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[email protected]. We are LCC, a podcast emanating from the halls of Lower Canada College on Royal Avenue and Montreal. Here's alumni officer Christine Jones. Today we're having a conversation with Chris Martin from the class of 2010 and founder of Empowering Empathy to discuss the concept of empathy, not being just a feeling but a strategic engine for organizational success. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much. We have Chris Martin from the class of 2010 with us here today. And I'd love to just start off before we jump into what you're doing now. If you could just tell us a little bit about what you've done since graduation and how you ended up where you are now. Absolutely. It's so nice to meet you, Christine. And I really started off in psychology. I really wanted to focus on sexual and gender-based violence. I wanted to focus on neuro inclusion. And I eventually realized there's more than one psychology in the world. There are many different formations of psychology. I went into international development and political science. And I shifted my focus over to violence and a conflict lens and also peace building. So how do we get people who are not in agreement together? How do we get them to be seeing one another's perspectives? And how can we reconcile all of our different points of view? Because I think that's really the thing that I see missing in so many parts of multiple sectors at the moment. It feels like so many parts. So many little pieces are kind of missing from our overall dialogue. Mm-hmm. Okay. And so now you're in this space where we talk a lot about empathy. And I'd love you to just define it for us. Or if you could define operational empathy. You know, many people, we hear the word empathy and we think about it as just being nice or being a good listener. But now you've built a consultancy around it to help people's business results. So how do you move empathy from just being a feeling to being a strategic tool that can solve people's organizational problems? Well, working in the nonprofit sector, as you can imagine, we're all wearing about 10 hats at once. No one is just a finance director. They're not just a fundraiser. They're often doing so many different roles that all intersect. So that's really something that I'm seeing be a huge problem at the moment on like the human connection side of things when we're actually getting into our conversations. So how do we improve things for our communities? How do we improve our business results? How are we even more productive? We're so often looking for quick solutions. And actually what I think we need to be doing is creating that sense of spaciousness where you're actually able to avoid that sense of busyness where you're just like, go, go, go, go. And actually take some time to be reflecting, to be consolidating, to be thinking about, is this the right call? Is this the right way to get to this goal that we've sought for ourselves? So I really see operational empathy being about how are we able to be more considerate of one another in order to empower one another to actually be doing that compassionate work that we're aiming to get to? So I really think of empathy as the sense making side of things. That's why my tagline is empowering empathy to engender compassion. It really has to have that second piece of, we have to be sensing what people are doing from that emotional lens as well, especially in nonprofit work where all of our identity stuff is pulled into our politics at the moment. It's pulled into our advocacy work. And you can't just speak from a place of the organization when you're doing that social impact work. You also need to talk about your positionality as an individual human being. You've got to be framing it from my lens. Here's what I am seeing. Now, what are you seeing from your lens? And that question is the one that's missing so much in the development sector. We're not doing that networked approach to social impact work. And that's something that I really learned on the international development side of things. It doesn't matter if you have the most beautiful desire or purpose or impact statement. If your work is not resonating with the people that you're actually trying to be supporting, it's not going to be sustainable. So in international development, we know that when, especially white folks and we think about Canadian development in particular, going to other places and trying to support people, those people are the ones who actually know what they need. We're not the ones who necessarily know what they need. So we really need to be creating that space to observe, to listen, and then actually aim for understanding before we do any acting. And so often we skip straight to that acting. We're so obsessed with doing and doing and doing. But we're not doing that messy back and forth. And to me, that's not a nice to have. Advocacy and that listening, that back and forth is all of the different stakeholders. That is the work. That is social impact work. So if you're not connecting the dots between all of those different perspectives, it's not going to land. And there are millions of examples in international development. And one of my favorite is on the Haiti earthquake, where so many celebrities were like, "Oh my gosh, there's a problem. We've got to jump in. I want to be seen as acting immediately." They filled their private planes. They flew to Haiti. They coordinated nothing with any other actors. And so many celebrities were actually blocking aid that was packaged properly. That was culturally appropriate. That was nutritious for the people on the ground because their planes were blocking the only airplane runway, the only airplane runway. So essentially there were circling aid airplanes going around Haiti waiting to bring all of those different things from all over the world to not just one nation, right? But they're all coordinating at an international level. Whereas these individuals, they want to have a nice impact or jump in. But they're not doing that sense-making piece of taking a step back and going. What other actors are doing? What's going on in the ecosystem? Am I the right person to be doing that? How should I be doing that? So that's that. It's misplaced. It's misplaced. And it happens all the time and especially coming from the development side. When you're in development, when you're doing fundraising, you actually have no control over anything that you're doing. You don't control the actual impact work. You don't control the capturing of your impact measurement. You don't control your communications framing. You don't have the leadership control. So you're basically negotiating every single aspect of your role. When I ended up finishing on the academic side, I went to work with an agency and they were very much, let's mix the data and the storytelling. And I was in a person-oriented role, kind of just translating between many actors. And that's really where I saw operational empathy just being so important. You can't keep going if you're not even using the same language. You're not even understanding the same definitions to mean the same things. If you don't do that contextualizing, the work they are doing will not resonate. Right. Well, no, it makes total sense in the way that you positioned it that you obviously saw. I guess the word would be maybe an opportunity because there's this huge piece of the puzzle missing. So when you talk on your profile about co-sponsoring the people-oriented leaders, that's a unique phrase to me. Explain what that looks like in practice and why empathetic leaders need that kind of backup to thrive. Absolutely. So I actually only get work. Now I'm a nonprofit. I just became a nonprofit in the last six months. But before that, I have about 10 years of experience doing more of the agency. We're doing more of the consultant work. And I just saw that so often we were getting stuck in conversations on delineating between what should a leader do in this scenario and what would a manager do in this scenario. And when COVID hit, we actually saw a huge, huge gap when it came to middle management in the nonprofit sector. I started to see there were only directors and coordinators essentially. So the directors were having to really do like that leadership accountability. And then they were trying to manage coordinators and everyone so spread out across multiple roles that the coordinators were just getting stuck with all of the busy work, all of the tasks that they could not contextualize to do effectively. So the leaders were trying to make decisions in order to inform the work so they could guide and do their coordinators. But they were getting stuck with that language of management versus leadership. So I brought in co-sponsorship specifically to tackle that issue in the nonprofit sector because too many people were leaving. We saw a huge exodus of fundraisers in particular. Also anyone related to data or digital work. So as our whole world is changing, I think about Microsoft, I think about Google, I think about AI, all of our systems are changing. So how we do the work change at the same time as the ecosystem with
in the where we actually do the work inside of. And that that amount of change all at once was just like so much for all of those organizations to bear. So the whole idea of co-sponsorship is you're not a group of individuals. You're a team of people in different positions in the org. So we should be positioning ourselves to be strengthening one another's positions based on what we're seeing differently. You and I shouldn't be glued at the hip trying to do every single task together. Right? Like you should be doing some tasks over there for your functions that clearly give the information from your point of view to my point of view so that when I'm making decisions, I'm being considerate of you. I know when to pull you into those conversations and I know when I don't have to pull you into those conversations. So when COVID hit and so much changes happening, we've seen so much conflict rise in the world over the last two or three years as well. As people are figuring out how do we build community? How do we do that piece building or how do we advocate for so many different beneficiaries? I really wanted to jump in and go, we need to make room for the emotional labor here. We need to make room for the connecting the people inside of the organization. So if we're not having that sense of like we're really sponsoring one another's growth not just as leaders and managers, but as individual humans just trying to do something really complicated with very minimal resources. We're never going to have that culture that really supports collaboration efficiently. It's always going to have that competitiveness seep into things and often I'll jump into a team and they won't recognize that yet because of course all those people who are jumping into the nonprofit sector, the ones who stay for a long time, especially the younger foe because we know that our younger generations actually prioritize that communal sense of is this equitable to as many people as possible? Did they do that sense