“If you’re not compassionate with yourself, how can you know how to be with others?”
There are so many good quotes from this interview.
“It’s ok to breathe at work.”
“Every day is a new day and let’s show up for what that is.”
And rightfully so.
This episode with Elijah digs into something deeper, more personal than our previous episodes. We go beyond all or nothing thinking. We leave the binary far behind.
Elijah Zimmerman is an interfaith minister, nonprofit executive, and PhD in communication whose work sits at the intersection of compassion, transformation, and leadership. He’s led through huge life transitions — as a trans man, a parent, a military officer, and a nonprofit leader. Currently, Elijah serves as Executive Director at the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, where he helps people and organizations use compassion as a real, practical tool for meeting change.
We explore:
- How can I be with this moment, with this person?
- How is self-compassion not selfish (though how anything can become selfish if it just becomes all about you and your inner world)?
- What happens if you just took a breath together?
- How to address the big elephant in the room (aka our feelings that are directly impacting our ability to do our work)
- What does compassion look like with a team of 500? How does it scale?
Plus, we learn a new vocab word: interpolation.
We all need this conversation, especially with the high stress of holidays coming around.
Action items:
- When you feel empathy, what is your next step? How do you turn your empathy into action?
- How might you practice pausing at work?
- Where are you using all or nothing thinking? How might you explore the grey areas, beyond win/lose?
Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
Learn more about the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.
Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:06] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for. We’re Janel and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company Strange Birds into a worker owned co op.
[00:00:22] Janel: Today we’re talking with Elijah Zimmerman, an interfaith minister, NonProfit executive, and PhD in communication whose work sits right at that intersection of compassion, transformation, and leadership. And he’s led through huge life transitions as a trans man, a parent, a military officer, and a non profit leader. Currently, Elijah serves as executive director at the center for Mindful Self Compassion, where he helps people and organizations use compassion as a real practical tool for meeting change. One of the things that I love best about Elijah is how he manages to make compassion sound like both an act of resistance and. And a skill that you can actually practice.
[00:01:02] Anna: So let’s get into it. We’re going to start really high level with some definitions. So Janelle and I are word nerds, so let’s define our terms. Elijah, for you, what is the difference between compassion and empathy? And I wanted to ask this specifically because I think a lot of people smush those two together.
[00:01:25] Elijah: Yeah, Empathy.
So broadly speaking, you can resonate or have a sense that someone is going through something and you have a feel. There’s a feeling match to break it down in a basic way.
My experience, compassion is something.
The feeling might be there, but it has. It comes with an enhanced sort of awareness about it. And so compassion, it has that component to be with.
And I think there’s an awareness of, okay, how can I be with this moment? How can I be with this person?
Has more of a holistic viewpoint where I think empathy just starts with the recognition that you’re having a feeling that you can relate. So compassion takes it to the next step. I know that’s not like the Latin definition that people might be looking up between the words, but in practice, that’s how I see the difference of both of them working.
Yeah.
[00:02:25] Anna: Full agreement. But it’s interesting how those two get conflated so often.
[00:02:33] Elijah: Yeah. I think a big part of it is in the doing of it. You can have empathy, but that stops right there. Right.
The next step is, what are you going to do with it? I think, Janelle, you brought up that sense of compassion as resistance in some aspect. And for me, that’s.
Compassion is an incredible tool for that. Because you’re saying, in this moment, what can I do to alleviate suffering?
What can I do as an action point? And that may or may not be comfortable for me. And it may or may not be something that I’m familiar with. I’m thinking about an example where I was so fortunate to work with my local first nations community here, specifically the Songhees, the Wasanich and the Esquimalt on a multi year project.
And I think with that example, there’s a lot of moments where, because it’s a new culture to me and I was learning and they were being very kind to me as I was learning, I. I was uncomfortable all the time. But that was me meeting the moment and saying, you know, I’ve said I would show up for this. And compassion is leading me to meet folks where they’re at in trying to address colonization and healing from that a genocide.
Empathy could say, wow, that must feel terrible to have your children taken away. Must feel terrible to have your language stripped away. But the next move is, what am I going to do in this moment with folks about this? That often has an array of emotions. But you talked about compassion as a skill.
When you practice that there’s a way that you can be in the moment and then also observe the moment so that you can hold it a bit more.
