How does being an equity-centered leader sound to you?
In this age there is a lot of talk (an therefore a lot of confusion!) about the relationship between DEI – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Anti-racism, Social Justice, Collective Liberation, how all of these things work together, and how to integrate them into your leadership. That’s why it’s important to have an experienced pro explain the nuances of what is behind people’s beliefs, their behaviors, and how social structures develop
To enlighten us around all things equity-centered, we welcome returning guest Trudi Lebron. Trudi is a coach and consultant for people who want to step into their leadership potential by prioritizing equity.
We also discuss how antiracism is a collection of behaviors, policies, and self-reflection. It’s hard, it’s healing, and it’s the only way to move forward.
Listen to episode 363 now!In episode 363 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:
- [7:15] One must be tuned into the social climate around imbalance of power and exploitation of people with marginalized identities.
- [20:00] Elizabeth and Trudi discuss callouts, policing, and interrogating yourself.
- [22:30] Where keeping it real goes wrong.
- [26:00] People exploring their real-life biases with discussion and practice.
- [28:45] On using shame as a teaching tool.
- [45:30] How to identify one’s privilege and how to leverage it instead of exploiting it.
- [58:00] The real nature of accountability.
- [1:09:00] Equity as social evolution and the only way to run a sustainable operation.
Resources mentioned by Trudi and Elizabeth in the episode:
- Check out Trudi’s Equity Centered Coaching Certification
- Embodiment Specialist Training
- Check out The Embodied Living Center.
- Email us with questions or feedback.
- Don’t miss an episode of The Embodied Podcast.
Quote from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:
- “You’re not antiracist because you think racism is bad.” – Trudi Lebron
- “If we’re going to affect people’s lives, if we’re going to create a world that is more equitable, then we have to understand the ways that it’s inequitable, and that can’t be taken away from identity.” – Trudi Lebron
- “There will not actually be any real healing, real transformation, real change if we don’t also let people heal what’s under, under, under, under.” – Trudi Lebron
How was this episode for you?
Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!
About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto
Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.
If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.
Transcripts for Episode 363:
– What’s up, everybody? Welcome to episode number 363 of “The EMBODIED Podcast.” I’m your host Elizabeth DiAlto. And we’ve got another one of my nearest and dearest with us today on the show. She is a repeat guest and she is Ms. Trudi Lebron. Trudi helps coaches specifically and leaders integrate anti-racism and DEI into their businesses, into their practices, into their organizations in so many different ways, on so many different levels. Trudi is someone who I am so blessed to call a dear friend, a peer, and a colleague. I have learned so much just from having Trudi in my life over the years. She is one of my go-to people to run my own education analysis, processing, and integration of these things in my business by. And in this episode today, we talk about a lot of that, as well as Trudi’s new certification program for coaches and leaders. You can find out more about that at untameyourself.com/Trudi if that’s something you might like to add to your professional development in 2022. You can also get the show notes for this episode at untameyourself.com/363. And even if you don’t work in this industry or what you do is not even tangentially related, there’s just some really great stuff in this episode around why these topics are important and how they can be integrated into our lives and not just our businesses and whatever we do professionally. So have a listen if those things are important to you, share it up, let me know what you think. And I will see you soon. All right, Trudi! You’re back.
– What’s up? Yeah.
– So excited. We’ve come such a long way since the first interview.
– Yeah, it wasn’t a long time ago.
– It was a long, I don’t remember. It was probably like 2019 maybe.
– I Think so.
– We’re super close now.
– I know, besties. Yeah, that was right soon after we met.
– Yeah. So we have been running a mastermind together this year, which has been really fun. I think we’ll talk about that a little bit. But before we dive into stuff, ’cause I could just, you know me, I can get off to the races with you. My opening question for everyone this season, this fall into winter season is how is your body? How’re you feelin’?
– I’m feeling.
– Oh, no. Damn, I lied. How’s your heart? That’s what I’ve been asking people.
– Oh, my heart. My heart is, oh, man, conflicted, I think. Conflicted because I feel good, things in my life are good, but so much of, especially the work I do, requires me to be tapped into so many other things. And there’s a lot of things that I would change if I could. And there’s still a lot of pain and a lot of grief and a lot of loss. And so holding space for all of that and the good things that are also happening, that’s a nuanced place to be.
– It’s the paradox. Something I’ve been saying for months now, I was like, I don’t have pandemic fatigue. I have paradox fatigue. Holding the full spectrum of everything I feel, everything I see. And like you’re saying, good things, awful things. And I’ve had a couple of really hard months this year, but comparatively to other people, my heart is like a walk in the park, but I don’t want to invalidate my heart.
– Right.
– There’s just so much.
– Yeah.
– So actually this is a cool thread, I don’t know that I’ve ever asked anyone this, and you would be a great person. So first of all, for anyone listening, if this is their first time meeting you or encountering yo, just describe your work. Not elevator pitch, but just let people know what you do, so they have context.
– Yeah, so I am a coach and a consultant for folks who wanna do, who wanna grow their business and step into their leadership and really prioritize equity and anti-racism. So I’m a business coach and a leadership coach for folks who have those kinds of commitments who really wanna be centering equity and finding new ways to do things better.
– Cool. Now, and here’s the thing, people. We’ve said this before with other guests. If you wanna know what equity means, if you wanna know what inclusion means, diversity, anti-racism, these terms, these are so easily googleable. I’m not gon waste our esteemed guest’s time giving you the basic 101 stuff. So please look that stuff up if those are new terms to you, if you’re like, what does she mean by that? Please, please look it up. So your work, as you’re saying, requires you to be tapped into a lot of things. How specifically would you categorize those things? Like what can you not not pay attention to? What must you be tuned into?
– Yeah, so I have to be tuned into our social climate, particularly around issues related to race, imbalance of power, exploitation of people who hold marginalized identities. Perfect example of this was literally just before we got on this call, I was reading a letter that an anonymous group up at the University of, UMass Amherst wrote and sent to a bunch of student groups that were Black student groups. And this letter is just filled with hate. And basically telling them that they got there, not out of their intelligence, but out of a diversity thing, and just really horrible.
– Is that a helicopter?
– I think that was a helicopter. Very low. Oh, my god.
– So Caroline will edit out that helicopter moment. So you were saying these students got this letter, it’s not about their intelligence, it’s a diversity requirement, something like that. So we’ll pick it back up.
– And at the end of the letter, at the end of the letter, it tells them that they should all sterilize themselves and do the human race a favor.
– Get the fuck out of here.
– Yes. And of course it’s like we’re sending this from a private account so that we don’t encounter any bias or discrimination based on our views. Like just horrible. Now it’s not everybody’s profession to go and seek that kind of information out and read it multiple times and analyze it and think about it, right? Those are the things that I can not understand.
– Yeah, so social climate. Things related to race and balances of power. Anything else? I mean, there’s so many social issues. What else can you not ignore?
