Christina: Understanding context is so important. And the change model that I designed, which includes these steps of awareness, attunement and action, the awareness portion is really creating deeper narrative context of the world, socially and economically and politically, so you can have deeper empathy and understanding and nuance in how you’re interacting with people, what assumptions you might make about them, the ways that you design goals and think about practices. Because we often don’t slow down, we have this automatic patterning that our bodies are on. And we do that because it’s efficient and it’s comfortable, but often it’s full of a lot of inaccurate narratives about the world and how it works. And it can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications. That’s why I think it’s important to slow down and give that context so that we’re not having so many misunderstandings.

Christina: And the more that we can do that practice and not jump to conclusions and react impulsively or have tons of judgment and criticism, I think the better we’ll have a much better interaction in our neighborhoods and our communities and the broader society.

Stacy: Welcome. Welcome. I am really glad to be with you this week and talk about a really important topic with a very inspiring, intelligent and status quo challenging guest. And as I’m recording this, we’re coming right off the back of the Presidential inauguration. So while this will be published a little bit after that, you’ll know this is informing some of my thinking and some of my own posturing as we come into this discussion.

Stacy: It’s all very new and I hope that we can leave with today’s conversation both getting to talk a bit about equity but also about we’re going to talk about storytelling and as I mentioned how to challenge the status quo in the way that you show up in the world and understanding yourself better. So let me introduce you to this week’s guest. Christina Blacken is a public speaker, performer, and the founder of the New Quo, a leadership development and behavior change training company. She creates transformational learning experiences and services that redefine community and culture within corporations, nonprofits and universities. She’s trained 14,000 leaders across nine industries using her unique change model, which uses neuroscience, equity principles and narrative intelligence to help people overcome bias, deepen trust in their relationships, and achieve equitable status quo breaking goals.

Stacy: She’s been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Business Insider, and Nasdaq.com among other outlets. Christina, welcome. I’m so glad to be with you.

Christina: I am happy to be here.

Stacy: I’d love to just start with your backstory to understand a little bit of your personal journey and what led you into the work that you do today.

Christina: And I’ll have to go back to the beginning of my childhood because I was born in Ogden, Utah, which were just talking about. Ogden. What’s up? Shout out to anybody from Ogden if you’re listening. But I essentially grew up as what I call an extreme minority. So racially, religiously, and politically, I was kind of on the outside with the dominant cultural groups that I spent my days around. And I often saw these groups using storytelling and narrative in school settings, in religious institutions, in media and television to shape how people perceived groups that they weren’t familiar with and they weren’t necessarily intimate relationship with. And that led to measurable outcomes, whether it was discriminatory practices, profiling people in stores, negative interactions with groups who are different.

Christina: And that to me, not only was something I personally experienced and felt a just and a drive to try to do something around, but also it fascinated me in terms of how it affected my community and the people that I loved and the people I grew up with. So this idea of story making and how it affected bias was really something that followed me from childhood into college. And in college I studied policy analysis and management. I thought I was going to change the world one legal brief at a time. I’d be on my ALEC mobile and go ahead and try to flip the laws.

Christina: And then I realized that there are other ways that I could use narrative to get people to change how they think and how they behave in the relationship dynamics and learn that through a number of jobs in nonprofit and the media and then finally as an entrepreneur. So now I run an organization called the New Quo and I focus primarily on equipping people with evidence based communication tools and practices so that they can reduce and stop automatic patterns of negative thinking and story making and bias that gets in the way of how they perceive one another, how they navigate challenges and conflict, how they build goals, how they shape their business practices.

Christina: And we’re in a time where we need those tools more than ever before because there’s a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of fear and paranoia, there’s a ton of isolation because people aren’t building community and relationships and friendship like they used to. And that’s leading to a lot of destruction and a lot of removing of progress and rights that we’ve been spending the last few decades building.

Stacy: I love your. How you shared about your early. Your. Your upbringing. As we discussed before we hit record, I grew up in Boise and a lot of my life actually was undoing a lot of the narrative I received growing up. I know that you grew up in a Baptist community. I grew up in a, a Christian like not non denominational Christian community, but I also went to Christian school. Embedded in that was a lot of messaging around race, around gender roles, reality that took me like probably at least a decade to undo. But then it’s a lifetime really. Right. Of continuing to excavate and continuing to hold in the light things that you were taught from a very young age, that you believed. And for me, growing up in Idaho that you mentioned, Ogden, Idaho.

Stacy: Ogden and Boise are very similar geographically in race and ethnicity. I think even socioeconomically they’re pretty close. So there’s a lot of parallels there. And to your point, growing up in this minority, I grew up in the white majority, which meant I was really kind of in a bubble basically my whole life. And it’s interesting the way that you talk about, it’s like the narrative, the storytelling does the damage, but then that’s also the tool that can start to undo it and create change. And I love that is the.