Empathy. If they kind of stay in that pool of feelings, then sometimes you’re not sure which direction to go and you’re just sitting with the feeling.
[00:04:26] Anna: Is it like the difference between doom scrolling on Instagram and feeling all the feelings you’re feeling and like getting out into the community and doing something about it?
[00:04:37] Elijah: Yes, yes, I think that’s a good one.
I think we need both. Right? There’s a little bit of a moment where in the time that we live, when you doom scroll, you gotta check your emotions and where you’re at and try to make sense of things.
But that’s also a feature of our time, right? Where people are.
You do that enough now you’re emotionally exhausted. So the idea of going out and doing something feels so overwhelming.
But, you know, we’re all traversing that. That’s. I mean, the dopamine hit, right?
[00:05:07] Janel: It feels like doing something even if it’s not actually doing something.
Our poor primitive brains are tricked into it a little bit because that’s what I’m understanding is like the principal difference between empathy and compassion. At least the way you’re using those terms is like empathy is just the feeling, whereas compassion, like, compels you to act in some way or to transform yourself and your perspective in some way.
So, like, what do you mean when you talk about that as a skill and what does it mean as a. I Know you specifically teach businesses how to use that as a skill. Like help me bridge over to that.
[00:05:43] Elijah: Yeah, I think there’s the. In what I’m currently doing around mindful self compassion, the mindfulness piece is pretty key.
And that in terms of training the skill, I’m sure many people are familiar with that in terms of, you know, breath work, lots of meditation apps, short meditations where you can just slow down your breath, be present and those kind of things. That’s the skill that you can craft. So the more that you can sit and breathe and for, you know, different stretches of time, I think it’s often a misconception that if you’re really skilled at doing some type of mindfulness and meditation, you’re not gonna have any thoughts. And some practices might say that that’s the end goal. If you can practice so deeply, you just have this pure awareness.
But often the skill is sitting there with all the monkey mind, all the thoughts. It’s that being able to be like, I’m still.
And there’s this immense amount of chaos happening and I’m just gonna be with it.
So that’s, I think particularly in business or your workplace, that’s huge. Particularly when there’s really complex situations or high conflict. If you yourself can be like, I’m present in this and even though all of this stuff is happening, if you have practiced that breath work, then your system isn’t going to go into overdrive and be like, what am I going to pick? Fight flight, freeze phone, let’s go. Right? You can have some awareness and just take a breath. And I’m sure everyone can relate. That’s listening to this, that’s not always easy. You can even be aware, right? And be like, oh, I’m going into fight mode. Can I reel myself in this moment or let it go? And the self compassion part that I’m working with right now is that moment where you go, it’s okay, it’s okay.
Of course I was going to be upset about that. Of course this thing was challenging.
I’m going to do better next time, right? We don’t have to put all that pressure on ourselves to get it right every time because we’re human. Humans being human together is bonkers most of the time. So the more that we can be gentle on ourselves and say, wow, it was important I showed up and I’m going to show up again and I’ve learned something.
So I think, you know, in that sense of workplace or business, those type of tools go a long way for resilience just general performance.
One of the things I’m really into right now, and forgive me if you’re not sports fans at all, the Blue Jays are playing the Dodgers in the World Series. And one of the things I love about the Blue Jays as a team is they just, let’s go out and play our game. And then whenever they’re asked a question by the press, they’re like, well, that was today’s game. We’re going to see what tomorrow’s game is like and we’re not going to bring today into it. Right. So it’s just that kind of mentality that’s already gone. That day is gone. We learned some stuff. Now are we going to meet this new moment? And so I think, you know, compassion and those training, those skills can really help a person bounce back and just be aware. Every day is a new day and let’s show up for what that is.
[00:08:52] Anna: Perfect sports metaphor. Yes. Janelle is not a sports person. I play ultimate Frisbee, so I get the sports metaphor. Actually played a game last night in cold wind and rain. It was terrible conditions. It was absolutely miserable and was one of the most fun games because at the beginning of the game I was, I’m a captain on this team. And I was like, look, conditions are miserable.
If you don’t catch something or if a throw is bad, blame it on the wind and just move on. Even if it wasn’t the wind’s fault, blame it on the wind, move on. And it honestly, it really helped.
[00:09:28] Elijah: So.