– I can’t ignore how business treats people. My work intersects exactly with business. How equity, diversity interests in all these things, intersect with business, and particularly coaching. The world of coaching, personal development, spirituality, anything having to do with growth. So of course I’m also paying really close attention to business practices, things that are being taught to people, things that are being said, marketing trends, whatever that are either misusing diversity, equity and inclusion as like these kinda hot terms or engaging in spiritual bypassing or teaching things that are harmful. And so I have to be paying attention to those things, partly because there’s a lot of folks who look to me, and now my team to kind of explain why those things are messed up. A lot of times people will be like, “Ooh, this feels gross, but I don’t have the words to describe it.” And so we do a lot of that kind of translating for people.
– That’s a really great way of putting it. I learned so much from you in that realm, ’cause I am so empathic. It’s like this obviously is disgusting. And I get the general idea, but I’m sure there’s more things below the surface here that I’m not understanding, or I don’t have context for. So in that vein, I was just thinking about this this morning. In the post, I’m just gonna call this the post-George Floyd world, even though it’s the post so many more things than that. One of the things I’ve noticed in, I’m gonna put air quotes around our industry, our overlapping intersecting industries, is the number of people of color who have decided now that they’re gonna do DEI or anti-racism work, but have no training in it, other than their life experience, which their life experience is important and valid. So this is like having someone like you in my life who is so, this is what you did. Like master’s program, working in nonprofits, working in schools, in different capacities, in different industries, in different contexts, you live and breathe this, right? This is what you do. And I have other friends who say like, that’s what, again, master’s degrees, PhDs, and that to academia is everything. We know that. But the lived experience, working in groups, facilitating just a breadth of levels and layers of experience. And I think it’s valid that people feel called like, man, maybe this is my purpose. But I’m curious, ’cause I see that being so harmful and so dangerous, ’cause then there’s also the intersection of all the unhealed trauma that’s coming through the teaching, the facilitation, and it’s so urgent, right? It’s so urgent. So it’s just like a cocktail for ineffective or harmful. I’m just curious how you feel around all that, because from a healing perspective, I look at stuff sometimes and I’m like, this is not gonna get the desired outcome. And at the same time, from like the higher spiritual perspective, I’m like, whatever choices people are making are the right choices. Or they wouldn’t be making them, for them. We can’t control that, but we can objectively zoom out on things and look at it and be like, ah, not the best approach.
– Right, yeah. I think about this one a lot. And I’ve talked to a lot of people about this to kinda gauge what they think and why some of them have made the choices that they’ve made. And I think there’s certainly a group of folks, people of color and White folks, right? Like straight up, who saw an opportunity post-George Floyd to really kind of exploit this market, right? And that’s just gross.
– Well, and that’s the thing, right? There really are some people who are just straight up exploiting it.
– Right, and the way that I define that as like, people slap the words on their website. They’ll start calling themselves anti-racist or they use the language of justice and equity. They’ll put a statement on their website. They’ll have a meeting or a workshop or whatever, but they actually haven’t done any work on themselves or inside the business, their own business to assess and to confront how they’re upholding systems of oppression and whiteness and replicating it in their business internally. But externally they’re just like, oh, like we’re anti-racist.
– They’re saying the right things. They’re regurgitating all the stuff they’re supposed to be saying.
– And sometimes they don’t even realize it, because they don’t know. That’s how little they understand. Is that think that anti-racism is an ideology or like a mindset or a belief system. They think it’s a value set instead of a whole host of actual behaviors and policies and practices and self-reflection and all of these things that really go along with this ideological value of anti-racism. You’re just not anti-racism because you think that racism is bad. Like that’s not, that’s not enough. You don’t meet the standard. You know what I mean? So that’s one set of people. And then there’s another set of people who have been doing their work in their industry, whether they’re an accountant or whether they are a coach of any kind. And all of a sudden White folks are reaching out to them to ask them to talk about race. And so they were kind of thrust into this space. I’ve had a lot of colleagues who have come to me and be like, “I don’t talk about this. But that’s what people are asking me to talk about. I’ve been at this for years trying to get a platform. And so if that’s the way to get in front of people so I can introduce my work and have to talk about my identity, I feel like that’s the opportunity I have to take.” And I can’t hate on anybody for that.
– No. Let’s talk about that. This identity obsession. And I wanna give context to it because you’re one of my people. We’re all out here doing our best. We all make mistakes here and there. Occasionally we get called in. Occasionally get called out. In the last couple of, I wanna say last year-ish, I’ve had like two major instances where people, I’m gonna put in an air quotes, came for me, who didn’t know me. Didn’t know my track record. Didn’t know anything about me. Didn’t know my identity, that I’m a mixed race, multiethnic person, that I’m not a full white, to use my term that I’ve coined. And you’ve officially coined for me. ‘Cause you said you used it in your frickin’ book, which is hilarious. By the way, anyone with any kind of non-White identity cracks up when I say full white, ’cause they get it.
– Yeah.
– A lot of white people bristle ’cause they don’t wanna be labeled, ’cause they’re not used to getting labeled. But, and what’s interesting is the way that some people have talked to me when they perceive that I’ve done some kind of harm or made a transgression if they’re reading me as White.
– Yes.
– Which this is a story, I’m ethically ambiguous. But my last name, you know what I have noticed? Interestingly, over the last few years, I’ve never read as White more than in the last few years, because more people are reading for identity and they’re basing it on things like your, which is, so my last name is Italian. But in real life, like the number one question of my life is what are you? People can never place me. But all these new people, and it’s only White people that do this.
– Oh yeah, this is a totally White people thing.
– It’s only White people that read me as White based on what? And listen, anyone could be married, even someone’s, I’m gonna put it in air quotes, ethnic last name could be by married. Like, you don’t know. So it just shows how like culturally incompetent some people are, but the piece, I mean, so that’s just ignorant. You don’t know what you don’t know, fine, but what I find to be disgusting and I’m actually gonna use the word disgusting, is the way some people will be so nasty to me if they’re reading me as White. And I’m not out here touting, like I don’t need people to be nice to me. So I’m not out here touting, but I had a friend of ours actually corrected, so let someone on a post like, do you realize you’re speaking to a woman of color? And this woman who had been acting like an absolute animal towards me started groveling. And it was so gross, because it was like, so you felt like it was okay to talk to me like that if I was White, but now that you know I’m not, you’re apology, like your approach fuckin’ sucked no matter what, like this identity obsession. And I really notice this more with White people. White women especially, ’cause I mostly know other women, the way they come for each other is so gross to me. But beyond gross in terms of just like inhumane treatment, my bigger beef is it is ineffective. It is not achieving or accomplishing anything in the longterm. So I kinda just went off, ’cause I hate that shit. Feel free to take it wherever you wanna take it.