making before they started acting? We really care about that. So we really need to be making sure that those people are able to have the conversation as if the people at the top of the organization who are using their formal power to change things and the people at the top also need to be listening to the people at the bottom who are on the front line who are like, you don't understand your strategic goal has an assumption in it. You said that we usually have a response rate of 5% for a fundraising mailing for example, but you don't realize that when you did your math, you actually assumed that we have addresses for 100% of our constituents. We don't. We only have addresses for 40%. So now as a fundraiser, we're starting off the year, you've assigned to me a goal. If we're not doing that co-sponsorship, I'm now having to go, how am I going to reach this goal? And there are so many problems with the goal itself in terms of how the leader got to that decision making and it's not necessarily that the leader is being lazy in any way she before. I guarantee you, they're probably not. They're probably working all those extra hours putting in all the effort. But if you don't actually bring all that information into a condens of some kind where everyone's able to discover it and engage with it and ask questions about it and challenge it, then your condens isn't going to work for anyone. And people are going to jump in. They're going to go, I don't know what's going on and then they're going to leave. So co-sponsorship is really about eliminating the leadership gap between the people at the top and the bottom. It's about also dealing with the secession issues that we're seeing in the nonprofit sector where so many people are leaving that executive directors are getting burned out. They're leaving their organizations and there's no secession. So I often end up jumping in. I try to be just a capacity builder, especially now that I'm just a nonprofit myself. I don't try to be like the replacement in the org. I try to co-sponsor the people inside of the organization who are trying to do that since making. So I only say yes to partnerships. Where I see that that's a goal. It's a priority for at least two people in the organization. I don't work with only one because we've got to have the vision to see it from multiple perspectives. Otherwise, I'm just prioritizing one point of view over another. And I role model it for them. So I make room for that sense making and the questions and the examples and the research. And I help them build a stronger foundations that when they go to talk to the other directors and the board and the donors and their beneficiaries and the foundations and all of the very different stakeholders in the ecosystem that all have different positions and points of view that they're able to translate effectively that they're able to bridge with them. And one of the through lines for all of my work I do work across like the leadership angle. I work across the narrative angle. And I also work across systems as well. Is really just attuning the connections inside of the organization because they're not attuned at the moment. They all have different points of view. They're aiming for harmony instead of attunement. So they're hoping to all just be doing the same thing. But you need to actually constantly be interrogating that you're still attuned because change is happening no matter what we say about it. We're not going to be able to avoid change. Right. And so when you talk then about your work helping teams move from friction to flow in your experience. What's the biggest source of friction in the nonprofit world right now? I know you're mentioning just a lot of people are leaving and is it that? Is it the systems or is it the lack of the human connection? I would say this is a really great question. And I had to think about this one for a while because I was like, oh, one of my principles is that I'm non-binary and I always say binaries are usually an oversimplification. So I will answer by giving you a definitive answer, but I want to preface it with these two things intersect. So in my work, I refuse to do work. That's only leadership oriented. I refuse to do work. That's only narrative oriented. And I refuse to do work. That's only data oriented. And that's very purposeful. That's something that I've only come to within the last year. And that's because we have to weave those things together. We have to be synthesizing them. We can't silo them and create even more silos in the nonprofit sector. So when I think about the issues that we have right now, it's really, I think the biggest one is really that human connection piece. So when I went independent three or four years ago, before I even became a non-profit and I came up with empowering empathy, I actually almost called it something related to just being distracted because I saw that so many people were just like I said before, they were stuck in busyness. They were not able to get to spaciousness. They were not doing reviews. They were not doing insight gathering. Every plan was detached from the previous plan. So nothing was leading into the next thing. So one of the biggest things that I emphasize at the beginning of every single working relationship is we need to be doing some form of progressive summarization. We need institutional memory. When someone comes into your organization, there should be an information architecture of some kind. Like you should have clear language that you use to describe things. I had one organization. I actually had to sit down quite painfully, I would say, last February because they were so convinced that they were all so collaborative. And I'm like, you are collaborative in the how and why? Like you are, but there are so many small details where you're out of alignment that are causing you to stop at the 11th hour and have to go back 10 steps and redo things. And you realize after we've set something up somewhere that we didn't consider something from another person's point of view. So I had to sit them down and explain that I know you guys are doing such good work. I know you guys are in the middle of rebranding. I know we're in a period of so much change and you're aiming to have the best impact in the world. I'm not saying anything negative about what you guys are doing, but I have to tell you that your organization has not been designed to remove the friction that you keep running into. That human connection piece was really missing. They were actually describing different beneficiaries for their non-profit across the teams. And they didn't realize it. I had another organization where they were paying for three separate customer relationship management systems. They were all incredibly expensive. If they were trying to cut all their costs, I was doing analysis on them on what activities should you be doing and things like that. I was trying to explain to them, stop trying to go like, we're not going to do this channel of communication or we're not going to do advocacy. I'm like, that's not how we approach this. We need to be thinking about what does advocacy look like in your context with your stakeholders? What do your activities need to be supported by to run effectively? So those pieces were
really missing and getting people to sit down and build that comments for one another is such a gap in the nonprofit sector. And I think if we're not able to communicate across all of our different teams and functions and we're also holding multiple functions in our roles all the time and we have so many people leaving this sector and we have finding being disrupted and we have our social issues fully decided how in the world are we going to have positive change how are we going to have transformative justice come into the picture where we're actually speaking truth the power where we're actually able to do all of that difficult work and when I started empowering empathy it was actually very very different my first framework for describing my work even just to myself was actually much more on the psychology side of things and it is on the development side of things it was how do we reconcile what I'm seeing come into conflict between the personal level and the professional level inside of nonprofits because I could see the individuals struggling to bring their individual perspective to reconcile it with the organizations perspective and then reconsider that with the ecosystems perspective and the main reason for that was psychological safety in a lot of organizations that I support people don't write things down because there might be one or two actors that weaponize data against them even if they don't mean to they'll disrupt what they're doing all the time they'll call you 20 minutes before you're about to give a speech at a gala to be like is the gala worth it from an ROI perspective and you're like I'm about to give a speech what do you mean like can you have asked me this tomorrow maybe right but if you don't have that comments that's really showing you like this is the time where we reconcile these things this is our language this is our purpose here's what we've changed over time and why we've changed it over time then every time you bring even if you do an amazing job of working on the human connection piece you've got your like 10 people you're like we invested for two years in it it's amazing this is where the intersection part comes through if you don't have the systems recording that documenting it that's another huge problem formalizing it then it disappears when people leave so that's another huge issue that I've been seeing and the reason why one of the reasons why I became a nonprofit instead of continuing on as an individual was that I needed to make it clear that that formalizing of the documents and the language and the definitions was not optional and I could see as the individual sometimes they would be like but Chris we brought you in to help with our fundraising campaign from that narrative lens like we wanted you to do like research on our angles and our framing and I'm like yes but I also have to talk to you about how are you segmenting the people you're speaking to to make sure that your narratives are individualized and tailored to each of those groups so that when it actually reaches them your presence resonates with them you're giving them what I like to call one of my principles is receipts you're giving them the receipts that you asked those questions that you took the time to be spacious with all of these different things that are in conflict that you're showing them I use this definition I'm hearing that definition from you is this what we're thinking about is that where we're not aligned if you're not having those types of human connection questions you actually can't build your systems to work for you so often I would get pulled in as an individual to help with the system side of things or to help with an activity or a project and I would have to explain to them that no we need to have a rhythm and nonprofit work development is about relationship building it's not transactional you need to invite people to be a part of your comments in the right place some people