Christina: Tricky, double edged sword of narrative where it’s both a tool that can bring people together and deepen understanding and empathy like no other communication tool. And it can also be used for manipulation, for exploitation, for violence. And so I think it’s really important. And this is why I talk about narrative intelligence, which is understanding how story affects belief and behavior. And when we’re conscious of that, we can be more critical of the narratives that we’re consuming. So one thing I often encourage my clients to do is a story audit. So really evaluating what is the stories that I’m consuming on a regular basis from the news, from tv, from podcasts and books. And what is it saying about the world, about other people? Does that give me a broader, diverse perspective of what’s happening in the world?

Christina: Or is it really making my worldview smaller and more contained and more insular? And often if you just add one new piece of media or narrative that you typically wouldn’t reach for, it can completely change your perspective, your point of view, your ability to relate to others. And so I think really having that consciousness around narrative and its impact on ourselves is one of the most powerful tools anybody can excavate. It’s really this self awareness and introspection tool that anybody has to practice, especially if they want to be influential and lead in any sort of way and communicate in a way that inspires people to make a difference or change their behavior.

Christina: And I think we’re becoming more conscious of it now because of the time we’re in with technology and artificial intelligence, where a huge explosion of misinformation and deep fakes and really struggling with what should we trust? What’s real, what’s not is going to become even more pressing in the coming years.

Stacy: I obviously couldn’t agree more with that. And it’s just going to, it’s not just like a small bit that it’s going to worsen. It’s really going to get harder to tell what’s real and what’s not. I wonder if you could give an example of this idea of an audit and how adding another angle or perspective can change things. I’m thinking about, like with my personal example, growing up in this bubble where everybody had the same messaging, everyone. My church camp that I went to, my school that I went to, my, you know, church, always the same messaging. And I can remember it. For me, it was college and taking a class and on a literary theory class that helped me change my perspective.

Stacy: What about somebody who’s into their actual life, they’re not 18, that is trying to be more mindful of the narratives that are coming into their world. What might be something practically that they could do right after they’re done listening to this, that could start to help them develop more nuance or have more perspectives on a topic.

Christina: One big one is correcting historical amnesia is what I call it. Most people don’t have any concept of the history of the place that they live in, so they don’t understand why it exists the way it does, why it looks the way it does, why it operates the way it does. And so one large project I ran for three years was a moderation project for a social media platform, teaching people how to identify microaggressions and bias in conversation and reduce them so they can improve the trust in their neighborhoods. And we had about 45,000 people sign up for the training, About a third completed it. And some of the feedback we got was around this concept of looking up the untold history of where you live.

Christina: So one of the questions was, look up and google your city’s name and the term redlining and see what comes up. So you could put Boise, Idaho, redlining, and that would give you a quick overview of what it was, how it operated, and how it essentially affected segregation within your city, financial and economic discriminatory policies within that city. And it’s really eye opening. I think when people are connecting history to where they live and how it works, they feel more grounded and rooted in the realities of how different demographics have grappled with certain challenges and barriers that were created institutionally and still have a legacy, in effect, today. And so I think anytime someone can reconnect themselves to the place that they’re in, another one I advise people to do is to look up the indigenous population or community that lived in your cities.

Christina: So there’s a really great website called native-land ca from Canada, and it’s a huge database of indigenous groups. And you can essentially put in your address in this database and it’ll pull up the indigenous community that lived there and you can look them up, what their practices were, what happened to that community, do they still have any kind of land or ownership or protection? Often they don’t. So I live in Brooklyn, New York, and the Lenape people were the ones who managed this land before colonization. And they were, you know, violently forced from this community. And they left a huge impact on the environment, how they stewarded the environment, how they dealt with agriculture, which is now used in a lot of modern farming practices.

Christina: So being able to connect yourself to untold history and getting new narratives around the literal neighborhood you live in, the land that you walk on, the streets that you are in, can give you a much broader perspective, Because I think most people operate from a very truncated history or from fantasy and delusion that’s not attached to the reality of history at all. So it’s almost like learning that Santa Claus isn’t real. Maybe in your later years in life when you’re like, actually, Santa Claus may not be real, and there’s these other things that actually happen. Too. And I think that alone is probably one of the most powerful narratives people can add to their lives, is a more accurate, more diverse and honest concept of history and how it shaped where they live.

Stacy: That’s a really great example of just something you could google and learn about that can, you know, teach you more about the place that you’re in. I also feel, you know, sometimes we’ve lived in four countries outside of the US and it’s really easy as a foreigner to make judgments about something. So, like, one of the things in Portugal is an example that. That. Well, it still kind of drives me crazy, but for sure, at the beginning is that all the places want cash. Like restaurants, you know, shops. They prefer. They prefer incentives will only take cash, especially if you’re in a smaller area.

Christina: You work the same way.

Stacy: Really. Okay, so a lot of places. Yeah, I wonder. Okay, so I’m curious. I’ll tell you what I learned, and then maybe there’s a connection for you too. One of the things that I. I learned as I dug into Portuguese history more, they had a dictator until the 1970s, and part of that dictatorship included control of banks. And so people’s money wasn’t safe in the banks. And so a lot of the drive around cash still comes from this sentiment connected to the banking system. Of course, that isn’t universally true. There’s also taxes and things like that involved in it.