– I mean, I hate that shit too. It makes me so angry, but I think what we’re witnessing, right? And this is a theory, but I think what we’re witnessing is actually the true nature of White folks when they do that, right? I think that if they felt like they could speak to women of color that way, Black women that way, that they absolutely would. And we see evidence of that across history. Now what we have right now is, and obviously I’m speaking generally, like obviously I don’t think that people are just talking to each other, everybody’s just talking to each other this way. But in moments of anger, I think that that there is an entitlement that’s like, I can speak to people in the nastiest ways however I want without repercussion. We are in a social climate right now where we accept, for the most part, most quote/unquote good people, right? Agree that we shouldn’t talk to women of color, especially Black women that way. And so they don’t wanna be caught. It’s not that they don’t want to do it, it’s that they don’t wanna be caught out. You know what I mean? I think that there is, I honestly think that that’s something to face. And I think that there is a lot of unpacking that people have to do around, why is that your reaction? Why do you feel the need to police other people’s, ’cause that’s where it comes up, right? It mostly comes up when someone wants to tell you the ways that you are wrong and they want you to behave the way that they believe that you should behave. They’re policing your language, they’re policing your behavior. I think people need to interrogate that part of themselves.
– Big time, right? ‘Cause there’s a way, like I’ve been doing this for years. There’s a way to just give people a heads up. Like, hey, I learned that this is actually super offensive. Or I learned that this is really inappropriate. Or I’m not a teacher of this, but I can give you resources. Let me know if you want help, if you wanna look at this. There’s a way to invite people without fuckin’ castrating and just being the most gross part, like I’m just astounded at people’s willingness to be so gross to each other.
– Yeah, it’s gross. And seeing, obviously no one’s talking to their friends that way, we’re not talking to, but we see videos all the time of like someone having a meltdown at a grocery store, for example, right? And it’s typically White women, like even melting down on other White folks, are melting down on Black and Brown folks. They get to this level of heightened anger where they lose it and they just feel like they can do whatever. And they know that their identity protects them from severe consequences.
– Consciously or unconsciously, they know that.
– Right, no, and I think typically unconsciously for the most part, I think when it’s conscious, you can hear it, ’cause they’ll use it, right? Like in the lady walking her dog at the park who was like, “I’m gonna call the police. I know that’s hell.” And the Black man is like, that was a very conscious statement. You know exactly what you’re saying.
– Yup, yup, and then I wanna talk about on the other of this too. Because again, just like the overall identity obsession and distilling whole ass people down to their identity, I always refer to the statement as, comes from a Dave Chappelle skit. This is like when keeping it real goes wrong. It’s like people want to be more conscious and aware. So it’s almost like we’ve swung the pendulum, I remember in the 90s, not seeing color was the thing.
– Oh yeah. Definitely
– Even like those lyrics were in Vogue songs sang by Black women, right? Be colorblind, right? I remember Overton, in an episode of “Living Single,” I think his hat said colorblind. That was a flavor of liberation in the moment. Now it’s like, no, we can’t erase people’s identities, but it’s like we’ve swung to, let’s reduce people to their identities.
– Yeah, it is like a overcorrection in, like an inaccurate overcorrection in some ways.
– Yeah.
– In the 90s, and definitely in the 80s, I remember being a really young student in school and being told not to see color. And that everybody is the same. And I think that that came from the desire to all be equal, right? Like we’re all, you treat everyone the same. Everyone’s the same, we’re all just human. And we tried that. And what we found, right? What we found is a few things. So one is that that doesn’t allow people to actually address the ways that systemic and cultural racism, right. The way that we are raised and what we see on TV, how those things create this internalized bias that pops up individually, right? And socially and then the other thing that we’ve learned is that we can try all we want to talk about being equal and being the same, but when we look at the facts, when we look at the data, Black and Brown folks’ life outcomes are vastly different. So we can’t ignore that, right? You can’t say we’re all the same. And then like, let’s if we take a high school, we can’t say, oh, we’re all the same. It just so happens that by accident, all of the Black and Brown kids are on the bottom half of the class list, the class ranking, right? That’s just by chance, right? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s clear clearly that that is a systemic issue ’cause there’s no reason that it would break it down that way by accident, right? Just naturally that wouldn’t occur.
– No.
– It has to be because of our biased policies, the way we treat people, the way we classify people, and it’s happening unconsciously. And so now we know that, oh, the only way to actually get at any of that is to become conscious. Not that we don’t see color, but to really see it and to start to understand it and to understand that if we’re gonna affect people’s lives, if we’re gonna create a world that is more equitable, then we have to understand the ways that it’s inequitable and that can’t be taken away from identity.
– Right, yeah, what do you see, so I know you have so many amazing programs and trainings and in a little while, I wanna talk about your new coaching certification, because I’m pumped for that. And are you calling it a coaching certification or no?
– It is. Yeah. And we can, yeah, I am.
– Okay I just wanna make sure.
– We can talk about water too yeah, yeah.
– Great. Yeah, we will. We’ll come back to that. But how do you help people not do this extreme ineffective shit?
– Yeah, so we focus on a couple of things. So instead of just talking about the ideology, which is, in my former career, when I was a consultant for other institutions being sent all the way, all over the East Coast to facilitate trainings and things like that, a lot of that work was about going into schools, going into non-profits or businesses and talking about the history of racism and getting people to understand that racism is bad and that diversity is important. And that’s not effective in creating change. So what we do is we actually, of course, we wanna give people the context about history, but we make it really personal. So we take people through a personal journey of exploring their own identity and starting to confront the ways that they hold bias. Not if they hold bias, because everyone does.
– Yeah.
– Not just White folks. All folks hold bias. We can all internalize whiteness. We can all be discriminatory, right? So we have to be willing to kinda confront the ways that those things show up and what we’ve been taught in our life through, again, through TV, through our families, what are we holding onto? What are we producing, because what are we reproducing? Because we were taught that that is the standard, like the status quo. And that that’s what success looks like. And that’s what it looks like to make it. How are we reproducing these things? And then once people kinda go through a bit of a personal journey and a social journey, ’cause people are doing the work both individually and in groups, they’re practicing talking about it with each other, and holding space for each other, right? Crying in front of each other, talking about some of the most uncomfortable things. Some of the things that we have been taught not to talk about and not to see, practicing saying those things in front of other people. And then for other people, holding the space for someone to have their moment, that alone is transformational, just that.
– Well, ’cause it’s healing.
– It is. It’s deeply healing.
– One of the reasons why we formed our mastermind this year, which is called “Invited Impact.” We’re not gonna do it again next year, but we’re gonna do immersions for people at some point or another, which will be super fun. But Trudi and I are both so passionate about people have to go on these journeys. People have to unpack their own stuff. And so much of this work, when I say work, I mean like social justice, anti-racism, et cetera. I see people using shame as teaching tools.
– Yeah.