are going to want to be in your library most of the time other people might want to be in your skating rink you know depends on what your organization is in terms of what's in your comments but different stakeholders will interact with you in different ways so we have to make sure that our systems and our technology and our processes and our policies they're all built around sustaining that ecosystem and I think one last thing is we try so hard to be permanent in our choices we want our language to be definitive forever we're using these three measures forever that's not how that works we need to have adaptive structures our structures should be really clear in terms of why we chose this language specifically in our context and here's there's so much clarity looking at our language that we chose our options that we chose and our drop down menus and even simple things like that that we know when something starts to emerge why it would be a new category or why we would need to update one of our existing categories because we've done that work to really get into the nuance to go down the rabbit holes to and I would say even create constraints for ourselves because so often in nonprofit work we're not building those constraints we're so focused on the goodwill and the desire for empathy to turn to compassion for our problems to be met with solutions but we really need to be thinking of it as how are we regularly showing people that we're there for this context we want you to be a part of dealing with this context and improving the conditions so that the problems we're seeing go away over time and that momentum piece is missing all the time um even in how do we talk to people about fundraising so people are so focused on how do I ask someone for money and I'm like stop thinking of that as your first question that should be like your 20 of question your first question should be how do I speak to you so that you feel like you belong in this conversation so that you feel included as an actor in this solution and it shouldn't feel like you have to have a million dollars to donate to a cause to be worth any attention from that nonprofit that's another thing that I push back on all the time because I'm an annual giving fundraiser I'm not a major gift fundraiser from from a professional lens I really focus on how can we be doing that community engagement how can we be speaking to the widest base of stakeholders while still resonating while still staying true to ourself while still constraining ourselves so that our place in the ecosystem is distinct it's different from the other actors we're talking about the other actors we don't have to hide for everyone else of we we could talk about like where does for example where does lcc fit in like the education system in Quebec that was one of the things I loved about going to lcc how lcc focused on we have a pre-university program we're gonna actively talk to you about how when I first came to lcc we just started to have women going to lcc that was the very beginning I remember in kindergarten one of my classmates had an older sister and I think she was the first grade and I got to listen to her in kindergarten explain what it was like to be one of three girls and a class of 40 five grades above me like that really informed I think all of my academia all of my professional work was really like that sense of non-nobisole like not for yourself alone like not for ourselves alone how can we be considerate of everyone else and amplify them we don't have to be individual save years that's not what we should be doing in an international development or we actually even push back against expert culture we don't like to use the word expert because that eliminates people from the conversation we need to make sure that we're bringing the right people into the right conversations at the right time with the right context but we shouldn't be saying you're not relevant right like being intentional about it yeah right right right no it's really amazing I love I am loving hearing about all this work and I know that you'd also mentioned partnering with peers who have a strong vision but are facing burnout trying to make everything sort of real so what do you think empathetic leaders or why do you think empathetic leaders are so susceptible to burnout I know you touched a little bit on it before with the gap in the you know leaders and the coordinators but how can you help the leaders protect their energy without sort of losing the edge that they need by getting them to use data I think is one of the easiest ways to get started I especially think about the people who are in roles that have to do all of that negotiating so I mentioned before how fundraisers they're not the ones driving the pieces of the puzzle that they need to use in order to reach their roles objectives so the same goes for your operational administrators the same goes for your data folk who are pulling the data for you
you really need to use data to contextualize those conversations so that you're not burnt out trying to convince people of your position without them having the pieces that they need to understand your position. So that's a really important piece. One example that I have that feels super concrete is I jumped in. I was an interim annual giving officer for a large mental health organization in Canada that works with like a million actors like very much spread out everywhere. There's like teams and every province kind of energy and there was one single person who was in charge of annual giving fun raising across the whole organization and going out to like hundreds of thousands of people consolidating so many different people's perspectives and I held that role for around six months. Then I brought in someone else with the leader at the time. We upskilled them and I could tell right away when I came in that some of the long-term friction that they were seeing that was burning out all of their development staff. I actually sat down and did almost like an exit interview with the development person before me before I came in to be like what do you see here? We were very values aligned. They were a woman of color and they were talking to me about all of the different issues that they were facing as someone marginalized inside of the system. They were talking about the leadership and power dynamics that were problematic for them and the really concrete thing was I can't get my data team to help me. They won't pull the data that I need. I don't have reports on what is going on and I'm trying to help them understand that I am so willing to do what needs to be done here. I don't have the context to tell them what I think they're missing from me. I need to have a conversation with them and we need to reach some form of understanding here. Because I have that background where I was very much forced, my first agency job, the interview was literally, "Are you okay with doing 50% data work, 50% storytelling?" I was like, "What kind of job is this? What are you unique framing? I love that." That's exactly where I want to be. So I jumped right in and as like, "Let me help you build an internal narrative just like I would help build an external narrative so that we can get everyone internally to understand your presence in this conversation. That you're not trying to tell them to change their language and their categories and I pulled a couple of the data team's queries and I started to ask questions like, "We run this every year. So every year we have a flow, right, for annual giving. It's one of the things that's the easiest to describe that sense of emotion. We do a lot of fun raising at year end and then usually every nonprofit has like one other quarter of the year that's really relevant to their mission. Maybe it's Pride Month, maybe it's a disability month, maybe it's Black History Month, but there's usually one other time where they're like, "We're gonna be a little bit louder than usual." So I asked the team, "Let's stop discussing this at a larger level. I just want you to tell me, have we done the same poll for data this year, last year, and the year before for those two times of the year? How did you pull that data? Like literally pull your data query for me. You don't have to translate it because I also read the data. I'll read your SQL, I'll understand what in the world's going on here and then I can explain to you from the development point of view why we're not agreeing on decisions, why we're not agreeing on language and where the friction is even coming from. And we realized that there was no continuity in the data polls. Every year the data poll was completely different. The constraints were different. The rules for pulling the data were different, but the data team was so overwhelmed because there were 50 actors asking them these similar questions at once that they realized that you're right. Like we're not being consistent. We thought we were being more consistent here. And then we got to a point where I actually was able to build a data request form for them between the two that built that clarity on there are different ways to be looking at this. We often talk about pulling data in segments segmentation is a buzzword that findraisers flee from the second I say the word segmentation. If a fundraiser is not a data oriented fundraiser, they will 100% stop listening to you say, I have to be really careful about introducing concepts and that sense of overwhelm is something you really can't avoid. So you have to always be reconciling as a support. Is this the right question to ask today or should I wait until tomorrow? Is this the right context to bring in right now or is it an overwhelm you? So we broke down the segmentation into there is an organization level of annual giving never goes to these people. And always usually goes to these people. I'm like as a highest, highest level, who are we always removing? Who are we always including? Then at a second level, who are we regularly including and excluding specifically at those times of year? And then after that, who are we deciding whether or not they come into the picture at this time of year or not? Usually those are going to be people who are either actively being engaged by an individual and major gifts. So if someone's really having one to one conversations with someone at your end, we don't want to be sending a bunch of communications to them without acknowledging that we're having those one to one conversations with them. So again, it's not even about removing them. It's about we have to acknowledge it. We need to tailor our communications to them. And then lastly, then we get into this segmentation that's actually what the annual giving fundraisers are usually thinking about, which is what variants are going out? What different versions of our story are going out to these different groups so that they receive the right framing to feel like we're really doing that meaningful work that they're supporting us on. So once we were able to do that, there is a much clearer flow between the organizations. I ended up then also getting another contract with their other team. And that is another example of how empathy actually works from that