Stacy: But a lot of it is driven by mistrust of the financial system, which gives me more empathy when I consider that, especially for older store owners or people, sometimes we look around, I’m like, that person literally lived under a dictator, like not that long ago. You know, it gives you more empathy. I’m curious in your areas that. What’s the. Have you looked into the reasoning behind the cash preference?

Christina: That’s really interesting. I wonder if there’s any of that potential mistrust of the systems. Because a lot of people who run stores and small businesses in New York City are also immigrants and come from a lot of places that may have had dictatorships. So that might play a role, actually, that I didn’t. I never connected the dots around that until now. But another one is honestly financial costs. So a lot of them are doing processing through their banking systems that put fees on them for processing credit cards and that sort of thing. So they end up paying a lot in fees throughout the year if they’re taking credit cards versus just cash. Although that’s starting to shift a lot. And now we’re seeing a lot of organizations and A lot of small businesses adopting cashless systems.

Christina: But I’ve been in New York City for 15 years and I’d say the first 10, it was like, you needed some cash on me at certain places because they’d just be like, no, cash only. And I was always so frustrated about it. But then as I learned the burden to put on small businesses in terms of paying those processing fees, I understood why they were taking cash first. So that’s going to save them thousands and thousands of dollars a year. And they have, you know, really small margins and really large overhead. I was like, okay, I get it. You know, they’re trying to be financially stable. But that just goes to show why understanding context is so important.

Christina: And the change model that I designed, which includes these steps of awareness, attunement in action, the awareness portion is really creating deeper narrative context of the world, socially and economically and politically. So you can have deeper empathy and understanding and nuance in how you’re interacting with people, what assumptions you might make about them, the ways that you design goals and think about practices. Because we often don’t slow down. We have this automatic patterning that our bodies are on. And we do that because it’s efficient and it’s comfortable. But often it’s full of a lot of inaccurate narratives about the world and how it works. And it can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications. That’s why I think it’s important to slow down and give that context so that we’re not having so many misunderstandings.

Christina: And the more that we can do that practice and not jump to conclusions and react impulsively or have tons of judgment and criticism, I think the better we’ll have a much better interaction in our neighborhoods and our communities and the broader society.

Stacy: I love also the segue into your model because that was what I wanted to talk about next. You, you created the new quo change model, and as you mentioned, it has these components to it. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about the framework and then if you could give an example of how this has impacted the leaders that you work with.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. So it’s a reflection tool around communication and goal setting. And it has these three steps of awareness, which is including understanding cultural social narratives around you and also the internal narratives that you hold from your own life experiences, from four key life changing moments, which I call origin moments, adversity moments, success moments, and innovation moments. Because that often dictates your values and your beliefs about the world. And then the next step is attunement. So it’s really understanding other people’s stories and narratives around those same key, you know, inflection points in their lives and how it shapes what they believe and what they value.

Christina: And when you start creating shared narratives, which I call that an action step, you’re able to then have shared values that you’re creating goals around, that you’re communicating around, so that you can find points of relatability, even if you’re very different. If you have shared values, you’re more likely to be able to get things done. And I designed the model off of a couple of different methodologies, one being neuroscience. Because our bodies are wired to seek out rewards and threats. And so often that’s a hormonal response and an emotional response. When you understand that, you can slow down and not just jump to assumption. Also equity principles. So how do we really think about distributing resources and opportunities in the best way possible to help the most people possible?

Christina: And then narrative intelligence, how does story affect all those things affect brain, your nervous system, the way that you’re thinking about and strategizing and coming up with ways to collaborate. And so when I’ve implemented this model with leaders, I’ve tend to found a couple of things. A lot of people who I’ve worked with are usually in a mode of transition. So there’s some huge change that’s happening. They’re either going through a big growth spurt, or the teams are blending together and trying to figure out how to work together and collaborate, or there’s been some infusion of capital and they need to figure out what they’re doing with it. And the leaders are a little bit concerned where they’re like, hey, I have this new big task and goal to relate to a lot of people. Maybe these people are pretty different.

Christina: Maybe we’re grappling with uncertainty. How do we do this? And the model is tended to help the leaders become more confident and aware of what they value. You know, if you don’t understand what your true values are, it’s easy to just be driven by fear. As we’re seeing with predominant leadership, we’re seeing right now in politics and in government and across a lot of business institutions. And a fear driven value system as a leader typically truncates innovation. And it also leads to a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of errors and mistakes made. So leaders who are able to slow down and expand their narratives of what they value and then build things off of their actual values are more likely to be more Effective, more influential, more persuasive. So I see that pretty often.

Christina: The other thing I’ve noticed too is really understanding that when you meet somebody, you really don’t understand what their story is and your assumptions are often wrong. So an example is I worked with this team at St. Louis University, and it was a team within their diversity, Equity and inclusion department. And this team was going through a hard transition because there was an internal team focused on DEI within the university. And then there was a part of the team that was focused on the external effects of the university on the community and the city at large. So how are we making sure that equity is accessible to neighbors and the impact of the university on resources, on the environment and that sort of thing? And they kind of had competing goals.