– And also really wanting to invalidate White people’s experiences. And it’s fascinating because there’s like these mixed messages, right? That’s like, White people, you need to collect your cousins. You need to gather your own. You need to handle your shit. But then also it’s like, and you don’t get to have feelings about it. You need to suck it up. All spaces are safe for you. Everyone has trauma and no one’s trauma, trauma and shame are gonna be intricately interconnected regardless of where it comes from or what the root of it is. So there will not actually be any real healing, real transformation, real change, if we don’t also let people heal what’s under, under, under, under. So that’s one of the reasons why Trudi and I teamed up, ’cause it was like, cool. You do your thing. I will handle the emotional experience. The trauma, I will help people process shit as we go through the year in our mastermind. And it’s actually been so, we were like, let’s see how this goes. It’s been so amazing.
– It’s been so amazing.
– Like the way our people are showing up, the stuff that they’re doing, and the way they feel and just the greater ease, because there’s space for their emotional experiences, there’s space to face things. There’s the ability to be witnessed without just knowing that no one’s going to be like, what the fuck is wrong? Like, you shouldn’t feel that way. Don’t bring your emo, like.
– Yeah, absolutely.
– So I know you all do that on a level as well, like you’re just saying in your programs, which I just, I cannot root for that. I cannot praise that. Be excited, promote that enough.
– Yeah, we actually won’t work with people unless they’re willing to do that kind of stuff. Like we don’t take clients who just want us to come in and facilitate the workshop or help them write a DEI statement or anything like that. They really have to go through this journey that is part personal and then also part strategic, right? So once people, or as people are going along that journey, we start to introduce concepts related to building practices and policies and procedures and people’s businesses, and people’s coaching practices that are culturally responsive and trauma-informed, and really honor the relationship between business, entrepreneur, and client, instead of having only policies and procedures that protect the business, right? So we look at a contract, every contract that I get sent, I’m looking at and revising, ’cause I’m like, we can’t have this language in here. We have to switch it up in this way, because it needs to be really equitable. But lawyers, when you hire a lawyer, they’re doing work in your best interest and not in a joint best interests, not in a collective best interest. So when people go through our programs, we’re working with them to start to think through how do I build a company that is both profitable, successful, aligned with my values and my commitments, and also can the hold space for a wide diversity of clients and identities and also raise or deepen my own skill to be able to deliver what I do. You know what started to get to me a couple of years ago, was that I noticed that all these people were promoting coaching business programs, like build a coaching practice, build a six-figure coaching practice, blah-blah-blah, all this stuff. And people would join with no experience in coaching or very little experience in coaching. And they would learn sales and marketing and never learn how to be a coach. And they would pick up some skill here and there, but not engaged in like a real deep coaching practice, right? If you’re a doctor and you run your own company, like your own practice, you are both an entrepreneur, ’cause you’re running your practice, like the business of it. But you’re also a doctor that has to read the research on medicine and take accountability on these standards and ethics and continue to go to professional development around your medical training, right? You have to do both. And I believe that coaching should be the same thing. If you’re a coach, yes. You need to know how to run your business and grow your business, but you can’t forget that you are also a coach. Like how are you continuing to deepen your practice, your skill around coaching? And that is a severe deficit in the industry that we are trying to rectify.
– Yeah. Mastery of craft. I’ve been putting together my new EMBODIMENT Specialist Training. And one of the things, I was looking around at some trainings, ’cause they’re the same, right? You gotta look around the industry and be like, what are people offering? What’s going on out there? And I don’t look at stuff like that. I was actually, I was on a date last year and this man asked me, “Who are your competitors?” And my brain short circuited, ’cause I just don’t even think about competing with people. I was like,” I dunno. I’m not out here competing with people. I’m out here just doing my thing. They’re doing their thing. I’m not for everyone.” It was such a weird thing, But it is just important to be like, well, what are people’s expectations or what are people wanting? What do I need to speak to be clear about what my training is and how my training might be different from something else? And one of the things I did this round was I just made a video. I was like, “Yo, this isn’t a sales page. I’m not selling you into my training. I’m informing you. I’m letting you know what the opportunity is. I’m letting you know what kind of person you might be able to be, what you might be able to do in your career after this training.” ‘Cause I really only want people here who wanna be here. ‘Cause this is like, this is craft mastery. I’m calling it an EMBODIMENT Specialist for a reason. When you’re done with this, you’re gonna be able to say you specialize in something. I thought of that, ’cause like what you were saying about doctors, right? You could be a general practitioner, but it’s like if you wanna have mastery in something, right? And I think you and I, we were on a call recently where I was sharing with you how I saw it in this group, someone was like, “Oh, what do you all think should be the next course I should create?
– Oh yeah.
– And me, Debbie Downer is like, “Well, what are you an actual expert in?” People are like, what about this? What about this? I think people really want this. I’m like, “Okay, but what are your skills? What is your training?”
– It’s like the obvious thing though, right? You shouldn’t be teaching a course that you don’t have a level of mastery over any way.
– But that’s not what people are packaging and selling. People are packaging and selling launch a course in 60 days, make money online, God.
– People need to just investigate better the teachers that they hire, because there’s too much of this like, oh, I did this thing one time. Let me teach people how to do it the exact same way. Not realizing that the way you came about your success is not necessarily something that is repeatable and applicable to everyone. It’s just so wild that it’s just like, oh, do that.
– All the factors that go into why that worked for you.
– I know.
– This reminds me of, over the years I’ve had so, so many clients who have done a lot, a lot of therapy. And then when they come to me and we’re doing like embodiment work, energy work and deeper healing work, and emotional processing, they’re like, “Wow. I did therapy for years and I’ve been doing this for like a couple of months and I feel so much better.” And I’m like, “But who’s to say that you weren’t totally available and ready for this because of all the therapy? Who cares how long the therapy took and that this is working for you faster? We’ll literally never be able to measure the impact that therapy had and how that’s contributing to the result you’re getting with this, right?
– Yeah.
– So I can’t be out here being like, this works better than therapy. I could just be like, yeah. Some people really get quick results, because they’ve been doing other kind, like, we don’t know, we can’t measure that.
– Right. Totally.
– What do you find is the correlation to that in your work, right? For me, like if therapy is to embodiment, healing and energy work, what do you notice? People who can really take to what you do quickly and actually just really run with it? Is there any correlation or other things that they’ve done that have kind of prepped them, primed them for that?
– Yeah, I think there are people who, whoa, do you hear that?
– Yeah.
– We’re having a major thunderstorm here. I love thunderstorms, that’s why, but if the power goes out, that’s why.
– Stay with us.
– So yeah, that’s true. So I think people who come to us who have a quicker time, like grasping the concepts and applying the concepts, are people who have some background in justice work. Like they’re activists, maybe they’ve done social work in undergrad, or have a master’s in social work. People who worked in nonprofits. They grasp on the concepts quicker and the process quicker. It’s harder for them to adjust some of their mindset stuff around like money and business and sale, ’cause there’s just a lot of things there. So yeah, people who have like a human, like who are really tapped in to social work and human services do really well.
