Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Becky Mollenkamp: Happy New Year.

Faith Clarke: Happy New Year, Becky! Have you done a Word of the Year? You did!

Becky Mollenkamp: Yes, which is funny because I was just adding it to my dashboard. I have a business dashboard I've created in my big spreadsheet, and I love it. It's so beautiful. I can see all my numbers in one spot and—

Faith Clarke: Where do you use? What do you use? Just Google Sheets?

Becky Mollenkamp: Google Sheets, nothing fancy, but it's a beautiful dashboard that it took me some time to figure out. I integrated it with Google Analytics so it updates my website information. Anyway, I'm very excited about it, but I was just putting my Word of the Year in there because I had forgotten it. I was like, it’s a new year. This is really my first day back at my desk. So my Word of the Year is simplicity. I am really trying this year to think about how to simplify just everything in my life. How about you?

Faith Clarke: Yeah. So my word of the year, it landed on me a couple of days ago, and it's with. And I think it’s really about my current desire to be in really reciprocal, really co-creative interactions with people. It’s easy for me to step into a space and do for, but I desire with. This whole thing of the rested Black woman—which I don’t know if I’m going to get there—but that means being discerning about the spaces and the interactions. I’m reminding myself, I want to be with people, and I want people to be with me. Not kind of tolerating me, not kind of, you know, anyway.

Becky Mollenkamp: I love that. I love that. It makes me think that another word I would love to—maybe next year—is and, because I’m all about trying to explore the and, right? Letting go of the either/or. But what is the and? But I love with, and with is so perfect because we are with each other here, with whoever’s listening. For me, this year represents a major shift because of the with. We are going to be doing this with each other, versus me trying to do this Feminist Founders business alone. So I’m very excited about that. Today, we’re going to pull back the curtain a little for our paid subscribers to talk about creating a framework for Feminist Founders, which didn’t exist until we decided—until I decided—to do this with you. One of the magical things about bringing you in is you asked, “Is there a framework for Feminist Founders?” And I said, “What? No, there’s not.” I had some things in my head, but I’d never put anything down on paper, certainly hadn’t shared it with subscribers or members. So I think it was a great idea to figure that out. Most importantly, it helped ensure we’re aligned in our vision for this and gave us clarity on what we’re doing. So, we sat down to hammer this out. What does a framework for Feminist Founders look like? But since you’re the one who brought it up, maybe you could first share briefly why a framework would feel important to you?

Faith Clarke: Yeah, and framework can feel academic. Like, “Framework is just, you know, these structures that people use.” I remember the first time a friend said, “What framework are you using?” I was like, “What’s wrong with you? Framework?” There’s a way that the word itself can connote a level of structure that isn’t real and organic. I sometimes resist the word, so I’ll tell you where I came from. I use it as common language people understand, but internally, I started to recognize that I have medicine, and it’s important for me to understand my medicine.

Whenever I’m in space with people, the medicine I’m offering to them for whatever they’re asking me for—I need to know what that is. It’s not enough to just say, “This is the problem I solve,” because the problem can be solved in multiple ways, and it’s your medicine that we need to understand. As I got clearer on that, I started asking people, “What’s your medicine?”

When I say framework, I’m really just using less woo-woo language to say, “What’s the medicine we feel Feminist Founders need? The medicine that feels organic to us?” I like to capture medicine because I believe the medicine we give to others is the medicine we need. When I help people clarify their medicine, I’m helping them see how they’ll help others and themselves. When stuff comes up—when shit hits the fan—it’s your medicine you should apply.

It felt important for us to know together what our medicine is so we know what we’re offering. And also, when the inevitable stuff comes up, we can say, “Wait, what’s our medicine?”

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah. And we started by—I think I briefly downloaded to you the things—because you started asking questions. A lot of it was, “What do your clients need? What do you think this audience is needing?” I shared what I’d seen generally when working with folks, and you shared similar things. Then you had us write down some “I believe” statements, and that was our starting point.

Then we just kind of had a mess of stuff and tried to figure out how to put it together. Each of us was going to look at it individually and come up with ideas to see how they meshed. But I think I got to it first because I’m an activator. I tend to take action immediately because if I don’t, it doesn’t happen. Ultimately, we ended up working from what I pulled together, which was pretty much where we landed—other than the one piece I noticed was really important to you, and I had some resistance to at first but have come around.