Christina: And I remember the leader of this community and group, were doing an exercise where everyone had to reflect on their early stories of leadership and what leadership looked like in their towns growing up. And she’s a middle aged, like, older black woman. And she had realized, she’s like, you know, as everyone’s sharing their stories, I realized that I grew up as anomal where my city and community, everybody who was a leader looked like me. They were all black individuals, they were all accomplished, they were professionals. And mind you, people assumed that she probably would have had the opposite because she’s a person who grew up in a time where there was a lot more discrimination and a lot less opportunity. And so for her, she’s like, I didn’t realize.

Christina: It shaped my perception that there was no limits on my ability as a leader and who could make decisions and have a waste, not power. And then there are other people in the team who had the complete opposite and who you could assume maybe those leaders that they were around looked like them and they actually didn’t, you know, and so that was really eye opening where often we have a lot of complex stories and intersectionality of our identities that people don’t know that shape how we’re showing up to conversations, how we’re managing misunderstandings or conflict. And when we have a better understanding of those narratives beyond the surface, we can actually collaborate more effectively with those people.

Christina: And so it was great to see the trust deepen and the understanding deepen within this team and giving them practical tools to do it, that doesn’t feel like inaccessible and really difficult. I think most people assume that work around relationship and community building is so complex and difficult, which it can be, but a lot of the time, really basic tools of communication and reflection and navigating differences and conflict is really a great starting point that can lead to a lot of improved outcomes.

Stacy: That’s been my experience in my life too, is the conversations are everything and just connecting with another human. You mentioned awareness at the first step. What I heard from that is there’s awareness of self, there’s awareness of others, and that can only result through conversation and through also I think, genuine care to know the other person and to consider them. Obviously the work that you do is very important and I’m curious to hear from you. We’re in a very tumultuous time in the DEI space. Obviously in the last week plus programs have been canceled, major companies like Meta have just stopped doing this really important work that has been happening for years and years by good people that really care about this change. How are you thinking about your work right now in the world and what do you see as your kind of.

Stacy: I don’t know. I know, I know you’ll continue to do the work that you’re doing, but does it evolve in some way? Does it change in some way? How are you thinking about that?

Christina: One thing I’ve been thinking about is language. I think language is really important. And often the tools of oppression are to weaponize language and to bastardize language. And that’s what’s happening with the term DEI now. So people are using it as a substitute to, you know, put forward their very racist ideology and beliefs and assumptions around who is under qualified and being given handouts is sort of their assumption of what it is when the practice is really ensuring that an organization is treating everybody fairly, with respect, and really actually implementing merit in their systems of hiring and recruiting and development. Because the default, not only through policy and practice, but also through bias, is people do not use merit when they’re making selections. They often select who’s the most familiar to them, who they’re most comfortable with, who might be a friend.

Christina: And that leads to a lot of homogenous outcomes and organizations. Right? That’s why a significant portion, a majority of leaders and a majority of business owners are still white men. And that is not because of merit. There’s enough representation because of bias and because of familiarity and affinity bias. And so DEI helps everybody, including other white men who may not have the social capital connections or financial connections to get their foot in the door. And so I think one really moving away from fighting people and trying to redefine DEI and using new language to achieve the same outcomes, I do think is important. I don’t think we should Give up the term diversity, equity and inclusion. But there’s so many other terms that we can use.

Christina: One thing I’ve been saying is unconventional wisdom, because often these are the insights and the ideas and the knowledge that help us to challenge the status quo and improves our outcomes. And so I’ve been pushing forward this learning community called the New Qual Learning Community that I launched this month that really helps individuals to go on an unconventional wisdom learning journey. So that’s still going to give them those equity principles, but do it in the way that feels accessible. It’s about still achieving trust and collaboration and relationships and still practicing the work, which is really challenging yourself to have better trusting, healthy relationships with all different types of people. And most people, if you ask them, do you want to have the ability to build healthy, trusting relationships with anyone of any background?

Christina: They’d be like, yeah, that sounds like a great skill to have. If you say, is DEI good? They’d be like, no, it’s taking away rightful opportunities from people and giving it to unqualified people, which is just such a bastardized and distorted view of what it is and what it’s been achieving. So I think that’s one is what’s the new language we want to use and the definitions we want to give. I think the other thing too is getting very specific and coherent on what are the goals of dei. I think often if you sit somebody down and ask them, they can’t answer. So it’s like, what are we trying to actually achieve? You know, that means that we are thinking really consciously about the impacts on the environment.

Christina: When we think about our supply chain and design our products, it’s making sure that everybody gets an opportunity for rightful pay and getting paid what they deserve for their labor and for their expertise and talent. It’s the ability to make sure that everybody is getting opportunities in an organization and not just some who are favored and who the leaders like. Like, these are all very specific outcomes that if you sit them down and tell people prescriptively, they’d be like, yeah, that sounds great. But I think a lot of organizations have struggled because they didn’t really have specific, prescriptive, measurable commitments. Often they were like, dei, we’re going to do it because we don’t want to be sued, we don’t want to be perceived as bad guys, we don’t want to be perceived as something negative. And so we’re committing to this vague thing.

