Cultivating a Learner's Mindset: Jennifer joins Natasha Rainey on the All Inclusive Podcast

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Jennifer Brown:

Empathy and compassion are not the same thing. Empathy is jumping into the pain of another, while the want to share in pain and understand that so deeply, that is a wonderful instinct. What's been shown for our human behavior is that it can traumatize everyone involved actually. Compassion, to contrast, it comes with action, with sort of solutioning, with moving forward. Doesn't necessarily say you need to feel my pain directly in order to build a better world.

Doug Foresta:

The Will to Change is hosted by Jennifer Brown. Jennifer is an award-winning entrepreneur, dynamic speaker, bestselling author and leadership expert on how organizations must evolve their cultures towards a new, more inclusive workplace reality. She's a passionate inclusion and equity advocate, committed to helping leaders foster healthier and therefore more productive workplaces, ultimately driving innovation and business results. Informed by nearly two decades of consulting to Fortune 500 companies, she and her team advise top companies on building cultures of belonging in times of great upheaval and uncertainty. Now onto the episode.

Hello and welcome back to The Will to Change. This is Doug Foresta. Today's episode was originally recorded on the all-inclusive podcast and features a conversation between Jennifer and host, Natasha Rainey. As Jennifer reveals the importance of having a learner's mindset as a leader and the difference between empathy and compassion, she also discusses how leaders can cultivate inclusivity in their teams and organizations and provides actionable advice on how to be an inclusive leader in today's rapidly changing world. All this and more, and now on to the conversation.

Natasha Rainey:

Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer Brown:

Hello, Natasha. How are you?

Natasha Rainey:

I'm really good. I'm so excited to have this conversation.

Jennifer Brown:

Me too. It's going to be good.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah. So let's kick things off. Tell our listeners, if they don't already know who you are, a little bit more about you and your journey to where you are today.

Jennifer Brown:

Yes. Oh my goodness. So I always say everyone has a diversity story, even those you don't expect. For me, the pieces of that are that I was very active in social justice in my early twenties, which was years ago. Community organizer worked for nonprofits, but I was also a singer and kind of did it on the side. But eventually, I would be able to move to New York City and study opera, which was really incredible, what a privilege.

Unfortunately, through operatic training, preparing for that field, I injured my voice. It happened several times, I had to get surgery to repair it. I literally would really need to go through the heartbreak of realizing that I wouldn't be able to make that living that I thought I would be making and give up that dream. In the process then of wondering what's next, I discovered and stumbled on the field of training and development because from one stage to another, it was literally switching to facilitating adult learners in the workplace context, and it found me.

I think there's a lot of previous performers who are now trainers, and facilitators, and coaches, and all of that. So I got another degree after my music degree in organizational change and leadership from Fordham University, and I began to love that field. I fell in love with it. I began by being a trainer for leadership, all things leadership, and then pivoted into DEI, which was not called DEI back then because this was almost 20 years ago. It was really just the D, which was diversity, which is how it was referred to, and then of course it's changed since then. Then I had some corporate roles, and then I started my own company, Jennifer Brown Consulting, and I've had that for almost 20 years now. I like to say I was meant to use my voice just not as a singer, but to bring voice to those of us who felt and feel marginalized in workplace systems that weren't built by and for so many of us.

I also intimately understand that too because I'm a member of the LGBTQ plus community, so I've been out for 25 years and very active as an advocate in that space, particularly for workplace equality, but very closeted in my professional roles as a corporate person, even as an opera singer, certainly corporate person, and then as an entrepreneur. Slowly over the many years, coming to the front about that and now from stages, every stage I'm on and every moment that I can, but that was not always something I was comfortable with. It's really the work of my life to build more comfortable organizations of belonging where people feel they can bring their full selves. Even if that wasn't true for me, it's the work that I get to do now and leave it better than I found it.

Natasha Rainey:

I love that. I love the way that it's like I was meant to have a voice, and it's a voice for others. That's amazing.