– Something else you and I have talked about, both being from the Northeast, the New York tri-state area, something that has shocked me in my journey of doing this work and integrating is there were some unconscious biases I had that were more in the positive direction. ‘Cause it was like, I’ve just grown up around in multicultural environments.
– Right.
– Like I was used to being around people, used to being around other cultures. And something I literally had no awareness about was that some people’s biases about Black and Brown folks literally only comes from like TV movies and like books and stuff.
– Absolutely.
– I just never in my life could fathom not having people around. And it was like, what is wrong with you? You know how many people have only ever lived in bubbles of people who look like them?
– Yeah, I think that struck me actually not until I was an adult. Not until I was, meeting people in college who had never, who weren’t acclimated to being in a city. And when it really hit me was when I started to dive into the coaching industry and meeting so many people who were just so kind of touched with even any conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion. ‘Cause I have been doing this work for years and years and years and years. And then I’m meeting people who didn’t go to school with any people of color. And then it’s like, whoa, you know that that happens, but it’s hard to wrap your head around.
– Do you find that people like that, do they have a steeper, tougher learning curve? I like to always think of, when I make generalizations-
– It’s a longer journey.
– A longer journey.
– I don’t know that it’s, whether it’s harder or not depends on the individual and how open they are. We actually don’t work with people who we have to convince, you know what I mean? You can’t come into our program and be like, prove to me that racism is real. Like that’s not the work we do.
– You posted an Instagram story the other day from, you were speaking at some event. And some white dude asked you, it was like, the question was something along the lines of, okay. So for me, who already has the power, what would be the benefit of this to me?
– Right.
– He was basically, it sounded like he actually cared, but also underlying the question is, why would I bother doing this when I already have all the advantages?
– Right. Right, right.
– And I loved your answer. Could you answer that?
– Yes, so I firmly believe that white supremacy culture harms everyone, including White people, right? Including white dudes. And that is hard for people to wrap their head around when you just hear it like, oh wait, how is that possible? It seems like people who have white privilege, like they have everything and, yes. They have all kinds of privilege. That’s true. And what I believe is that, and what I continue to see is that holding that level of perception, the perception of perfection, that some people need to hold, is severely damaging. Like if you buy into the culture of whiteness as a whole, right? Which I have to be successful, I have to buy the house. I have to get the perfect heterosexual partner, you know what I mean? All of the norms, right? The mainstream identities. I have to go to college. I have to get this degree. I have to make, whatever, six-figures, buy a house and have a dog and a couple of kid. I have to do all those things. And I have to keep it all together. In this world, that is extremely difficult, right? And people walking around with that pressure, I don’t think they realize how it affects them negatively. And I think the more power people have, and this is really having to practice holding what I call like the yes and, like this super nuanced space, right? Because it’s horrible. It is hard to find compassion for people who are upholding toxic masculinity and patriarchy and racism and exploiting people. It’s hard to do that. And maybe not all of them deserve the compassion, but for some people, they are upholding that, and they are breaking down because of it.
– They are paying the fucking price.
– They are paying. I mean, there’s so much data around the suicide rates for White men and abuse happening in people’s homes and financial crisis that they’re not talking about, because they’re keeping this perception up. That shit is happening, right?
– Totally.
– Does it mean that that the impact of their actions is lessened? No, absolutely not. They should be held accountable and all of that. And we have to, if and when White folks, those White folks are willing to confront that, they could really liberate themselves from the bonds of White supremacy.
– Big time, we’ll link to it in the show notes. I interviewed my friend Jessica Fish last year. And she does a really incredible workshop on perfectionism and whiteness. It’s like divesting from perfectionism is also how we divest on whiteness and the correlations there. I went to a meeting of, I think it was White People 4 Black Lives when I lived in LA a couple of years ago. I was just talking to someone about this yesterday. And the topic of the conversation was White people’s stake in this stuff being, like letting White people see, it harms you too. And when people talk about privilege, this is, I’m curious what you think about this. I’m a little fatigued on the way people weaponize privilege as a way to get people to stop doing something or talking about something. Like, well, that’s a privilege. Okay, cool. And privilege has not been dismantled yet. So we need to be able to function with our privileges and make the best possible choices. And also white privilege is not the only fucking privilege.
– Right, and I don’t know that privilege, I think we’re making privilege this bad thing, and we don’t need to make it a bad thing. I think some people take their privilege and exploit it, and that is bad.
– Yes.
– To make that, that is bad. Privilege on its own, I think it would be a useful exercise for people to think about privilege as this neutral thing, right? As like there is privilege and everybody has, most people have some kind of privilege. And if we can identify how our privilege interacts and influences our life and the places who don’t have privilege, how that makes things harder, we can see that it’s something that everybody has to deal with. And we can teach people to not exploit their privilege and also to share and leverage their privilege, right? So for example, if I’m a dude, if I’m a white dude in a meeting. And I am aware of power dynamics and gender and all that, and I notice because I’m tapped in, I’m aware that the privilege I hold is gonna allow me to go into this meeting and be listened to just by the nature of who I am and what I look like, right? And I know that. And I also can know that there’s gonna be women and Black and Brown folks in this meeting who may be cut off, right? Who may not be listened to, who may say an idea, and someone else may say the exact same thing and present it as their own, right? So if I’m a White dude in that space and I go into that space, I can share the privilege I have to be like, oh, you just interrupted Elizabeth. Elizabeth, can you please finish your idea, because I was really interested? Or yo, she just said that five minutes ago. I think we need to go back. Like people can use their voice and the power that they hold in a space to kinda navigate and create a little bit more equity in the spaces that they share.
– And without making it about themselves, without like proper themselves as they do it. Just do it.
– Exactly. No, just like super casually, neutrally, not performing anything. Just like these small little things. But you can’t do that unless you are comfortable identifying the privilege that you hold.
– Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? ‘Cause otherwise you’re just like, oh, just me. I’m just a person. I mean, yeah, you are a person, but you also hold, you’re taking up, it’s not that that’s a good thing. We don’t like it. We wish we could erase it. And for now let’s leverage it. You know what I mean?
– Yeah.
– Until we are truly post-racial, let’s learn how to share, how to share the space that we have.
