn’t clear.
• Sharon: Encourages starting without a plan—many heroes profiled in her book “literally were like, well, I’m going to board a train and ride it till I run out of money.” (20:46)
• The critical step is to resist feeling paralyzed by the enormity of challenges. Action, even small or directionless, matters.

A Small and Mighty Story: Septima Clark (23:07–26:32)

• Sharon shares the story of Septima Clark:
  • Born in 1898 in South Carolina, Clark began teaching in incredibly challenging conditions, faced personal and systemic tragedies, and at one point was near suicide.
  • Nevertheless, she created “citizenship schools” teaching Black adults basic literacy and civic participation, which helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Clark directly taught Rosa Parks, linking her quietly pivotal work to one of America’s most famous acts of protest.

“We would not have the Civil Rights Movement as we know it” without Clark’s persistent hope and organizing. (25:28)

The Case for Incremental Change (26:32–29:56)

• Nicole: References Sharon’s assertion that sometimes we have to “work within the system before we can tear it down.”
• Sharon: Explains that sustainable change is almost always incremental. Sudden revolutions can leave power vacuums vulnerable to worse leadership; real progress usually grows through daily efforts.

“Incremental progress is sustainable progress. This is just human nature.” (27:53)

Legacy, Kindness, and Digital Footprints (29:56–34:34)

• Nicole: Discusses the role of legacy in motivating change-makers.
• Sharon: Encourages listeners to reverse-engineer their lives from the legacy they wish to leave, emphasizing:

“It is almost always the people who are known for lifting other people up, not the people who made a career of putting people down.” (31:16)

• Adds a modern twist: our digital records—the messages and comments we leave—will define us for future generations just as historical letters have for past figures.

“Who we are, in secret is who we really are.” (32:46)

• Nicole: Agrees, reflecting on the ongoing influence of our words and actions—even the forgotten social media posts brought back by “memories.”

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Nicole Kalil:

  • “Why have we become so obsessed with celebrity influence... We become more concerned with being an influencer than with actually having a positive influence.” (02:56)
  • “It’s just… a responsibility on our part to go looking or to pay attention and not get sucked in to what Instagram says we should be paying attention to.” (11:44)

• Sharon McMahon:

  • “Hope is not a feeling that we wait to experience. Hope is a choice that we make.” (14:40)
  • “There's no one coming to save us. …We are the people.” (21:03)
  • “Who we are, in secret, is who we really are.” (32:46)
  • “Legacy... is almost always the people who are known for lifting other people up, not the people who made a career of putting people down.” (31:16)

• On Starting Without a Plan:

  • “So much of what has been accomplished… have been done by people with no master plan… They just refused to be limited by what, what their life circumstances were.” (20:52–21:41)

• On Claiming Agency:

  • “We need to let go of this idea that there's somebody out there with the plan and start putting one foot in front of the other.” (22:26)

• On Incremental Change:

  • “Lasting change requires concerted daily effort. …Incremental progress is sustainable progress.” (27:47)

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Memorable Moments

• The story of Septima Clark, who overcame immense hardship and helped lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement, providing a concrete, inspiring example of “the small and the mighty.” (23:07–26:32)
• The discussion on how digital legacies—our messages, comments, and online behaviors—will become the historical record accessible to our descendants and historians alike. (31:55–32:46)
• The call to “choose hope” and not wait for ideal circumstances before taking action. (14:40, 19:35)

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Takeaways and Calls to Action

• True “woman’s work” and leadership aren't found in titles or fame but in authentic, values-driven action, often unnoticed but deeply impactful.
• Hope and confidence are not waiting games—they are choices. Don’t sit back; act, even when you don’t know the full plan.
• Assess your legacy through your daily actions, both public and private. Strive to be someone who lifts others up.
• If you want change—whether in your life, community, or society—start where you are, with what you have, and remember: “There is no one coming to save us. We are the people.” (21:03)

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Resources

• Book: The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon
• Sharon McMahon’s Website: sharonmcmahon.com
• Podcast: “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting” (hosted by Sharon McMahon)
• Newsletter: “The Preamble” substack

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“The change agent, the innovator, the reformer, the disruptor, the mover and the shaker—the get shit done leader—might not be on the ballot. ...It might even be you. So get out there and be mighty regardless of the position you’re in. Because that is woman’s work.”
—Nicole Kalil (35:12–36:22)

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Transcript

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[Nicole Kahlil]