Jennifer Brown:

Great.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah, I know actually. It's really great. It's good that you've been able to make that connection now, but obviously when it was happening to you, it was probably quite difficult at the time, and it was probably a difficult time. So in all that you've accomplished and all the great things that you're doing and the voice that you're giving to so many, what inspired you to turn to writer, to be an author? Because you recently released your second edition of your How to Be an Inclusive Leader.

Jennifer Brown:

Right.

Natasha Rainey:

Congratulations.

Jennifer Brown:

True thanks.

Natasha Rainey:

So how did you work through that process of going from being on the stage, being the speaker, to actually putting all your thoughts down in words?

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah. That is such a leap, like you say. Some of us become authors before we become speakers, and some of us do the reverse. Speaking, I would say, was always more comfortable, but I think the process of writing your first book in particular and going through that work of the imposter syndrome, kind of cracking through the "Who am I to write this? What do I really know? How am I going to do this? Is anybody going to care? Will anybody read it?" I definitely have to credit people on my team back then, which was almost seven years ago now that I did my first book with saying, "You need a book. If you want to be a speaker, you need a book." Getting over that fear and then beginning to put words on a page, and that book is called Inclusion actually, and it still has a wonderful audience, which is really neat to see.

I would've thought it might be maybe out of date because so much has changed in the space, but people still go back and read it. It was really, I think, a kitchen sink book. It was all the things that I wanted to write about, all the things that I knew comfortably and could write with confidence about. It was a very broad book, and I think I had a lot of audiences in mind because I think I wasn't really clear about yet who is my main audience, so it was a bit of spaghetti against the wall, a little of this, a little of that. I like that too because it kind of had something for everyone, for different readers.

Natasha Rainey:

I mean, it worked for the title though, right? Because it's inclusion.

Jennifer Brown:

Exactly, yeah. That's exactly-

Natasha Rainey:

You want to make sure you've got-

Jennifer Brown:

That's the whole point.

Natasha Rainey:

A little bit of everything. Yeah. So it worked in your favor.

Jennifer Brown:

Exactly.

Natasha Rainey:

That's great.

Jennifer Brown:

No, thank you. I never thought about it that way. That's true, but yeah. Working with a team was so helpful for me. I always rely on others in this work and have always done that with my company even. I always wanted to build it bigger than me. I wanted to do this work with people. I wanted to play a role that was, I guess, thought leader or voice or evangelist for our message. Then I've always dug deep financially and otherwise to hire people to bring on the help that I needed. So I absolutely can't take credit for all the work, and the team could go through and say, "Jennifer, you need to jump into here and write a couple pages or add your story or talk about what this means to you," and so a lot of times we would gather a lot of information, and then I would personalize it.

I think the best business books have the voice of the author and the experience of the author in them. Why is this important to you? What does this mean? Why are you writing about it? What's the significance? How did you come to learn it, and how did it come to be something that you felt so passionately about? I think too my advice is that weave your personal story into your writing when you are a teacher of any domain. Don't just write from the head, write from the heart. That's what I think readers really resonate with as well, and we've tried to do that in all of my books.

Natasha Rainey:

Fantastic. I think that frame of thinking does quite bleed quite well into being just an overall leader. It's being able to be a bit more open about your personal experiences, having that kind of transparency with "this is my thought process. This is how this means to me." When you are looking at making changes in the initiatives and programs that you're putting out, that you are actually explaining how has this come about. Why is this important? Why does it matter to you? Because I think people follow people, people believe in other people. So yeah, I agree. I really enjoyed your books, both the first and second edition. I haven't read Inclusion, and I'm actually now going to definitely read it because it sounds amazing.

Jennifer Brown:

Please, please.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah, no, definitely. Because what would you say for being an inclusive leader and sharing your thoughts onto paper. What sort of responses have you got, which has really been quite impactful for you in knowing, "Yes, this is definitely the right thing. I'm glad I put this book out. This has changed so many." Is there a particular moment that you can remember?