– Yeah, quick break in the show, everybody, to let you know that applications are open for my 2022 EMBODIMENT Specialist Training. I am so excited about this training. It is like seven or eight years in the making. It is expanded beyond what was Wild Soul Movement teacher training since 2016. And this is really for anybody who feels the pull to graduate from doing basic-level self-help personal development and spiritual work and truly embody self-love healing and wholeness, so they can live soulful and soul-centered lives that contribute to collective healing and liberation, as well as people who are wanting to really integrate the light and the dark, who place a high value on kindness, generosity, integrity, humility, and reverence. Who know that while we receive all kinds of gifts and talents and genius, we are the instruments, not the players. This is for people who wanna prioritize embodying their divine nature in order to serve the human experience as well for those who would like to incorporate embodiment work into their professional lives in some way, shape or form, or just deepen their own practice. So if you wanna learn more about the training, which starts in February, 2022, head to untameyourself.com/specialist. There are some dates by which to apply if you need an extended payment plan, so we have a couple of different extended payment plans. And it’s just gonna be an incredible, all chemical transformative experience. It’s gonna be a small intimate group, ’cause I will also be mentoring and working with everyone one on one throughout the 13 months of the training. So again, really deep, really beautiful, really incredible experience. If you are interested, go to untameyourself.com/specialist, and I will be so excited to receive your application if you decide to submit one. So I wanna, I also love origin stories. So I wanna know about your certification, but I wanna, and I mean, I already know some of this stuff, because we talk all the time. But tell the people, I’m always also so interested in the creative process, like the sacred work, like the work you can’t not do. So I remember you were taught, I literally remember, sometimes I remember where I was when I was talking to someone or listening to something. And I remember when these were like seeds of ideas, I was like on a walk and Marina del Rey, I think it was during the pandemic. So it was at some point last year and it was starting to bubble up that there could be a certification, that there could be like a stamp of your company creates and holds some kind of a standard on this kind of coach.
– Yes.
– Where’d that all bubble up from? Give us the creative origin immersion story. And then we wanna know all about the training as well.
– Yeah, so it came from this place actually of need. Like I saw a need. So I saw what a lot of us saw is that in 2020, people started slapping on diversity statements and whatever hashtags and stuff like that to their Instagram bio and their website, and whatever. And a lot of it being performative. And at the same, something happened that had not happened previously. I had been talking about this work, you know this, for a very long time. Specifically to coaches. I’ve been doing DEI work professionally, like as my core profession, since 2008. I started to zero in on talking about how this work needed to be adopted and kind of introduced into the coaching industry in around 2015. So I’ve been talking about it for a long time and getting frustrated that people weren’t listening as fast as I wanted them to. And then 2020 happened. And then I started to get some messages from people on the inner webs. And these messages were asking me basically to verify if other people had worked with me. So it would be like, Hey, I’m thinking about joining so-and-so’s team. I asked them about their anti-racism work. And they said that they’ve worked with you. Is that true? Could you verify that that’s true?
– Well, right, ’cause what does worked with you mean? Like went to a webinar once.
– So funny you should mention that because as it turned out, the majority of people who were using my name and other people’s name, other colleagues of mine in the industry, had taken a workshop, taken a webinar, they downloaded our webinar or attended our webinar, which is great. And is not sufficient to be like saying, oh, I’ve worked with Trudi. Like, yes, we are an equity. We’re committed to equity and anti-racism. I mean, maybe they are committed. Obviously you don’t have to work with me just to demonstrate that you’re committed, but I certainly can’t quote/unquote sign off or verify that a company, I can’t speak for a company that I don’t know. And so there was, what I started to see was a need that people wanted verification from companies. They wanted them to meet standards, right? To have these standards of practice. And those aren’t widely available, especially in the coaching industry. And then there was some brand integrity too. It’s like I don’t want people saying, oh, I’ve worked with Trudi. And they really haven’t. And they’re out here doing wild stuff, but people know that, I mean, people who do work with us are transformed. They are different. They are different people. They do their business differently. Especially for people who work with us longterm. And I’m happy to co-sign on their work vast majority of the time. So I wanted to be able to offer our clients, here. Here is a certification, right? Like some recognition that you have done this work and that you’re committed to these standards. And I did this rant yesterday on Instagram where I was saying that it’s actually, all that is true in it’s, but it’s not just about the certification, right? It’s not just about having this credential. It’s about the work that you do on the journey. So I have an academic background. I take my academic work extremely serious. So you don’t get a certification just because you come to some classes with us. You have to do this deep personal journey and then do all of this practice and technical skill-building. And then you have to demonstrate that you can do it consistently and that you can meet the quality of standards that we have in place. And then you submit to be certified. And what that basically means is that you’re committed to upholding these longterm and that you’re in a longterm relationship with us, right? So when people come and get certified, they do a year-long program, but it’s a three-year initial relationship. Because for the following two years, we’re providing ongoing professional development, right? At no further cost as part of what, that’s part of the relationship, ’cause we’re committed to people who are doing this practice. And it’s an accountability measure, because if you have our certificate, if you are certified, and you have like a little badge that says on your website that you’re certified, if you do something wrong or make a mistake, there’s a set of procedures to repair harm. And people can kind of say, oh, hey, we saw this thing. Like a red flag, people can submit to us to say this thing was out of integrity or this thing happened. And we can step in, not to penalize people, but to support people, ’cause part of being in a practice means that you’re gonna make mistakes. And so then you get support to be able to repair and restore relationships. So it’s not just about having these badges. It’s about how you do your work and elevating. I have always been so committed to elevating the practice of coaching. And this is how we can best support with my skill and our team’s skill and education. This is how we can contribute.
– I love this because there’s so much, I’m actually, it’s so funny. You can’t make this shit up, right? I look up and my eyes catch Adrienne Maree Brown’s, “We Will Not Cancel Us” on my shelf. As I was about to say, people wanna be like, fuck coaching, fuck coaches. But no. Coaching is an amazing thing. If you’ve ever worked with a really great coach, there you go. People who are listening, Trudi, literally within arm’s reach, had her copy of “We Will Not Cancel Us,” right? Because cancel culture also doesn’t solve shit. That’s a traumatized response to people being so tired of folks not having to face consequences for their shitty actions.
– Right.
– Right? We don’t need to be canceling people. We literally actually need to be having some consequences. And like you’re saying, supporting people through being accountability, being accountable, right? And people wanna talk about holding others, like for most of us, it’s not our job to hold people accountable, because we don’t even know the depth of what the fuck they need to be accountable to, like we just need so much more restorative and reparative practice.
– Absolutely, my position is that you shouldn’t be holding people accountable to anything that they haven’t agreed to. Right, like for real. Like for example, why would we try to hold our former president to a standard when we consistently see, or to one set of standards when we consistently see that they have no interest in that, right? So now this is why, and sometimes I don’t really get into the canceling. I will go in on Instagram and talk about people who have made big mistakes and break things down and expressing frustration, and all of that and-
– Which is different, that’s analysis. That is analysis. And that is very important. Keep going.
– Yes, absolutely. It’s 100% true. But that comes from, and I don’t shame people for being like, oh, going for this person or that person, when that person has said many occasions that they are about one thing, and then they do something that is different, right? So they have made public commitment or built a whole brand around one set of values. And now they’re clearly doing something else, call ’em out. You know what I mean?
