Transcript

 
Sigrun:
You are listening to the Sigrun Show episode number 420. In this episode, I talk to Trudi Lebron about how to embrace the anti-racism revolution coming to entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Sigrun Show. I’m your host, Sigrun, creator of SOMBA, the MBA program for online entrepreneurs. With each episode, I’ll share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for spending time with me today. Building an online business takes time. I share with you proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, uplevel your marketing and succeed with masterminds.
Sigrun:
Today, I speak with Trudi Lebron, a diversity, equity and inclusion coach who teaches entrepreneurs and institutions, how to build successful anti-racist businesses. Trudi has been featured in Forbes and has been named one of the 40 under 40 leaders by Hartford Business Journal in 2016. In this episode, we talk about how to embrace the anti-racism revolution coming to entrepreneurship. Before we dive in, have you signed up for my upcoming masterclass, Lessons From a Seven Figure Launch? After launching my signature programs, [inaudible 00:01:33] kickstart in January 2021, and making over a million, I want to share with you how I did it. I’ll let you in on my most valuable lessons and strategies that had the biggest impact so that you can make your launches even bigger too. Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/420, where you can find a link to sign up for the masterclass, Lessons From a Seven Figure Launch, and of course all the links to Trudi Lebron. I am so excited to be here with Trudi Lebron. She is a friend of [inaudible 00:02:14], and all friends of [inaudible 00:02:16] are my friends. So welcome my friend, Trudi.
Trudi Lebron:
Thank you so much for having me.
Sigrun:
I see you have red background. Do you like red too like I do?
Trudi Lebron:
I think the lighting is a little off. It’s really pink. It’s a deep fuchsia maybe color, but it is my favorite color.
Sigrun:
But it does count because it’s close to red.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. We are in the middle of remodeling, redesigning the office and studio right next door. So yeah, we are painting and all kinds of things.
Sigrun:
Good. Feels like similar to me. I’m in my new office in Reykjavik, Iceland. You might hear a little echo here because I have not figured out how to reduce the echo yet. Working on it, working on it. But Trudi, I love what you do. Before I hit the record button, we were talking about how this is also a topic dear to my heart, but maybe hard for me as a Icelandic European woman to know how to approach this topic. So I’m glad you are here on the show to tell us more about it. Anti-racism, probably this was not your topic since you were born. You have somehow come to this topic, you have somehow decided that this is a part of what you do. You also help people in leadership and building a business. So how did the anti-racism topic, how did he decide to make this yours?
Trudi Lebron:
It has been my work almost my whole life. I grew up in the United States, in the East Coast in the United States in the eighties. And in the eighties, in the community that I grew up in, there were not a whole lot of biracial families. I am biracial. My mom is white and my father is Afro Latino. So he is a black Latino, Puerto Rican man. So I always grew up, from as young as I can remember, with a very heightened sense of race and identity and fitting in and belongingness. Those were things that are themes throughout my entire life. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer when I grew up. You know what I mean? I wanted to be a hip hop.
Sigrun:
I like it.
Trudi Lebron:
That’s what I wanted to be. The way my career unfolded, I worked for a long time in nonprofits, in youth development, working with students who were struggling students, students like me, kids who grew up in the same kind of environment that I grew up in. I was also a teen parent. I’ve dealt with a lot of things in my life that had to do with fitting in and access and trying to get your life to be better and all of those kinds of things. So these are themes through my whole life. When I was working in the nonprofit industry and realizing that I wasn’t going to make enough money in that field to live the kind of life that I wanted and I started to, as many people do, listen to podcasts and explore online space and what it takes to start a side hustle.
Trudi Lebron:
I really fell in love with the world of coaching and personal development, professional development. And that world was so white. There’s just no other way to say it. The conversations that I have been having in my career in the nonprofit and education industry, really facing inequity and race and diversity head on for, I started doing that work professionally in 2008. So when I was started exploring the coaching industry, I was like, how has this field not, this entire industry has not even started to scratch the surface with this conversation? Just like with many entrepreneurs, I had an expertise, I saw a gap that needed to be filled. To me, it was a really important, not just a business opportunity, but a social and moral opportunity to help people build better businesses and serve more people. That’s how I found myself here.
