Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Faith Clarke (00:01.016)
Hello everyone. This is the Feminist Founders Private Podcast and I'm Faith, Organizational Culture and Inclusion Specialist. And today I wanted to talk a little bit about my own vision as a feminist founder, how that connects to my vision for my leadership and maybe how all that works together to anchor, I guess, my ethic of belonging within communities.

I'm always thinking about this. So one of the things that I did recently, and I'm going to start with a quote from somebody, but I wanted to tell you this context. Last year at some point I said in the socials, listen, I want to talk about belonging. Who wants to get on the phone with me? I'm on zoom with me and like 30 something people just within a day and a half, I had 30 something people scheduled. And over the course of a month, I interviewed these people just listening to their stories of belonging and not belonging.

and thinking about what do they have in common? What are some of the themes? What are some of the ideas? And I'm going to share that with you. But for me, belonging is the fundamental practice. The practice of cultivating belonging is the fundamental practice of anybody who identifies as feminist, anybody who is anti-supremacist, anybody who is trying to break old systems and cultivate.

create, co-create a world where justice and equity is fundamental, like the people actually are not in a hierarchy. And so some people are more equal than others, that there's real justice and equity. And I think creating this world means breaking the systems that make some people belong and others not. So anyway, let me just start by talking about

Ashley, let's see, Ashley Ford. I was listening to an interview between Elizabeth Gilbert and Ashley Ford and that had me follow a rabbit hole to Ashley Ford's apartment therapy page. I'll put this in the show notes. But just there somewhere, Ashley describes home. And I want you to just listen as I read her definition or her statement. She says, to me, home is your safest space.

Faith Clarke (02:27.138)
And I don't mean safety in terms of a bubble or something that keeps danger out, but just a place where you feel free to be yourself, free to love and to be loved. Home is for you to be vulnerable. And one of the things that I noticed in my definition, in people's conversations about belonging with me is how many people said belonging felt like home. So we'll revisit that, right? But.

So as a feminist founder, when I say, don't, like, I have no illusions that we all have the same definitions of feminism or even, one of the things that I encountered just being an immigrant is how many ways in a society like the one we live in, in the United States or on the Western side of the world, how many ways people have to clarify. I'm saying this word and what I mean is this, right? Just because,

of the mixture of people and of times and of cultures that are built in, everybody isn't saying the same thing. So when I say I have feminist ideals or my vision as a feminist founder, I think about a world where I am seen as whole and the people around me, the communities, the environment want to facilitate my wholeness.

and I prioritize my wholeness and my commitment to staying whole, even when I'm working. and I could go into like what's underneath each one, but I, I, maybe I'll do that in another episode. so I stay committed to my wholeness, even while I'm working, I'm committed to upending status quo systems and healing the broken systems in, in the ways I transact business and

in the business models that I have influence in. So as when people invite me into their businesses to support them, I am committed to healing the broken systems and upending the status quo systems in those businesses and modeling something different, helping people reimagine and model something different. I am committed to co-creating a work world where equity is the norm. I am committed to reimagining how power is used and shared.

Faith Clarke (04:45.748)
I am committed to centering women and non-mens working together and collaborating. I am committed to prioritizing women's needs and vision. I'm committed to centering and elevating women and non-binary people's voices. And while when I say justice and equity and upending systems, my focus on centering women and centering non-mens voices

That focus is just for me the antidote to what's the norm, which is the centering of power identities, right? So when I think about this kind of world, then for me as a leader, my commitment in my work with my clients and with any staff that I hire and any contractors, any volunteers, anybody just gonna help me out is to...

introduce them and invite them to want to be in this new world with me. There's a way that this vision can't just be inside of me. It has to be a part of my conversations. needs to be infused into my processes, how I engage with people. Because if it is that I'm looking to center particular people, to share power, et cetera, then that has to be in how I recruit and how I...

market and how I everything right so there is a constant invitation from me as a leader to anyone that I interact with that's as part of my like leadership practice and so inside that constant invitation is my own practice of belonging so let me tell you what people told me belonging was and like if you're listening here maybe you pause

And just write down for yourself, when you hear the word belonging, when you think about the word belonging, what does belonging mean to you? Here are the questions I ask people, by the way. So if you want to pause and just answer them for yourself, I ask people to think of a time when they belonged and describe that time to me. And I wanted them to think about something that was time-bound, right? They can run it like a little movie script in their mind. It was between this time and this time, a certain age or something like a

Faith Clarke (07:06.702)
confined episode of belonging. Just describe it to me. I asked them how did they know that they belonged? And for some people, depending on how they answered, I asked them what did this feel like in their bodies? And then I did the same thing, but with not belonging. I was like, think about a time when you didn't belong, a confined period, a specific example. How did you know? And how did that feel in your body?