– Yeah.
– Call ’em out. But if we have no reason to think that that person would behave that way in the first place, it’s a waste of time, I think. So I don’t agree, I don’t get into this like hold people accountable, unless there is a relationship or they have previously indicated that they want to be accountable to those things. So that’s number one. And then accountability is also subjective, depending on who you’re talking to. Like what it looks like, what it doesn’t look like, what people want as an outcome. People throw accountability around and I am just convinced that half the time people don’t know what it actually means or what a process of holding someone accountable means.
– What if there’s a process? This is my other thing. Especially on social media. I had someone come for me around something recently. And she really spiraled out and lost it. And kind of launched this whole narrative, like literally just fabricated a whole story in her Instagram stories about me, because I didn’t respond to her comment fast enough. I literally, I had calls. This is the other thing that I think is so, I hate to use the all-encompassing problematic word, but I’ll use it. People, like honestly, people who really understand and who have done their own work are never gonna try to hold people to being accountable in five minutes, because they know that’s not how it works.
– That’s not how accountability works. No.
– And I think this is it. I think all the ways people reveal how much work they haven’t done and how they’re like calling people in, out or whatever, and the demands they’re making, if you knew how any of this worked, you wouldn’t be doing that.
– Right. Yeah.
– If you had transformed yourself at all, you would not be trying to force-feed people to do things that are not transformative actions or behaviors.
– And there’s so much capitalism wrapped up in even that, right? This like desire to, ’cause people know that that stuff will catch on and be viral, and people will share it. And people like the hype. But what is kind of sickening about it, especially when we’re doing well, what’s really sickening to me is that people wanna see you angry. People are subscribing to you and sharing your content and all this stuff, because it’s almost like reality TV. It’s like they are consuming your anger, which is why, and I feel like it’s a nasty cycle. It’s a real nasty cycle.
– And the energetics of that. People don’t realize how much they’re harming themselves.
– No.
– In the process.
– The level of investment that you have to then take on, I see this all the time with accounts, right? People will have an account where they’re calling other people out all the time. And then they get invested in something that was never about them in the first place, right? They’re just calling something out that has nothing to do with them or that’s about another situation. They insert themselves so closely that they now are harmed, but they’ve created it and it’s on display. And all the Instagram people are watching. Most of ’em who are just consuming your content and not really invested in a transformation process for themselves. It’s like, what are you doing?
– They don’t realize it’s like the equivalent of walking into oncoming traffic because you created that.
– You created it.
– Yes, there was a problem. But this is like the people who are like, well, we are trying to educate you. It’s like, okay, but nobody asked.
– Right.
– It’s also not appropriate, like if we’re talking about those platforms, which is very popular in this industry, nobody asked and people should be paying people for that. People should be seeking out people that resonate or holding onto like, no one asked you to hold space for this today. You decided it was your duty. And then now you’re flipping out, because you’re not being recognized, compensated, listened to for shit that nobody asked you to do.
– Right, that’s why you will never see me going back and forth in comment. Sometimes I get sloppy, and I’ll like whatever. But it’s never with the expectation of being like, I have to educate all these people in the comments and someone needs to Venmo me, whatever. You will never see that, right? You’ll never see me shaming people into joining a program or anything like that. Even though I am an educator on those platforms, I’ll go on Instagram and I’ll go live and I’ll break down things and I’ll teach and I’ll share. I like to. I enjoy it. It invites people into our world. We have a great community there. Whether or not people join our programs or whatever, there is a great community of people who are learning and they message, and I’m there for all of that. But I can’t do that with the ex, the second that it turns into an expectation is when I need to leave, right? ‘Cause it’s just not, it’s not healthy. And those aren’t platforms, and the same thing with like, I mean, I feel a little bit about this with pages that are shut down and people get so upset about pages being shut down, and this doesn’t apply to everybody, but in some instances it’s like, you don’t own it. If you don’t own these platforms, and I’m not saying it’s right that they have the ability to shut you down. I believe that is censorship. And, yes, absolutely. And I think we have to be realistic about our own power and what is likely to happen. I feel like that’s.
– There’s entitlement and there’s expectations
– Yeah. Exactly.
– Around how things should be. But we know they’re not that way.
– Right.
– This is something I get really caught up on because people waste so much of the precious life force, their energy, their time, effort and, like we could be creating so much more healing, growth, transformation by just staying in our fuckin’ lane. So I love to remind people, mind your business.
– Yeah.
– And this stuff is not your business.
– I wanna make sure to name though, ’cause later on, I’m gonna do some writing about this, because I got a comment yesterday on Instagram from someone who saw me speak at an event. And I get this compliment a lot and it makes me cringe every time I get it. It’ll be like a thank you, like thank you so much for coming and sharing and breaking down these things in a non-angry way, right? Like my nature, and also my experience allows me to do my work with a level of emotional neutrality in the delivery. Don’t get it wrong. I’m pissed off that this even has to be my career.
– Right. right.
– I’d rather be producing plays. And I would have rather gone to film school. I would have rather, you know what I mean? But this is work that has to be done. You know what I mean? And so I’ll get this backhanded comment, this feedback-
– It’s like a dig on other people.
– It is. It is.
– It’s propping you up and it’s making a dig at other people.
– Right, right, and it drives me crazy, because it’s just like, look, first of all, you’re making a mistake that I am not angry, one. And you’re using other people’s anger as an excuse to not be engaged in their message. And you probably have to explore some of your own bias and internalized racism to unpack why.
– Yeah. Big time. So one of the standards that I created for myself after a couple of those funky instances online in the last year was that I no longer engage with people who were being passive aggressive, right? Like if I have to read between the lines of what the fuck you’re talking about, I’m not engaging in that. Emotional immaturity. And someone was like, oh, so now we’re tone policing? And I’m like, this is not tone policing. ‘Cause I don’t give a shit. You can call me names. You could be angry. Bring up, like, I don’t give a shit about your tone. But these like behavioral things, passive aggressive, manipulative, gaslighting, emotionally immature, I’m not engaging with that.
– Right. No, it’s a boundary.
– And No one has to.
– Exactly.
– No one has to. So, all right, we went on this tangent about like social media and stuff. I wanna come back to your certification. So what is, ’cause you already, your first cohort is happening. I know you were enrolling, at the time this goes live, your next cohort, you’re enrolling. And here’s the thing, I really want people, like if you’re a coach, if you’re someone, like most coaches are doing some kind of professional development year in and year out, right? Whether they’re joining a mastermind to grow their business, and this was one of the reasons why we did our mastermind this year. It’s like I really want people to consider that an incredible longterm sustainable strategy for your business is to do this kind of work, because honestly it might take long, but these systems actually are crumbling, right? I firmly believe like people who aren’t getting on this stuff, sure. There might always be a market for it, right? Like there’s always gonna be some like douchey, narcissistic, racist, whatever people, but the only clients left for those people are gonna be like the worst human beings that only those people wanna work with, because that’s what’s resonating. So if you actually want to have a business that you wanna be running, if you wanna work with great clients like this, I don’t think people see the direct ROI, because it’s down the road.