Sigrun:
My why comes also in terms of equality. Now, obviously being raised in Iceland, we don’t have a lot of colored people, but I saw the inequality that women felt they couldn’t make their dreams come true because they got married and had kids. That inspired me 16 years old. Did anything happen? I know, yes, you say you were raised in a community and this was always a topic, but was there anything specific where you said, I’m going to make this my mission, this is my why?
Trudi Lebron:
I think part of it was that I had had a lot of experiences as a teen parent, where the world was sending me really strong messages about my life. And those were that I was a failure, that I was going to be poor forever, all of these really harsh narratives. Thankfully, I was really stubborn and I didn’t believe any of that, but it encouraged me that when I got to college to study psychology, I have a master’s degree in psychology. I specialized in public administration and social change. I am a PhD candidate. I spent a lot of time understanding how the environments that we’re in shape people’s lives, and shape the way that we interpret ourselves, our own identities and experience the world and the communities around us. Because of that, ow that then impacts what we’re able to achieve.
Trudi Lebron:
The coaching industry, the coaching personal development, that world is inherently designed to help people transform. So it was almost like what I was seeing was that there was this entire industry whose core purpose is to help people live better lives, but it didn’t have this content knowledge, this body of knowledge about how race and diversity impact the outcomes that people were having. So it just made so much sense to me that if the coaching industry could fix this and address this, that we could collectively serve more people, not only serve more people, but particularly serve more people of color, more black and brown folks to help them have better outcomes, better businesses. People get involved in coaching for all kinds of reasons, whether they’re starting a new business or want a healthier relationship with themselves or other people. That’s what it was, it wasn’t really a moment. It was more of a collective experience of my life.
Sigrun:
Yeah. But you also had this feeling like, I’m not going to accept society’s view of me and I’m going to do something about it. Which feels very dear to my heart too. You had already started all of this before last year, obviously.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. Pretty much.
Sigrun:
How did last year change you and your business? What did it feel like when you saw, Oh, it seems like everybody’s waking up like the whole world suddenly realizes the problem that has been around for 400 years or more?
Trudi Lebron:
It felt like people finally showed up to the party that I had been trying to throw for a very long time. Seriously, I launched my first online course, I had been doing one-to-one coaching and small group coaching and a ton of consulting for years, but I launched my first course, I think it was May of 2018. That course was called Diversity and Equity for Coaches. I am almost certain that it was the first course of its kind at the time, which is funny because now there are so many, which is great. That means that the demand is there. But when I launched that course, it was, not that it was hard to get people to come, but it was so new to people. It wasn’t just that I was teaching the content, it was that I was even the phase before that, just trying to help people understand why it was important that they learn it.
Trudi Lebron:
I spent a lot of time in that awareness building and education building and relationship building before I could even just start teaching people what they needed to know and coaching them to do things a little bit differently. Last year, and for the last couple of years, we’ve had successful programs and we’ve had multiple six figure business for a while. But last year, it was like 600 people were on the workshop that I hosted on a Sunday afternoon that I put together in 24 hours, that’s when I knew something had shifted. It felt really, there’s this tension because it felt really wonderful. At the same time, it was so sad that it took, it was a combination of the murder of George Floyd, the amplification of Black Lives Matter, also that people were home in front of their computers for Coronavirus. It was almost this blend of multiple crises happening at once. There’s a lot of mixed emotions. It was very heavy emotionally. Also, I was like, finally, bye baby, we can get some stuff done now.
Sigrun:
Yeah. I got goosebumps as you were explaining how this happened. It’s wonderful that people finally wake up to something they need to learn to know about, but it’s sad that it took so much to get there.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah, exactly.
Sigrun:
But that’s when people started to hear your name and I definitely heard your name last year, and I’m glad we are finally doing this episode. But what can people, most of my listeners are based in Europe. Most of them I assume, are white. I know from my clients last year when I spoke up about Black Lives Matter myself, that not everyone was ready to do it. I said, “You have to mix your values with your business. You cannot separated. That’s not possible.” It’s something that I learned, starting a business or running a business 16, 17 years ago, that you wouldn’t do it. And I can see that was the old way-
Trudi Lebron:
Yes, for sure.