Jennifer Brown:

The feedback is just so wonderful. Authors, we're desperate to know what difference our book makes, and there's just nothing ... it never gets old to hear somebody who felt a certain model. There's a model in the first and second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader that's like a four phase-growth model. I love models because my background is organizational development, so we literally study models, and I've been teaching other people's models for a really long time, and I always wanted my own. I didn't put too much thought into it when I created it. I just wrote it from the heart because the model speaks to my journey, and the steps that I have taken and the evolution that I've gone through, and how I've puzzled through where do I get stuck, and where am I, and where I need to be. What is the gap?

So when people say, "Your model really helped me understand where I am and what I need to do next," and in calling people to action, the highest phrase I can ever hear is that I am clearer. I have a plan. I see myself in a different way. I understand what role I can play and what role is needed, and where I was hesitant before, I now feel equipped and encouraged and excited. Right? I think if I can meet people in that place, there are so many people stuck and immobilized in a certain place when it comes to things like allyship, and things like using your voice, and storytelling like you were talking about earlier. How do I enter this conversation? How do I add value? How do I establish trust when I'm perhaps limited in terms of my own lived experience, in terms of understanding what other people are experiencing?

If I can help people get over that hurdle, then I believe ... I hope they will take it and run with it. But loosening us up, getting us into more of a flow so that we can evolve because nothing really evolves from stuck. Right? It's impossible. It also doesn't evolve. We don't evolve from things like places like guilt or shame, for example. Those are tricky places when we're not happy with the way the world is. It's very important what choice we make about what to do next. I want to be right there when that happens. When that awakening happens and somebody says, "Okay, I understand why I want. What do I do next?" I want to be right there with the right resource, and that was kind of the energy I had as I was writing it. That's the audience I had in mind.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. I'm not going to lie, that's definitely somewhat how I felt in reading your book is it made me feel a lot more confident and assured that creating this podcast is something that I can do, and I can assist people in doing. I can totally see that from other leaders reading it. They can really have a clear plan, like you said, and have some sort of action plan. Because it's one thing that has come out of a lot of the conversations that I've had with leaders is that a lot of them just say, "Just take action. Just do something." I feel like it's a little bit easier said than done sometimes.

Jennifer Brown:

A little bit.

Natasha Rainey:

You know what I mean? Like, "But what action should I take? I don't know."

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah. I think it's having a model and having a resource to go to that's going to give you that guiding, shining light along the way is amazing. That's great. Moving on with the leadership role and especially within DEI, whilst we're taking action, and that's great, and we're moving forward, there's a lot of baggage. There's a lot of trauma. When we're sharing personal experiences, and we're hearing others' experiences that have not been the greatest, we want to show compassion. We want to show empathy, right? It's something that we say for leaders to be inclusive, those are the qualities that you need to have. You've got to show empathy. You have to be compassionate. But what's the difference between the two?

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because we ... Empathy and compassion are not the same thing. Actually the research is starting to show that empathy is jumping into the pain of another, right? It's jumping into the stream with neither one of you knowing how to swim, right? While the want to share in pain and understand that so deeply, that is a wonderful instinct. What's been shown for our human behavior is that it can traumatize everyone involved actually. Compassion, to contrast it, is it all comes with action, with sort of solutioning, with moving forward, right? Doesn't necessarily say, you need to feel my pain directly in order to address, build a better world, in order to take steps. Some of us, this is what the foundation of allyship is, I think, is that some of us are standing on stronger ground because of the way that we are protected by our identities and our lived experience, right, and the way the world sees us, and the way that we're privileged in systems.

So when you are standing on a stronger foundation, whether that's emotional, whether that's systemic, whatever it is, right? The point is that the strength that you can bring to your allyship and to your advocacy means that you can take next steps. You can carry that real experience forward and bring that with you into building something with next steps, right? Different. So it's very interesting because I think if we all are in empathy, there's an exhaustion that we take on. What's important is to take it on to a degree, but to also move towards asking the harder questions, getting to the root cause, challenging yourself and others to do more, to your point earlier, to think about why is this happening, what role can I play in influencing change within a system so that you carry with you what you've heard, what you've learned, what others you know are experiencing, but you're also able to understand what you aren't experiencing, understand the kind of playbook that comes with that.

