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One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our personal values. We each identify our top five values, writing one each on five index cards. Then we have to drop one, and another… until we are left holding the card with our number one, top value. What is your current One right now and why?
My number one now and for a long time, is humility. That is just who I am.
I grew up in a very humble family. I grew up with a mom who was raising four kids on her own. I grew up in poverty. I’ve always been a very humble person.
Humility, to me, is really important. It’s really important to always remember my roots. To remember that we all come to this earth with infinite worth, regardless of what family structure or societal structure we’ve come into. We’re all worthy. There’s a deep strength and power in being humble.
I’ve feel like anytime I accidentally trip into ego, things take a turn for the worse.
Yeah. And you know what? There’s a place for ego. Ego’s not always bad. Ego helps us protect ourselves, ego helps us defend ourselves. It’s about being in a good relationship with ego, and understanding that ego is not everything that we are. But it serves its purpose when it needs to, there’s a place for it.
What is one big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with these days?
I’ve been wrestling with two things for a while.
What is the role of documentation, organizing, templates and structures and platforms, versus the role of showing up very organic. I’m constantly thinking about a balance.
What’s the role of those structures that can help me tell a story through data, and can help me remember things, and can help keep me organized, while also honoring that I am a very natural person that operates from her strengths, gut, showing up to relationships and ways of being that don’t always align with being super-structured. That is a question for leadership that I’m always navigating and keeping at the forefront.
I’m curious if it’s connected to authenticity; the ways we carry our strengths into the world, and then need to adapt or change them in organizations or culture?
What you’re helping me think about is this idea of our core essence — who we’re born to be, and then who we become because of the social and cultural conditioning. I think so much of who I am now, today, is becoming that true essence that I was born to be. I am slowly shedding back all the conditioning. But it’s taking a long time, I’ve been doing work on myself for over five years, to really be in my true essence.
And still navigating our societal conditioning — a lot of times either I don’t fit, or I get criticized, or somebody looks at me and they’re like, “wow, she’s got so much depth.” Lately, I’ve been moving away from the word authenticity. Because I feel like that word has been used in this popular culture so much that it’s lost its value. So I’m leaning into using the word honest.
I want to show up honest to myself. Which is another way of resisting. I’m not trying to be unique all the time, but I am trying to give power where power gets diluted.
I love that. I think of it as integrity — integrated, are we being who we are.
Truly. The gift that we have after we’ve been conditioned by society and by our families of origin. We receive messages as very young children of our worth, through the way the adults in our lives have interacted with us. So to me, it’s about identifying the message that was told to me and the belief that I developed of myself as a result of the message that was told to me. To look at that belief in the face and say ‘thank you for what you did to protect me at one point, but this is who I am.’ I am this natural essence, I just am.
You mentioned there are two leadership questions you’re wrestling with?
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about lately, is around access to leadership roles. It’s taken me a good 20-something years to get to the level of leadership and pay that I’m at right now. What I have noticed is that there are so many younger people in leadership roles now, making similar money to the money that it’s taken me 20-plus years to get to.
I’m excited for them. But it does make me think about the sacrifices that I had to make to be where I am now.
I identify as a person of color, I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New Haven. And as a person of color, there’s so much access now for younger people who look like me, that I didn’t have access to then.
For one side of it, I’m thankful, because it means that there’s a lot more access for people like me than there was when I was coming up as a young person in the workforce. For that I am really thankful.
But the other piece is the idea of emotional maturity — truly engaging with another human, or a community of humans, from a place that is not creating more harm. That is something that I had to grow and mature into; so I continue to think about that for younger leaders who are getting more immediate access at a younger age.
I am such a different person today at 46 years old, than I was at 26. The leader that I am today, owning the power that my voice has, entering relationships and leaning into my emotional responsiveness, my relational responsiveness — those are pieces that I didn’t have fully developed then.
What does that mean in leadership? How might we support young leaders to develop their emotional maturity or even bring it to consciousness?
What inspires you, gives you hope these days?
I work at All Our Kin; I’ve been working there for over ten years. The work that I’ve done has been exclusively with home-based educators who care for children in their homes when their families are at work. Before that, I was helping families think about the ways in which they interacted with their children, helping them think about ways to strengthen rich bonds and understand how their children learn and grow.
So from a very young age, I’ve been in the space of helping people build stronger relationships. That’s never stopped.
Right now, my passion and my drive is still that — ensuring that people feel whole, helping people tap into their full potential. And helping adults understand that children come with inherent worth; they have their unique personalities and are learning everything about the world through the relationships they have with the adults in their lives.
When adults understand and respect that children have inherent worth, they will be able to pause in their interactions with children, and honor them for the potential that they possess. Adults send a clear message to children with every interaction, a message that will stay with that child for the rest of their life.
This is my passion and my intention.
One thing that is true about me is that I am always learning and stretching. Every year there’s something new — a leadership something, a new course, I’m always doing something to expand my consciousness. I like to not be a hoarder of knowledge, I like to help others by sharing the content knowledge that I get intentionally exposed to. I like help those I am in relationship with around their natural essence, who they really are and the power that’s within them.