I am Nicole Kahlil, and unless you've been living under a rock or are practicing extreme denial, you are likely very aware that the United States is in an election year. And I have to tell you, I I'm not sure these years bring out our best. And while there are lots of opinions and beliefs and hopes and even some foaming at the mouth about who we think should be president, it makes me wonder. Are we taking things too far? I'm not saying the choice doesn't matter or that there aren't consequences. I don't believe that at all. But are we putting far too much focus on two very specific politicians and not enough on ourselves and the everyday people who surround us? The reality is, only 45 men have been president in this country's history, and I bet you can't tell me all that much about them, their policies, their beliefs or actions. Outside of a small handful. Some have been great leaders, some have not, and most we have no idea. But I bet if we looked around, we could find far more and far better leaders from history as well as currently in other roles and in other places. I bet we could find more people who have not been presidents than who have that have made a greater mark, left a more impactful legacy, or made a larger contribution to the world. Even more than that, I bet there are people who have contributed to your life in some meaningful way whose name you don't know, or who isn't being talked about in the news or on any of the medias. Why have we become so obsessed with celebrity influence, and I put that in air quotes, because I worry that we become more concerned with being an influencer than actually having a positive influence. We're infatuated with people in positions of power, with politicians and with the uber wealthy. Again, not saying that there aren't important roles in there or that we shouldn't be paying attention, but rather that we may have over rotated and also in our effort to prove how right we are about our opinions and our choices as it relates to these people that we've begun to sacrifice the values of we claim to espouse. So on this episode of this is Woman's Work, I've invited Sharon McMahon on to talk about what she calls the small and the mighty. Sharon is America's favorite government teacher and proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators, not the aristocrats, but the school teachers. In her book the small and the 12 unsung Americans who Changed the Course of History from the founding to the Civil Rights Movement, Sharon discovers history's unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time. She also hosts the award winning podcast here's Where It Gets Interesting and is the author of the Preamble, a substack newsletter about politics and history and all that she does. From her work to her philanthropic initiatives, Sharon encourages all to become world changing humans. So, Sharon, I have to start by saying how grateful I am that your work doesn't focus on the famous and the celebrities and the politicians, but those everyday people who are doing extraordinary things. So thank you for doing that and for being here.

[Sharon McMahon]

My pleasure. Thanks so much for that great intro. Thanks for inviting me.

[Nicole Kahlil]

My pleasure. All right, my first question, and I have many, is who are the small and the mighty? Can you give us some examples and maybe a bit about the criteria you use to identify them?

[Sharon McMahon]

Well, there are many small and mighty people and I could probably fill many books with their stories, but I picked 12 people from history who I feel like really do not get their just desserts. I refer to them as the auroras of history. The people who, you know, they're. Our view of them is eclipsed by these dominant sons of the wealthy and the famous and the people with all the ships and the tanks and the billions of dollars whose name grabs all the headlines. But if we, if we stop to look, there is so much beauty to be found in their stories. I feel like we should, we should spend more time looking for them. We should get up early, look for the auroras of history. So a few examples I can give you, if you'd like to hear a few examples of people who I feel like really fit this criteria of the small and the mighty are people like Virginia Randolph. Virginia Randolph was a world class educator. And I mean that literally. She educated people around the world. Her work deserves to be in the pantheon of educational greats. She is, is regarded in educational circles as, as important as say, a Booker T. Washington, but yet she's not in the books that our children are reading, by and large. Right. You know, maybe some people who live in Henrico County, Virginia might recognize her name, but chances are really good that you don't. And Virginia Randolph had came from nothing. Her parents were enslaved. She was working from. Her parents were formerly enslaved, I should say. She began working as a child. Her, her father died when she was a very young girl. Her mother was trying to support her four daughters and even her young children, including Virginia, had to go to work at a young age. So Virginia goes to school and is not successful in school. In fact, the teacher sent messages home to her mother like, I don't, I don't know what's wrong with Virginia. She just cannot learn how to read. And she's really, really struggles in school and after school. She has to go to her job even at age 7 to be able to earn extra money. Well, what Virginia does with her life is continuing today to impact Americans. We just may not realize it. She goes on to develop an incredibly important educational system that is adopted throughout the entire American south, in over 1, 000 school districts around the American south. Internationally. Historians of the time said that the phrase I've hired Virginia Randolph as the teacher needs to be like on, on the bronze plaques. So it's stories like her that I just really love being able to share.