So it's a fascinating thing to think about. I think that empathy feels wonderful and important. We all want to know that we're being listened to. We want to know that our pain, and our angst, and our anger, and our frustration, and our hopelessness about the current situation is being felt deeply by others. I think that's part one.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

Right? Then I think we need to move to, "Okay. So what can we do to prevent this from continuing to recur? Why does it continue to recur?" Those are systemic questions, and those are where I think it gets really interesting. I always think of it as we're feeling these downstream impacts of racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and bias. We got to swim upstream and look at where it's being created. We have to address it at the root. It's sort of the bandaid on the wound versus the root cause. It's the symptom versus the illness. It's toggling back and forth between those things and triaging certainly the wound, but us being really, really consistent and insistent on talking about root cause. That's where the work gets really interesting and really hard, honestly, because systems don't want to change and people don't want to change.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah. I mean, literally that's what that is.

Jennifer Brown:

Right?

Natasha Rainey:

That is what kind of leads me on to my next question. So I was like, so why do you think that is? Why are we not looking forward? What do you think is the reason why we've been doing it the way that we have been, and we need to change?

Jennifer Brown:

Oh, so many reasons. Oh goodness. Well, I do think it's been limiting that we have ... we, and I'll say we as the practitioner community or the advocate community. We have very much focused on a couple dimensions of diversity like race and gender. I think the assumption has been by those who aren't addressed by those strategies directly that "I'm not included. This doesn't matter to me. This doesn't impact me, and I don't have anything to contribute." So you are not female, if you're not non-white, right, if you're not certain things, somehow, how could we have talked about it all these years in a way that could have been more inclusive? That means we've got to define diversity dimensions way more broadly than we've been defining them and believe that we as humans can kind of hold all of these truths together while still keeping that laser focus on all the isms that we know are with us and cutting so many folks to be derailed and leave organizations and suffer.

I mean, we know all that to be true. At the same time, it's so much bigger. If we were to be able to do that, then more people would see themselves in, "Oh, that's me. Oh, that's my life story. Oh, that's my kid. Oh, that's what's happened to me. Oh, I've never knew that that was something that I've struggled with and I feel afraid to disclose." Things like mental health, and parenting and caregiving struggles, and chronic illness, and neurodiversity, things that we don't usually think about when we talk about DEI. So that's one piece of I think why we're here, why we find ourselves here.

Many other reasons, I think we were told to argue that this was good for business, and I have done that dutifully and loyally. I've signed up to do that, and it was 20 years ago when I first learned the business case, and I've been using it. But honestly, sometimes I feel like it was a red herring a bit because it really ... I don't know if it has changed behavior. I don't know if it's changed hearts and minds. I'm tired of talking about it and having it not move the needle. So that's another piece that I question these days, 20 years in. Really I question it. I know that it's true, but I question its power in terms of changing hearts and minds. Right? We all know it's true. Many things are true, but the question to me as a communicator is what is landing for people? It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.

We can teach anti-racism in organizations. It can be true. It can be right. It can be the right thing. Is it the right time? Is it packaged in the right way? Can it be heard? Will it be taken on board by people? That's where I live is sort of the impact, not the intent, but the impact, the adoption. If the adoption isn't happening, and if it's not loosening up and getting people to move and explaining how, then it's not that it doesn't matter. It's just the strategy needs to change a bit.