[00:09:29] Anna: Okay, going back to the question at hand.
I know that this is changing a lot in business, but something that I think still is sticking around is that leave your emotions at the door like you’re here to do a job, just do your job and then go home and have your feelings about it later.
Even though those conversations are shifting in business, how are you navigating that? Just ingrained in the idea of work overall, where self compassion requires you to have feelings while you’re working.
How are those compatible and how are those not compatible in the.
In specifically American culture?
[00:10:14] Elijah: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense for a question of how can that work, particularly in our current moment where there’s so much conflict and vulnerability is so high to try, you know, show up and have an opinion or a feeling with others around you.
Maybe I’ll just give an example. Like my current workplace, which is so great, we do mindful self compassion. So we’re, you know, on this meta level, so aware of it being integrated.
I think there’s A way that you can show up and acknowledge things are happening. You can name it. There are tons of scholars who would say, if you can name something now, you can clearly start addressing it. And I think that is a critical workplace aspect, right? How many times have someone. You sat into a meeting, there’s a big elephant in the room, and you’re like, this is the fifth meeting we’re having. Can we just talk about the actual thing that’s happening and we can get on, right? Whether that’s, you know, improving how a team is working, improving a system. Like, the more those things drag on, the more work you have to go back and fix it, right? So for me, this is a critical workplace thing. And often people’s emotions, that’s the first radar to let you know something’s going off the rails or, you know, there’s some team dynamic that’s going to be really negative for performance or completing a project.
You know, we have a really good attendee, all of us, walking around of what we think, you know, is or isn’t working for us. Of course, the conflict arises, and I’m thinking specifically about your workplace in the US when you have people with so many different experiences and perspectives and they’re willing to die on a hill for it, then it becomes extra risky. But I have found in my work life, too, it doesn’t have to be big. You can even. And it’s so risky to do.
But if you’re someone with some amount of power in the room to say, can we take a pause?
Can we take a pause here and just reflect on this, or just even the act of saying, can we take a pause? People will sort of get out of this sight line of running through a meeting or whatever you’re doing without awareness. So, you know, and that what kind of pause you take depends on the context. You know, I imagine if you’re at a construction site, that’s a different kind of pause than the work I’m doing in meditation. But, you know, compassion works in all kinds of ways. The pause could just be cutting up, making jokes, you know, diffusing the moment from the direction it was going. It just gives everybody’s brain a little bit of room to breathe and to look at something differently.
[00:13:00] Anna: To have another sports metaphor, it’s knowing when to call a timeout. When you, like, see your team ratcheting up, like, we gotta, like, getting more and more friends. He’s like, okay, timeout. Everybody calm down.
[00:13:14] Elijah: Absolutely. This is my last Blue Jays example, I swear, because I just want them to Beat the Dodgers so bad. You know how it is where they’re just. The daughter’s like, I’m untouchable. You know, and you’re like, last night, this really young pitcher, he’s 22, he’s made like eight starts in the, you know, professional career at all. He’s quite good. He started going off the rails with one batter, and the catcher came out to him and just said, you know, let’s have a breath. Exactly what you’re talking about.
Just, you’ve got it.
You’re getting wound up on this moment, but have a breath and we’ll keep getting through this. And so it doesn’t take a lot, I think, sometimes, because we’ve overlaid with work all of these systems and all of these five steps to do this. Here’s how you can improve your team in these 25 ways.
Go out and drag everyone through the mud and then have them come back and reflect on it. It’s like all these extreme examples when really, if you all just took a breath together, it’s so simple, but so difficult. But that can do a lot more than spending 15, $20,000 on some trainer to come and do something no one’s going to remember. Right. So some of this also is like culture change, just having people be. It’s okay to breathe at work. And I think in a lot of places, people don’t feel that.
[00:14:41] Janel: Yes, I have a thought that is specifically about that. I. A lot of the industries that we intersect with, it seems like their God is optimization of all sorts.
Everything ought to be up and to the right. We want to do things faster and more and.
[00:14:59] Elijah: More.
[00:15:00] Janel: This feels almost completely antithetical to that. So I guess my question is, is compassion even compatible with capitalism as we understand it, or does it require, like a complete rewiring of our brains?
[00:15:15] Anna: That’s a big one. We’re hitting you with all the big ones.