Sigrun:
… but that’s no longer the way. We seem to agree on this. But what do you say to someone who has these thoughts, like I’m not going to mix this?
Trudi Lebron:
I try to stay out of the business of convincing people what they should do. Our clients, our audience members are people who have come to the conclusion because of how they were raised, how they feel, what their values are. That they’ve come to the conclusion that, I can’t do business that way. I need another way. They come and they find me and my team and we help them. Your people, to me, everybody is one person. You can’t separate your business. Well, not that you can’t, but I don’t think that you should separate your business from your values and from your commitments. I think that that way of doing business is one of the reasons that we’ve perpetuated things like pay and equity, for example.
Trudi Lebron:
It’s one of the reasons that we see disparities in the way that people have outcomes in their life because of the access that they have to opportunities. If have to understand, we have been taught business from a system that is really about amassing large amounts of power and money and control. And if we just take those skills, that’s what we’re doing. We’re just replicating these unhealthy patterns that are about control of resources. That’s not going to lead us to a world that is healed, where people can have healthy relationships, where we can help people have better lives, make sure that people are making the money that they need to make to support themselves and their families.
Trudi Lebron:
I think we’re seeing more and more. You said before, it’s one world. We have one, we are all here together in one world. We can talk about different countries and languages and States and all of these things. But at the end of the day, we’re all in this together. I think many people are starting to see that, and our businesses have to be a reflection of the world that we want to build. What we’re seeing is that more consumers, whether it’s a client, or a product that you sell, or someone who’s purchasing a service that you’re going to provide, or support that you’re going to offer them, that consumers are making more purchasing decisions based on their values. So they want to do business with people who share values with them. Business owners are going to have to adjust. I think that that’s what we’re going to see. It’s more of a call to action and aspiration. Can we get more people to do business in a way that’s anchored in their values, anchored in creating healthier communities, healthier world, better relationships? I think that’s the way to create change.
Sigrun:
Yeah. I saw a lot of big companies in the US speak up, which was a refreshing.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah.
Sigrun:
Where as before, anytime something happened, they wouldn’t say anything. And suddenly I’m getting all these emails from the CEO, the CEO is writing and suddenly there’s these statement emails. This didn’t really spill over to Europe as much as I would have expected, but I hope this is a change, a lasting change that businesses to take a stand.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah, I hope so. Again, I think that if we continue to see this trend of consumers wanting to do business with companies that are taking a strong stand and whose values are aligned with them, I think more companies are going to be forced into that. I don’t want people to do things because they’re forced into it. I want people to do things because it’s the right thing to do. What we do is we help people scale businesses in a way that is equitable, inclusive, justice oriented, diverse. How our clients are trying to build diverse teams and improve retention and make sure that their values are really coming through. I want people to do that before there’s a crisis, or there’s a problem, because we do help people with that too, but the work is harder and longer.
Sigrun:
It’s interesting when you say, wanting to do a business with companies that have values that are aligned with yours. I did switch a few systems last year because of that.
Trudi Lebron:
Exactly.
Sigrun:
I was not aligned with the values. So we switched to email system, we switched to teaching platform, we switched the landing page tool. It was all based on the values. Maybe there were some other things that I was unhappy about before, but the ultimate pulling the pluck with the value discussion.
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. We’re in the same place right now. We’re changing some of the systems that we use. We have been looking to do business, doing research on some of the companies that we’re thinking about moving to. Those things seem obvious when we’re talking about a coach or a service provider, but it’s really, when we’re talking about a technical service, like some applications that we’re going to use, sometimes people don’t think of it when it comes to that, but we’re really looking at every part of our business and where all of our money goes. And really to the extent possible, making sure that it’s going to companies where there is alignment. And not that we have to agree on every single thing. It doesn’t have to be that they’d take a super explicit stand in the way that my company does, but this is what we do professionally. What we’re looking for for sure is at least red flags, we don’t want to do business with people who aren’t saying anything. People don’t have to have it perfect, but they need to be aware and making an attempt to communicate where they stand on things.
