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Gather At The Well: Microdosing on the Margins - Lindsey Fuller
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Lindsay
I'm Lindsay and it's time to Gather at the well. We're on a mission to microdose wellness, create human centered systems and retain our greatest asset, our people. We believe it's time for podcasts that teach moving beyond thought leadership and towards change leadership. Join us and our friends at We Are For Good as we model the way with concrete examples from the field and gain tangible tools because it's possible to build adult work cultures we don't need to heal from. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Gather at the well. It is Episode five. I can't believe it. In this series on microdosing wellness, we have taken quite the journey together. So today I really want to talk about microdosing on the margins. And maybe it's even macro dosing on the margins. Let's dig in. So you might be wondering how I would dedicate an entire session to DEIJ work Diversity, equity, inclusion and justice work. Okay, girl. How are you making this connection to workplace well being? Well, let me drop just a couple of stats because to me, the time is now for us to talk about our new normal. And no, I'm not talking about the imposed new normal post pandemic. I'm not talking about navigating all that we are in this current moment in the country. But I am talking about what is it like to work in professional contexts across difference. We now know that Gen Z and Millennials include more racial and ethnic minorities than any other generation in our country's history. Unfortunately, the pay gap is still here and persisting for women in this country. It's a no for me. 0 stars. Do not recommend that pay gap. And in a diversity and inclusion report in 2022, here's the real one. Diverse companies earn 2.5 times higher cash flow per employee, and beyond that, they're more productive by over 35%. So if you're not inspired by a worldly team, I know you're driven by productivity and results. I guess what I'm trying to say is companies more than ever need to meet this moment. The moment where true collective liberation efforts are integrated into our strategic plans, practices and policies. We can't just recruit and hire diverse candidates, especially if you have no intention to retain and sustain them. In the short term, you're not leading in human centered ways, but in the long term, your reputation as an organization, your credibility regarding those operationalized values. Oh hey, episode three and your impact will all take a hit. If you aren't ready to open arms, embrace the folks that you're bringing in from the communities that you're working to serve, but also finding ways to truly honor in culturally responsive ways their needs, learning preferences, communication styles and collaboration modalities. The way I see it is if I have the audacity to build a diverse team, I better be prepared to take concrete actions to ensure they can thrive. You've heard us talk about at the teaching well that our educator attrition crisis in this country is not primarily fueled by children. Folks are quitting their bosses in toxic adult cultures. And what we're finding in our research is that there are many contributing factors within those cultures that are pushing and pulling our dearest educators directly out of the schoolhouse. Things like ruptures based on communication, non verbal communication signals, facial expressions, the tonality of emails. There's so much that comes through that makes someone feel like work is psychologically safe or that in fact it's a hostile work environment. Things like microaggressions to me feel like an intravenous slow drip of poison. But if that's the case, what if microdosing, wellness and human centered systems can be a part of the antidote? Let's make sure that we are grounded. The conversations about hostile work environments, the healing that's required to collaborate across difference and truly living Deij may give you those butterflies in the belly, that tight chest. Some of y'all were like, I don't know Lindsay, I might not have it for you today, but I promise you it'll be worth it. So stick with me to support with a regulated nervous system. Let's drop in for just a moment, allowing your seat to hold you if you're standing, finding a sturdy base by widening your legs. If you're driving, take a moment to just let that seat belt give you a little hug, closing your eyes or lowering your gaze if that's accessible to you. I love a steady three breath. So let's begin. In through the nose and out through the mouth. And two more just like that. Audible exhale. Taking a moment to really source from the incredible land that we are on. I give credit to those past and present and future on the Ohlone land that I'm situated in. But who are you connecting to? You're here right now. You're anchored and steady. You cannot be shaken. Find your inner fortitude. Take a deep inhale in. We can't bypass these conversations, they're too important. So access your breath across the session, but stay with me. A little bit of story time for you all. A couple of micro moments across my journey as an educator in multiple schools, different districts, many communities across the state of California. And let me tell you how I experienced some of my identities being welcome or not. Those subtle or overt communications that I was valued, I belonged, I was welcome or safe. My first year teaching, I think I told y'all about that in my first podcast episode. But I was so hyped to change the world. One of the challenges that we faced in South Central LA was a very clear division between black and Latino students. And I wanted to create a safe space and contribute in the way I knew I could, building bridges and not barriers between these two communities. Having come from the Bay Area, I was so clear that when we're united, we can do so much good. I