[00:15:17] Elijah: Yes, definitely. Mic drop on that one.
I think it has an undoing quality for capitalism because inherent in it, you’re saying, let’s be aware of what’s around us and ourselves and capitalism.
And I’m completely collapsing this. But capitalism said, who cares? Are we making money? Right?
And I come from my own background where I believe more in whole systems or ecological awareness. Because if some, in all this optimization, if you’re forgetting about the very basic fundamentals of how we can all be here together, then it’s not optimizing.
To me, it seems like a bit of an illusion. And of course, it’s an extended illusion. How capitalism’s been functioning.
But I think most people, again, would say, it doesn’t really work for me.
There’s maybe a handful of folks who are designing some of these systems or profiting off it that say, I’m jamming out, man.
This is the thing for me. But I think most people would say, I don’t want to be on that hamster wheel and I don’t want to be optimizing with another app on top of the 20 apps that I’m required to do at my workplace, in which now half of my time is just managing the technology and actually not doing the work, that really feels like, what am I doing? Right. When you’re just sitting at the computer trying to troubleshoot something for the 50th time that you’re like, well, there goes the rest of my afternoon, I guess I’ll actually do something meaningful tomorrow. Right. So I think most people, I mean, I’m sure both of you have something to say about this because of the work that you’re doing. But the trend, I think people are saying, like, there’s life, there’s life beyond work. And why aren’t we respecting that? Like, that’s. I don’t.
I’ve seen people be like, job applications or people like, if you like work, life, balance, don’t come here. And you’re like, oh, good, thanks for letting us know. You know, why would someone great. Yeah. Not want to live with their life?
[00:17:27] Anna: Yeah. I just had a. Someone who recently graduated from college ask me, you know, every three months I get to do something new with class. And now it’s just going to be the same thing over and over again. And I was like, it’s actually not about that. It’s about figuring out how you rest.
Because if you’re in a school system, you’ve got holidays, you got long holiday breaks, you maybe even have summer.
So, like, it’s about how you rest and have that life. Yeah. So I’m loving this conversation.
Self compassion is what you are specifically really focused on right now.
Could you dig a bit more into why that is so important and what myths you could bust for us? But myth in particular is it’s selfish.
[00:18:23] Elijah: Yeah. Maybe I’ll start there and say any modality can become selfish if it just becomes all about you and all about your inner world. Anything, capitalism itself. Right. As a methodology, if you will, can become really selfish. I’m sure there’s purists out there who say, no, it works for everybody, you know, But I don’t think we’re seeing that right now.
But to speak to that sense of the self and self compassion, maybe I’ll talk about this way if we’re thinking about being compassionate with others.
If you’re not compassionate with yourself, how can you know how to be with others? And I think this is one of my biggest things of when people do things that puzzle me, that are brutal to other people. And I think this is part of some of my PhD research. It has to be the sense that you have not felt, the sense of suffering and someone coming to meet you in your suffering and to say you can have care here because I think once you have that experience on a deeper level, you realize just how critical that is. A sense of belonging, a sense of love and like what it can do for your life and then you want to share that with others. So self compassion is a way to start small in with yourself and then to be able to build towards sharing it with others. And in some respects people who are really struggling with self compassion, there’s a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, which makes you less available to be with others around you.
Many people are just very lonely, very isolated and they’re trying to cope with that and trying to learn how to love themselves in that. So if you can reach some level of care for yourself in that, imagine then your neighbor, your community, the sense of public good. You want everyone to feel that. So it starts with yourself, but it’s not an end point.
The point is not to just stay with yourself. I’ll go back to the sort of curriculum of self compassion that was created by Kristin F. And Chris Germer.
And a key component of that is common humanity.
So it is really meant to be practiced with others.
I think again practicing anything by ourselves has value of course.
And once we put ourselves in community and practice something, that’s a whole other level.
[00:20:50] Janel: You gave me the perfect segue to ask my favorite question because I get to quote you in our like warm up call that we had you mentioned the phrase and this is been going around my head ever since then, catalytic transformation. That can happen when we do practice compassion together. Tell me more about that. When have you seen that? What does that look like?
[00:21:08] Elijah: Yeah. Being word nerds we can like just that sense of what is catalytic. And I just think about how it operates in any kind of equipment. Right.
