ï»żHello and welcome to the Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast. Have you ever felt that you were out of place, struggled to belong? Well, today we're joined by Dr. Priya Nalkur, the author of Stumbling Towards Inclusion, Finding Grace in Imperfect Leadership.
Dr. Priya is a Harvard and Yale educated psychologist who has traversed a long path from isolation to inclusion. Her book has many testimonials, one from Mel Robbins, check it out.
At 17 years old, Priya was a brown girl in a predominantly white Canadian town who yearned to break free from the constraints of her environment. She sought acceptance, visibility, and understanding. Now, she's inspiring others to do that and so much more.
We're your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One Branding. We're here to support business founders like you to launch a new business or a new part of your business. It's an exciting time and one that requires a lot of support and it is our intention for this podcast to be a valuable resource in your kit on your journey.
Dr. Priya, a very warm welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs and thank you so much for sharing your story with us today.
Thank you for having me. It's such an honour to be here. And I have to say, just reacting to what you shared, Vicki, it's so humbling to hear somebody else tell your story. It's something about inclusion, you immediately feel included and seen and understood just by saying, here's what I understand about you. Welcome. What a beautiful way to start.
Awww, thanks, Priya. Vicki is amazing at that, I agree. Let's start there, let's start with your story. So much of who we become is shaped by our childhood experiences, we know that. So tell us a bit about yours so that we have an idea of who you are today.
Thank you for asking. So I was born and raised in Canada in a small town outside of Ottawa, the nation's capital called Nepean, Ontario. And grew up in the 80s, there weren't many kids of colour. My parents were first generation immigrants from India. And I found myself having to deal with discrimination and racism way earlier than anyone could have prepared me for. So there was no way to anticipate it. It was just, okay, go to school. My parents were like, this is also a new land for us, we are just trying to belong and navigate and play by the rules and you're going to learn with us. So, I had a lot of formative experiences looking back. One of the experiences I write about in my book and I talk about a lot is where I was in kindergarten, we had a class picture, and the little boy in front of me named Sebastian turned to me and said, âYou're not supposed to be in this picture, you're brown and you'll ruin it.â And it was the first time I recognised that I was different. And we all have that experience developmentally when we're kids. We come to understand parts of who we are, usually because somebody else tells us. And I looked down and I was like, âYou're right. I'm not like the rest of you all.â So I stood to the side. But I had a teacher, Mrs. Haley, who found me on the side and said, âWhy aren't you coming into the picture?â And she picked me up and put me on her lap. And she turned to Sebastian and she said, isn't it great that we all get to sit together? And so to have role models like Mrs. Haley throughout my life to help me fend off those feelings of exclusion was really important to me. I had a music teacher in fifth grade, I really desperately wanted to play the trumpet. Well-meaning, white male teacher said, âYour lips are too fat to play the trumpet, you should play the piano.â It sounds so egregious today in 2024, but in 1985, that was the way of the world, at least where I was growing up. And so these things felt uncomfortable for me. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't have the language to talk about it until much later in my life when I started to study psychology and storytelling. Frankly, I started to learn about how we tell our stories and excavating my own story became clear that, okay, there's this common thread of having to overcome moments of exclusion and having to have heroes and allies who supported me and where I felt safe to ask for help and that's a constant journey. I'm 46 years old now and I still experience not the same way, but we've all experienced headwinds, tailwinds. We all know who the safe people in our lives are. I want to invite people to pay attention to who the safe people in our lives are. Can we be safe people for others too? And so it's a constant journey and it's part of the reason I call my book Stumbling Towards Inclusion, because we stumble, we fall, we get back up, we try things. Some of them work, some of them don't, with the ultimate goal of being whole people ourselves.
So much there to unpack and I guess let's start with that title of the book, Stumbling Towards Inclusion. It's a very common theme that we have in this show as well regarding resilience and everything you're talking about there is resilience on a very deep and personal level.
I studied resilience when I first started my doctorate in psychology. I was very interested in what allowed people to overcome the odds when they were so highly stacked up against them? And there's a lot, there's a lot in the research. I'm not going to unpack everything in the research, but a few things that felt very personal to me is that we get back up, we notice when we fail.
