contributed photo
Before we get started, let me ask – do you prefer Elizabeth or Liz?
Professionally, I still put Elizabeth in my signature, but I really go by Liz. It’s a funny origin – in kindergarten, they asked us to stencil our name. And mine was always so long. When I got home, I asked my parents, “what’s the shortest version of Elizabeth?” Liz, Beth, Eliza, Betsy, etc. Liz was the shortest, and that’s the one that I chose. At that moment I became a Liz.
I appreciate that agency! And, that leads us right into values. One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our personal values. We identify our top five, writing one each on five index cards. Then we drop one, and another… until we’re left holding the card with our number one top value. What is your current One right now and why?
This question is making me think about what they have been in the past. I was in Cohort 8, and then almost 10 years later, I had the chance to be a Fellow for two cohorts. From what I recall, each time my answer has been similar: listening or connection, and both are part of being seen.
My five top values right now are care, connection, listening, love, and maybe change. I’ve heard change referred to as a process not an event. I appreciate and yearn for it, and it’s difficult for me. But then again, why do the values have to be easy? We can and must continue to hold values that are hard for us.
I believe that love is the best motivator for any good thing. Through love, being able to show and share love, we become able to make change happen. Since George Floyd’s murder and the deaths of so many others, I’ve appreciated hearing many more people using Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase and belief in the truth, justice, and power that lives in creating a Beloved Community. I’ve learned more and more about love and my beloved community this past year, especially in the midst of this year-long and continuing pandemic and the racial justice awakening I’ve noticed a lot of white folks experiencing.
In this moment, my number one value is listening – because it is something I think I do well, and it’s something that I know has the power to change. I believe that if you can truly listen to other people, changes happen. People change as you see them differently, or as you understand them and their stories differently. Listening deeply is reinforced over and over in CLP. We get to see and notice how our listening impacts other people, and how our listening to others can change and impact us.
You said listening is connected to ‘being seen?’
Yes. I value creating and being in spaces or moments where I see people share their true self, their full humanity. And, I’m realizing as you ask me these questions, it’s often very hard for me to do it myself; there’s a big part of my story around taking care of others without being seen. Back to that theme again where our values are not always easy. To be honest, doing this interview, talking to you feels like it’s an offering to me as well. I’m learning to prioritize listening to myself as much as I listen to others.
What is one big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with these days?
I have lots of conversations with my dear friend, thought partner and business partner, Kia Levey-Burden about all the leadership questions. We love the questions; I’m so grateful to be imagining, discovering, and supporting big important leadership questions with her and the leaders we work with. A big one that’s very present for me right now is: How does change actually happen?
I’ve noticed change requires openness to learning, but that isn’t enough. I participate in a few whites-confronting-racism groups where I’m in the continual process of uncovering what I thought I knew. Learning is a wonderful source of inspiration; but I notice a pattern of white folks, including myself, getting stuck in the learning phase. Learning can feel like change but it really isn’t; it’s not enough. I need to ask myself, what do I do with this new knowledge. Perhaps I get stuck because it feels safer, or I’ve been taught it’s the most important, or I’ve been praised for the learning part. But truly, I must not and cannot stay there. The next steps for me are critical reflection to hold the learning deeper, and action.
I was in a workshop recently – I think it was AORTA – and the facilitator said: “the work is not the workshop.” I want to scream that from the mountaintops; what we need is to do right now. I hear many white people using the phrase ‘I’m doing the work.’ I want to ask, ok, what is it? What are you changing? What are you challenging in yourself and others? How are you connected to it? What’s motivating you to rethink who you are, what relationships you have, and the ways you want to show up?
Of course where these actions go unchallenged isn’t just in white-only spaces, but that’s where I’m seeing it a lot right now. I want folks to have time for – and to value – the reflection and processing part as much as the learning, so that we can each move into active spaces with love, without fear, motivated not by shame or guilt, but by a drive to help dismantle, reimagine, and rebuild.
Being in community with a healthy, open heart – not to get the ribbon.
Yes – which I think is really hard in a ‘doing’ culture and especially a white supremacist doing culture where the value is placed on what you’ve achieved or what others can see you’ve achieved. The work is challenging my way of being, and it might seem much more internal. There is true power that comes with working on it – ‘how you be’ impacts how you show up and what you do.
My undoing racism journey – the internal journey – will be always; there’s no endpoint. There’s always more to undo, work on, take action on. And I see this happening in other leaders also.