Moves things over. Right. It helps like a car gets you going and in a direction. So um, I think the possibility of compassion when you’re really aware of yourself and you’re being aware of others and you’re, you’re being kind to yourself when difficult things come up, that it has a kind of spaciousness that allows you again to have movement in a way that just opens up possibilities. Right. Because if you’re closed down, you’re not, you know, open to your feelings, you’re not open to other people. You’re just, you know, rigidly holding to something, you’re in a small box and you’re not going to be able to move very much. Right. As hard as you would try, the. You have to open the field of your awareness to see all the different possibilities, potential outcomes, the creative process, see other people like. Anything that helps things really move requires a sense of openness. So in terms of where I’ve seen that the group I’m working with now, when I came to the organization, there have been people laid off and half the staff is replaced. And we all had to learn how to do this together. And we’re all remote across the country, the North America, actually. So everyone’s got different realities they’re dealing with day to day. We come with different experiences and because we’re a small team, we have the opportunity to practice it all the time because we depend on each other so much. So if someone’s kids are sick or someone’s in a situation with climate change and their systems are in or out, it could be easy in a workplace to go, this person has too many issues, we’re cutting them. Right. You can just say, that’s not working out.
But in a small team, you can do a little bit more of a awareness and say, what can we hold today that that person can come do tomorrow? Right.
And that has a huge shift. I think it lets everybody’s nervous system just slowly, slowly start to relax and to know that something comes up in my life or if I’m having a really hard day, I can attend to that and come back the next day. And I don’t have to be worried about is my job still going to be. I don’t have to be worried that the people I work with going to be mad at me. No, we’ve.
We’re having an awareness here that we’re all trying to move together as humans doing something.
And I think that that in itself, that nervous system check or relaxation, that’s the catalytic thing, I think for me that’s just huge with any of these practices.
[00:24:03] Janel: I’m reminded of a thing that Anna said in a meeting a couple years ago.
Hopefully that’s all right. I quote you, Ana, we were having our first Summit. So I’d been at Strange Birds for under six months, just about half a year, and I still carried with me the dregs of corporate and was still shedding that little by little. And one of the things that I told them, like, you know, what I really appreciate about you is that you’re always, always there. You’re just always good for it. When you say you do something, I can always rely on you. And Anna was like, no, don’t put that on me. No, I don’t want that compliment. And at the time, I was like, what? I’m. I’m telling you something nice about yourself. And they. And it’s only after really, like some. Some years of being outside of that expectation of like, you just run as fast as you can all the time until you hit a wall or collapse, that I realize how.
How much they were right. And how much rest is an integral part of doing your job and of showing up as a human in your life in general.
That’s something that really took years for me to wrap my whole system around. And I’ll just. I’ll never forget that they said that. You remember saying that, Ana?
[00:25:16] Anna: I have absolutely no memory of that, but it sounds like something I would say. I. It’s like, no, I am not that reliable.
[00:25:22] Elijah: Nope.
[00:25:22] Anna: I am not Energizer Bunny. Absolutely not.
But I think going off of what you said, Elijah, and then Janelle, the quote I don’t remember saying, we’re all on small teams, right? How does that translate to that big corporate environment?
What does self compassion. What does compassion look like in practice in a team of 500?
[00:25:49] Elijah: That’s a really good question.
Um, and it is a bit of a question of scale, but certainly even a team of 500, you’re going to have people close around you, right? So whatever level you’re at, there’s probably five to 10 people that you interact with the most, right? So you can scale it down to that sort of level of awareness, because past that, it’s. You’re not going to be able to be aware of 500 people. That is complete overload. And so, you know, as corny as it sounds, start right where you are. Start with the people that you’re working with the most.
And one of the things about, I think, compassionate tools or practice, again, it’s easy to do, but hard to do, you know, in the practice of it. But studies have shown just putting your hand on your heart, you’re signaling to your body a level of like, I got you. We can calm down, you Know of your heart or your lungs. You know, you’re. You’re letting your body know you’re there just having a moment, because your brain doesn’t know the difference. If someone else is saying or you’re saying it to say everything’s okay, you did it. You did as best as you could. And you can. You can breathe right now for a moment. Right? So I think that’s the beauty of, you know, doing it for yourself and then sharing it with a couple other people. That, again, it’s corny, but it has a ripple. There is a. People will notice that differently. And, I mean, how many people would love to be in a meeting with people who are calm and clear and.