First thing is we notice when we fail, and we notice our reaction to the failure. Are we beating ourselves up? Are we using it as a possible moment to learn something about us? Are we examining and exploring an underlying belief or assumption that caused us to fail? So we can either learn from it or we can let it make us stay down, we can let it affect us. But when we learn from it, we might ask a different type of question. Okay, so next time I'm going to do something different. I'm going to make sure there's nothing in my way as I'm running across the street, right, because I tripped on that thing. So each time we learn something from it. So I call the book Stumbling Towards Inclusion because I want people to pay attention to those moments that they stumble with curiosity and grace, not with failure and punishment or shame right? Shame is part of the human experience, I'm not saying ignore it, but you're not a bad person because you tripped and you fell, that's human, it's very human. And I wanted to write a very disarming book. One thing I learned in the journey towards inclusion is people are very afraid to speak up, people are very afraid to call out injustice because they're afraid of offending someone, being called racist or sexist or homophobic or worse, they're afraid of being misunderstood and so they just keep quiet. And my invitation is to say, put down that guard, say it anyway. Start in places where you feel safe, keep experimenting, expand and give yourself a whole lot of grace because you're human.
Yeah, I think a lot of people hesitate because it's easier to stay quiet and in the background than to become perhaps a target yourself because of speaking up. I mean, it happens whenever there's any major world event. There's people who will speak up really quickly and the others who will just quietly whisper to their friend, âI can't believe this is going onâ. I love that your attitude is embracing that stumbling because I think a lot of us feel like we're not doing it right. We're not quite sure what is the right thing to say or how to say it, or is it going to have impact or am I going to sound stupid? So we just keep our mouths shut, but that doesn't help anybody, right? So I guess it's how do we open the door for everyone to feel more comfortable stumbling through? Because it's better to do that than to do nothing.
Yeah, well, I think number one is when I stumble, I want to share it with other people. I want to tell people, my gosh, I just fell and it hurt, and here's why. Because when I share it with someone else, they're almost always going to say, âOh my gosh, me too. I've done that too.â Right? Or they're going to apologise or they're going to feel something for you. And so what you're doing is you're giving permission to others to also stumble by sharing when you have stumbled. Right? And then they feel safer to say, okay, I've done it too, thanks for sharing that. I don't have to be alone in my failure or in my mistake or in my stumble.
Can we bring an example to this? Is there an example that comes to mind, Dr. Priya, that would highlight this element?
Iâm going to give you an example that seemingly has nothing to do with inclusion, but it's a very concrete, accessible, real story that happened in February to me. I'm 46 years old, I'm a runner, I love running. I've been running since fourth grade and I was at the gym running on the treadmill and I don't know what happened, but I immediately, I was running at my regular pace, six minutes into my workout and at minute seven, I was 15 feet behind my treadmill, bruised up, right? A literal stumble and there was no way to explain it. The power didn't go out, I didn't trip, I didn't even have my headphones in. There's no way to explain this, right? So I literally stumbled and then I kind of did these calculations in my head, I'm like, okay, I'm probably at that age where I don't need to be running on treadmills anymore. I can run on the road, or I can walk, or I can make some adjustments because my body is somehow more, it's easier to fall, right, at my age. Maybe the older I get, maybe I should get used to falling. Okay, fine.
But the amazing thing that happened is when I stumbled, who noticed, who came to me, and how did I react? What kind of help did I ask for? And the reactions I got, of course I'm in a gym and you make a big scene when you fall off a treadmill, right?
Yeah, I can imagine.
One person came up to me and she said, okay, I saw what happened. Check your right knee, check your left elbow. Because I was in total shock and she held my hand and she took me over to a bench and she said, stay right here I'm going to get you a cup of water. And I felt safe. I no longer felt bewildered and confused. So you have that option when you stumble to receive help and to give help. Another person came up to me as I was sitting on that bench and said, âI'm a lawyer, if you want to sue, here's my cardâ. It was amazing to me.