So could be right information, wrong approach. Could be right information, wrong time. Wrong order, could be wrong audience. Right? I think we'd have to kind of cut our audience too. We've got to understand that people are incredibly different places as learners. How do we present information in ways that can hit people like I was speaking about before, right where they are, the right information, right time for where our learner is. How can we give that? This is not spoonfeeding. I don't diminish it in that way because I do believe that learning is all about kind of, "I needed that right at that moment. I needed to hear the right thing," and it dropped right in.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

It's something I could do. It's something I understand. It's something I feel equipped to take that next step with, and I know what to do with it. It's enough, but it's not too much, so that I feel kind of my hard drive is like crashing,

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

Because I'm overwhelmed both with information and also feelings because the feelings will bury you as well.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

I mean, it is hard to get out of and kind of crawl your way out of, "I don't feel bad," I feel ... and this is the bad person. Right? I feel badly. I feel regret. I feel shame. I don't feel important. I don't feel significant, very difficult to lead from that place too, so I think we've got to really be careful on that front as well and somehow find our way to having a more encouraging conversation because that's where we're going to get the traction.

Natasha Rainey:

What have you found to be that impactful message or that approach that you found has landed the best?

Jennifer Brown:

I'm still experimenting with that.

Natasha Rainey:

I mean, yeah. I was going to say, our whole conversation is we're kind-

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Natasha Rainey:

We don't know what the right answer is, but for you so far-

Jennifer Brown:

I know, I know, and that's what-

Natasha Rainey:

Where are you sitting now?

Jennifer Brown:

I know, right? That's the fun of this work. It's art and science, right? The art is, to me, the fun part. It's where I bring my improv performer self to it. I think, what can I do to ... I like to use my personal story and my own vulnerability as one tool to bridge to people quickly. I think that just humanizes us. Seems obvious, but honestly, there's nothing like our story to really open that door up and encourage people to A, not see me on a pedestal, but see me as another learner. Right?

I'm alongside you. There are many things I don't know. There are things I'm trying to figure out. There are things, ways that my emotions and my ego get in the way of my own humility and my own learning, and also being LGBTQ, but not having that be something that's assumed about me is also a very powerful moment of learning for people, and also the fact that I'm unafraid in addressing the privileges that I've had in my life and doing that very quickly and very soon in every interaction also lets the air out of the balloon in my audience in terms of what people are really defensive about now because I speak to mainly leaders, and those leaders have been accused of having so much privilege that A, they could never understand,; B, that they are bad people; C, that they didn't work hard to get where they are.

All of those things, right, that people kind of put up the barrier around. I know as a speaker and a voice that I have to neutralize things quickly in order to get to work. I only have a limited amount of time with people. So we speakers, you got to be able to anticipate. The second you walk on stage you've got to be able to anticipate, how are they going to dismiss me, how are they going to make up their minds about me, and I'm going to lose credibility immediately. Believe me, like some of us walk on a stage and feel this and others of us don't by the way. It really depends what our demographic is and what education we have. Am I a doctor? Am I a PhD?

There's all Kinds of ... what's my skin color? What's my stature? What's my gender presentation? How have I been credentialized? It's really fascinating to notice and know that those biases are happening to you in every moment. I teach a lot on this covering concept, but I'm so keenly aware of not being my full self from the stage and challenging myself to push into the discomfort, lean into that and to talk about what it feels like to lean into it. To your point earlier, writing my book and putting my personal story in, what I'm hoping people understand is say, "Watch this and this is how you do it. Listen to me do this. Read my words and notice how I weave my personal story in, and I'm vulnerable, and I'm trying to get deeper and share something that I haven't figured out and talk about my process and notice it," because this is what you need to do as a leader.

So I also hope I'm doing that and role modeling that from the stage in terms of how I present information, how I contextualize it, how I bring it to life, how I personalize it. This is precisely the work of leadership now, and it's not just inclusive leadership, it's good leadership. So I throw a lot at people. I think they're probably not expecting these sorts of things, particularly I think they're not expecting the discussion about privilege to be one that's not aggressive, and it's not. It's actually done with love and acknowledgement that we all carry some of some kind.

Natasha Rainey:

Well, this is the thing, I think it's-

Jennifer Brown:

What we can really do is use it.