[Nicole Kahlil]

I'm asking this question because I host a podcast called this is a Woman's Work. Do you find, and I'm sure this is true, regardless of gender, that there are small and mighty people, but is there any credence to the idea that some of the people we aren't hearing about are women and the reason we're not hearing about them is because of their gender, possibly at the highest level, above everything else? Is that fair to say?

[Sharon McMahon]

Okay, totally. For a variety of reasons. One, of course, is that women, socially, during the early part of this country and even still continuing today, in some ways women were not given the opportunities that men were. Of course, right. Like they didn't even have legal rights to, you know, own things of their own. In some states, if your husband Died, you weren't even entitled to your familial possessions. And I write about this in the book. If you wanted anything other than your, you know, family Bible, you would have to, as a widow, buy it back from the state of Illinois, for example. So women had no. Had few legal rights. So that's part of it. And then also a huge part of it is who has history been written by? You know, history has been written by the men with the most ships. It's been written by the people with the most dollars or the people who admire those people who have not spent time looking for the accomplishments of people outside of those headline making stories.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Agreed. So I guess my next question is I started by kind of describing more traditional roles of power. Right. These are the people we are hearing about. And you say that the best Americans are not always the famous or the powerful or the perfect. I don't think anybody's perfect, but. So tell us more about that. Do you actually think there are more of these small and mighty people than there are the people we know about?

[Sharon McMahon]

It's a very fair characterization by orders of many magnitude. Right. The. If we were to say, if I were to say, Nicole, who has had the biggest impact on your life? Would you say George Washington?

[Nicole Kahlil]

No. Right, right.

[Sharon McMahon]

Would you be like, you know what? It's Grover Cleveland, biggest impact on my life? No, no.

[Nicole Kahlil]

I'm gonna start saying that though, just for fun going forward. Right.

[Sharon McMahon]

John Adams is the person I would name. Of course, these are figures from history that we recognize. And we're not saying they did not contribute or do anything important. That's not the, that's not the position I'm taking. But in terms of the number of people that have been impacted by the small and the mighty, who would say because of her or because of him, my life was changed. That those are, those are the people who deserve to be recognized and are not, they're not being recognized for their contributions. And you know, I really push back against this idea that great Americans are people of the past.

[Interjecting Guest or Co-host]

Right.

[Sharon McMahon]

They're the people in the books. They're the people with the statues, the people with the marble things and the headstones. Then the, you know, like, yes, some of those are great Americans, but great Americans live today. And the good news is we can choose to be one of them if we want to. It doesn't require fame and fortune. It doesn't require you to have a specially shaped rocket that goes to space.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Space.

[Sharon McMahon]

Do you know what I mean? And I think we need to redefine what it actually. What greatness actually is, you know, as

[Nicole Kahlil]

you were talking, it brought to mind. I was at a conference once, and somebody asked, like, for you to write out your family tree as far back as you can go. And basically the gist of it was the vast majority of us didn't know the names of anybody past our grandparents. Some people knew a couple great grandparents, but that was really it. But the reality is those people have had great impact on us individually in the world. You know, they pass down beliefs and values and culture and so. So many things. So I kind of went historical again on that. But I agree with you completely. I think we are surrounded by people who want to make a difference, who are making a difference, who, you know, are changing lives individually and collectively. And it's just, I think maybe a responsibility on our part to go looking or to pay attention and not get sucked in to what who Instagram says we should be paying attention to.

[Sharon McMahon]

If we spend all of our time paying attention to, you know, say, the 15 elected officials that we could name off the top of our heads, right? For some of us, it's more. Some of us is probably less. But if we spend all of our time and attention paying attention to what this presidential candidate says or that presidential candidate says, we are missing the good stuff, right? And why would we want to spend all of our life, our. Our very. Our two short lives. Why would we want to spend our two short lives honing in on what somebody said that one time into a microphone on Twitter? Do you know what I mean? Like, nobody gets to be 99 years old and is like, wow, I really should have left some more sick burns in the comments on Facebook. That's not a thing you will regret, right? But you will. You will be recognized someday for what you did contribute. And, you know, let us be people who leave a legacy for our descendants instead of focusing all of our time outward on what other people are doing?

[Nicole Kahlil]

Yes. Okay. Now, I have to imagine some people are thinking as we think about voting, like, there is that feeling of, like, okay, my vote doesn't matter. It's just one of, you know, bazillions. And those of us not in power or without massive influence can often feel powerless. Or like what we do doesn't make all that big of a difference. How do we fight against that within ourselves? Hmm.