Unbelievable.
I can't make this up, right? So how somebody else can capitalise on your stumble, okay? The third person came up to me was the facilitator at the gym, and she came up to me and she said, can you please fill out this paperwork so that we know what happened? Like protect ourselves.
So you can offer help and reassurance. You can capitalise on someone else's stumble or you can protect yourself. So you can have so many different reactions to someone else stumbling. And I'll tell you the one that made me feel safest was the first person who brought me ice packs, who held my hand and saw what happened and was willing to share, and Iâd never met any of these people. And at the end of the day, who probably felt best about how they approached me? The person who gave the least amount of effort to just say, âHere, let me help youâ. So we can react and so it's a choice we make in a second. And then of course, there are dozens of people who saw it but didn't do anything. And so my question to anyone who's listening is, which one are you? Are you the one who falls off the treadmill? Are you the one who gets the help? Are you the one who is the lawyer? Or do you not say anything? What do you do in that moment? So there's an example, it has nothing to do, I mean, it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with inclusion, but it has everything to do with humanity. These kinds of things happen all the time.
And what comes to me here is about being kind. I think if we're just genuinely kind and tap into how we wish to treat another human, then we've pretty much gotten to the centre of inclusion.
Well, I thank you for bringing that word in because I think about the programs we teach at The Roundtable Institute. And I reflect so often at the end of the day, that all we did was we talked about kindness and we learned about that in kindergarten and primary school, but we forgot about it because for various reasons we felt excluded or we got some power from being mean to others, or we learned that that's what was required to get ahead.
And I'll even offer an extension of the word kind and it's a word that's actually taboo in corporate spaces, the word love. What we're teaching is love. And why are we so afraid to use that word at work? That's what we're doing. I understand there are boundaries around romantic love and intimate love, right? But kindness is a version of love. And if we can come into work with that mindset in the morning. I love my work, I love myself, I love my colleagues. We're going to react differently, we're just going to behave differently. That woman who helped me probably had kindness in her heart, felt some love, felt, gosh, if that happened to me, I would want someone to help me, right? Empathy, love, kindness, these are available to all of us.
And how do you bring those in to an entrepreneurial world? What thoughts do you have on how entrepreneurs who are starting their business or may well be well into their business cycle, how should they be incorporating or can they incorporate these things?
It's a great question. I think for me, kindness is as much an aspiration, a constant goal of mine, as much as it is a strategy. It's a business strategy for me. The more kind and generous I am, the more I give away, the more I get. And it's like a rule that won't break. The more I give, the more I get and so I want to give and give and give. And I know you both are like that too, right? It's just that generosity, that spirit of generosity and when you're starting out as an entrepreneur, it's scary because you don't know if you're going to have enough for yourself if you give it all away. I'm not saying give it all away, but maybe you get to that point aspirationally, that I've got so much that I can give and you have, everyone has so much to give. If you can't give money, you can't give time, you can give ideas, you can give a smile. There's so much you can give. So that's one way to incorporate these concepts into your entrepreneurial journey.
But also, in all of our products and services, the foundation of them is kindness. Are we delivering our services with kindness? When we facilitate, are we kind to each other? One of our company values is spirit, which means can you bring your own spirit to the work? I do it my way, but you might have a completely different way of doing it and because we're so different, we get to learn from each other and we get to offer more to our clients, right? There's that offer, generosity and kindness again. So if it's a value of yours, some version of a value, if it's foundational to the way you design your services and products, I think it can be a really competitive, a real advantage in the competition because unfortunately, not everyone I've met is kind, or at least not at first glance. And I understand that too. It can be hard to be kind when you have been hurt. We've all been hurt, I understand that. And so what I want to do as an entrepreneur is disarm myself, because if I disarm myself, it'll invite others to be disarming too, and then we can have a real conversation.
Yeah, it's interesting what you just said there about trauma. And I recently saw on a podcast or something I was watching on YouTube, and it said, in the Marvel Universe, every hero and every villain story starts with trauma and it's all about how they overcome it. I was like, whoa, wow, that was powerful. Because if you think about it, it's just about perspective. So changing perspective can be massive.