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah, I think it's when people talk about privilege, you just see the whole room just be like-

Jennifer Brown:

Oh.

Natasha Rainey:

Oh. Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

Uh-oh, she's going there.

Natasha Rainey:

Like, "Oh no." Yeah. It's like you said as well, depending on who you are or how you present or your stature, it can be taken in one way or the other, right? So if I'm on stage, and I'm talking about privilege, people may well automatically think, "Oh. Well, she's going to start saying that all white people have privilege. It's a bad thing. They're just horrible people. They haven't worked hard." Do you know what I mean? Whereas ... or if it was for you, for example, as a white woman standing there, they may well be more susceptible to listen to you because they feel like, "Oh, she is in the same boat of us." That's if the crowd is similar to you and look the same as you.

But if they look like me, they may be thinking, "Okay. Who's this woman here standing here talking to us about privilege?" Do you know what I mean? Right? So I definitely understand that you need to read the room, but in the same breadth, the whole topic on privilege does not need to be seen as a negative thing at all. I think it's one that we really need to get over this like, "Let's not talk about that," because it should be like, "Yeah, let's talk about it." As an ally, how can you use your privilege to assist? How can you support? How can you advocate? Those are the sorts of mindset or questions I think we should be asking really when we talk about it.

Jennifer Brown:

Absolutely. It answers the how question too. Right? We can't get to the how, because how am I going to enact the how? I enact it if I'm coming at it from an ally place. I enact it from those privileges. To me, that means access, influence, platform, voice, permission, getting into rooms, accountability. That's all of that, the foundation of all of the allyship that we can apply, the behaviors and the choices and the actions come because we can do something or feel something or survive something that others cannot. Or weather something differently, right, I can ride through a storm differently. I'm not going to feel things or be impacted by them in the same way, back to our conversation about empathy and compassion. So it is the foundation of it, but I think we've got, as learners, remember back to the order you need to do things in.

You need to open up that learner's mind and heart with an unexplored bias. Then you have to get in there and say, "Okay. So let's look at ourselves differently and the puzzle pieces of who we are. Let's put privileges in there and neutrally, objectively, not as a bad thing, but as a fact." Then once we've inventoried ourselves, then my question is, "Where do you need support honestly?" Because I do think too, we're so many things. I need allyship as an LGBTQ person less and less, but I still benefit from it, and I value it, and I appreciate it. But then I can also be the ally in so many other respects, and I can do all those things at the same time, and I can talk about doing them at the same time.

That's what I tell leaders is I say, "Make your work visible. Talk about the ways that you are coming to understand your identity. Do this publicly." This is not about having the answers, but it's so counterintuitive, Natasha. Leaders think they have to have all the answers. They think they have to be setting this brave course, and there's no ambiguity to it, and they know where they're going, and that's what sort of inspires this confidence. Yes, that was all true, but honestly, I don't know if that builds trust in the same way. It may, but I think you need this other piece, building trust, which is the realness, the vulnerability, the transparency, the humility, and the bravery, and the courage to say, "Here's how I'm developing."

Natasha Rainey:

Yeah, no. I mean, sometimes I feel like for me, those sorts of leaders, I mean, they're good, but they're only good for a short while because-

Jennifer Brown:

Good point.

Natasha Rainey:

I think those around you ... well, for me personally, if I'm around a leader that's like that, I don't necessarily feel seen, and I don't necessarily feel like I would be heard because they're so overpowering. Their confidence, their stature is just so ... it fills up so much of the room that, "Is there any room for me? Is there any room for you to have a look at who I am and how I can contribute, and how you could help me develop?" Because I think that's also an important part of being a leader. It's not all about you guiding or showing everyone the way. It's actually about taking stock of who you have with you and how you can help them.

Jennifer Brown:

Love that. That's beautiful. No, you're absolutely right. Generationally, we have a sea change in terms of our expectations of how we are heard, how we are included, how we are, how all of who we are matters. Not just we know how to do, but our wisdom and knowledge coming from our lived experience and from our identities. So if I had to interpret what's coming into the workplace, that workforce is coming with a very different stance, with a very different approach, with a very different need to feel seen and a group of leaders that don't even know how to do that because that was never done for us. We don't know. There was nothing to emulate about that was not okay.