Sigrun:
Yeah, I agree. It’s a bit like the movement probably a decade ago, to sustainability.
Trudi Lebron:
For sure.
Sigrun:
You go on a company website and see, are they doing something about that? So this becomes just a part of the mission statement of each company.
Trudi Lebron:
Exactly.
Sigrun:
But you mentioned a diversity in teams and this is a bit harder in some countries than others. How do we approach this in Europe? What do you think we should do where diversity in my clients, diversity in teams is harder to achieve because it’s just not as many colored people in this area?
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. Having people of color, black and brown folks in your community isn’t the only way to achieve diversity. I think that is a common misunderstanding. I think it’s important, but me and my team had this question, this conversation all the time, because there are places in the United States where it’s still majority white people living in communities. So if you own a store and your employees are coming to work, what do you do? Diversity is more, that’s why we always talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, because diversity is just about differences. So you can have diversity in age, you can have diversity in perspective, obviously diversity in race and ethnicity, which is what most people think.
Trudi Lebron:
But there’s a lot of ways to make sure that you have diverse perspectives in your workplace or in your community also thinking about, how are people included? What is the experience of the people when they come into your space? I always give this analogy of putting an elevator into your business. If you go into a commercial building, if you’re going to build a commercial building and it’s going to be more than a floor, you have to put an elevator in. And in most places, that’s a legal requirement in order for you to be compliant, ADA compliant.
Trudi Lebron:
The purpose is so that people who cannot walk up and downstairs can get upstairs, but everyone takes the elevator. Having the elevator improves the experience for everyone who comes into the building for the most part. Even if you are a company that is, again, maybe for whatever reason you are mostly white, and you’re mostly a white community, there are still things that you need to be looking at to make sure that it is inclusive and that it is equitable for people who are showing up. It’s much more than just, Oh, let’s create more diversity, let’s have black and brown folks come and join us at our workplace. It’s deeper than that.
Sigrun:
Yeah. That’s good because I think that’s the common misperception, that if you cannot do a conference or have pictures of your team and people like are, ah, there’s no diversity youngest team because they don’t see what’s behind the face may be.
Trudi Lebron:
Right. That’s not to give people a pass and say that you shouldn’t try to achieve racial diversity. You should. There are things that you can do to most places, even if there are very few people of color, most places have some people who are not, whether they’re indigenous to the place where you live or just different kinds of immigrants people, language diversity, there’s a whole lot of ways, again, that people can be diverse. So it’s not that you shouldn’t attempt that, there are things that you can do to make your company more attractive, to recruit diversity, to create a safe space for people so that they can show up and not be discriminated against and not have to deal with microaggressions. I don’t want to give people a pass and just be like, no, it’s okay if your summit is all white or your conference is all white. I’m not saying that’s okay. What I’m saying is that that’s not it. That’s not the extent of how we measure diversity, equity and inclusion.
Sigrun:
But how do we really bring forward the anti-racism discussion overall in the coaching industry? What do you propose?
Trudi Lebron:
What I think is that people really need to start with a personal journey around what your understanding is about racism, about discrimination, about patriarchy, misogyny, all of the ways that people have been oppressed over time. Really start to understand that, start to understand what you’ve learned about roles, about power. Start to unpack your identity. What does it mean to be a whatever identity you are? Whether you’re a white person, a Latino person, Indian. Wherever you are from, start to unpack, what have I learned about my identity? What have I learned about other people’s identity? Where do those biases start to come in in my life? Start to look at your business. Do you only have white clients? Look at your podcast feed. Are all the podcasts that you subscribe to just a whole lot of white folks? But why is that? Start diversifying there.
Trudi Lebron:
Start listening to people, teachers and mentors who come from a variety of backgrounds and start to understand the broader conversations. And that’s before you start to do anything in your businesses, just start to learn, why we have the world that we have and the conditions that we have, and come to a personal conclusion around what are your values? What are you committed to? Is this something that you can take on in your business? Then you can start to look at, all right, what are our policies? What are our job descriptions? Or can we do differently? But until you have done that in that personal journey, you’re not even ready to start swapping up pictures on your website, for example.