But something else you said right there I want to comment on too was about diversity in the people who are around you. So when you're an entrepreneur, when you're a solo entrepreneur, it's just you, you don't have a lot of diverse information coming to you. You just have your idea and your driven vision, to create what you're creating. But when you're lucky, like Vicki and I are to have a partnership and have diverse conversations between you, we recognise just within ourselves that we're different people and how great we're able to build something just by being so different. And then we think, well, who else can we bring around us to bring more different voices into our small team? We're just a really small team, but when you think about entrepreneurs as scaling their business and they're hiring more staff as they're growing, let's talk about how they can incorporate and the value of incorporating more diversity within their team. Because you're talking about it's good for business. So why is diversity also good for business?
Yeah. Well, you brought in some really important words, right, Laura? Perspective and depth and knowledge and sharing, these things are really important. And when I talk about why diversity is important, I really think about it in two ways. One is, how do you diversify your inner world, your own life? So if you look at your consumption habits of media, do the people you're watching on the screen look and talk just like you? Could you stand to diversify that and expose yourself to a bigger range? What about the books you read? Are they written by people who look and talk just like you? Are they just repeating things that on some level you already know? And that's okay because you might feel seen in those spaces. I'm not saying get rid of those. But could you also stand to diversify the books you read, the shows you watch, the movies you watch, also the stores you shop at, and think about why you shop at those stores. I understand convenience is a big factor, but what sorts of values do those companies and stores represent? And are they aligned with yours? So that's about diversifying your inner world. How am I living in this world? And how is the world influencing my mind and my thinking?
The second is, how do I diversify my outer world, which is what you were talking about, right? One exercise we do with our clients is, okay, write down your five closest friends on a piece of paper. Now, for each one of those, write down what you know of their age, their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and their ability, and their education, for example. And you can go further, you can say, write down their height and their weight, and etc. And so people start doing this and then we say, okay, in the bottom row, now write you, your name and your age, your race, your gender, all these things. And immediately before they've even finished the exercise, people are like, Oh, I see where this is going. All my friends are exactly like me. And then I say, well, how do you feel about that? And people always say, I feel really guilty about that. And this is where I say, why? Actually, it makes sense that your closest five friends are exactly like you because through proximity and sameness and relatability, we feel really safe. My question is, why do you feel guilty about that? People know that they stand to benefit from more range. So they feel bad when they realise that their closest friends are not helping them necessarily expand their worldview. So a lot of people decide after this to like, okay, I've got these five friends, how can I leverage what we have together to expand our worldview? That's one commitment I hear people make. Another commitment is, okay, I've got these five friends, I'm not getting rid of them, but I'm going to build off of them. Let's see if I can make friends with people who are not like me at all. I have to feel really prepared and brave to do that.
And I love where that goes. Itâs just the awareness that your friends are just like you often opens the door to diversifying your outer world. So I always like to encourage people to think about it in two ways, inner world and outer world.
Dr. Priya, can I ask you to share with us what your vision is with this work for the next 20 years?
Oof, what a big question. And I don't think of myself as a visionary because I've always done this work as a reaction and somebody's asked me to do it and it sounded compelling so I've done it and then it's felt really good. But the arc of history bends towards justice, right? So my vision is that if I continue to stay on that arc and if we're moving towards a world of justice and if I continue to learn and repair mistakes and invite others to do that, then I'm on the right path. I'm on the right path. The vision is about being in this work together, being in the trenches and the hard work together without our armour up and making mistakes, learning, sharing stories together. So I don't think it's anything new. It's the vision that's always existed for humanity. It's just my job to help amplify it and share it with others.
So if everything went the way you would love, what would the world look like? What kinds of conversations would we be having in the future?