This also makes me think about the conversations I’ve had about language lately. A lot of folks have come to me with, “what’s the language, what’s the right thing to say?” And I’ve encountered a lot of stuck-ness in organizations and boards; even when we think we have the right language, we can still get stuck. Right now, it feels extra stuck. A group might be thinking, ‘But wait, we have the right language. Why are we still stuck?’
For me, finding the language is about what is going to motivate you to do differently. If you need to use the term racial equity, great. Anti-racism, great. If you need to use the term white supremacist capitalist system, great. If you want to use “diversity,” okay, and it now feels insufficient to me since I heard Resmaa Menakem powerfully ask, ‘what does diversity really mean… diverse from what?’ Questioning language is one thing; understanding how it makes people feel and communicating with others the hopes you have for words is another. Working together to change language feels is practice and action I’d love to be a part of, more than saying one word is right and one word is wrong.
I also hear it as intention – understanding ourselves, the impact we each have, and our role in co-creating beloved community.
Which is one of those classic CLP learnings for me – intention versus impact. Everyone in a cohort probably has experienced it many times before, but learning it together and then noticing together how it showed up as we shared ourselves with the group has been powerful for me. Intention and impact almost lives as another character in the CLP circle. Held carefully, it can allow for so much growth, individually and collectively.
What inspires you, gives you hope these days?
The people I get to work with. Kia Levey-Burden, Fahd Vahidy, so many people within New Haven and the CLP community. People who name and make time for reflecting on essential questions: What are you yearning for? Where’s your learning edge in your leadership? How is that showing up? How can you make space for it? How can you nurture it? How can you be with others while you’re nurturing it?
All those things feel really alive. It’s inspiring to be in conversations where people hold on to the values and vision for themselves and the people around them with care, concern, and hope.
At the beginning of the pandemic I was in a conversation with Karen DuBois-Walton, and she shared with me a hope around this moment becoming a movement. The pandemic has cultivated both; I too hope there is movement that comes from this, that it’s not just a moment. There’s the pandemic of the Coronavirus, and there’s the pandemic of racism and poverty. The intersectionality that some leaders have tried to draw attention to for decades, is living large. We have opportunities to support each other and do big things.
This work of transformational change is hard. Stepping in, stepping up, over time, can be draining – physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. How do you recharge, restore, take care of yourself, rekindle your fire?
This is a question I don’t have an easy answer to right now. I have a one-year-old and a four-year-old, so I’m moving through an intense parenting season with a lot of joy and a lot of challenge and just pure exhaustion.
Recently, I was listening to Sade Jean-Jacques’ Cafe Au Lait podcast, an episode on patterns of self-care and motherhood. She talked about her mom modeling that her body is a temple, showing how she took good care of herself. I thought, wow, you can model this for your children? It was a good jolt of realizing self-care isn’t just for yourself, it’s also good for your kids.
It can be so difficult to balance one’s own self-care with caring for others.
Absolutely. For me, self-care has almost always been connected to someone else – which speaks to that core value of connection. It’s been extra-challenging in this time of social and physical distancing.
I used to be very compartmentalized about when and how I did things for our house and our family, separate from work. It has been a challenge to move through, but also really good to get to a different place.
I learned that my kids are going to be a part of meetings sometimes, and that’s completely ok. Work typically labels families’ needs as “disruption.” But it’s not disruption – it’s a need someone has. And that’s not a disruption, it’s who we are. Showing up acknowledging my family’s needs is also who I am. It struck me when I heard Esther Perel recently say, ‘I don’t think we are working from home… I think we are working with home.’ Our home is with us all the time now; it is a bigger part of our lives than it ever has been. Our culture can do a much better job working with home. Let’s change that.
Are there specific strategies for self-care you’ve relied on this past year-plus?
I find therapy essential – a place to process, learn, and move through all the big feelings, and help me think about stories I tell myself or others. I’ve been sitting with a bell hooks quote recently in regards to how I think about my therapy: “When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.” It feels like the place I rest and practice and learn, so I can keep building the self-love essential for all the change I want to be a part of creating.
For a little bit in the middle of the pandemic, I was making time for some Qigong between Zoom calls, and I continue to reflect about mind/body practices and their connections to healing, racism, and justice. I’ve learned that centering myself with breath or introducing a body practice for a group I’m facilitating can have a real, positive impact on how we show up for harder conversations.