business development perspective. By taking the time to reframe things from development and data are not cooperating and they can't cooperate to there's clearly perspective conflict here where they're not able to see one another. They don't have the language to bridge perspective. So you need someone to come in who's worked in many different contexts who can translate both teams' perspectives and can acknowledge where both teams are right now, acknowledge what is fair and important for both of them to be prioritizing and start to help with the negotiating when it feels too unclear for them. So telling the data team, we won't do this for you. We won't touch that. We understand now that field really matters for 40 different things that you do. We won't change that. That's okay. We just need one more category there so that we're not excluded from the importance of that field so that when you're helping our specific slice of the organizations activities, that the system is working for both of us, not just for you and not just for me, that we can pull reports that help us in a moment understand where we are, but also that we can do historical analysis to pull important insights to do that progressive summarization so that our strategic planning is relevant and meaningful and timely. It's not just wish you wish you or coming a finger in the air. I cannot tell you the number of times I've had to tell an executive director on the for-profit side in agencies because sometimes I'm also bridging to agencies that nonprofits work with, not inside the agency, but as a support with the nonprofit. How many times I've had to tell them that like your data is actually just wrong. Like you've, there's a miscommunication and how they've pulled the data and because we didn't do a sense making exercise at the very beginning, like I was pushing for, we've now spent three months where you didn't realize that you've used the wrong assumption for all of your things. So I do a lot of work to help organizations understand what assumptions are even going into what we're doing from that process in policy lens, what is the decision matrix that we need, and then what are the regular exceptions that we need to be considering. So we know that we usually have a golf event, for example, in November. So we know that for the variants that we're going out with in December that we're going to have at some point to bridge from thanks so much for coming to our event to, we're talking to you about something new. We don't want to just jump into the ladder. We want to be bridging, we want to be educated,
We want to be contextualizing before we ever get to any ask. It doesn't matter if it's for fundraising an external. It doesn't matter if it's about adjusting our adaptive structures internally. And it doesn't matter if it's about attuning our internal connections. For all three of those, you've got to have that shared context because when we think about collaboration and we think even going to the polysize side of things, we think about democracy. You're supposed to in a democracy all have the same information when you start voting on your decisions. If you don't have the same underlying information informing those decisions, you're actually not in a democracy. You're not doing collaboration. You're actually not synthesizing what you're trying to do. Another thing that really stood out to me and is part of your profile was when you say when you talk about pushing back on narratives that don't reflect the realities that you serve. And so how does empathy empower a leader to challenge the status quo or speak those hard truths to stakeholders at times? I think the most important thing here is empathy can be about soundboarding. Empathy can be about creating that really safe space for ideation. So when we're talking about narratives, especially with development, development's role is to progress the narratives. Inside of an organization, an executive director and a communications director and the board of directors, because there's a lot of power dynamics going on inside of a nonprofit that other organizations do not need to think about. Imagine being a for-profit business owner and there are 10 to 15 people who volunteer on a rolling basis who decide your government's decisions. Like that's a whole other dynamic that people don't understand. And I very much, as a nonprofit, I chose not to go straight to being a charity because as a smaller nonprofit, I exclusively getting things through service delivery. I'm not getting things through public donations or grants. So because I'm not doing that and I don't pass a $10,000 coming from the public threshold in my nonprofit, my board can be one person. My board is just me. Just little only. I'm everything. I'm service delivery. I'm the board. I'm the ED. I'm the treasurer. So how can, how does empathy empower a leader to challenge a status quo or speak hard truths to the stakeholders? When we're thinking about speaking truth to power inside of an organization, you can't ignore all of those power dynamics. So especially when the work is like so tied to our identities, it's so tied to like social issues that are very emotional. We often ignore the emotional side. And when you're in those roles where you're doing a lot of negotiating, you're doing a lot of difficult relationship work. And you have no power to just like do more sales. Fundraising is not more sales. Its relationship work. Speaking truth to power can be incredibly dangerous. I've seen countless fundraisers lose their jobs unfairly because they spoke truth to power. Often I'm coming in after they've done it if I'm in Tearum and I'm like giving them that final like at least all listen to you moment. Or it's a new person coming in or someone being challenged by the board really unfairly. Maybe their HR agrees with the development director. Often the ED is going through a culture audit. The board is bringing in someone external to be like we see that there are problems with power and culture here. So I really jump in to create that separate space that's away from everyone else. And I have basically four tears to my support. One is coaching. One is advising. One is facilitating. And one is in Tearum. And each of those is on one side of things about depths and the other about responsibility. The lowest is about just giving that sense of training and sense making and ideation that space to someone who doesn't have that within their organization unless it's directly the person who has formal power over them who doesn't have time to understand development. It's not even their role. So they already recognize that they need to be doing some learning there that they're not seeing eye to eye. There's that sense of we're not doing this as well as I think we should. There is friction that we don't like on both sides and we want to eliminate it. But we don't have the language for it. We don't have the words for it. Because I did so much work on the academic side on peace building and on psychology and on neuro inclusion. I can help bridge those unsafe spaces particularly for the people who might be autistic or have ADHD like I do or they might just communicate in a way that's a little bit different from someone else or they might have dyslexia. So the board might not realize that sending them like 40, 20 page documents to refer tomorrow at 6 p.m. is like incredibly extra unfair. So of course there's an extra emotion behind pushing back. So a lot of the time we want to avoid discomfort. We want to prioritize comfort. And like that's really been my call to action to this actor with empowering empathy with transformative justice with truth telling with peace building. You can't avoid discomfort. You have to embrace comfort. But also there was a tagline for an organization that was I'm going to try and not say it exactly so that I don't give them away. So I don't want to need them because that's not the purpose of this comment. But they were essentially saying like we want you to be able to just like talk out loud. And I was like that's not good enough. You have to recognize that some people cannot be out loud. They can't be themselves out loud without people targeting them. There is gender and sexual based violence. There is misogyny and racism and transphobia and ableism in the world rampantly in our system. Yeah, it's petrifying for some people. It's really scary. And often they won't have anyone who can listen to them. Or if they do, it's their coordinators where they have to be doing that leadership versus management angle. So I'm trying to teach them what co-sponsorship looks like with their higher ups and the people that they're managing at the same time. How do we do it in multiple directions at once? How do we acknowledge how your rage or frustration or sadness about something that's going on in your organization is totally justified. But let's also be strategic. Let's talk about it you and I and get rid of the anger that's not generative. And I think generative controversy is so important to the sector. We exist in the nonprofit sector to fill gaps. So if we can't acknowledge the gaps, what are we really doing here? So we have to give space to those roles in particular that are operational so they don't have all of the power formally to make the calls to talk to someone and do the emotional labor so that when they are having those negotiations with people, it's fair and they're not bringing undue emotion onto the other person as well. Because often they'll come to me and they'll be, they'll not want to do that. But they're like, I am sometimes. Can you help me? It's such an impossible situation. I'm like, you are like your rage is valid in this scenario. Like someone did something wrong to you. Someone did something that was not considerate of where you're coming from. When we talk about a lot of organizations that will say, we've always done it this way. And so I thought it was a valid to bring it up as you're making, as you're talking about the answer of the previous question because, you know, we're trying to make these organizations more human centered. So when people are faced with that kind of resistance and, you know, other ones in the organization are afraid of change. Like how can you handle that? Exactly. And being afraid of change is like such a leadership problem at the moment, especially when our leaders come from an older generation where they have not gone to school as recently as a lot of the younger folk inside of organization. That's a point that constantly gets ignored. So I'll go into organizations and a really easy example here. There was an organization where they're talking about sex and gender. They're really just focusing on those two topics. Can we get everyone to understand what does sexual orientation mean? What does gender identity mean? And I had to keep explaining to them that you guys were socialized around these topics in a period where we didn't want to distinguish between sex and gender because our social movement couldn't do it safely enough. We didn't have the language and the research at the time in order to do that. But now we do. So now I get to go into organizations and I do so much social listening.