[Sharon McMahon]

That's a really great question and one that I hear really frequently. And I think it helps so much to remember that if we are waiting for a feeling of hope, which is what this hopelessness is, what you're describing, right? Like what I'm doing doesn't matter. It's a sense of hopelessness. If we are waiting for a feeling of hope to descend upon us in a beam of light from the heavens, or we are hoping to wake up one morning with the hope that floods our bodies, then we are going to keep on waiting. And that is because hope is not a feeling that we wait to experience. Hope is a choice that we make. And when we choose to have hope despite current circumstances, that is the place from which we can begin to make a real difference. That is the place that all of the people who are profiled in this book said, I don't know what it, what tomorrow holds, but I am going to continue to move forward with hope because we cannot make any kind of positive change without hope that what we are doing will someday matter. And I can promise you that there were many people in this book who woke up in the morning and their lives were in shambles. Their lives were in absolute shambles. Everything had been taken from them. And this is true of more than one person in the book. They have lost literally everything. And they continue to choose to move forward with hope. And that choice, not the feeling that we experience, that choice, is what has allowed them to impact the course of history. And that's true for truly each and every one of us. So the advice that I would give to somebody who is feeling like my vote doesn't matter, nothing I say will make a difference is to stop waiting for that feeling of hope and to start choosing it instead.

[Nicole Kahlil]

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[Nicole Kahlil]

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[Nicole Kahlil]

so I love that for so many reasons, but one of them is that I often. So I talk mostly about the topic of confidence. And I often say confidence isn't a feeling, it's a choice. And so I think that that's so true with a lot of these things that we think of as feelings, but the reality is we have everything to say about it. Choose it until you become it, right? You choose hope until the feeling catches up. If you're waiting for the feeling, we often will just like waiting to feel ready. We don't get ready by waiting. We get ready by being in action. I also love what you said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's sort of a. This is the way we get anything done. It's one foot in front of the other towards what matters most, right? That's it. That's the deal. We just get into small action. I. I think sometimes people think they need to see the master plan, right? They need to know where they're going from A to Z. So let me ask you, what would your advice be about where to start?

[Sharon McMahon]

Listen, almost everybody you're going to read about in this book had zero master plan. They literally were like, well, I'm going to board a train and I'm going to ride it till I run out of money. I mean, quite literally, that is, that's a person in this book. So much of what has been accomplished, important things that have been accomplished in history have been done by people with no master plan, no training. Maybe they were born with the wrong credentials. They were born with a face that other people rejected because they were the wrong ethnicity or the wrong race. They were born the wrong gender. And they just refused to be limited by what, what their life circumstances were. They just refused to sit in a. In a sense of hopelessness and refuse to be. Refused to allow the enormity of the problem. Refuse to allow that to make them inert. Refuse to allow that to make them feel so overwhelmed that they are just paralyzed with indecision. So the. One of the big lessons from history is that, number one, there's no one coming to save us, Right? There is no one coming. It's us. We are the people. When women worked for over 80 years to gain the right to vote in the United States, and for black women it was longer than that in the south, many black women did not gain the right to vote in the south until after the Voting Rights act was passed in the 1960s. The 1960s. Okay, so there was. There's nobody out there, no mythical person on a white horse who was like, I have arrived with plan.

[Interjecting Guest or Co-host]

Right?

[Sharon McMahon]

There's nobody who's like, the plan has arrived. So we need to let go of this idea that there's somebody out there with the plan and start putting one foot in front of the other. These are the pre. These are pregnant teenagers. These are the children of formerly enslaved people. These are people who are put in. In who are imprisoned for absolutely no reason, who had no master plan, but refused to allow that to paralyze them from doing all the good they could with the resources they had available to them.

[Nicole Kahlil]

So, yes to all of that. And it feels like a good time for a story. Can you give us an example from the book that exemplifies what you're talking about?

[Sharon McMahon]

There's a woman that I profile. She's one of my favorite people in the book. Her name is Septima Clark, and she. She was born in 1898 in South Carolina. She becomes a teacher at a time when Charleston, South Carolina, did not allow black teachers, even in. Even in schools that served the black community, no black teachers were allowed. So she's forced to get a job on one of the barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina. And when she gets there, her school is literally. It's one room. It's falling down. It has no supplies, of course, and it. It doesn't even have glass in the windows. So in order to keep the bugs out. And of course, we all know that the bugs are copious in South Carolina, in order to keep the bugs out, they'd have to close the shutters. And the children are literally having school in the dark. She's paid next to no money, but the school is called Promise Land School, and she. I can promise you that she did not look around that school each day and think, wow, I am really changing the course of history here. That is. Those are not the feelings she had throughout the course of her lifetime. She is almost killed multiple times. She is falsely arrested.