And then this is part of the When We Belong project, whenwebelong.com, if you want to go take a look at it. I then said, complete the sentence, when we belong, and I have them fill it in. So if you want to just do that, and if you get intrigued by what you say, feel free to send it to me. I'd be so happy to look at it and also to include it in all the other stuff that people have shared with me. So pause, right? Because I'm going to tell you what people have said no. So if you want to do it, time to pause now.

All right? So one of the things that people say, the first thing that people said, or people said most often is that it's a subjective feeling. It's something they feel in their bodies. It's not something that another person can make them feel, although it has certain kinds of characteristics. So when people felt like they belong, they felt this sense of home. And they weren't saying it's my home, like the home I grew up in.

they were talking about almost something ideological. And I was like, what do you mean by home? And they talked about safety, this perception of not, it's not about bad things not happening, but it's almost a relaxing, it was definitely people gave sensations of relaxing, spaciousness in their chest. There was a whole lot of, it felt like an exhale, some people said. And basically it was the ability to,

It was almost like I don't have to be hyper vigilant. I don't have to be monitoring. I actually know that the people who are around me, because belonging is a communal kind of experience, it's not you on your own. Although some people defined belonging, were able to define a self belonging, for the most part, people define belonging in the context of some kind of community, smaller, big family, workplace, know, hobby group, whatever. And

Faith Clarke (09:27.2)
It's a sense of, don't have to look out for myself by myself. I don't have to look out for myself by myself. There is this sense of a we and an us that's sharing the responsibility of looking out for me. And there is this sense of a we and an us that's advocating on my behalf so that my needs are not just my responsibility, but they're the responsibility of the community, right? And this, this sense of the repair,

or the sourcing of the additional support when bad things happen. So bad things do happen, and when bad things happen, the sourcing of the support, the repair, et cetera, is not just my responsibility. In other words, one of the biggest indicators, people said, of not belonging is the persistent need to prove that you need care, the persistent need to self-advocate. That's a great indicator of not belonging.

And when I think about integrating these ideas into my own business, before I even get to staff, thinking about clients, especially in the coaching consulting world, there's a way that we sometimes buy into the power over ideas and part of people, part of the way we qualify potential clients.

is to see how much they're willing, how much they want it. And in some ways, it requires a certain kind of self-advocacy and yeah, there's a way that, well, I'll just say that it has a, sometimes a debasing kind of feeling because there's something about,

I need your help. No, I really need your help. I'm willing to prove that I need your help. I'm willing to prove it with my money. I'm willing to prove it by adjusting my schedule. I'm willing to prove that your help is what I need. That is the, this is just Faith's opinion, is the smacks of, smacks of the depth of self advocacy that's tied to.

Faith Clarke (11:51.188)
your needs aren't priority here. And there's something about requiring people to lean towards us before we lean towards them. That's not a model of true belonging for me. And so when I think about belonging, I think about John Powell's work at Othering and Belonging Institute in Berkeley, California. And one of the key practices that they teach, skills that they teach is this skill called bridging. And

And when I think about bridging, think about that intentional work of perspective shifting, of seeing the other person and creating that connection that causes not us and them, but this really integrated sense of us. So when I think back about clients and just, guess I'm sort of wrapping up here just to say in my model, my persistent interrogation is in my model of client attraction,

client relationship building. We also have a lot of boundary setting in the consulting coaching world, is very adjacent to boundary setting in corporate spaces because there is access, and access as a way of showing the hierarchy between people. People who have more access to you earned it, you know?