and I'll bring in, I do tons of engagement. I don't do any posts really online. I don't even have a website. I really just focus on being in the spaces where those conversations are happening where I'm commenting where the discourse is going on so that I can bring those things to the people so that they can bring that to the conversations and influence the stakeholders with. But this is what people are talking about. Like this is what's relevant at the moment. And once you get to a place where you can name things so clearly, it becomes unavoidable. They can't ignore it anymore. And that's really the work I think of empathy in the org when you're fighting the change. When you can name how the change is so necessary in the simplest terms, you can bypass all of their concerns especially when you're forthright. And I think that's kind of the last thing for this one that I want to mention. We talk so much about transparency. And I really want to push back on transparency and level it up to forthrightness because being forthright is actually going and preemptively reflecting on what should I be transparent about before you even expect it. I want to tell you this before because I thought about your position about being scared about change. And I want to meet you where you are. And here is what I want you to understand. So digital transformation is a great example. They're always scared of digital transformation. And I always explain to them that I'm not here to sell, I'm platform agnostic. I'm not here to sell you a complex system or anything like that. I'm here to simplify your systems with you. I'm here to help you make decisions that increase your digital wellbeing by removing the clutter, by making it so that your systems are integrated and speak to one another. Often they'll think about centralizing as every single thing in the universe needs to be in one single system. And I'm like, no, that's actually not the reality at the moment. No system will cover every organizational need. You need to have the smallest tech stack to meet your specific needs. So absolutely reduce extras. But there will always be some level of consolidating. And when I explain to them that I'll always approach that systems change work. 'Cause I think that's really the most afraid. The narrative changes like a whole other angle where it involves the identity. But for digital transformation, it's really about getting them to understand that we always start with change with people first, then process and policy. And then we go to systems and technology. So the way that I make sure that that happens inside of the work is I do that observation and listening and I'll record what really comes in at that people level, then I'll go into, all right, well, if this is what the people want and what they're dealing with, and we're consolidating that, this is what we would need the system to do from that process and policy lens, which means that in the reality of this specific system, that's what it would have to look like. And that makes them understand that, oh, this is very adaptive. If we were to change systems two years from now, our first two steps would actually be ready for us to go to that new system. We would already know what language to be pulling and we would already know which things are important for us regardless of what system. So they get much less afraid of that and I show them that you can do very simple things with simple tools. Like I use Power BI, for example, for data visualizations and I explain to them that you're always gonna have to make them meet in the middle somewhere outside of one of your systems. There's always gonna be an Excel somewhere, at some point, I'm sorry. There's gonna be a data table somewhere, but we can-- - Somewhere, there's like numbers and it sells. - Exactly, it's gonna exist. But we can make it so that your systems group them for you. That they highlight when two things don't match up, that we can use our tools to make that change easier and we can change slowly over time. So a lot of the feedback that I get from organizations is that they really appreciate that about the work. I think that's really my distinction from a consultant. A consultant is really going in, and there's nothing wrong with being a consultant. It's more like, I'm meeting the momentum. We definitely need more embedded supports who are embodying those values and principles that we're trying to explain while we're doing that change management support and we're helping them navigate the change slowly over time. So there's always a person with them. There's always someone to ask questions about too. We can slow things down and then speed them up again. I actually don't do projects anymore, really. I might do a project like leading to some form of change management in a larger scale, but most of the work that I'm doing is over six months at a minimum to a year or two of planning. And it's really about how can I come in to help you during a capacity building moment, during a transition moment, during a you have to evolve your organization and you know it and you're terrified moment. Let me take on some of that burden of reconciling the vision of holding some of the things that I know you're going to have to change down the road for you. And I'll signal to you at the very beginning that we'll get there, but you don't have to know that right now. I'll get to that with you. So being able to pace it out a little bit more, being able to break it down into manageable chunks and also changing it, negotiating as we go. So just like I tell them to do, I always explain like you should be doing that reporting with your data. So you can always see from both like the numbers perspective, but also the stories perspective and processes. Like where are we right now? And then keep looking at things from that review perspective on like a semi-annual basis or a quarterly basis or an annual basis if you're much smaller. And you can strategically go, here's where we're going to make a change. So sometimes they'll tell me that they want change. They'll tell me they're scared of change. I'll come in and I'll explain that. And then I'll actually have to stop them from proceeding. I'll actually multiple times I've had to say no to the second contract for example, because I'm like you're not listening to me. You're trying to go straight to technology. You want me to give you a solution. And I've told you we have to reconcile these one or two incredibly specific friction points. And then we can build a solution. But we're using the wrong assumptions or something is not aligning or attuned across the organization. So being able to have an actor that's there in the change management who's not a part of the formal structure, who is not being compensated in the same way, who is not going to be there forever in terms of having to manage the relationship. I get to go in and explain like that doesn't make sense to me. And you don't have to agree with me. I never forced the decisions, but I won't move forward with you until you at least understand where I'm coming from here. If you give me a great reason for it, I'll drop it. We'll change it. That's okay. It's never a problem. That's what I mean by being forthright. If you want to have empathy in the change management, you have to be forthright. So I tell them we can pause, we can start. I want to be working on your change management with you over time. That doesn't mean I'm always doing the same thing with you. It means we were able to change this amazing. We're going to be busy for three months. You go do something else. I'll do another partnership. And we know that in six months, we're going to be changing that we would love for you to come back to help with that. But I often have to to say no because they want this open, they want the quick answer. And they're scared of the change while asking me to help them with the change, while denying the need for change, while demanding change. So there's lots of conflicts there. Right. And you have to manage it for them or help them manage it. Walk them through it, you know? Lots of management for that. Absolutely. I actually pushed back very hard on an organization recently where I was like, this is not making sense to me. The way that you're talking about our partnership, we're not in alignment. You're going to have to convince me to come work with you again in the future because I've been forthright this whole time and you're trying to be transparent after the fact. And that doesn't work when you're in a partnership that is involved with so much emotional labor that's involved with like that long-term capacity building objective. And so if we talk a little bit about leaders who are leading change, both out having necessarily the capacity or clarity that they need. So if there's someone listening to this a leader that's feeling that sense of being overwhelmed, what's one of the first things that they can do to regain some of the flow without dropping the ball on their responsibilities? How do you do a little bit of a reset? Stop doing things. To be very, very blunt, I think we're so trapped in doing that whenever I see someone feeling that.