Yeah, I think that we would have more democratic debates where people could say how they really feel and people could resist it and it wouldn't be uncomfortable. It would just be welcoming. That we can disagree with each other and still love each other. We can develop shared wisdom and deeper wisdom. In fact, when we resist and challenge each other that we don't always have to agree, but we do have to see each other in that process. So I think we're having a very different kind of conversation if the world were the ideal world. I don't think it makes sense for all of us to think the same way or to agree on everything, that's the opposite of diversity. Diversity invites debate and dialogue and difference of perspective, and we're better for it. The problem is when we leave it as a problem statement without being willing to go under the water line and explore why you feel the way you do, why I feel the way we do, and maybe there's some deeper shared wisdom around that.
Yeah, I recently heard it's better to be curious than judgmental. So when you hear something that perhaps you disagree with, maybe question the why. Why did that person say that? Why are they thinking that way? Let's get curious, let's ask questions, let's open up debate. I have a lot of hope for the next generations to come that they are more open to that. They've grown up in a world of technology and interconnectedness and a much more globalised world than even we did. We're all Gen X here, so we definitely grew up very differently in the 80s than what they have now, which I think is good and bad. There's definitely pros and cons to all of it, but I see as one of the biggest challenges, especially in the superpowers of the world, is that the ones in power are such an older generation and are so divisive. I don't want to dig too deep into politics, but just in leadership in general, there seems to be a lack of diversity. I find that really frustrating, I think is what I want to say, because I just want to tune it all out. I don't want to be part of those conversations, but that's not great either. I know that. But it's just a frustration of, come on, I want the younger generations to rise up and take some control, some voice, have a bigger platform with better, stronger voices. What do you think on that? I don't want to go too deep in politics because that's not what our show is about, but it's kind of hard not to touch on it when you're talking about diversity and leadership.
Yeah, and just before you answer, I would even love to hear your views on, I trust that it's not even about lack of diversity. It's more than that, it's a shift globally towards right wing. And I think that's the underlying thing that is unsettling.
Yeah, I am really glad you brought that into our conversation because it's the conversation we're most afraid to have because it is polarising, because it is isolating, because we don't always feel prepared to have the conversation or we're afraid that we're going to hurt someone's feelings or have our feelings hurt. So I'm really glad you brought that in. First, I'll say I am absolutely delighted to experience Gen Z being so emboldened to ask for what they want and demand it. And we can call them entitled. We can interpret that in a lot of different ways, but I have chosen to your point, Laura, about curiosity, I've chosen to be inspired by that. I've chosen to learn something from that for myself. Gosh, my generation, especially if you're a female in my generation, we did not learn how to ask for what we needed. We were taught to accept and be grateful for what we got, weren't we? And here we have Gen Z asking for what they need and we can learn something from that. So yes, I have a lot of faith in them.
The second thing I'll say is I started my company on November 9th, 2016, which was the day of the United States presidential election. We learned who our new president was going to be that day and many of us woke up thinking, was that a nightmare? And what is going to happen? I was so concerned that the voices of women and minorities were going to be categorically dismissed and minimised. So that morning I was on a business trip, I woke up that morning thinking, you got to be kidding me. This is not the direction any of us wanted, right? Or no, I shouldn't say any of us, this isn't the direction that the majority of this country wanted. And I registered The Roundtable Institute that morning because I didn't know what else to do. And often that is the entrepreneurial journey. When you are so enraged and the solution isn't obvious, you do what you have to do and you grow it, you grow it. Because you have to know that you're not the only one who is as enraged as you are because of the injustice. And so you can close your eyes and wish it didn't exist. And if you do that, I hope you recognise that you have an enormous amount of privilege to do that because some people can't do that, or you can open your eyes and say, okay, is there one thing I can do?