Sigrun:
Yes. So how do people approach this journey? Do you sit down and start to write a journal on this or what [crosstalk 00:27:07]?
Trudi Lebron:
A lot of people do it in a lot of different ways. Some people do start a journal. Some people read a bunch of books and join a book club and start to have conversations there. We have a lot of people join our membership program. It’s called the Equity Centered Coaching Collective. Each month we publish a learning journey for people to go on, that intersects the personal journey and the business work. So find a mentor that resonates with you and start to learn from them.
Sigrun:
How do we approach… Do we all need to, for instance, I have been watching some documentaries about what’s happened in the United States. This is not something you learned in school. You’re shocked. Even just little clips on Facebook about explaining the systemic problem. Like you couldn’t get a loan or why the schools in certain areas are so much worse than in other areas. I’m like, Oh my God, I’m so privileged. We don’t have this. Maybe that’s difficult for you to explain, but I’m wondering, how do we approach that? Should everyone just learn the history of United States? Or do we have to try to dig up what’s the history in my country or in my part of the world?
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. I think it’s a little bit of both. I really would challenge people who are from different countries, particularly European countries who feel like, Oh, we don’t really have that problem. Or it’s really different because from… When I talk to colleagues in the UK, they’re like, Oh no, this is a problem here, it’s just that people aren’t talking about it. Because the culture is more formal and more polite, there’s just a different way that people show up in those conversations. So I do say, look at the history of colonization, of slavery, of power. How power has been amassed by people. Learn that about your communities.
Trudi Lebron:
What are the groups that are coming into your communities, your countries as immigrants, why are those people coming? What’s going on? Those are good places to start. What is their experience like as people who are immigrating into a different country? Do they think that there is no racism? They probably have another opinion. You can definitely look at the US, where we talk about these things way more openly and just broadcast them. But then I think it is important to look at where you live and have a local context for how these things are manifesting close by.
Sigrun:
I know you said you don’t want to be in the convincing business and talk to people, but one thing comes to mind, as you’re saying this, like this is hard work. I guess a lot of people will just say, well, I’m not going to go there. Why do I need to do all this?
Trudi Lebron:
This is what I say, the fact is people don’t need to do it. But understand that if you don’t, that you’re just complicit in the system that we have. Not participating in this conversation is 100% a choice that people can make. I don’t necessarily understand that choice, but I acknowledge that that is a choice that many people make. I think that if people are feeling a pull towards, I want to do something, I want to understand more, I think more people, I don’t know, maybe I’m an optimist. But I think that most people do care. I really do think that. I think most people do care.
Sigrun:
Yeah.
Trudi Lebron:
If you care, and if you want to be a part of making things better, not that you have to be a hardcore full-time activist, but that you just want to be in better relationships with humans, then this is a door to walk through. Where you become a part of making someone’s experience better. It will also make your life better. We hear that that is a consistent outcome that when people take this journey, whether they are white folks or people of color, who also have their own identity work and unpacking to do, that it changes the way you show up in your whole life. It changes the relationships you have with peers, with colleagues, with your family, how you parent your children, how you run your business, it really is transformative work. You feel more connected to people. You feel more connected to everybody’s humanity. It just does, it deepens your experience, I think, as a human.
Sigrun:
Yeah. I can totally see that. How has the coaching world changed since you started? You said you’ve been doing this since 2018 and maybe in 2018, people were not ready?
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. I think people are more ready. I think people are seeing the need for it now. Still a lot of people don’t know what to do, and we’re working on helping people learn that. But yeah, people are way more open to the conversation. People are seeing the need to be participating in these conversations, heightening their awareness, be on their own journey around their identity and what they’ve created and what they’re holding onto, what they’re perpetuating. People are thinking about how to do business differently, how to create more access and impact opportunities for people. So yeah, it is shifting. It’s great to see, especially when I get to work with entrepreneurs who have really big businesses. I worked with Hay House Publishing. I’m continuing to work with [inaudible 00:33:14] and the Life Coach School.