Now that spring is here, my husband and I decided we’re going to commit to 30-minute walks each day, which has become a wonderful ritual. I also love to cook and bake and actually have a small Liz + Andrew heart recipes website my husband keeps up, of our favorite recipes.
Introduce us to someone you are/were close with personally (e.g., family, teacher, friend, mentor), who shaped (or shapes) you and how you view leadership and possibility for a better community/world?
Lynn Levinson, my high school U.S. history and civil liberties teacher. She was a lawyer who quickly left that profession to teach. In ninth grade, her class was organized around the stories of all the people the United States has oppressed. We started with indigenous people, Native Americans, and then enslavement and slavery. We then talked about the Irish and Italians, Chinese and Japanese Americans, and of course it unfortunately goes on. That was how I learned U.S. history.
I remember making these timelines; we would go from the origins of the genocide of Native Americans to the re-taking of Alcatraz, in one unit. We had our U.S. history book, but also an entire binder full of copied pages from all sorts of different places – essays and other things that were not in the book.
A few years ago I was in a white people confronting racism training with Training for Change, where someone was saying that with every story of oppression there’s a story of resilience and resistance. When the trainer said it, I realized that as hard as it is to remember with the continuing tidal waves of oppression, I also had been taught by Ms. Levinson to find and listen to the narratives of resistance. Stories of oppression, and stories of resilience.
I did not know at the time how revolutionary and privileged this was as a foundation for learning at 14 or 15 years old, and it has shaped how I can hold truth. How I can think about what really happened, whose story are we listening to, and why.
She was a powerful role model for me. I was on Student Council, and she was the teacher for the group. She listened to us, helped us see that we had power. I didn’t realize that at the time, but looking back, it’s totally clear. As a bonus, she also had brown, very curly hair similar to mine, and was one of the first and few people who helped me understand how to take care of it!
I think Ms. Levinson helped me see the world in a broad, complicated, messy way. I think she helped me see myself that way too; in a way that honored who I was even when the structures around us didn’t seem to support it. I have a visual learning disability; my eyes work against me. It takes me longer and it’s more exhausting to read things. One day, I was having trouble finishing part of a test for her class. I would get extra time, so I was in her office trying to finish it. She saw me struggling and said, ‘Liz, stop writing, and tell me what you would write.’ I told her the rest of my essay, and she gave me my grade. She helped me understand that there are other ways to learn, other ways to be, other ways to be seen and understood.
She led for me when I didn’t even know what leadership was, and showed me how to be with history, how to question things, and how to hold all the truth as you learn.
What do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:
- Reading – Salt, by Nayyirah Waheed, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts, by Resmaa Menakem, and Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, by Kazu Haga. I also highly recommend children’s books; People Get Ready Books has been my source during the pandemic for beautiful books that also create opportunities for so much love, learning, and conversation with my kids.
- Listening – Prentice Hemphill’s Finding Our Way podcast, and Alphabet Rockers’ album The Love.
- Eating – Rawa in Westville is one of my favorite places, Manjares, Big Green Truck Takeout, and Pistachio Café in New Haven started by Syrian artist and architect Mohamad Hafez, who is my husband’s friend and former colleague. We’ve been missing seeing all the beautiful people who own and work in these places, but have so appreciated the privilege and opportunity to get takeout from them.
- Watching – Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers has been a true companion for me and my kids during the pandemic. I’m constantly struck by how much he models acceptance and sharing of feelings, and demonstrates how we all make mistakes and can learn and build confidence for ourselves and others. It is slow by today’s standards of TV, but he offers a philosophy of being seen that I hadn’t remembered until watching it with my kids again. I’ve been holding on to a quote of his: Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.
- Laughing – I recently had a truly joyous conversation with a few CLP alumni as we met to talk about the power of great facilitation. I haven’t laughed that hard in a while; the joy that stayed in me beyond the conversation is so helpful.
- Wildcard – your choice – My older son currently says “it surprised my heart!” when he’s startled by things, which I think is such a great way of describing surprise and wonder. I think about that a lot; it feels beautiful and endearing. So I’ll share the question here, too: “How or what would surprise your heart right now, and what can you do to find a moment like that?”
To get in touch with Liz directly: liz@launchconsult.com
I loved reading this and feeling connected to you, Liz. Thank you for sharing the interview and so much of yourself.
Susan