And so some of the ideas, like some of the things that we trade to show hierarchy is like access, it's like information, et cetera. So in our work with clients, to what extent are we leaning back and requiring clients to prove to us that they want our help? And I'm not saying it's bad or not. I'm just asking questions for you to interrogate because for one person that may be a nourishing restorative practice.

because your own, you have, your access needs have been violated. There's been too much. I know you have to set boundaries so that that's not what's happening to you. So all of what I'm saying, while I'm sharing big ideas, you have to interrogate it through the lens of your own identities and what's important to you in your justice work, first with yourself and then with others, right? But when I think about my work with clients, I have to ask, and I'm also like,

Faith Clarke (14:15.95)
a hundred years in academia and in higher education, one of the primary purveyors of colonizer thought. So power over is just the way academia works. It's very similar to what happens in corporate. So I am constantly checking for, to what extent am I cultivating belonging? That is your needs matter to me. You don't have to go above and beyond to prove to me that you have needs.

I am committed to cultivating space and place where your needs are met without you doing gymnastics. And you don't have to feel unsafe to get your needs met, know, all of those principles. To what extent do my clients feel that in their interaction with me? And what are my practices?

to set that up because often my clients are in environments that do not feel safe. And so they have built in strategies for keeping themselves safe, which means that they're not gonna, they will not expect me to be trying to cultivate their own safety. So how am I setting that up so that I'm cultivating this new world in my client community? And when I say client community, it's not because I have a Facebook group or anything like that, but when I think client community,

That's different from set of clients or list or something else where it's individuals not necessarily connected with each other. And I do believe that owning this new world is about owning the fact that whether we acknowledge it or not, we're all connected. And because we're all connected, what we do matters to so many other people, even when we don't believe it matters. And so when I say client community, what I do with one person,

absolutely impacts the other people who are in my influence and orbit. And so how am I co-creating belonging community with these clients? And similarly for staff, as our businesses grow and we invite people to help us with the mission, there is an invitation that we're offering people into this new vision of equity and belonging in the world, which our businesses are a reflection of that world. So how are we

Faith Clarke (16:38.124)
doing that with the one-off contractor that's helping us with our taxes? And how are we doing that with the virtual assistant that we may have that only works five hours per week with us? And do we think that cultivating culture, this culture that reflects equity and justice, is that just about full-time employees or is that everybody who's in contact with us?

So as we, you know, this is a new month, March is a month where we center women's voices and coming out of February where we centered Black voices, it's an opportunity to keep the conversation about how are we creating equity and justice in the world, you know, in our minds and keep our vision alive for it while also saying, what does this mean for my leadership practice?

And I'll wrap up with this. One of my favorite therapists, I just had my first son and I was experiencing postpartum depression and I hadn't been typically depressed. I mean, I had low feelings, but I tended more towards anxiety. So when I felt the depression, I was quite scared. I was like, my, plus I have a newborn baby, I'm overwhelmed and under-slept and...

reached out to a therapist and I was having my first appointment and she said to me, the moment, I don't know what I said to her, but this response has lived on rent free in my mind. she said, the moment you are able to say, I won't be like my mother, you already are. So it's, you know, I'm not going to be like my mother. No, I am already. Right. The awareness to kind of do the different thing comes way after we've already become that thing.

So let's just acknowledge that all of us have lived in this non not equitable, unjust, divisive, polarizing, dehumanizing society for a long time. And we've learned power over and we've learned human value hierarchy and we know our place in the hierarchy and we've lived this out in so many ways for so much of our time. So let's not pretend that this isn't us, it is us.

Faith Clarke (18:59.002)
Regardless of the identities we hold, this is the water that we've been drinking. And so how do we keep interrogating the practices that we have to keep ourselves soft and open to noticing the places where we can move this dial and do this shift, right? So what's your leadership practice around the continued seeing of your own leadership?

And then what's your leadership, what comes out of that? What's your leadership practice around redefining new habits within your leadership, within your business to keep you close to the vision of this equitable world that you have and that you want. That's it for me. I am Faith Clark and I look forward to hearing your own thoughts on your leadership practices, on belonging, on

your vision for the world and how you tie this all up together and on the places where whether it's your client's community or your staff or team how you are modeling how you are practicing how you are rehearsing this new world as we move together. Take care. Bye.