Trudi Lebron:
We have some clients who serve thousands of people. So when we get to work with people who serve that many people, the ripple effect of the work is just explosive, it’s massive. We also work with people who have tiny businesses who are in our mastermind and in our membership. So it’s really dynamic. But in 2018, when I ran that course, and the year previous 2017, when I was doing coaching for business owners and helping them, the conversation was really more about, how do you use your coaching practice to make a social impact? People weren’t really ready for the race part of that conversation. But yeah, so it’s great to see how it’s evolved over the last couple of years. And I’m looking forward to what’s to come.
Sigrun:
I see a big change and I’m glad that this is a part of, because I mentioned before, sustainability is something that everyone talks about. And now we can address this social injustice as well. But now we are in Black History Month and I come back to the question, what can someone in Europe do where we have never heard of this term before? Maybe some people heard it last year and maybe they heard the year before, but mainly from American businesses. Everything that comes, we’re doing Halloween in Iceland because we have Halloween in the United States. So everything spills over. And I wonder, people are very careful. I saw some Facebook posts and they’re careful what is applicable, what are they allowed to do? What is okay? I wonder if you can give some tips?
Trudi Lebron:
Yeah. I think that this is an interesting question about how people in other countries do this work. I would encourage people to really think about, again, their local context. What contributions has the people who come from the diasporic African community, what contributions have been made that are showing up in your community? I am 100% sure that there are impacts there. So taking the opportunity to highlight that and to say, look, this is something that we use every day, or this is a building that was designed by this African architect. No one knows that, we should know that and we should be thinking about that. Those are ways to… You don’t have to just talk about what’s happening in the United States Civil Rights Movement.
Trudi Lebron:
You have history for mural and country that should be explored. I think that’s just immersing yourself in learning that, I think is a great way to spend that time. Because this work is, it’s not about Black History Month or any of this work. It’s not about an Instagram feed or showing the world that you’re cool and that you get it right. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about how you let it change you and how you share that learning. So taking the time to, if you’re not aware, taking the time to do some learning is probably a great place to start.
Sigrun:
But it also sounds like something that is ongoing and probably a journey almost forever. You’re not finished at some point.
Trudi Lebron:
Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think that we have that conversation all the time about how Black History Month is, it shouldn’t just be a month, it should be something that’s incorporated into curriculum in school all year round. It shouldn’t be that black history is American history. It’s not a separate thing. If people want to use the month as a catalyst to begin the work because you’re paying attention to it in a different way, that’s great. But it should be something that, it’s a commitment, it’s a commitment, it’s something that you should always be thinking about and learning about.
Sigrun:
I think there’s a lot of parallels to gender equality discussion and the anti-racism discretion. It’s an ongoing, it’s a never ending project. If we don’t know what to do, maybe if we take it to some subject that we know better, we would know what to do.
Trudi Lebron:
Exactly.
Sigrun:
So what’s next for you?
Trudi Lebron:
Oh, man. Well, once we get these two rooms finished, we’ll be working on some YouTube stuff, which we’re really excited about. Continuing to podcast, of course. We’re actually going to be rolling out some new programs that are really designed to teach more about how to coach, because we do a lot of business development. Our work so far has been a lot about helping people build business that are and inclusive, but we are putting together some plans to talk about the skill of coaching. How do you be a coach that is inclusive and equitable? That’s the next thing that we’re putting together to roll out later this year. Yeah, so those are… And who knows what else?
Sigrun:
Who knows what else? Trudi, it’s been really so much joy and informative to have this talk together. I’m excited to hear what my listeners say. So please tag me and Trudi on Instagram and let us know what you think about this episode. And we’ll link up in the show notes, your programs and your website so people can go and find Trudi and learn more from her. Thank you so much for coming to the show.
Trudi Lebron:
Awesome. Thank you. Bye.
Sigrun:
Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/420, where you find the link to sign up for my upcoming masterclass, Lessons From a Seven Figure Launch. Also in the show notes, you’ll find all the links to Trudi Lebron. Thank you for listening to the Sigrun Show. I hope to see you on the masterclass. Let me know that you’ve signed up by sending me a DM on Instagram with a code word, Launched. I’ll see you in the next episode.