Is the inspirational or hopeful core of it, that we are able to heal and grow and improve, or resilience in general, or something else?
I think what makes me hopeful is that we are really adaptive beings. We have an opportunity to shift, we are in control of who we are, if we can quiet the chatter and address those core beliefs that we were programmed with. Those are not a part of our essence.
That inspires me. To know that we can all change, in relationship to someone else that sees our true value.
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?
I love to walk. Walking provides me a lot of clarity in a lot of situations.
I love to be with my puppies. I have two rescue dogs — Juancho and Mac — that I love a lot. My partner José insisted we rescue one from the New Haven Animal Shelter, and the other little one, I found him tied to a tree in Puerto Rico. They’re both my babies. I also love being in space and time with my sons, Calvin and Jomar and my grandpup, Roscoe.
Another thing I do a lot for self-care, is I love to learn, I love to read.
I wasn’t a reader. I actually graduated high school without knowing how to read. I learned to read on the job reading children’s books with the pictures. When my son was a little bit over three years old, he got accepted in the Zigler Head Start program. I was about 18 years old, and his teacher invited me to volunteer in his classroom.
I started to go to his class, and that was my introduction to early childhood. I like to always say that he chose my career for me. I began to read children’s picture books, and I began to really start retaining information. I didn’t feel confident in reading much until my mid-twenties. Now, twenty years later, I love to read. I’m an audio learner, so I love to listen. I learn through conversations.
So, self-care for me looks like a walk, reading a good piece, listening to something really magnificent. It could be a podcast, or a webinar, lecture or one of my family members. Anything that gets me to be curious and helps me expand my thinking.
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?
Oh, boy, that’s hard to pick. So many people have shaped me, contributed to who I am today. So many women, I’ve had so many women shape me.
The biggest woman has been my mom. That has its pros and cons for sure. [laughing] She was the first woman that I met that helped me, taught me about resilience and grit, and working through fear, moving through fear.
My mom’s remarkable. She raised four kids on her own. She divorced my father when women didn’t get divorced, when women still didn’t have rights. She became less-than, and she was ok. She was the only one in her circle of family that was considered poor; her sisters married men and stayed in that relationship, were considered middle-class.
They supported her, but she still did a lot of brave shit with her kids. At forty-something she decided to get on a plane with all her kids and a grandkid, to a whole other country where she didn’t know anybody. She was determined. She was determined to experience the world differently, even if she had four kids and was single.
She taught me so much. She taught me through modeling about perseverance, and she also contributed to the sense of self-worth that I struggle with. It was hard for me; I was a high-risk teen, the picture-perfect traumatized teenager running the streets, trying drugs, I got pregnant at 15.
Even through all that, I am here today because of her and the many women who mentored me, who stayed by me, and who saw the magic in me that I didn’t see in myself. [crying]
Thank you for sharing. I’m taking a big, deep breath with you.
Thank you.
Ooo talking about deep breath, I left my daily meditation practice out, at self-care! That is big. For the past six years, since 2017, I’ve been meditating every day. I may miss a day or two, I don’t miss a week, I always come back to it. That is definitely part of my self-care.
I started with Insight Timer, that’s the app that I use. I love it; it’s a great app, I recommend it. They have every possible meditation that you can think of, courses, music, and timers where you can just set the time and you do your own practice without it being guided. I diversify my meditation practice — sometimes it’s guided, sometimes I only do only music, sometimes I do chants. I try to get it in in the morning and the evening, and sometimes during the day depending on how I’m feeling and what I need. Sometimes I’ll do six minutes in the morning, sometimes I do a half hour, it just depends.
It really has changed my life. I come from a real spiritual background — my mom, her family and my granddad, although I never met him. He founded the chapter of Masons in the town where she was from, Jayuya, in Puerto Rico. He was not a religious person, he practiced spirituality and was the town healer. That’s how I approach the world also.
Meditation has helped me connect back to those roots. And helped me understand that meditation’s not just for certain people who look a certain way. It’s accessible to all of us. For a long time, in my younger, teenage years, I was really disconnected from that. And I’m connected back to my roots and myself, the app definitely helped me do that.
What do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:
- Reading – I’m torn, I have so many good books that I love. The last book that I read was The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté. But my work bible is From Teaching to Thinking by Ann Pelo and Margie Carter.
- Listening – Karol G’s newest album from this summer, Mañana Será Bonito – tomorrow will be beautiful.
- Eating – The Sandbar in West Haven. It’s a little hole in the wall, and they make the best seafood platter and scallops. I mostly am a vegetarian, but I make an exception for my mother’s codfish and for scallops – I’m aware that their lives were sacrificed and I am grateful to them.
- Watching – Sex Education on Netflix. So good!
- Laughing – Look at your pets – they’re so funny. Laughing in the small, intimate moments with your family.
- Wildcard – your choice – Try not jumping to have the answer, try just sitting with intent.
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Email Marina directly: virgenmarinarodriguez@gmail.com