Faith Clarke: Before we go to that piece, I think what was interesting about our process is that, because I’ve done this process with myself and others, I respond to what people give me. When you shared what you were seeing, I started framing that in terms of, “What are Feminist Founders thinking?” I wrote down some statements. Then I also spoke to another Feminist Founder—not necessarily calling themselves that—but I said, “You’re a Feminist Founder. You’ve been on boards, been an ED, been a program director. What are you about?” It was cool hearing them say the same things I was thinking but in different words, and that kind of helped.

I had your words, my words, and this person’s words. I had this mishmash of ideas that, when you shared yours and massaged it into five buckets, I could recognize my words said differently, this person’s words said differently, and even cravings clients have shared.

Becky Mollenkamp: That’s great. Because for a lot of service providers in our community, figuring out how to take their magic and put it into a framework is a challenge. It’s hard to sell your magic because people want to know what they’re getting. It’s helpful to hear how others approach it.

Faith Clarke: Right, right, it's too hard. I mean, even the values work, right, which I think is super important. It’s about, yeah, so okay, cool, integrity, sure, right, let's go with that. What does integrity look like in this moment—in this conflict or in this hiring? And what does it look like from this point of view of equity that we say we want as feminist founders or disrupting the status quo? So what does integrity in disrupting the status quo look like for us? And so, I say to people, as I say to myself, if I can't see it like a movie—if when I say "integrity," a little reel doesn’t run by specific to this situation in my business—then I don’t actually know what it is.

And I should get it to the point where I’m like: pictures, movies, songs, you know.

Becky Mollenkamp: Right, so that in any situation, you already know what it means for you to act with integrity.

Faith Clarke: Or I can imagine it in the moment. Like I come into the moment and I’m like, okay, yeah, this is what this means now, you know? I worked with an organization that was committing to anti-racist policies, and they gave me the values. And I was like, yeah, so, what does this value look like in this moment for an anti-racist organization? What does that mean? Well, you know... and I think that’s the point where a lot of us stutter, me included. I was like, I don’t know what integrity means.

So then just giving ourselves the time to work through that. It’s like, can you visualize that? What’s this future world where integrity to anti-racist principles, to feminist ideals, or whatever it is—what does that look like?

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, I love that. And I’m thinking, this is a real-time thought, so we’ll see what you think. But as we’re talking about this, I’m like, you know, we spent a lot of time on this framework. We haven’t specifically, as a pair for this business, thought about what does it look like for our business.

I think that could be interesting for us to embark on and share some of that behind-the-scenes stuff. Like maybe next month in our behind-the-scenes conversation, we could talk about what it looks like for us as we think about our own vision. Because I think that’s the one of all of these we’ve done the most beginning work on. But I think we were still looking at it as, what is it that our community wants to install as a vision? And I think it’s very much the same, but I still think it’s important for us to talk collectively or together about what it looks like for Feminist Founders. What is our vision?

Faith Clarke: Yeah, agreed. Back to that medicine that we give is the medicine we need, right? That was part of the thing when I was saying, it would be cool if we could spend a day together, but you’re in Missouri. But I still think that it might be cool just to—even though we have a lot of systems in place and a lot of this stuff feels together—just to critique it through this lens. Yes, it will be useful for people watching us do it. But also, I think we will embody the framework in a different way when we do some of the fun stuff that’s coming up.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’d be awesome. I think for us to sit down and work through this ourselves and then peel back that onion again for sharing with folks what it looks like as we embark upon it ourselves.

We talked a little bit—this is getting a little aside, we’ll come back to that fifth bucket—but I just want to mention it. We talked a little bit about what does our year look like? And thematically, what are we thinking about for the year, month by month? These first two months of the year for the community, we’re focused on vision.

We’ve sort of used this framework as a bit of a guide for the kind of content we’ll be talking about in the year ahead. So this month and next month, we were going to be talking about vision stuff anyway. It’d be great, I think, and very much on theme for us to do that.

This month, for our paid members—y’all who are listening—we’re going to be hosting our first community event that you’re all invited to. It’s only for you members to come and be a part of. That’s on the 28th, Tuesday, January 28th, at noon central, 1 p.m. Eastern. It’s going to be thematically about vision and looking at some of these areas of your business and yourself, through this lens of love because next month is Valentine’s Day.

So this month, I’m going to lead us through some exercises to think through these different parts of our business in this way. Then next month, Faith is going to talk about how to take what you uncover or think about this month and actually apply it in your business.

I just wanted to mention that too, since we’re talking about vision, we’ll be talking more about vision if you come join us. So that’s that.

Now, our fifth bucket. I know we don’t want to go super long with these conversations. Everyone has limited time.