Right. You’re like, okay, that’s working for me. Right. I want more of that. Like, maybe I want to learn from that person whatever skills they’re doing, how to show up to this and show up to work and not feel out of control. So I know with capitalism or business, we have to think all these big, grand things, but oftentimes it’s the small moments in which we recognize each other that make the difference, which, when there’s all this demand, go faster, move harder.
It’s harder to see the small moments. It’s harder to recognize, particularly if you’re a leader and you’ve got staff.
You know, sometimes just checking in with someone and say, I noticed in this meeting you’re a little off. What’s going on, Right. Five minutes. But you have to be. Have enough breath or enough space to notice that that person might be going through something and said, oh, you know, and time and time again, I’ll have this experience, this whole long thing will come out, and they’re like, oh, I’m glad we talked. Right? And now they have some space to be able to do their job. So for people who feel like, oh, that’s. That kind of emotional labor is just nice to have.
I don’t have, you know, I can’t do it. But you’re.
You’re witnessing other people doing the work, and people want to be seen in what they do. And they want, particularly someone who has more power than them or capacity in some way to say, I got your back or I’m in this with you. And that just changes the whole scene in terms of culture. But I think also performance. If you feel like you’re carrying around a backpack to do your job, then you’re not going to be.
You’re gonna be weighed down.
[00:28:58] Anna: Yeah. It speaks to the power of just the. The deep human need to be seen, right. Of if you’re going through something, how much easier is it if you just know someone else knows?
It doesn’t mean that they have to help you through it. It doesn’t mean that they have to actively be there for you. But like, someone else knows.
And there’s times like with Strange Birds where it’s like, yo, this is just where I’m at today.
This is going on. I don’t need help or validation or support. I just need you to know. And.
And then like, that backpack is a little bit lighter.
[00:29:38] Janel: Well, I love that example that you gave because it demonstrates that it’s not that you have to make your business 100% talking about, well, how do I feel in every single moment? We should have a gossip circle. Like, that’s not what we’re talking about here.
It’s making these fairly small changes that have quite an enormous impact in the culture of an organization. And I’m reminded yet again, I’ll quote you again, Elijah, if that’s okay, from our previous conversation about how we talked about how binary thinking is very common in business.
And I guess I start to think about what it would look like to be on the other side of that, because how do we. We always think at Strange Birds? Like, how do we build structures business that allow us to put what we want to see into the world? So like, what do. Can. Can you talk a little bit like, as to more structures that might help us move beyond this all or nothing thinking?
[00:30:35] Elijah: Yeah.
My first thought as an example, currently we have a program that it’s very mission forward, it’s very on point in terms of sort of the start of the material educationally, how it can be used in the world. And revenue wise, it just keeps meeting our minimum, right? It’s like you’re just waiting till the very end and you’re like, I don’t know, is this gonna. What’s gonna happen?
Right? You’re like, okay, let’s keep trucking with it. And I think in a more binary sense, you could look at it and say, you know, on the balance sheet, this sucker’s gotta go this. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But if you dig deeper and then you say, well, actually look at all these iterations this has gone through and it’s been adapted to meet needs. And in the changing time and the fact that we’re still here and still doing it, that is a huge success. So both can be true to say, wow, it’s not delivering on the revenue in the way that we had initially thought or had hoped and it’s actually performing and doing the thing we want it to do.
So now I think the non binary aspect would be, let’s start thinking about this differently.
Let’s say where does this have a place in the organization? Before it was sort of the centerpiece or this idea that it was going to just scale in the epic way. And you’re like, it’s telling us it’s not going to do that, but it’s still good, it’s still quality, it’s still offering people something. So let’s put it somewhere else and focus our energy in a different place. So that’s sort of a long winded example to say, I think when we apply again that more whole picture thinking, not just the bottom line thinking we can be more creative about where something may or may not fit. Right. It’d be a different story if it’s like not making money, everyone’s miserable, nobody likes it. You know, there’s a whole different sort of perspective there on what would happen next. But I think, yeah, oftentimes so many things can be true and it just much like that breath or that pause, if we all are aware of that, that just gives us a bit more fluid to work with, right.