went to the principal's office ecstatic. I even, I think I wrote up a one page proposal. You know, I was feeling fancy. And as I made the proposal to lead a first ever black student union, you know what I was met with? I was told I was racist. Fast forward to the next school where I taught. I had a booming plc, a professional learning community which were exploring black and brown learning preferences focused particularly on how black boys could succeed academically, socially and behaviorally in classrooms. And it was the biggest, most well attended PLC in the school. All of a sudden I got an email from someone at the home office, someone I didn't have a tremendous relationship with, stating that they were interested in purchasing the PLC so they could replicate it and they were excited to offer me. Drumroll. $200. My intellectual property, the hours of labor, the feedback, integrations, my pedagogy, really trying to liberate, support my community, all reduced to a minor amount of money. In subsequent roles, not only as an administrator, but as a district leader, I was paid less even though I did more work and got better results. So called leaders love to call me into de escalate screaming parents, break up altercations and respond to crises. But somehow my seat at the decision making table was always in question. In one of my final years, I was surrounded by three high school male students and repeatedly called the N word. So what you hear in this is that whether it's benign to outright hostile, the way my identities were treated contributed greatly to my mental, emotional and physical well being. These districts used my body as a tool and my mind as a resource. But my heart and spirit were neglected. I felt exploited, undervalued and disconnected from my needs. After a decade of direct service in schools. You see what I'm talking about in these examples? Just talks about one of my Many identities, my racial identity. But there's research on this, y'all. What I've experienced and what many folks of color have experienced is racial battle fatigue. The concept of the stress and trauma that bipoc folks experience when navigating racially hostile environments. And it can be a combination of those microaggressions, the macroaggressions, or systemic racism is real. And I think I'm over trying to convince folks that it is. But what I have unlimited energy around, what I'm not done fighting for is a different way forward, is healing the historical multi generational divisions across difference. It's choosing each other. It's not trying to figure out how to be PC digestible. I'm even over tolerance. I don't want you to tolerate me. I want you to accept me, to embrace me, to empower me, to link up. I'm done with allyship. I want co conspiratorship. Leverage your privilege and I'll do the same for you. We have work to do and I have a whole lot of critical hope about it. But you might be like, girl, that's a whole lot. So maybe I'll offer you another somatic. This one's called Shake it Out and it's dope for people who are tactile or kinesthetic learners. There's movement, right? So to do this, practice, you can keep your eyes open, you can be walking or standing still, you can even do it seated. To shake it out, you identify a couple places on your body and you count rhythmically to be able to move that body part and let whatever is creating constriction loosen, if just a little bit. So for me, I'm going to start with my feet and my legs and I'm actually just going to shake it out for seven seconds, breathing deeply as I do. So join me. You can wiggle those legs. Shake feet for 7, 5, 3 1. Big inhale here. Noisy exhale. Let's move to the arms and hands. You can shake them for another seven. Join me. Seven, five, three one. And if you really are feeling like, okay, she was talking about racial battle fatigue, you might go do a full body shake it out. It's not so much about the number or the exact place on the body, though. It's always most potent if you're able to align your somatic to the place that you're experiencing a block. It's more about the fact that when we encounter tense moments or topics, we have agency. And sometimes it takes just a little bit of physical release, emotional release, mental release so we can finally release our energy towards doing something. I might have an unpopular belief here, and I'll start by saying this requires a paradigm shift, a naming of the mindset trap and the PC police efforts to shut down these types of actions. Y'all know what I'm talking about. It's the oppression Olympics. If you don't know that term, Google it. But. But it's the concept that when we introduce supports efforts, focus on a particular group, others meet it with well, this group has it harder or I've also suffered. And what it does is it creates a greater chasm within our community. It ranks our oppression and our suffering. It forces an energy of justification, of proving, of weaponizing data and grief. Instead, we want to show up and honor that multiple truths are present. It's that duality. Two things can be true. Both of our ancestors suffered. We're still facing discrimination today. And it's okay to center one group at one time. Do good and show the rest of your staff that this type of attention and care and resource will be provided as well to you. It's a patience for peace that I'm summoning in this moment. So what I'm advocating for is that each organization identify an affinity learning. And I'm not talking about affinity groups. Today we have a publication. If you're interested in it, hit up our website, the Racial Healing Affinity Groups page that can teach you more about our learnings and facilitating that model of community building. But what I am talking about is that as an organizational leader and as a staff, there are likely trends in who is in the center and who is on the margins, who feels most emboldened and who feels relatively silenced, who gets the accolades and recognition, and