Natasha Rainey:

Right, yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

For work. Right? So it's a foreign skillset for people, and yet my message to leaders is you're behind, and you need to really start to lead in a different way. No matter how unfamiliar you are with it, you've got to surround yourself with it. You have to be reverse mentored if it takes that. Right? I love that idea to say I might be a leader on paper. I might be in the top of our org chart, but I am absolutely a beginner when it comes to understanding belonging in the workplace and what's actually meant by that, particularly by younger generations and cohorts. Then build, shift my leadership and shift the workplace towards the future leader and what those leaders are telling us about what this means to them, and what would keep them here, and what would enable them to thrive. We should all be students of that. That's what we should be listening to because that's the world we need to build.

Natasha Rainey:

No, I love that. I think a running thread throughout this whole conversation for me, what I'm taking away from it is that learner mindset. It's just being open to growing and to knowing that you don't have all the answers, and there's always more to learn, more to do. So yeah, I mean, I'm so much enjoying our conversation, Jennifer. This is amazing. I could literally talk to you for hours, honestly.

Jennifer Brown:

I know. This is so fun.

Natasha Rainey:

I know, but we are short on time. So what I would love to hear from you is, just before you do leave us, one piece of parting advice for the leaders out there that are aspiring to be better learners.

Jennifer Brown:

What a great question. Well, better learners. Well, it's checking your certainty about things, the openness and the seeking of ambiguity because things are on a continuum. They're not binaries, just like we're learning about gender identity, not a binary. I think it's resisting the right and the wrong that this world is pushing us into and pushing us away from each other. If you can hold space for ... I think of it like bridge, living on bridge and connecting world, connecting sides, enabling the passage of learners and people to come together that have never come together before, connecting the dots within your own story and your own diversity dimensions, and all the contradictions that make us who we are. Those of us who can hold the learner mindset I think will really thrive in this world as it's developing because we have to know the right questions and not necessarily the right answers.

I think you made the point earlier, bringing people around us and surrounding ourselves strategically with as many different lived identities as we can and ensuring that we know ... at every moment, you should always be aware of, "Where am I in a given system? What is easier for me, harder for others? What is harder for me, easier for others?" Then choosing your approach from there and shifting whatever system you're in, shifting it forward. I think that that's going to look different depending on the day and what we're thinking about, what's top of mind, what feels like it needs to be healed in us in terms of celebrating all of our identities and really bringing those out so that other people can learn from us, so that other people can be changed by us. But it is also how can we then bring others' identities to the fore instead of ours and step back and center others?

How can we use our platform to do that on a daily basis too, and understand where am I really needed as a change agent and as a voice, and when our other voice is needed? Really being flexible and toggling back and forth between that. I could say more, but just I think if we begin to understand our world in that way, then I think we will constantly be learning because we'll constantly be questioning, "Where can I be most valuable? Where can I be of service?" That ultimately is the question I sit with all day every day.

Natasha Rainey:

No, that's fantastic. No, honestly, Jennifer, thank you so much for sitting down with me today.

Jennifer Brown:

Absolutely.

Natasha Rainey:

I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.

Jennifer Brown:

Hi, this is Jennifer. Did you know that we offer a full transcript of every podcast episode on my website over JenniferBrownSpeaks.com? You can also subscribe so that you get notified every time a new episode goes live. Head over there now to read my latest thoughts on diversity, inclusion and the future of work, and discover how we can all be champions of change by bringing our collective voices together and standing up for ourselves and each other.

Doug Foresta:

You've been listening to The Will to Change: Uncovering True Stories of Diversity and Inclusion with Jennifer Brown. If you've enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. To learn more about Jennifer Brown, visit JenniferBrownSpeaks.com. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next time with a new episode.