That the first question I ask is, "Lay out your priorities." When I was in agency, I was always helping coordinators and we did cross-matrix work. The coordinators that I would be managing from that leadership management lens, they were on different accounts. While I would be working with doctors without borders and the Center for addiction and mental health and the Heart and Stroke Foundation, they were working with Worldwide Left Fund and Greenpeace on Red Cross. We didn't have all of that context across everything all of the time. When we would have our one-to-one meetings, when we would have those moments where I would pull them aside and go, "Hey, I sense overwhelmed. I sense burnout. I've seen you lighting that candle and being here until 9 p.m. and I'm not liking it. I would jump in and I would tell them, "You have to give things to me." And sometimes they would say, "No." And they would be like, "But control and all of these things." And I would have to tell them, "No." You don't have to hold everything. We are a team. We should be checking in on one another and sharing the burden when one of us is getting into that overwhelm. And secondly, it's not your job to solve these incredibly complex interwoven problems on your own. You have me as your soundboard, but a lot of the time those people don't have a leader who is supporting them. They have a leader who is making them cry on Friday nights. They have a leader who is holding back their professional development, who is micromanaging. So when I jump into an organization, I really look for the people who are trying their hardest to move things forward against that tide. And I only hesitate when I see leadership that is completely unwilling to acknowledge any of that emotional friction. So if there's some level of acknowledgement and desire for change, even if they're fighting the change because they always will, they'll never not challenge the change. But if they're at least willing to have a little bit of wiggle room there, then I know that I can go in and I can take some things off of them. So well, I won't replace their functions. I might build a simple tool that translates their Canada help, donations, for example, and makes it so that they can import it into their like main donation platform in two minutes instead of it being a manual two hour affair. So we'll immediately look for quick wins. Immediately take something that is reflection based that they don't have time to reflect on, but they're really stressed about reflecting on and I'll tell them, let me let you start without a blank page. Let me give you a two-pager with my thoughts because we've been talking about this. I know at least at some level I have something. And even if I don't know something, because you and I have that trust and we've been building that relationship over time, and you feel comfortable telling me that you're overwhelmed when I point it out and we have that angle, I can tell you if I'm not 100% sure about something and maybe that question is actually what leads you to your review, your insight that you bring to the other organization that changes how you're communicating with people. A really simple example is I would have, we would be doing fundraising in the agency across so many channels, it'd be like email, telephone, out of home ads, commercials, YouTube videos, petitions, text to donate, like everything imaginable. And our distinctiveness as an agency was we would actually do the reports and reviews. Like we would really do that analysis on top of the operational delivery. So sometimes coordinators would be sitting there with the data and they would go, I have no insights to put into this review. And they would be trying to choose things and I would have, being forthright with them is really what changes the game for them. So I would tell them, you don't have to have a change. If your review tells you that things are performing as per usual, your review shouldn't be about changing what we're doing. It should be about exploring something new. You should only be doing that change in site review if something is not working or you just did a test and you're like, did the test work? What's going on? So getting them to understand that we don't expect them to have the answer. They don't have to explain why something didn't work perfectly every time. Sometimes we don't know. Sometimes you call supporters, we had a fundraising campaign where we were talking about an endangered animal in one part of Canada and then 13 North Atlantic right whales were beached to that summer in like a very unusual manner. So while we were doing all of our outreach, no one wanted to talk about the animal that we were talking about. We had to pivot mid campaign to be like, they only want to talk about what's on every single news channel, slow news, summer. Nothing else is being spoken about in the news. We're only talking about whales showing up on Canadian beaches all over the place. So the poor coordinators looking at that, like how do I explain this in that historical institutional memory perspective of progressively summarizing this? And I'm like, just explain. We have one place where we have a summary of our campaign's year over year. Just mark that we had to change our script. We had to change our framing mid campaign because something unusual happened or we had another campaign where it happened in the middle of the Haiti earthquake. So I took explain to coordinators that wasn't because we did amazing from a strategy lens. There was a really urgent sudden thing that happened that influenced people's willingness to give. So contextualizing that being forthright about our expectations, those are the things that really enables them to not feel as burnt out, to not feel as stressed, to be able to tackle things more effectively. And you don't get things like recommendations that you would never actually apply. And great example. Whenever we would do telephone marketing, for example, we would do stewardship, we would do fundraising, we would do questionnaires, like we were doing all kinds of different telephone stuff. We would do people who had already donated and consented in everything. Of course, French donors in Quebec, they would donate at a lower amount for monthly giving but at a higher rate. And English donors would give at a higher rate and at a lower amount. So sometimes coordinators would think, well, then we're going to, if the campaign didn't perform as well as we would like, we're going to just not call those French donors. I was like, no, no, no. We don't ignore all of our French people in Quebec. We have to think about how people in Quebec have a different culture. How are we meeting them where they are? Is our content as relevant to them? Do we need to adjust the, like how are the conversations going? The conversations were going really well. It wasn't about that. It was there in a different economic system. Their average income was different than the rest of Canada. And we actually loved that they were doing more monthly giving because that gave us so much sustainable unrestricted income. So instead, we focused on who are the French donors who do not care about telephone calls. Let's remove those people and prioritize the ones who are being responsive to this channel. And those people, let's double down and let them know how extra distinct they are in terms of they are showing up at a higher rate and then look at that. Now our response rate and our average gift value went up. Like that's the recommendation angle that we need to do. But if someone's not used to data literacy, they don't have the structures or they have leadership pounding them for things. They don't have the time to reflect on it. You end up getting stuck on those decision moments and you don't know how to pivot or how to move forward and you need that person who's just going to listen. Who's just going to be like, "Here are three ways to approach it." Here's the one that I think makes the most sense to you. But before we make a decision, I want you to explain how all three resonate with you. Is one of them an absolutely that's not what's going on from your point of view? Eliminate it. And then that way they understand that you're in conversation with them. You're not overpowering them. You're not better than them. You're not seeing something they couldn't see. Think, regulate and think about it strategically instead of coming from that place of fear, coming from that place of competitiveness. And we all only have one life. We don't know what people are dealing with outside of school. When I left the agency and I ended up going out on my own, I actually was having a personal health thing going on. And I found that I was neurodivergent at the same time. And it was right when COVID hit. So a lot of the people in the organization thought that it was only one or the other. And only my line manager at the time understood that there was much more going on. So that's kind of like my shout out to everyone is.