Now I could have done all kinds of things. For whatever reason, I opened up my laptop and I registered The Roundtable Institute and I made a website and I said, we are going to amplify the voices of women leaders and minority leaders, if you're interested, join our wait list. And next thing you know, we had hundreds of people. At the time, it was can't suit nation, right? And then it grew and it grew and it grew. And people said, hey, wait a second, the work you're doing with minorities and women, do you mind if we spread it across the whole enterprise? And I was like, yes. And nobody was even talking about DEI at the time and it became us. People were like, Roundtable does DEI Leadership, Roundtable does Inclusive Leadership. Pretty soon, we hit Covid, George Floyd was murdered in the United States and CEOs started calling and saying, âWe don't know what to doâ. And within months, we were doing enterprise level work, not just working with groups of leaders or individual leaders, but working with whole companies because people said, âWe're obviously not listening to each other. We're obviously not talking well to each other. We are obviously not being kind to each other. Can you teach us that?â And so we started to train people from cafeteria staff all the way to the C-Level, everyone in between. Can you see each other? Can you talk to each other? Can we talk in this way with each other in a real, vulnerable, authentic way? And regardless of your politics or your social identity, when we came together to just listen to each other, we started to make inroads. I'm not asking for harmony, I'm asking for progress. And people on all sides were, âGosh, why have I had my blinders up for so long? It's not that hard. If I leave my power at the door, I can have a different kind of conversation.â That's why we called our company Round Table Institute. Come in, sit around the table, take off your power, take off your title. We're all at the same level around this table. Now we can have a real conversation.
That's so amazing. And actually, that gives me so much hope that that is what the reaction was. Because sitting here in Bermuda, we watch the United States a lot. You're our next door neighbour, so influenced by politics and things that happen there. A lot of our businesses are intertwined as well. So very much we see it, but we come from a different culture. Where the predomination is, well, your minority is our majority. So it's a different perspective, I think, that we have, but we still feel a lot of it. And hearing now there are just so many more businesses opening up to DEI and just having the conversations. I know a lot of that's happening here and it's needed in so many more places. So if a leader is listening to this podcast and he's like, okay, I'm definitely not on the bandwagon, but I need to be. I recognise that this is a missing piece in my business. How does one start to have these conversations? Is there a person that's needed on the board? What do they need? What's the action that they need to take to start the progress?
That's such a good question. I think you start with identifying the need. Now that is a long process, a lot of my clients come to me thinking they know exactly what they need. Then I ask them just two or three questions and it's pretty clear they don't know what they need. So we have to figure that out together. And sometimes it's as small as âOur leadership team needs to understand what an inclusive culture would be.â That's it. Or âOur executive team really needs to understand what equity means and embody it.â Okay, fine. So we can do that work. How I like to frame the problem is through the lens of leadership. Okay, because whether you like it or not, you're a leader. You're influencing the people around you, they're deeply influenced by your presence, just the way you present yourself to the world. So, when people recognise that, they change, right? So the first thing you do is recognise that you're a leader, recognise that you have influence. You might as well leverage it and move towards the person you mean to be, right? Dolly Chugh wrote this fabulous book called The Person You Mean to Be. It's like, at the end of the day, sometimes we're like, âWhy did I do that thing? That's not like me.â And we all have those experiences, which is why do we falter from the person we know we're meant to be?
Can we ask ourselves that every day and can we come closer to the person we mean to be? So the first step is recognise that you're a leader and that you're meant to be someone, and can you move towards that?
I love that. And it's right back to the stumbling, stumbling along and just accepting that it's all imperfect and all challenging. And I think it's a lot of fear that we often sit in to open up a conversation. We don't know how to have uncomfortable conversations and that could be generational, right? That could be generational. I think the younger generations, I think they're better at uncomfortable conversations than we are in a lot of ways, but it's just the key.