Christina: But in fact, if you weren’t committed to real prescriptive business practices and outcomes, you weren’t committed to this work anyways. You know, the organizations that are pulled back, they were never really committed at a deep level in terms of their business models and their practices. And that’s why it was so easy for them to backtrack, because they were more concerned with public opinion than doing the real work of equity in their organizations. And so I think the organizations that were already committed to it before this moment, before the black squares of 2020, are still going to continue doing the work anyways. They can call it bootiful or Frankenstein, whatever we want to call it, right? It doesn’t matter. The work is still going to be done anyways, regardless if the term is being attacked and bastardized. It’s never going to go away.

Christina: The sense of, we live in a multicultural society that is never going to change. And so the ability to build healthy, trusting relationships and outcomes in a multicultural society is inevitable. No matter how much resistance or backlash there is to it will not go away. And so I think people have to come to terms with that. I think there are some people who are really mourning this fantasy romantization of an America or a United States that was really homogenous and only tailored to one group. And that’s just never going to come back again, no matter how much you wear your shirts and your hats and your slogans, you know, And I think that’s the thing that people are really struggling with. Some people are struggling with also.

Stacy: That’s boring. I feel like it’s like, why would you want to live in that?

Christina: No one wants that, right? It’s like, don’t you like the spices of life and being around people who are different? I mean, I think it’s so fascinating. There’s something also that’s interesting about this too. There was a study that came out around conservative and liberal brains. They were looking at the reactions to change and how different people who adhere to a certain political ideology. Is there an inherent difference in how their brains react to perceptions of change? And they discover people who tend to lean more conservatively. And this is across demographics. Anybody who might have a conservative sense of thinking tend to have an amygdala response to change in a more dramatic way than someone who doesn’t have the same sort of ideology or beliefs. So they tend to have a larger response to what they perceive as threats.

Christina: So something that might be a shift or a change is automatically categorized as a threat. And what’s an issue with that is there’s a kind of disproportionate reaction to small changes when in fact life is but change. There’s nothing in life guaranteed but change. Everything is changing. Cells change, nature changes, the planet is changing. There’s no way to not have change. And so individuals who have a hard time with change tend to lean more into authoritarianism and control and dogmatic beliefs and laws to hopefully create some sort of certainty and control. But that often leads to even more anxiety. It doesn’t actually create any of the security that they’re hoping for. So it’s fascinating to know, and this is a narrative practice as well.

Christina: How do you appeal to people who have a lot of anxiety and who have disproportionate threat responses to difference and to people being different from them? And what do you do to assuage some of those fears? I think that’s a question a lot of people are going to have to grapple with in terms of messaging and communication and figuring out how do we not necessarily appeal to the most hateful person in the room, but for the people who might be in the neutral middle, which is not really neutral, let’s keep it real. You’re complicit if you’re neutral, but there’s another conversation for another day. But those individuals do have genuine uncertainty and fear. What do they need to be given to feel more security? That’s not just control and oppression of other groups to fill that security.

Stacy: You know, it’s, it’s always an interesting conversation for me because my family is all very like super conservative, which isn’t shocking, I’m sure. I come from Idaho and I’ve always had a very different mindset around politics because of that. Because I know they’re amazing, loving, kind human beings who. I strongly disagree with their worldview, but I also feel, I don’t. I feel empathy because I was thinking about our conversation earlier in this idea of storytelling. When you’re constantly receiving the same scary messaging all day, every day, and you’re not getting any other message that is challenging that ever it. It’s easy to stay in that like threat response. It doesn’t condone what I, you know, any of it.

Stacy: But I think having some empathy for the fact that good people can have not great views and perspectives in the world, that for me has enabled me to have bridged conversations. I feel like I can go into different spaces and have conversations with very conservative people, hold my values, hold my perspective as somebody who really tries hard to create social change. And I can also be on the other side. And in those conversations, of course A bit more freely. But I think there’s so much divisiveness and shaming, often of people with other views, which is the absolute opposite of what you’re talking about, which is around genuine connections with people and fostering those relationships.

Christina: I think also too, what’s interesting in terms of demographics, typically depending on the culture you grew up with and the context you’re in, these, the tools of keeping people in threat typically is also just through an avoidance. So a lot of people avoid talking about racial issues or social issues. I, for example, grew up in an environment where I was forced to talk about those things because of what I was experiencing in the world. So my parents had very specific conversations around history and around black culture and gave me an alternative set of narratives that I was not exposed to in school so that I could understand that the history I was being taught had holes in it.

Christina: There are people who look like me, that were leaders and activists and politicians and inventors that will not be talked about, that are often overlooked in a race. And so that gave me a sense of confidence and security, knowing that the biases and the assumptions and the truncated stories of the people I interacted with did not define my value or my worth as a person. So I had to do that practice at a young age. So say I’m six years old, seven years old, constructing this narrative of the world. There are people who never do any of that. Right? Because we’ve designed a society of comfort for some people who have different privileges, so they’re not forced to confront any of that until maybe midlife or later. I think that’s very hard.

Christina: So we’re often asking people to have conversations where some people have a kindergarten or first grade level understanding of social issues and someone else has a PhD. So how do you put those two people in a room and have them have a productive conversation? So I think one of the issues is how do we increase the social, cultural knowledge that people have to a baseline where they can have productive conversations? Because if I’m talking about redlining and someone’s like, what is that? That’s made up, that’s not real. How do we even begin to have conversations around why our neighborhood looks the way it does and why some communities have been trapped in poverty for four decades because of literal banking practices and institutional practices. So I think that’s important.