When you're thinking about like moving forward and all this conflict and all of this chaos, focus on consolidating multiple perspectives. Don't just take a moment, just sit with yourself. That's not enough anymore. We need to be not individualistic. We really need to be more pro-social. Even I think about language and Quebec, such a contentious issue. We talk about, we have to prioritize, and this is a great way to take something that feels so problematic and make it really simple by having doing that reflection time. When we think about it, a lot of the narratives are about, we have to protect the French language and culture. A lot of people outside of Quebec, I almost exclusively work with people outside of Quebec. So I'm often translating for Quebecers in terms of, stop just translating our language. You need to think of our culture, please. We have a different life here. That's always my thing. That's my contribution from Quebec to the rest of the sector. I'm constantly having to explain that no one who's coming from that anglophone or immigrant background in Montreal or Quebec is against the French language or bilingualism or preserving French culture. We're all excited to have more language skills. We just want people to understand that our culture and language here is also important to be protecting and preserving. It's not a zero-sum game. We are not in an oversimplified binary of English versus French. I like to always bring in the angle of, we're all settlers and colonizers here unless you are indigenous, like why are we not prioritizing indigenous language conservation. Quebec is blaming immigrants and international students for so many different things while removing positions specifically related to indigenous relations. If you can name that clearly, the conversation shifts immediately because you've done that piece of building work, you've done that deeper reflection and by going out into the world and being brave enough to stand against intolerance, because I always say from an advocacy lens, the only thing we should be intolerant of is intolerance itself. We need to be allowing room for different perspectives, but we should never be making room for intolerance. We should always be willing to listen to people. We should always be willing to meet them where they are and that's so important. You can't ignore where they're coming from when we talk about violence and conflict and peace building. The times that it works in terms of deescalating and in terms of things like the Rwandan genocide when we think about, let's go on in Gaza, when we think about all those conflicts, the times that we have been able to deescalate a little bit or we were able to have true and reconciliation be prioritized and actually lead to different communities who were neighbors, then enemies, then neighbors again, is because we met people where they are, we acknowledged power dynamics, we spoke about majority versus minority, we spoke about the marginalized versus the people who are prioritized in our support structures. Having the courage to name those things is what attracts people to you. That's what I talk about when I talk about the receipts angle and when I think about summarizing the work that I'm doing, I really think about how can we be doing more interdisciplinary weaving at the highest level because I see that being kind of like the macro problem across many different domains. Then we're doing like that, we're attuning those internal connections, we're building the adaptive structures and we're working on making sure that our presence actually resonates with our communities, showing them that you've done all of that work, showing them that you have that language. That's what actually makes you confident enough to say those things out loud. When I say those things out loud, I attract things so I don't have to look for funders, I don't have to respond to request for proposals, I don't have to post three times a week, I don't do any of those things in just the last three years alone, not including all of my experience in agency, I went from not doing anything on LinkedIn and having like 400 connections to having over 1500 connections but I don't ask people to connect because I'm trying to role model organic growth from that development lens, I wait for people to connect with me by showing them how my values and principles are going to show up in the work. I'm going to show you not tell you that this is what's important to me. When people reach out to connect with me, even if I'm talking about the most contentious issues, I'm like fighting a senator on LinkedIn about transphobia and freedom of expression in Alberta, like it's getting spicy sometimes. The messages that I get are my work would be so much easier if every man I worked with thought like you. I'm not, I don't even identify as a man, I might be male from a sex perspective but I'm non-binary from a gender lens but I'm okay with that because I understand that from a systemic privilege lens, I am perceived as male so I'm going to get systemic privilege. So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about the nuance, you have to be able to reconcile all of those things and I even get pushed back from people who are not queer phobic or transphobic who will be like well, you don't have the same experience as someone who feels the need to transition not just their social gender but their biological sex and I have to explain when have I ever said that I'm the same as that person. And from an educator lens, both sex and gender are non-binary because intersex folk exist. There are dozens of variations for sex and at multiple points in our life, our sex changes as far we have menopause and puberty. So you could become intersex, it's not just the beginning of your life that you're intersex, you can become intersex at any point. There are many different inflection points. So because on the biology side and psych side, I studied all of those angles in terms of how people have different cognitive functions and differences, they have the biosecology is different. I have that more like sciencey side of things but then I switched over to the more art social side of things, I'm able to bridge those two groups. So I always tell people, bridging narratives, meet people where they are, be considerate, don't center yourself. And in fundraising, we talk about being donor centric, we talk about being community centric and just like transparency to being fourth right, I want to level us up a little bit. We need to be peace centric because peace centric is always reconciling things. It's never giving up on reconciling. There's always that is more harm coming up as something gone the wrong way. Is it not landing? Peace centered always centers all of us as a commons. It talks about how are we meeting in the commons instead of how can my organization tell you about me? No one cares about that from a fundraising and development and community engagement lens. We want to understand how can my principles and values continue to make progress for people or issues that I really care about through you as a vehicle. How can I be a part of the change in momentum that you're doing? It's so interesting and it makes me just want to go sort of way back when you talked about, you know, you started out with more of the psychology side of things. But if you can go even further back and you look back to when you were a student at LCC, were there any sort of specific experiences, teachers, moments that planted the seeds that you do that I'm going to restart that planted the seeds for the work that you do now? Absolutely. This was another tough question because I think I have about a dozen. So I'm trying to narrow it down for the sake of time. One of them is definitely, I remember Mr. Vio and in grade six, I was just trying to get on the hockey team. I loved team sports as a kid and my parents worked so hard to put me into LCC. I'm a lifer, my grandfather went to LCC, skipped a generation, I came right back and they worked extra shifts. We lived an hour and a half from LCC in Rosemary. Every morning I left up five to six a.m. in order to get to LCC and I spent an hour to two hours going home and I was in after school until six p.m.
I didn't get to have a hockey coach growing up. I learned how to skate in grade four or five at LCC. So when I went to the hockey tryouts at one point, Mr. Vio asked us to skate backwards. And I had to really awkwardly skate over to Mr. Vio and go, I can't do that. (laughing) I actually don't care about being on the A team. I just want to play hockey. - Yeah. - Like I'm already here until 6 p.m. - Yeah. - Can I at least play a sport or something? - Do something. - Do something. - Like I'm bored essentially. And I remember him like really taking the time, not just at tryouts, but I think he mentioned it like later on in the more like public setting outside of that. And he was like, I was so impressed that Chris was willing to show up and like name that they were not able to do something. And then I could accommodate that instead of like Chris having to feel really embarrassed. Well, everyone's trying their hardest. They've all been skating since they were, half of them were skating since they were two, being super competitive. I'm like, I just lost the chair I was using like two, three weeks ago. And like that was a huge thing for me because that really showed me that we don't have to make people feel bad when they don't have the same skill level as everyone else. Like that's okay. Like we all have different competencies and strengths and skills. So that really landed for me. And I have two more if that's all right. - Of course, yeah. I know testimonials are so hard to get sometimes. So I'm always like, let me give you all the testimonials. - No, this is so great. Yeah, absolutely. - Another one was I had an English teacher. I think I was miss Saunders. I also had Mr. Lawson. I remember both of them were really, really considerate and caring and took the time to like sit me aside and talk to me about my writing. And I am a gestalt language processor. So it means that I fully perceive language differently than most people. So when I choose words, it is very different from other people. So that's why things like co-sponsorship come up for I like very different language than others. And it's because I often get misunderstood if I use their language because my brain perceives it differently and I want to communicate using different language so they can understand this is a bit different. When I was younger, I was so shy as an undiagnosed autistic ADHDer. And I would not even order food for myself. My little sister, who was four years younger than me, would be the one who would go up to the counter, ask her a puttin an ahtag for me. And make sure that I got food. And I remember like really just spending so much time reading, so much time reading as a kid. I was constantly like parents, dropped me out at Barnes and Nobles for three hours. I beg of you while we're on a trip from fraud. Yeah. Going through all the stacks and I read way advanced for my grade. Like I was reading books that were much more advanced and the English teachers at LCC actually took me aside and they allowed my summer reading to be four levels above where we were. So in grade seven, I was reading grade 11 books for all of my summer papers. Amazing. And at one point in grade nine, they actually pulled me out of class one day and they were like, we're sending you downtown. And I was like, what? And what do you mean? And they took me and one other student and we got to participate with authors who were fully adults. We were the only youth there. And we were sitting at a table just talking shop with a bunch of published