I learned about, now I'm going to use some potentially inflammatory language, but I'll explain why I'm using that language. I read years ago a paper about white supremacy culture. Now, as we know, we all, and that's the inflammatory language. We all live in these systems that we're not always conscious of but they inform the way we think and the way we believe and the way we act, and they just sort of become us. And one of those, there's multiple, there's capitalism, there's patriarchy, there's white supremacy, right? And you can have your opinions about that, but white supremacy culture is one where we don't have hard conversations. We're conflict avoidant because it's nice. We have to be nice, we have to be buttoned up. It's one where we have to be perfect, where we have to be accurate. We have to be productive. And as I think about this, this is not about white people. So that's why it's kind of inflammatory language. This is not about blaming white people, okay? This is a system that all of us live in and white people are just as implicated by this system as non-white people, but can we dismantle the assumptions in those systems like, when we feel the need to avoid conflict, where is that coming from? It's coming from the system that told you that it's shameful to confront someone, or you shouldn't do that, or you'd be mean, or you're a bad person for doing that. And so in my work, I really want to dismantle the notion of that and say, actually, âIs it possible that conflict could be a gift? Can we work through and actually develop a better relationship with each other if we're equipped to manage conflict the right way and then maybe even invite conflict because we know how to do it together and we're better for it, instead of avoiding it and being scared of it.â
I'm really leaning into this part of the conversation because I'm living as Laura's just explained the demographics in Bermuda, I'm living in the opposite. I live in a very white country. Our policies in Australia in the not too distant past were very geared towards only white immigrants. That's within a generation that's still alive, even though that's not the case now. The way we treat immigrants, refugees and so on is questionable and I can't help but think that there's this word privilege that you raised, Priya, that I think a lot of people in Australia don't fully understand. I wonder if you could help us understand what privilege is.
Yeah, it's a really tough word to hear. Sometimes people immediately get defensive. âHey, you don't know how I grew up, how dare you attribute privilege to me?â And I understand where that comes from, but here's what privilege really is. It's unearned advantages that you get based on who you are, the colour of your skin, the length of your hair, the size of your waist, your shoe size, ridiculous things like that, arbitrary things, but that have been passed down by these systems like colonialism that tell us that certain ways are more advantageous than others, okay? So privilege is such a heated word, like people get really triggered by it. I like to use the words headwinds and tailwinds. They're a little bit more neutral, so if I'm flying from Chicago to London and I've got a headwind, it's going to take me a little bit longer to get there, but by no fault of my own, it was mother nature. By the same token, if I have a tailwind, I actually save a whole lot of time. I had an advantage that I didn't even ask for, I didn't earn, I didn't do anything to get. I just got lucky. But we can use the same metaphors for our social identities and say, okay, yes, I'm white, I didn't ask for that. I'm a man, I didn't ask for that either. I'm straight, I didn't ask for any of this. But in this system that affords me a disproportionate amount of power. Now, what am I going to do with that power? Am I going to do good, neutral, bad? It's my choice what I do with that power. Now, if I recognise that others have disproportionately less power than me because they are a person of colour, they are gay, they have a disability, et cetera, can I spread my power to them? Can I use my power to be an ally or to advocate or to uplift like that? Privilege doesn't have to be this toxic experience, it can actually be very empowering when you recognise what is your privilege? All of us have privilege, all of us have unearned advantages and unearned disadvantages, all of us do. And it's our job to recognise what those advantages and disadvantages are.
Yeah, and can you use them to mentor, promote, hire, lift others up in your process? Because I think that's what it is. That's what it is important to remember, that if you have the power, then you have the potential to do really great things within your organisation as an entrepreneur, a business leader, a mentor, because that's something we haven't talked about, but it's super important. Because then you end up having conversations with people that can get very deep and that's important as well. I think it's about this connection, this connection and I think we're all wired for connection and it's just getting outside of that circle and connecting with others who are different than us because that is really what opens up our minds to the greater world.
Yes. I love it. It's very much connection, and another aspect of that white supremacy culture is zero sum, right? But if I recognise that I have all this privilege, giving it away doesn't take anything away from me. I don't have any debts. It's not like I start at 50 and go to zero because I've given away all my power. It doesn't work like that. But using that quality of generosity to build connection, like you said, that's such a beautiful and humane way to use our power.
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. This is such a goosebump conversation. Thank you, thank you so much. And I almost don't want to do this, but I do at the same time because I don't want to stop the conversation, but recognising time, I want to be respectful of all of our time, but we want to give you the opportunity to flip the script and now ask us a question. So you got a good one for us?
I have so many, you guys. I have so many questions I want to ask, but here's the one that's coming to me right now. At some point in your life, I imagine you got advice from a person of colour, and I want to know what the best advice you received from a person of colour was.
Not to reduce that advice to all people of colour, but I'm just curious what you got from them.