[Interjecting Guest or Co-host]

She.

[Sharon McMahon]

Somebody tries to firebomb her house. She is fired from her job. Her husband, she discovers, has an entire secret second life and a second wife and second children. One of her babies dies from an undiagnosed birth defect. She becomes the single mother to the one child she has that does live. She becomes so depressed that she is moments away from committing suicide. Okay, so these are not life circumstances that any of us would likely be willing to trade. We would not look at that and be like, wow, that is a hero in the making. That's. And this is, of course, at a time when therapy doesn't exist, when. When antidepressants don't exist. We would look at her life circumstances and think, she has every right to be depressed. She has every right to just sit and in a pit of despair. And yet what she did was decide, okay, well, I've been fired from this job. I'm going to do what I can. And what she ends up doing is creating something called citizenship school in which she begins to teach other black adults who were deprived of the opportunity of education, teach them how to read, how to vote, how to write a letter to your elected official, how to do basic math so that they too can become involved citizens. And this idea of citizenship school spreads around the south, and it moves huge numbers of members of the black community onto the voter rolls who then can become involved members of society. But here is the kicker is that this woman, Septima Clark, goes on to teach a woman named Rosa Parks, then of course, goes on to change the course of history. We, Savannah Clark, did not wake up in the morning and really think, wow, this is. I'm. I'm a world changer out here. But without her persistent continued effort to have hope, to orient herself toward hope, that what she was doing was just going to keep making a difference, we would not have the civil rights movement as we know it. So that's just one tiny example that I hope people will take away, that what we do actually really does matter.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Perfect. Small but mighty example. Thank you. One of the things you say in the book that I'm really intrigued about. I agree, and I'm just intrigued on your perspective is that we must sometimes work within the system before we can tear it down. And I feel like, you know, it's really hard when we think about movements or revolutions or things like that. You've got a lot of polarity in how people think it should be approached and lots of name calling and things like that. Why do you believe and in what cases do you believe it's important that we work within the system in order for us to change it?

[Sharon McMahon]

Listen, I get the desire sometimes for, like, let's just tear this whole thing down and start over. It's too broken. It's too corrupt. It's too terrible. It started wrong. You know, like, I. I really do understand the inclination, this notion of, like, I don't want to wait for justice. I don't want to work a Little bit each day. We're deserving of justice now, right now. So I do, I want to acknowledge that I do understand this, you know, propensity toward wanting massive systemic change right now. So this is not a value judgment against people who feel that way, because I, I share your sentiments. But I will say that nearly all of the lasting change that has occurred, not just in US History, but world history, has occurred because of the efforts of people in with incremental progress. Incremental progress is sustainable progress. This is just human nature. Right. Anybody who has tried to lose weight, they'll tell you you can't lose 20, 20 pounds overnight. You have to do it a little bit each day and you have to keep at it and you have to keep working at it. And if you want to sustain it, you have to do the following things. That's just one example of how human nature is. If you become, if you become sober, you have to work at your sobriety each day. If they just drop you off at a detox facility, you're going to leave and go right back to what you were doing. So change, lasting change requires concerted daily effort. So I think it's important to acknowledge that these systems that we have to work within can be changed. But if we don't want to create a revolution in which there is a power vacuum and somebody has the chance to seize power, that is actually worse than what we might be imagining now. There's a big danger in a revolutionary mindset. In some cases, it creates a power vacuum that allows something, the potential for something worse to take hold. And we see that around the world. The United States has been involved in a few of those scenarios. Somebody worse takes over and that's not. We don't, we don't want that situation either. Democracies thrive when people work together to change things. And that often requires an acknowledgement of what is an acknowledgement of reality. So it's not. I understand the desire for immediate systemic change. I understand it. But I also am asking you to zoom out and look at the big picture of if we want this to change for the better, for the long term, we have to work with reality.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Very well said. I would imagine when we think about change makers or people who do really big impactful things, a component of that is wanting to be remembered or legacy. And I feel like all of us want to leave some sort of legacy.

[Interjecting Guest or Co-host]

Yeah.

[Nicole Kahlil]

And so your team actually sent this question in advance and I thought it was a great question. I wanted to ask, who do you believe history will remember with kindness. Or maybe said another way, what should we be thinking about when we think about leaving a legacy?