– It is, it’s a longterm return on investment for sure. But it is the sustainable one. Right, I think people are way to invested, I’ve been saying this, people are over-invested in business training, ’cause that’s a vast majority of these programs that people are running are, how to get my next client, how to hit six figures, how to get seven figures, how to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s all about like lead and marketing and all of that kind of stuff. And way not enough on leadership and how to manage people and how to manage yourself and justice and all these things, right? And not at all on the practice, like deepening the professional practice of someone. And so that’s the invitation that we’re making to people is come into this certification and have a holistic experience, get the leadership content, get the business support, and really prioritize your professional practice, learn how to be an effective, culturally responsive trauma-informed coach. Learn how to navigate between the roles of coach, facilitator, consultant, like really deepen your practice and you have some options and you can serve people better. Because sometimes a client comes to you and they think they want a coach, but what they could really benefit from is someone who has really strong consulting skills or facilitation skills, right? Coaching isn’t just like, let me sit down with you and teach you what I know and encourage you. There is a technical level that you can achieve, right? As a coach that means that you have like a whole bunch of skills and a whole bunch of processes and tools that you can pull out of your bag to really meet the need of the person that’s in front of you. That takes time to teach. I taught college classes on that, like how to interview and assess people and identify what their problems are, and what they needed. These are things that people learn in school, not just like your instinct, ’cause you know how to do something. Which personal experience is valid, but I’ve been talking about taking a practice to a way deeper level. So that’s what our certification is. It’s all the DEI content, all the anti-racism content, leadership, business and coaching practice. And for people who aren’t coaches, we have a leadership track that is like, so a dentists could come into our program and take the leadership track and learn about running their dental, like how to be an effective leader in whatever industry, if they’re supervising people or whatever. But we do have a lot of coaches in our audience, in our community who do focus on coaching and many people opt to do both. And then there’s like this community of other people who are doing the work with you. Do you know how isolating it is to be thinking about this stuff on your own, You need a community to do this work in community with people.
– This is one of the things that I credit my ability to integrate this stuff into my business without much trauma-drama struggle, was I had people, I had learning partners.
– Yeah.
– And then I had people like you who, this is what they do. And I could ping stuff off of you, ’cause you’re my friend, I could be like, yo, am I fucking this up? What’s going on? How would you respond to this? I have so many, I’ve at least half a dozen, probably more than that, people in my life who we were like in the trenches together, right? Even now, stuff still comes up. I’m not like done.
– Stuff always comes up. I’m not done. That’s the thing. This is not a check-the-box compliance. Like, oh, I went to the sexual harassment training this year, check, done with that.
– Yes. Yes.
– It’s not the work.
– What’s that seminar, still making inappropriate comments to everybody.
– Exactly. No.
– That’s pointless.
– Continuous development being tapped into what’s happening in the world. Being tapped into changes in language, because the goal is that we’re all at the end of all this, right? That we live in a world where we’re all free, right? Where we’re all liberated and where our life outcomes are no longer influenced by our identity, right? And we’re not gettin’ there from workshop, one two-hour webinar.
– We are not.
– This is a continuous practice. Like I’m always reading, always looking at what’s going on in the world, always pulling from other fields, education, psychology, management, like to understand how to integrate, how to integrate the learning from other industries into this. This is is ongoing personal, professional, and business development work.
– Big time, anybody who wants to learn more about Trudi’s certification, we have a special link ’cause we are a proud referral partner. And we’re not bribing you with bonuses and shit. We’re just gonna be so happy for you if you sign up and get your professional life up-leveled if you work with Trudi. So you can go to untameyourself.com/Trudi. And obviously the training is not all about Trudi, but that’s just an easy link to remember.
– Yes. Exactly, Trudi with an I.
– Trudi with an I, T-R-U-D-I. Go to untameyourself.com/Trudi if you wanna learn about the certification, if something’s calling to you about it. Honestly, if the thought of it makes you really nervous, like a little queasy in your stomach, go check it out. ‘Cause that stuff is usually like pulling you, compelling you towards something that, and again, one of the things I love about Trudi is everything is deeply transformational. This is not lip service. Like she’s saying, this is not like just checking boxes so you can feel good about yourself or so you can appear to have done the right thing. This is like really doing, like when people say do the work, this is like really doing the deep inner transformational work that’s gonna create outer results, ripple effects in your work, in your business in your world, in the world. This is the real shit. I’m so excited about this. I’m happy for you. I’m proud of you as your friend. So great.
– Thank you. It’s really exciting. And I just wanna encourage people, this is not, especially for people who are coaches in this world, this is not what you might be used to in terms of a mastermind or a group coaching program. If you’re thinking about this as something that you wanna take, we want you to treat it almost like you’re going back to school, right? We don’t want it to be an impulsive decision. If you are going to college, you would get on the phone with an enrollment person. You would check out the campus. You would get a feel for your major and what you’re gonna be learning, right? And you would plan to attend, in the upcoming semester, or like the upcoming year or whatever. It’s not the kind of thing that you need to just decide immediately, right? It’s the kind of thing that you really take seriously. And I say that because sometimes people will message me and be like, oh, I don’t wanna get on the phone and ask questions if I’m not ready. No, get on the phone, ask questions, because that is how you will become ready. Whether it’s something you wanna do now or later, we are not set up as the kind of company where our enrollment folks are being pressured to hit certain goals and no one’s gonna be manipulated or anything like that. Talk to us, let’s get to know each other. And then you make a decision, but don’t be, it’s so interesting that people are always like, oh, I don’t wanna waste anybody’s time. Trust me. It’s not a waste of time.
– No, well, even like when I was creating the application for my EMBODIMENT Specialist Training, I’m like the application alone is a transformative process. Having to sit down and answer these questions and really think about, and tap into. And that’s a service that we’re happy to provide. It’s like even that, even if you don’t end up doing this training, you’re gonna learn some shit about yourself and your goals and your dreams and what you’re available for and what you’re not just by filling out the application.
– Exactly.
– I love that. And I know your stuff is like that too. All right, mama. I love you so much. Everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed this. Share it up if you have friends that are coaches. And here’s the thing too, like we said, learning buddies. So of course you’ll make learning buddies in the program, but most birds of a feather flock together. If you’re a coach, you probably have coach friends, ’cause you’ve done certifications or you’ve done other courses, share this. Invite people to do it with you, invite people to level up, step up, like that’s a service that you could do as well.
– Absolutely. Absolutely.
– All right, everybody.
– And thank you so much for having me.
– This is episode number 363. Links to everything will be in the show notes at untameyourself.com/363. And we’ll see you later.
– Bye.