who goes largely unnoticed. There also may be data points around attrition, a lower satisfaction rate, having a hard time diversifying your candidate pool or other data stats, especially if you provide surveys to check in on how your team is doing. It's my belief that if you try and do a general sweeping DEI effort, you'll probably just hit the surface. You'll trivialize some of the very real concerns that require diligence and empathy and active listening and yes, probably financial contributions. So I'm advocating that every organization identify one subgroup within their organization that is farthest from the sphere of success. Center that for a full year of study and then revisit. Let me talk to you about how we did this at the teaching. Well, the first year that we engaged in a DEIJ deep dive, we landed on being a pro black organization. What would it take to shift beyond anti racism to being actively pro black? Yes, I am black. And no, that's not the only reason we landed, though it was a contributing factor. I was the second wave leader, not the founder. I was uncertain how an organizational team would respond to having a black leader following a white leader, but also because we were amidst the George Floyd murder, the mental and emotional saturation on social media, and frankly, we hadn't retained or sustained the two black teammates in the organization's history. I was fortunate that it didn't take much change management effort to bring my team along. The data was clear, the case was made and everybody was committed. So what are a couple of the concrete actions I took to launch this important work? After identifying this issue and providing some of those data points, I did a black bias training for my team. Now that's content I already had from my private practice from before I joined the teaching well, but it really speaks to the need for us to go past the basic implicit bias training that every organization's HR department mandates. If it were working, we would see some difference. After training the team, Marisol and I, the current executive leadership team, created a pro Black audit. We're actually going to give you this pro Black audit in the blog. Connect to this episode. Now, some of you are like we are audited out. Okay, this is not a compliance audit. This is not a was review. This is not an enormous undertaking. It's significant and important, but sustainable. Because when you bite size and audit, when you identify a couple of key metrics and you actually follow through with them, you're more likely to do it with consistency and fidelity. Looking at things like the pay gap across different racial identities inside the organization, did we have one? Did we not? What was our evidence? Creating structures like kinship preferences, recognizing that many black family structures include godparents, aunties, uncles, grannies, multi generational family systems. Did our policies demonstrate that kinship would be honored? There are several metrics. Check it out on the teachingwell.org blog. As a team at our winter retreat, we did commitments. Pro Black commitments. We landed on four of them and progress monitored for entire year. And we capped that process off with a manifestation session for a Black male employee. Because we know that intersectionality is real. And while we had recruited at that point a Black women leader and the two former Black teammates in the teaching well were also Black women, I was holding curiosity around that dual identity. What would the evidence be to ensure that we could welcome a Black male into the organization and that his emotional, mental and spiritual state his somatic essence would be safe to fully express inside of our organization? Were we ready for Black Boy Joy? Could his inner child come out? Could he play and innovate and lead? And would others welcome that leadership and amplify it? These were rich conversations that all occurred during our winter retreat and the following year when we looped back together again to live for a full week. I know we could talk about our retreats another time. We not only checked back on our commitments and shared back the results of our most recent pro Black audit, but we held a panel of sorts where we invited Black teammates to sit in front of the room and answer a set of questions to be in dialogue with one another. And the rest of the staff was able to witness, to hear what was working for us, what was retaining us, and where we felt like we could still improve as an organization. In that moment, the full team was choosing each other. The full team understood, just like good teachers do, that supports for groups on the margins actually benefit us all. I want to stamp that this is not DEI just for DEI sake. This isn't performative. This is a necessity. This is a data driven investment to actualize your desire for workplace well being, for an inclusive workplace, for belonging, for actualizing your mission, vision and values. And so I know there are a couple of you listening that are believers. You know you need to do this. And two things that might get in the way. We don't have the internal bandwidth or the skill set to facilitate this space. I don't want to get it wrong. I get it. I truly do. Or perhaps you feel like you don't have the resources, the budget. So if you don't have it internally nonprofit folks, I'm speaking to you. Perhaps someone on your board can provide this resource or training. Maybe they can sponsor it or they know someone in their professional network and are willing to provide the finances to compensate that consultant. You might also think about pooling your budget. I've seen creative models where a couple of small nonprofits come together to pay for the $2,000 training. It's more sustainable for all of them and actually they're going to be stretched out of their comfort zone learning in a collective. Make sure you don't just pull in any DEI consultant. Everyone and their mom decided to be