Christina: It’s how do you elevate that in a way that doesn’t feel threatening and is aspiring? So this is an aspirational tool. It’s a tool around relationship building. And trust building. And I’ve seen, even with the work I mentioned with the moderation project across the United States, which had all different demographic ages, all different political leanings, the messaging of it was, how do you create civil, respectful conversation in your neighborhood? How do you create a belonging sense of belonging in your neighborhood? And it included improving and uplifting our social, cultural knowledge in addition to communication tools to deflect and de escalate conflict. And often we got feedback that was like, hey, these are things I never learned. Like I’m realizing in my 60s, my 50s, my 40s, there are cultural, social knowledge that, wow, this is making me see the world differently.

Christina: This is giving me a new point of view so I can learn and grow. And so I think that’s a really important part. It’s maybe the books people read or the conversations and podcasts they’re exposed to and getting people to know that just outside of their own perspective and outside of, you know, maybe attacking their quote unquote beliefs, it’s like, have you heard about this about the world and how it works? And a lot of that is just factual about what the world was and how it operated up to now. So I think that’s a big one. And another one too is, I would say a majority.

Christina: There is an active percentage of people who know all these things and don’t care because they’ve built a sense of value and belief off of subjugation, right where they believe I am inherently superior, I deserve more. People are inherently bad, especially if they’re different. That is their worldview. And no amount of facts is going to change them from believing that. I think that’s actually a small portion of people, though I would say it’s probably maybe 10% of people, you know, sociopaths or people with certain defections in their empathy and how they treat people, et cetera. I would say a significant portion of people are what they consider neutral. So they haven’t felt the unfortunate downsides of certain practices or policies or discrimination. And so they don’t have a context of it personally.

Christina: And they also don’t actively hate certain groups or, you know, want to harm them, but they have a huge gap information and their lack of agency and their lack of taking action is complicit in people’s harm. And so I think that’s a significant portion of people who, if they’re exposed to new social, cultural knowledge and conventional wisdom around the world and how it works, what power looks like, what relationships look like, what economics and politics look like, they can Change, they can shift. I think those people can change and grow. And the work that I do, I typically am talking to those kinds of people. The people who feel like they want to do good but aren’t sure how to close the gap between what they believe and what they’re doing in their day to day.

Christina: And also the people who are already committed and just need tools for it. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to convince people who don’t believe in my basic humanity to believe in it. I think it’s a waste of my time for a number of reasons. But I think people who are in the neutral middle or who are already there and just need the tools, this is a significant portion of people and they just need to be supported in acting those beliefs out in real life, outside of just what they say they want to do, but actually what they want to embody in their day to day lives.

Stacy: I love that area of focus and I know that there are a lot of people out there that are curious and want to know more. But it’s always or not always, it’s often you feel like I should know this stuff already, you know, like, I don’t even want to ask. We have a amazing client, Joel Perez, who wrote a book called Dear White Leader that’s for curious white leaders to really like, help them start that journey of cultural humility. But I think that there’s this sense of like, you know, if you’ve been in the neutral, in that neutral middle, which is, like you said, not truly neutral because inaction is being compliant, complicit, there’s, I’m sure, also shame related to that of like, I should have started this earlier, like I know better.

Stacy: But also I think you have to have grace with yourself as you make that journey. If you make a decision that you want to be part of the solution, you want to be part of change. Like I said earlier when I started my journey of empathy and understanding other people and reframing my worldview, I was so naive. Like, I remember when we moved to the Dominican Republic, that was the first country that we moved to outside of the US and for the first time I was the minority. I was getting yelled at, I was getting racial slurs and I was experiencing that for the first time. And I went to share that with one of my friends who was black and had experienced this her whole life.

Stacy: And I was trying to connect and share my experience, but the way that I shared it wasn’t okay. You know, I was like, hey, now I Understand what it’s like. And she was like, no, you don’t. Like, that’s not the same thing. I was naive, right? And, but over time I started to learn and I started to like recognize where I was naive and where I was being offensive and then I felt really bad, but then I would do better next time. And it took, it still takes. I still mess up all the time. But you try and you forgive yourself and you’re curious and you move forward. So I’m curious to hear from you. If somebody is listening to this and they’re like that Christina has got it.

Stacy: Like, I’m feeling like I want to do something different in my life and kind of take this journey of discovery and change. How could they start to do that through? And I know storytelling is a way that you integrate that in your work, but what are some things that they could begin doing in their lives maybe today or just over time?

Christina: I think a big one is cultivating self awareness. We don’t have a society that encourages a lot of introspection for a reason. They want you to stay distracted and constantly consuming stuff because it makes people money, right? So the more that you can reclaim your attention and time from social media platforms for a number of reasons and actually focus it in on yourself, how you feel, what you believe, where those beliefs come from, you be, you can become more unconscious and intentional in how you’re showing up in your relationships. Because I don’t think people realize that how you’re showing up in your relationships is the biggest thing that you can control. And equity work is relationship work. It’s how you treat people. It’s how you talk to people. It’s how you move your own resources and capital and opportunities around.