That's such a good question. And it's a really hard one to answer because I can't think of one particular thing. Because I think you should know about me is that my two best friends growing up, I was born into friendship with these girls. They were twins and they were mixed. Mom was white, dad was black. And we grew up together from diapers to today, best friends forever. And I think I was so part of their life that I didn't ever see myself as even white. I was mixed too. I was always just part of that life. Yeah, I guess I grew up as a minority, so it was a bit like there was some shame of being white growing up. I wanted to be black. It was in some ways in my mind, as I remember as a young, teen especially, it was harder to be white because I was different and I went to private school so add that on top of it. And then I went to Catholic private school so add that on top of it. And then it was looked down on, discriminated against. But it was just, I think, growing up with them, moving in their space with their friends. I get went to their school, they went to public school. So I felt like more of that comfortable in that world. And even to today, I think I feel more comfortable in a space with the majority black than I do in a space of majority white. And that's weird, but that is how I feel more, like I feel more inclusive there. It's weird. I don't know how to explain it other than it was just always part of my upbringing was just being in a world like that.
I love how that question had you excavate your identities. I love how you share that.
Yeah, because I haven't even thought of it like that before, you dug it deep.
Beware speaking with a psychologist.
I like it, I like it. And today I have two mixed children of my own. So yeah, it's almost full circle and now I get to live in their world and it's great. Yeah, and help them navigate it and it's really interesting. It's really interesting.
Yeah, you strike me as like really aware of those dynamics. Thank you, but how about you Vicki?
Thank you Laura, it was beautiful to learn that about you. I mean, I knew some of it, but not the depth of it. Yeah, it's a tricky question. My best advice, I think for me, it's going to be more about the connection and the love that I've felt from this person or people. So my ex-in-laws are people of colour and I learned a lot, and I felt a lot of love from their family. A lot of love. And I'd say that's really where I learned to receive love. So I wouldn't call it advice, but it was so much more than advice.
Very powerful. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. Wow.
I love this conversation.
Mee too, mee too.
You've taken us down the road. And I hope that you've taken our listeners down the road. I hope for our listeners and viewers that there's a little something in this conversation that they may chew on afterwards or may want to come back to and listen to again. I know I'll be listening to this episode again because there's so much richness in it and things, I want it. I'm in this mode of when someone says something great, even in live conversations, face to face, I need to rewind and listen to that again. I think it's a marker of the new era that we're in. Everything's video based. Yeah, so thank you, Dr. Priya, thank you.
Being in dialogue with you both is uplifting. It felt the space was also inclusive to me. The way you asked your questions felt very inviting. And I want to make sure I say that because the way, the volume, the pace, the tone with which we talk to each other matters and creates inclusion. And you both offered me that implicitly. So thank you for that. I think it resulted in this rich conversation.
I really appreciate you saying that because we are intentional about who we invite on the podcast and who we want to talk to and we started this podcast with all women. We said we are only going to start talking to women. And then somewhere along the line, we had so many guys asking, we wanted the platform for women. We wanted the platform because we recognised that women didn't have enough of a voice in this space. Especially in the entrepreneurship space, it's heavily populated by men. So we wanted to give entrepreneurial women a platform to speak on and we're very proud that we started there. But of course, we wanted to open it up and eventually we did and I'm grateful for it because we've had more interesting, inclusive conversations with different perspectives and had great conversations on mental health and where men fit in the world and all kinds of things that I never would have had the opportunity to have, had we not had this podcast and opened it up. So, yeah, I just want to echo Vicki's words that I'm also super grateful to have this level of depth in conversation because it's important and we all need more of it and I certainly hope everyone listening got something great out of it. And I just want to remind everybody to just be a little bit more curious than judgmental and have conversations, create connections and let your world grow and travel. That's another good one too. Go travel, see the world, see outside of your space because there is so much more to learn by being in different cultures and different places. So again, from the bottom of our heart, thank you so much, Dr. Priya. This has been amazing and like Vicki, I'm listening to it again and again and again. Thank you so much.
I'm so grateful. Thank you.