So we had these four buckets: vision, leadership, culture, systems. Faith really strongly believed in a fifth bucket around conflict navigation, which we’ve ultimately landed on calling disruption. So, how do we deal with hard things?

My thought was, well, those hard things come up in all four of the other buckets. Why can’t we just weave it into each of the buckets, right? It’s there. We’re going to be talking about it all the time anyway. Why does it need its own bucket?

Why I felt such resistance, I can’t fully identify. What was it? Let’s see. Probably—I’m going to guess part of it is—I can be like a dog with a bone, right? Where it’s like, no, this is how it is. I can get stubborn.

I had the idea of, it’s these four buckets. And once I’m like, but no, it’s these four. I also like four—it felt good. Like five started to feel like too much.

I was just like, I didn’t understand why it needed to be its own thing, because it didn’t feel like the same as these other four areas. It was like one of these things is not like the other. I was like, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

Faith Clarke: Yeah. And I think that what we have to remember is, as I listened to you narrate your own thoughts, it’s like, yeah, no—me too. This is why we love each other. But the systemic nature of things—the thing about systemic issues is that by the time they've become systemic, they're largely invisible. And in our hyper-individualistic society that we're in that means individual people take responsibility. So when we become aware, we take responsibility, and then it becomes, "I am this way." And we are—individually, we absolutely are. But it’s important to be clear that we are that way because the groundwater is this way. It’s not like, "Oh, Becky is just so kind of perfectionist about colors." It’s that there’s this perfectionism in the groundwater that has been rewarded in the value hierarchy created by supremacist ideology.

And I’m going to stop using those words and just say: let’s not blame ourselves. But let’s examine when these things come up. It’s like, oh, this is the stuff that’s in the water. And so the more aware I become of my own thoughts, the more I can understand what’s happening for the people I care for. So as I’m holding myself accountable to changing my own mind and my own body—and to shifting the environment I’m in so it’s easier to change my mind and my body—I’m also like, this is what other people are dealing with too.

So when Becky has some resistance to my colors, I’m like, Becky isn’t evil. Becky’s been drinking water.

Becky Mollenkamp: I mean, and I can say it’s not even about perfectionism around colors. I’ll be honest—the piece you said about power dynamics absolutely resonates. And I can say, intellectually, in my heart, that’s not how I want to show up in the world. Right?

I don’t want to be the person who’s like, “But it’s my pie.” I resist that. And yet, it is because I drank that water and have been drinking that water for almost 50 years now—gulp. It is so deeply in every pore that when you say that, I’m like, yeah, that’s what it was. It was, “No, I decided these colors. They’re mine. I chose them.” Right? “I made the decision—how dare anyone, you know, you or anyone—resist what I say.” Right? Like, it’s power. That’s what it was. It’s power.

And so for me to be able to see that and then be able to say, that’s not how I want to show up, and also not to—it’s not like I’m beating myself up, like, “I’m so bad.” You know, feeling shame. It’s more like being able to now—like a few years back, I would have felt shame. Now, what it is, is I can almost look at it and laugh, right?

I can see it and experience the feeling, but then hold it up and look at it and almost chuckle, like, “My gosh, how silly. How silly it is that this is here inside of me, and I don’t want it.” So I can throw it away. I can say, no, I’m not going to show up that way. But I can also honor that, like, yeah, of course, immediately, there is still that, because I have been conditioned over and over and over again—simply because of the color of my skin—to believe that in a room, I get to have power.

Especially in a room with other women, there’s power for me. And in a room with a Black woman, I’m sure that’s been my conditioning. Is that who I am? How I want to show up—like, fundamentally, at my core? No. But also, of course, I swallowed that water, like you said. Of course it’s there.

But the big difference is being able to say, I can see it, and I can make a choice of how I want to show up. So very quickly, instead of going in and being like, “I’m just going to put it back to my orange and screw her,” you know, it was like, “What’s this about? It’s just an orange. It’s a shade different. Who cares?” Right? And then being able to get to that place—even talking to you about it—and sort of laughing at it, like, “Okay, it was a moment, and it’s passed.”

Faith Clarke: And I think that, you know, looking at the framework, we talk about the culture, right? And culture is habits. Culture is meaning-making and stuff like that. And what we are—what’s illustrated here for me anyway—is that we are cultivating a certain kind of habit with each other.

Built into those habits are ideas like deep compassion and graciousness and, for me anyway, this openness to other stories aside from mine. It’s me recognizing that my first thought—it’s a story. And that there are a whole bunch of other stories that may serve, and I’m open to that, and I want to choose the most compassionate story.