one during the peak of the pandemic. Get clear on your why, articulate the data that's driving this decision and bring in a highly skilled facilitator. Pro tip. If they try and sell you an implicit bias training run, it's not Just about having a statement on your website, y'all. It's about having authentic discourse with high quality materials and an action plan that you're willing to pilot, to test, to implement and to continue to fight until those folks on the margins are clear that they belong in your team. So this next somatic practice is one of our favorites. Shout out to Jillian Bell at the Urban Yoga foundation who brought this to the teaching. Well, it's called body drumming. It's an Afro indigenous practice. We are so grateful at the teaching. Well, I love to use this somatic after a stressful conversation when I feel like I've been seated for too long or when I'm reaching for that additional cup of caffeine in the afternoon. It can bring a natural alertness while also moving tension through your soma. I want to just note as a trauma sensitive plug that for anyone who has experienced unsafe touch in your life, remember that this practice is yours to lead. You can skip over body parts and you can provide as little or as much pressure as feels safe in this moment. To do this, I invite you to take your palm of your dominant hand will start there and I want you to begin to provide some thumps, some tapping, some movement up and down your other arm. I'm drumming on that arm, rotating it slightly to be able to get both the outside or top of my arm and the inside of my elbow and forearm. I'm going to switch to the other side. Body drumming across the arms, coming up to the shoulder with a noisy exhale. First inhale you might go to the chest thumping and drumming, loosing any type of constriction in this area to your belly, to the top of your legs. If you're seated all the way to the knee and drum on back up and finally switch to raindrops on the top of your head. We have so many nerve endings. You might even come on to the temples and forehead, under the eyes, at the jaw and right where your lymph nodes reside underneath your chin. Deep inhale here and exhale. So you might be wondering if I'm giving you advice to only work on supporting one community at a time completely. And I want to share with you some of the concurrent efforts that the teaching well endeavored towards. We wanted to get rid of that binary thinking we can take small actions to support everyone who needs it. But our deep dive, just like your strategic plan, is what guides your work when all else fails, this is the focal area. That's your equity. Deep dive. But there are other actions you can take a Couple of concrete examples for us when we started our racial healing affinity groups, it was at a time at the peak of the pandemic, when there was a tremendous amount of Asian hate and hate crimes targeting our AAPI brothers, sisters and relatives. As a stance from the teaching well, and to demonstrate that we wanted to visibilize this crisis, we decided not to lump all of the Pan Asian community into one affinity group and instead decided to have three distinct groups to make sure that there was additional community, that they saw that we were allocating resources and that there were highly skilled and trained facilitators who shared their identities, who could hold more complex space. We had an API and Polynesian group, we had a South Asian group, and we had a Swan Amina group, which is our Middle Eastern and Northern Africa. Just an incredible group of beautiful humans. When we wanted to demonstrate our pro indigenous stance, we didn't want to just make land. Acknowledgments Many organizations are stopping at the land acknowledgement. It's important to know whose land you reside on. It's important to honor Natives are still here and they will rise and thrive. But for us, going beyond a land acknowledgement meant that actually we do what's called land back donations. When we did our racial healing affinity groups, we made sure that we made a concrete donation. Yes, nonprofits, you can do that to all three tribes represented in our facilitator team, as well as to a local group to honor the Ohlone people. Because this is the origin place of the teaching well Oakland, California to visibilize the access needs of our Latinidad community, we took concrete steps to begin translating our curriculum and ensuring that we could offer all of our services in Spanish. Because sometimes people don't want to have to code switch or linguistically switch while they're accessing deep healing. Healing in our home language can be a extremely restorative, connective and liberating experience. And no, not everyone in the Latino community speaks Spanish. But for the ones that do, we wanted to make sure they felt at home in our services. And finally we really started to work on articulating benefits for parents as a subgroup. If you haven't heard, go back to those original podcast episodes with We Are for Good, we talk about the first year of life. During that entire year, we want to promote nursing and bonding and connection because the mental and emotional and spiritual health of the birthing person is deeply connected to having time with their baby. So we would provide resources to ensure that those folks for any mandatory travel were able to bring along their baby as well as a care provider. While they covered the travel of that care provider, we provided lodging and food for as many incidences as occurred with mandatory travel. There are also other small steps like late start work days on the first day of schools for any parenting teammates. And I could go on and on, but my my point here is that I'm not advocating for you to only work with one group. I'm asking you to get clear on which group you need to go deepest towards and what other concurrent efforts you can lead as a human centered organization to meet the needs of the staff you have right now. There's