Christina: It’s how you leverage your unique skills and talents and privileges or not. And being able to become more self aware allows you to connect the dots between what you believe and then how it shows up and what you make say and do. So I think that’s a huge one. So that’s excavating. You know, a question I ask often in my trainings is really evaluating your early stories of leadership. What did leaders look like in your community growing up? Did they look like you? Were they very different? What sort of lessons did you learn from them? What were some of the messages that they put forward about what leaders should look and act and sound like? And often that’s the very first starting point of what you believe about power. And if you start to excavate what you believe about power, you can change it.

Christina: If you had a belief about power, that it all has to look this very specific way, or be transactional, or be about power over people, you can begin to shift that and realize that there are alternative models of power and how we relate to people that are more fruitful, that are more loving, that lead to better outcomes for more people. So I think that would be the first. The other is to really find resources to learn that social, cultural knowledge. So obviously I offer a number of them. I have a learning community I launched, I do trainings and facilitations and things. But also there are so many amazing resources in the world that more than we ever had before at the touch of your fingertips and so many incredible teachers and authors and writers and activists.

Christina: So diving into that and really creating your own sort of learning journey to hear from places that look different from you. You know, we have a media and a narrative world that’s predominantly white, predominantly a Eurocentric view of the world and how it works. And that really can truncate your understanding of cultural social issues. So expanding the narratives that you’re exposing yourself to pretty often, even if it’s once a week, you pick up a new book article, you follow a new person on Twitter or TikTok and start learning from those people for free. That is going to expand your skills in so many ways.

Christina: You know, being able to create an alternative narrative about the world and how it works and seeking out voices that are typically silenced or erased or overlooked can really improve your thinking, your divergent thinking, your creativity and your communication skills. And the third is not seeking perfection. You know, the culture that we live in really emphasizes perfectionism and that is a death knell for making change right. You’re not going to be perfect, you’re not going to always get it right. You know, I have a friend who’s really justice oriented and deep in the work and there are times I’ve used language and words and should be like, hey, actually let’s not, don’t say that. Try this, right? Just correcting me in the moment. And I’m a person who’s very informed to work in this work and I still make mistakes, right?

Christina: So really letting go of the idea that a mistake means you’re a bad person or that something’s really wrong. It’s so much better to admit flaws and faults. People trust you more when you can admit and take accountability for the harm that you’ve created and choose a different behavior and outcome. And I think that’s really hard. I think most People are very defensive to feedback. And that’s why we have so many people who have really avoidant and disconnected relationships, really distrusting relationships. And when you can take accountability and correct behavior, you’re more likely to deepen trust and you can reduce your defensiveness and perfectionism seeking. You’re far more likely to build healthy relationships regardless of who they look like. So I think just those basic skills of relationship, social skills and introspection can shift your life and your outcomes dramatically.

Christina: And we live in a system right now that there was a study that just came out that Americans are more isolated than they’ve ever been before. I think a quarter of all men don’t have a single close friend. A significant portion of young Gen Z individuals never see their friends or spend very little time socializing or having companionship. We have an isolation, loneliness epidemic happening in addition to misinformation and paranoia and platforms being used to divide people further and to line the pockets of a few really extremely wealthy people at the detriment of our entire society. So if you can work against that and really build skills of community and trust building and healthy relationship with folks, you’re well ahead of the curve of where we need people to be. And I think we need people to actually be in healthy relationship.

Stacy: At the end of the day, all of that. You got two things that came up for me. One is having somebody that can challenge you or that you can safely ask if this is like, is this okay? One of my very close friends has a DEI company and I will often go to her and go, hey, can I ask you about this? And she never judges me. She’s always so gentle and so willing to like, say if it’s not okay, or give me input or help me shape the way that I’m thinking. And I, to me, that’s so important, so valuable. The other thing that this is just my personal journey, as I’ve learned more, followed more people, read more books, is that disability often gets forgotten.

Stacy: When we are really like diving into understanding people better, it’s often left out of the conversation of equity. It’s often like really these, you know, people with disabilities are often really erased from all areas, including even being able to get into buildings. So for me, I follow a number of disability activists as well. And that’s just a point I wanted to bring up because I find that topic is so easy to forget when we’re having these conversations around dei.

Christina: Absolutely. I think seeking out intersectionality and different identities and experiences. I started reading Palestinian authors and learning deeply about their activism and how much has not been told about their story or their community or their history. And that was major. There was lots of things I didn’t understand about that. And the geopolitical structures that we have around us or individuals who are transgendered and are going through a huge amount of backlash right now, and a lack of support and love and acceptance and reading their perspectives and their experiences and their advocacy is so important. So I think it’s always a lifelong journey of knowing humans are. The beauty of humans is a complexity of difference across so many factors. Age, race, gender, sexuality, language, ability, and more.