authors on what it means to be a writer and how to approach it and how to make sure that you're framing and your emotion like isn't lost in everything. And like that was huge for me. And I think I really bring that into the work side of things to bring it to that because we don't spend enough time acknowledging strengths. And I see that being a huge issue for those leaders in the orgs who are burnt out, who are trying so hard. When I give them positive feedback, they cry on calls. Like we're emotionally regulating together because they're not used to leaders prioritizing, letting them know where they are doing well. So LZZ also definitely taught me that. And a final example, challenging you to be, I think the best version of yourself too. When you're not necessarily believing in yourself another one, 'cause those were all very much like, I know I can write and things like that. They were just amplifying it. They were like doubling down on it for me, which was so considerate and so caring. And so above and beyond, I would say, right? That's what you want from a school where it costs more to go to LCC. We're paying for the best education. And like you want to get those experiences. And I tell people all the time, I got those by going to LCC. I'm like, I'm so proud of that. But from a challenging perspective, I mentioned before the not ordering things I would go up as a kid and being shy. At one point my teachers told me that I should do improv at LCC and do a little bit more of that. And I ended up throughout middle school and high school. I kept going to the auditions for things that we have to do in grade seven. I don't know if you guys still do it. We have to do a history play. And everyone auditions, everyone gets a part. It's like a part of your grade. It's not these will like, you're choosing to do drama on the side. You have to do it. And I remember for that, I asked specifically, I said, I will do any role. Like I'm really not picky with roles. I don't want you to think that. But I was so stressed about memorizing. My brain is not designed for memorizing. If I have to do public speaking in grade 11 when I did my test for what job should you do, I got public motivational speaking. And when I do any speaking, if I'm trying to memorize, I freeze up because I like to tailor it, I like to individualize it. I have to be in context. My brain just doesn't work that way. And I asked, please, please don't give me the most lines. And I got the most lines. And the next play that I did, they gave me the most lines. Oh my gosh. And the next play that I did, they gave me the second to most lines. And I was in every scene. And that was, I didn't understand it as a kid. I was like, why are you doing this to me? And I think back now about some of the other things that happened around that. Yeah. And I listened to the teachers that I had who were talking to me about those things at the time. And one of them was telling me, you should really be trying to be more of a Leiber at LCC. Why are you not trying to be the Clackston House Head or anything like that? And to me, I was like, I'm already super different from the other kids at LCC. They're not driving four hours per day. Their parents aren't doing extra shifts in trying to do an extra job on the side for me to get here. I'm already doing that leadership work in my own way, in my own social circles at LCC. I didn't feel a need to do that. But now I see that they were telling me, you can do much more than you realize here. We want you to realize that you could do more here. And the biggest thing that drove this home for me that helped me realize it years and years later was I think in grade nine or 10, I won the award for most improved. And my grades did not move a single decimal percentage. OK. And I'm like, that's the teachers letting you know that they were hoping you would improve something beyond grace. They were looking at your social skills and your leadership skills and your confidence. And those are really the things that I got at LCC. At the end of LCC, I chose to go. I got a scholarship to Mary and Opholiss. I chose to go to Dawson anyway. The personal side, my family's involved in the Dawson shooting. I lost a cousin at Dawson on a stage. You had to Suza while I was at LCC. So that was also a big part of my growth. And I don't think I would have ever been confident enough if I hadn't been put through things like that. If I hadn't been encouraged to recognize how I was doing really well in certain aspects, that I could be a leader if I wasn't the stereotypical leader. I had people who were willing to name that for me. And it is amazing. That gave me the confidence to name that for other people and the confidence to go and actually study psychology in the place where I had such a personal, traumatic experience there. We're standing there like being recorded on the news We're having our emotional reactions and like I'm angry to eat. That's not
the normal middle school experience. - No. - My family had to do so much that was like not the normal, normal experience whatsoever. And LCC made so much room for that. There was so much checking in. There was so much support. And particularly the woman, I made a post about this at 3 a.m. on a work trip in Belgium because it just came to me when someone sends you the right message, the right encouragement, and you're like, you know what, I'm not waiting one more minute to do this. And I shared on LinkedIn that story and I was explaining how the girls at LCC, again, hugely disproportionate breakdown between genders, especially when I was there. Like I'm sure it's probably changed a little bit, but back when I was there, it was a huge difference. And it was the girls who stood up with me and asked people to support the fundraiser that my family had started off the back of the Dawson shooting. Who were like, we'll go up at assembly if you're uncomfortable and who made space for me to be emotional before or afterwards. And that I think is a huge part of me being non-binary as well is like going through LCC and realizing, I'm not resonating with the men in this school. I'm resonating with the woman in this school from a social perspective because their values and principles align with mine. My mom grew up in a show of anistic culture and encrained in me so hard at a young age what it meant to be a feminist. So going through LCC and having that space where people were amplifying marginalized leaders or non-traditional leadership, having younger girls stand up for me when they didn't have to, when they were also putting undue pressure on themselves when they were doing so. When they're standing in front of a school of mostly men in order to support me doing that, some of them would even stand with me at recess in order to actually do it every day at lunch. So men were not the ones who did that for me. That was women. And if we can be doing more bridging between perspectives between genders, between races, between people with different neurotypes, imagine how much better our world would be. - Oh, that's very well, well, well put. Wow. So I guess in closing, I'd love you just to leave us with a few maybe some words for the current students who want to make an impact, but worried about all this real world stuff. Can you give a piece of advice to them about staying true to themselves and their values? - Absolutely. If you focus on not being right all of the time and you instead focus on always learning, you'll always be open to feedback. You'll always be open to change. You'll always be open to growth. And that is what lets you navigate those scary conversations without being punished that allow you to have the impact that you intended on. And it will also attract the ideal people to you throughout your life, not just in the professional ways of business development, like I was saying before, but even on the personal side, it will attract the friends that appreciate you, the partners who are willing to do the work with you. That is how you approach all of these scary things. So listen to your grandparents and their stories and reconcile it with your stories. And you can style it with your parents and then listen to the kids who are younger than you think intergenerationaly, think cross culturally, think from an interdisciplinary perspective because things are non-binary, you have to be synthesizing things across leans and the more that you try to simplify and be right and go straight to acting or straight to solution. The worse it will be for you, it'll be more painful. You'll have to go backwards, you'll cause anger and conflict and it won't resonate for you and you won't get what you want out of that. So if you're willing to do that work, be the person who's open to feedback. Be the person who's like, you know what? We're not even talking about the same two things here. But also stand up for people who are different from you. We often end up creating little echo chambers. The queer community is particularly notorious for this. I'm constantly having to remind them if you want social impact and transformative justice in these spaces, you have to bridge to the people who are not already aligned with you who do not understand your perspective and you need to get them to at least listen to you to understand. And then if someone doesn't want to listen to understand, that's the person you don't waste your time on. Double down on the person who is willing to listen to understand before acting, who is willing to be wrong just like you and just like you're leaving receipts for others to see that you're doing that work internally. - Yeah. - Look for who else is leaving those receipts because when you find those people, you leave those conversations with four times the amount of energy with 10 times the amount of assuredness and confidence and what you're doing and you won't hesitate as much. You won't get stuck in decision paralysis. You won't get stuck in inefficiencies because you're prioritizing the most important thing which is that back and forth with other human beings. - Yes. So beautifully said, and I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and listening to you. You really have a beautiful, awesome energy about you as a human being. So I can just imagine how helpful and wonderful you are to the organizations that you work with and not just for those people, but just I'm sure everyone that is in your world, your family, your friends and your passionate and it's just been lovely to hear more about what you do. So thank you so much again for joining us on the podcast. - Well, thank you for having me for making space to share all the great stories from LCC and beyond so I can also impart some knowledge and do some of that knowledge chance for others as well. And yeah, just really appreciate this so much. Please keep allowing other people to have that platform. It means so much more than people realize. - Yes, well thank you. - Thank you. - Thanks for listening to We Are LCC. For more, go to LCC.ca/podcast and remember to hit subscribe or follow on your podcast app so you never miss an episode. - Produced and distributed by the Sound off Media Company. (gentle music) - The world of audio is evolving. Fast, so much so that it often means video as well. These days, staying ahead isn't an advantage. It is a necessity. I'm Matt Kundal and every week on the Sound off podcast, I speak with the people shaping the future of podcast, broadcast and audio, whether you're behind the mic in the production studio or in the boardroom. This is your weekly look into the Trends, Talent and Tech driving audio forward. The Sound off podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and at soundoffpodcast.com.
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