[Sharon McMahon]

That's such a great question. I love this. I love this. Because if we think about what do I want my legacy to be that allows us to then reverse engineer?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

How do.

[Sharon McMahon]

What kind of person do I need to be now so that someday at my funeral, my descendants are like, dang, Nicole was an incredible grandmother. She's an incredible community member. You know, like I. I was impacted by her. If we think about what we want our legacies to be, we can then act accordingly, right? So this idea of. Of. Of legacy, of who will history smile kindly upon? It is almost always the people who are known for lifting other people up, not the people who made a career of putting people down.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Right?

[Sharon McMahon]

History smiles far more kindly on Abraham Lincoln, who certainly made mistakes, as all people do, but who had made his mark by lifting people up. And it smiles far less kindly on Andrew Jackson, who made a career by putting people down. So that's one thing that I think is important to keep in mind. Great leaders are known for who they lift up and not who they put down. And the other thing that I always think of when it comes to legacy is that legacy incorporates all aspects of your life, including your digital legacy. It includes the direct messages that you're sending to people. It includes the comments that you're leaving online. And who we are, in secret is who we really are. And I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that often when, you know, like in the future, when we die, our descendants will be likely to gain access to all of our social media accounts, and so will historians of the future. In the same way that we now have the letters written between John Adams and Abigail Adams, we have these 1600 letters between them. Historians of the future are going to be able to read our. Our direct messages. They're going to be able to read, you know, they're gonna be able to go to Facebook, file a historic records request, and get everything we ever posted on Facebook, including what we posted under what we thought were anonymous accounts. So that's the other thing that I always think of is, like, who I am, in secret is who I really am. What do I want people of the future to know about me? Let me reverse engineer that, so I act accordingly.

[Nicole Kahlil]

I am so glad I asked that question. I have never thought about that, like, from the lens of what people will see and learn about me in the future. And I could not love this, this phrase more. Who we are, in secret, is who we Are. I think that's. I think of that as a call to action for myself and for everybody. I kind of said that at the. In the intro is it's like in our effort to support one belief, how often we're sacrificing another. So the example I give, like, with the elections going on is I am a very committed person. How do I demonstrate commitment while also demonstrating kindness? Like, so commitment to my beliefs and what I think is right, but also kindness to others, especially those who don't share those same beliefs, because both of those values are important to me and both of those would be part of the legacy that I want to leave. And so how quickly, in the face of something that, you know, pisses us off or, like, tugs at our emotions, we quickly will sacrifice one in the face of the other. So all that to say now I'm really starting to think about all the things I've ever written or put out there,

[Sharon McMahon]

all the DMS I forgot that I sent in the year 2011. Do you ever go on Facebook and you. The Facebook. Facebook reminds you of something?

[Nicole Kahlil]

Yes.

[Sharon McMahon]

And you're like, who was I eight years ago? This is bananas. That happens to be bananas.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Oh, my gosh.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Totally.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I love the memories. Yeah.

[Nicole Kahlil]

I was actually way funnier, like 15 years ago. I'm like, how do I get that back? But yes, I love the memories. And yeah. Such a fascinating conversation. Sharon, thank you for writing this incredible book, for taking the time and energy and passion to find and put out there for all of us to know and see these small and mighty heroes. And I know people listening are going to want to learn more. So again, the book is called the Small and the Mighty. And Sharon's website is sharonmcmahon.com, we'll put that and all the other links in show notes. Sharon, thank you so much.

[Sharon McMahon]

Thank you so much, Nicole.

[Nicole Kahlil]

Okay, friend, a loving reminder that you can love your country without loving everything about it. You may not love its past or its current cast of characters. You may love its ideals, but not some of its policies. Loving some something and seeing it for what it is, taking the good with the bad and giving it the gift of high expectations is what love is. At least that's how it looks in my mind. And if you think your candidate is all good and the other is all bad, then, friend, you aren't thinking. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, is perfect. And I'd never want somebody who hasn't made mistakes and overcome them, who hasn't changed their mind in the face of new information or or who hasn't risked and failed to be our leader or even a leader. So vote of course be passionate, committed and values driven. And remember, the change agent, the innovator, the reformer, the disruptor, the mover and the shaker. The get shit done leader might not be on the ballot. It might be someone in your life, at your work, in your community. You might be raising them. It might even be you. So get out there and be mighty regardless of the position you're in. Because that is woman's work.

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