Christina: And really seeing that’s a beautiful, wonderful thing that leads to so many new insights and creativity and not a threat. And I think the more that people can see that diversity is not bad. We’re not all supposed to be the same. For us to feel safe and secure, we’re supposed to embrace difference as the variety of life. I mean, look at the planet, look at nature. It’s all very different and diverse and interesting. Imagine if we only had one tree type or one kind of bird or one sort of plant that just wouldn’t even make sense in our world. So this idea that difference is bad and it’s a threat is something that we’re fighting against. And people who want colorblindness and all these things really are asking for a homogeneity that never existed to begin with.

Christina: And I think if you can push yourself to understand that, wow, there’s so many different experiences and perspectives and really listen and understand people’s stories, your life.

Stacy: Will better for it, 100%. It’s so much more interesting and rich. It’s funny, last summer, not this past summer, the previous summer, went back to Idaho for, like, a month. And we’re used to being, like, kind of unique in a lot of the places we are because we’re American, we’re from Idaho, which is not often the area of the country that people come to move here anyway. And so went to the park one day, and my husband. My husband in particular, looked around, and he was like, everybody has the same outfit on as I do. It was just this, like, moment where you’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s. Everything is the same. And, you know, khaki shorts, t shirt, ID hat. Yeah.

Stacy: And it was a good moment for us, though, of, like, we love our hometown, but we’re so grateful to get to be in places where, you know, life is rich and there’s different people and different Languages and which is the same in your area, although it’s in the United States. There’s such a richness of backgrounds and all of the things. One last question for you before I invite you to share a bit about where to find. Find more about you. And I know you have a new course coming out or that came out recently as we’re in this time right now, that’s so difficult and there’s such a heavy lift required from people that are in your space doing the work that you’re doing. How do you.

Stacy: And this is you, but also others that are doing similar work listening to this care for yourself through this period.

Christina: I love that question because I actually shared a quote from Toni Morrison in my learning community today, which was essentially how she says that racism is a distraction and it’s essentially distracting you to continuously have to prove your humanity. So someone says you don’t have language, so you spend 20 years trying to prove that you do. Someone says your head isn’t shaped right, so you get scientists on it. There’s always another thing. And so I think it’s important to understand that the work isn’t trying to prove your humanity to people who refuse to see it. I think that is exhausting and draining and it never ends.

Christina: The work is really reclaiming your imagination and your creative energy so that you can build the things that you want to see in the world and you can build the alternatives to the things that aren’t working now. So I think anybody who’s in this work, reclaiming your time, your energy, your space through meditation, through really intentional curation of what you read and expose yourself to leaning into in person community and people who can support you and love you and pour into you is so incredibly important. And if you don’t do that, you will essentially burn out and you aren’t necessarily going to create the change that you want.

Christina: So as a person who cares about equity, living in the fact of your job isn’t to extremely expose yourself to hatred and harm at the hopes that these people will be convinced of basic empathy and human rights. It’s really about leaning into creative imagination and envisioning a future and practicing that through your behavior, your commitments, your community, your beliefs. So I hope everybody who’s listening to this can really take. Take that information in and realize that your time and attention is a commodity that right now is being fought for and is essentially being siphoned away. And if you can pour it back into yourself and into your local community through book clubs, community gardening, you know Gatherings, hosting, all those things make a huge difference in how you feel and ultimately your commitment and resilience to the backlash that we’re facing against progress.

Stacy: Mm. It’s almost like cultivating delight in your life. So it’s like.

Christina: Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Stacy: Christina, I loved every moment of our conversation today. Thank you so much for your time and energy and sharing your wisdom with us. Can you share with our listeners where they can find out more about you and what you’re most excited about right now?

Christina: Absolutely. So right now I’ve launched a learning community, which is a macro learning journey of weekly content and live sessions monthly. And you can find more information on that at Bit ly TNQ Community. So it’s Bit Ly TNQ Community and the TNQ is capitalized and I’m really excited about it. There’s an intimate cohort that started, I think social, cultural knowledge that can help us to achieve meaningful goals that matter will really help us move through this time. And doing it in community with others is important. You can also find out more. I have a podcast and writings and more information on my models and my white papers and stuff on my website, which is thenewqlo.com and I pontificate on my email newsletter and LinkedIn and I was on TikTok, but we’ll see what that will be in a little while.

Christina: So it’s probably better to be on LinkedIn in my newsletter. If you want to learn and follow and hear more about my. My work, my perspectives and also information that can help us move forward, we’ll.

Stacy: Be sure to include links to all of those various places in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining me today, Christina.

Christina: Thank you for the conversation. I’m hopeful, even though we’re going through a challenging time now, that this allows people to really push forward and build something new as we’re tearing down what’s old.

Stacy: Yeah, same. I’m remaining cautiously optimistic. Well, thank you to our guest today, Christina, and thank you to you for tuning in and joining us for this conversation. I hope that you left with some insights and hopefully some practical things you can implement in your life as well. Thank you as always to Rita Dominguez for her amazing production of this podcast. I say it every week, but honestly, I would. This wouldn’t exist without her. She does everything behind the scenes and I am grateful. If you have 30 seconds, if you could rate and review this podcast. It makes a huge difference in helping us reach more listeners with the message of living a life that is not just better but beyond better. And I will be back with you before you know it.