As I work with people I hire or with teams and so on, that tendency we have to imagine the worst—especially now with all the stuff that’s going on, we’re primed for division. And when you see these instinctive reactions—again, systemic—this is not just Faith kind of having a reaction. This is a system that is being fostered.

So, what do I want my instinctive response to Becky to be? And how do I foster that in these moments? You know, like, I think that’s part of what we’re doing, which is just, yeah, slow ourselves down, be gentle, be slow, be gracious, and imagine stuff melts, you know?

Becky Mollenkamp: Well, right, assuming positive intent. Part of that, though, is that it can't happen if you and I had just met, like if this were a year ago and we endeavored on this. It would probably be very different, right? If our first interactions with each other were like this, there would probably be resistance on both our sides, right? It wouldn’t work that way.

There’s this culture creation and relationship building that has to happen. But part of that is this fundamental—like you’re talking about—a fundamental place of, what do we all want to agree to here? And I do think it’s about agreeing to positive intent.

There was no part of me that thought, “Faith is doing this as a power trip.” Like, there’s nothing like that. That’s where I could immediately get to.

I have a feeling that as a white woman, brighter colors resonate with me because I’ve always been told I’m a summer or a winter or whatever. Remember those days of color balance and “what colors you are”? Those match with my skin tone and just feel more appropriate to me, right? Whereas you have a different skin tone, so probably different colors feel right for you.

And it may not even come—oh, sorry, go ahead.

Faith Clarke: Well, I was just thinking about it. You may also have your communications background. You went to school around the same time I did, when they told us that certain colors mean certain things. Meanwhile, I went to engineering school. Nobody told me anything about colors! I had the luxury of just saying, “This is what I like.”

So, I immediately thought maybe there’s some formula marketing and communications people believe is the “right” thing.

And then I also realized, if I yield to that, I’m saying that some system knows better for me than I know for myself in terms of colors.

Regardless, I had this moment where I felt like, “Do I want to change it? No.” And then I thought, “No, no. Marketing people don’t know my colors.” And I just let it be.

But either way, this was an awareness moment for me about how power moves, and the different ways we feel power. Whether it’s my academic background—I’ve spent however many hundreds of years in school—or just that power comes from having “learned” something and being told what’s right.

So, I realized, “Nope, I’m not going to hand my personal power over to official knowing.” It could be about colors or race or anything else. Either way, what I’m saying is, I want to be careful and gentle about how power moves between us. I don’t want to be whipping my power around and smacking people in the face. And I feel like that’s part of what we’re saying to each other.

Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, that’s true. There’s also a little more around our vision I just feel like maybe we’re starting to define more of our vision, even though we haven’t put it all down yet. That speaks to some of it, right? There’s this shared understanding that we’re building. I think we’re getting there with it, but there’s more to do. We’ll keep working on that piece.

I want to be mindful of time—we’re almost at 40 minutes, and we could probably talk all day. So, we’ll stop here because we’re going to do this every month. Tune back in next month.

I think we’ll talk a little more about what came up as we crafted our vision for Feminist Founders and what it looks like for us to collectively create a vision. Not just for the vision we think our folks are striving for, but also what we see as the people running this business.

Like you said, the “medicine” idea—it’ll probably be very similar, but we haven’t really done that exercise yet. I think that’ll be great.

A quick reminder to join us later this month—what did I say? The 28th? Yes, the 28th. I’ll send an email with the link to sign up. It’s for all of you, our paid members. I just don’t have that link ready yet, but I’ll get it out so you can add it to your calendars.

Anything else, Faith, that you’d like to mention?

Faith Clarke: Yeah, just a quick invitation. For anyone listening, figure out your medicine. If you have questions about it—medicine, framework, learner journey, whatever you want to call it—reply to the email or wherever you’re watching this.

Your medicine is like vitamin D. It’s the thing that facilitates transformation for your clients. This framework is our medicine, and the internal stuff you offer to your clients is your medicine. We’d be happy to help you get clear on it.

Becky Mollenkamp: Love it. Perfect.

All right, hopefully we’ll see you on the 28th. We’ll continue to see you inside the community. Thank you again for being a paid part of this community. Your support means the world to us and allows us to do this.

Soon, we’ll be telling you about a new Share the Love campaign. It might be in this week’s or next week’s free email to the whole community. Paid members, you’re the most likely to help us out.

Faith pushed me to set an ambitious goal for how many new subscribers we want in the next quarter. We’ll really be asking you to help us make that happen, and we hope you will. Thank you so much for being here.