a incredible power, there's a potency when teammates see that even if the struggle isn't theirs, the struggle will be met with compassion, care and community. This is the difference between thought leadership and change leadership, y'all. It's not about having the perfectly crafted message on your website. I love your equity commitments. I'm not sure you're living them. It's time for action. What's coming through me in this moment is that we need empathy in action, not sympathy and shame. Don't feel bad for the folks in your org. It's time to link up in solidarity. So you may be wondering, well, what is this year's deep dive at the teaching? Well, we have been focusing on becoming a queer safe organization. And yes, it started with a study of some of the strategies that promote psychological safety for queer identifying professionals. We do share our pronouns in writing and verbally as an identity forward organization. But we did a study at our last winter retreat, really asking the team, where are there indicators of success and belonging and where are there areas where we can all improve internally or to externally fortify queer teammates as they're out in the field? We worked really hard this past year to attempt to better align staff identities with client needs. We've seen a huge uptick in queer trans non binary folks requesting wellness coaching or mental health therapy through our programs. And whenever possible, we want to provide safety in affinity. I'll name we haven't yet figured out how do we diversify our reproductive rights beyond a parental leave in some of our policies. And that's a place that we are really watching. We made sure that for parental leaves it also included foster and adoption options. But we also know the cost of fertility interventions is very high. This poses a financial inequity for queer teammates potentially if that is the route that they're seeking. So we haven't landed, we haven't arrived. It's something that we are researching and a commitment that I have is anytime we add and codify a policy, I want us to be able to financially sustain that support so that it could never be pulled back. So there is a cautious advancement in a human centered leader that's not just reacting but is responding to the need of the staff stewarding finances appropriately, doing thorough research to ensure that once you launch a policy or practice, it's comprehensive and effective and research based. It's that balance of heart and head work that's needed to demonstrate your values in action. A Quick Plug. Our first ever offering. We are hyped about it. In the new year 2025 we will be launching our first ever national queer affinity group for educators. TK we know they need space that is safe and we're happy to provide that opportunity. So check it out. Keep tabs on our website. We're excited to bring in a new element to our affinity work. I want to close us out by just saying this is the work. This is the work. Young people in our communities are watching us. They are more progressive, forward thinking, creative, innovative. They want to feel like they can bring more and more of themselves and dedicate less and less mental and emotional energy to masking fitting inside of a box. They want work that liberates, not work that consumes their entire life. To be responsive to the next generation in our workforce, we have to figure out ways for both the business to thrive, for collective teams to find authentic, true balance and effective collaboration, but also individuals to feel like who they are and what they bring, the gifts they have and the potential of their impact is truly embraced. So a couple of affirmations that might inspire a bit of practice or reflection in the coming days and weeks. I will not contribute to the Oppression Olympics. I'm steady and values aligned. I can hold boundaries and heal from prior employment trauma. My rest is resistance. Collective liberation starts with me. For this session's homework I'm inviting you, especially those of you who hold leadership roles. Check out our Pro Black audit. We're going to make it accessible so that you could insert truly any identity subgroup. But here are two question lines for you. Who is most on the margins in our organization? How do we increase their workplace well being? Pro tip Ask them. Don't guess. And this line as well. What are my deij edges? What are the biases that I hold and where do they store in my body, behavior or communication? What's my work Linking back to last episode it's me We World. How do I prepare myself to lead deij? Work authentically and effectively? Where am I leading my team and what is our contribution to society and the greater world? I'm glad you came and played across this five part series Centering Microdosing, Wellness and some of the ways that change leadership and human centered design can really thrive inside of your organization. Let's close the chasm. These divides don't serve us. My critical hope is that wellness is anti racist and that when we resource ourselves, we can do wonders while Gather at the well isn't ending. This particular micro series is for now, but who knows, we might come back and play some more. Gratitude to our hosts and dear friends at We Are For Good. Shout out to the Teaching well team for letting us air our very clean laundry. And in the future, if you're feeling dehydrated or ashy, come back to the well again. To be a change leader means you need multiple at bats. This is a steady practice and small things over time often commit to yourself and your own growth. We'll be here waiting with more resources to provide. We're your partners now. Let's get after it. All right y'all. Thanks for coming to play at Gather at the well, the podcast that teaches. If you like this conversation, come visit us online@the teachingwell.org and hit us up on our socials. Remember to visit the podcast page to download a couple of useful tools to get your life and heal up your work.