I guess to jump on gender fluidity and that whole concept, right? Like, who wouldn’t want more fluidity, right? Like, right. It just gives a little bit more space.
And you know, if you’re in that zone too, you can be like, oh, there’s the possibility we have never thought of or seen had we not stayed a bit loose here.
[00:33:07] Anna: It goes back to the what we just said at the beginning, right, of compassion as an act of resistance.
As a I olock is a comedian, artist, poet, someone that I truly, truly admire. And something that they say a lot is if we’re going to go down this gender pathway, let’s go of I’m trans, non binary, me personally. And that is really scary for people because I am showing them something completely different that they never would have thought of or experienced before outside of something that is so seemingly black and white of male and female. Right. And so because I’m outside of that binary, I have like all of these other options and ideas and ways to live my life that goes beyond how I experience gender. It goes how I show up in the workplace, how I think about my life as a whole, how it’s structured, how I move through the world. Like that small little act of resistance here is showing all of these different ways things could be. And I think to bring it back to business and away from gender is that can happen in the workplace too, of that moment where someone sees something outside of. It could be this or that, but it could.
That one moment of pausing and saying, hey, it could be neither of these things. And something completely out of the ballpark and you start thinking out of the ballpark and then everything else becomes possible in this really exciting way that actually really moves the business forward rather than it’s got to be this or that. And if it’s not this or that, we’re screwed.
[00:34:54] Elijah: Absolutely.
[00:34:55] Anna: How’s that going from gender to business? That, that. That’s new.
[00:35:01] Elijah: Nailed it.
[00:35:01] Anna: In that way. Did I nail it?
[00:35:04] Elijah: You did. You absolutely nailed it. Can I, can I jump like piggyback on it? Because I’ll get nerdy too.
A theorist all through. Sarah has this concept called interpolation.
And the crux of that is a structure, a system will call. Call us out. Right. So I’m sure you’ve had this experience. Any kind of group, you show up as yourself and the system is so rigid, it’s. It can only call from you that part of one part of yourself. Right. And then you feel like, why is it just this? I feel so minimized. Right.
I think what you’re speaking towards is, you know, that fluid or more queer way of being says let’s be open to people coming with who they are. Right. And we’re going to try to keep the system, you know, structured enough so we know what’s going on. There’s some clarity. But leave room for people to say, this is who I am and this is what I’m about. Whether that’s gender or beliefs or other cultural practices or, you know, whatever difference, there’s a different capacity for belonging.
And you know, I think this is partly the corporate challenge. It’s. It can be a very, very narrow. Like this is who you can be here. Right. And that takes a huge toll on people’s well being because we don’t. We’re not designed to operate in like one way as human beings where there’s so much more to us than that.
[00:36:36] Anna: I’ve seen businesses struggle with, make taking that first step of figuring out how to make space for the humanity of the people that make the business work. And so maybe that’s also where that act of self compassion comes in is like, it’s messy, it’s hard, but it’s necessary work. If you want to create something that makes an impact on the world in some way, shape or form requires you to be okay. With mess.
[00:37:09] Janel: And be okay with the discomfort that comes with it. That’s one of the first things that you said. I think that compassion oftentimes is wrapped up in uncomfortable feelings of growth, of the unknown or whatever it is. And businesses aren’t usually okay with discomfort, and maybe they ought to be. Maybe that’s something to practice.
[00:37:32] Elijah: Yeah, I can see the fear. Right. Because discomfort, uncertainty, you can’t plan for that. Right. There’s, I think, a logic where we can plan, we can budget for it. Like, let’s just fit right in this box.
But again, that’s not how we human together. That is just not realistic for life forms. I think in general, there’s not to go so deep, but here we are on the podcast, going deep. I’m just thinking about all the wisdom that indigenous people can have been teaching us and have been just cultivated over thousands of years about reciprocity and interrelationship.
If you think you’re going to extract or exploit, and then you think you’re going to be successful in the long term, but it’s not going to happen, that’s just a road to burnout, and you’re going to be left with less than before.
You know, even if you had a momentary feel of like, wow, look at all this excess, what’s underneath it? And is it really going to last when you’ve burned through people and resources?
I just. I know it’s a complex world we live in, and people are trying to make sense of things economically, make the best decisions they can with the information they can. And I think the more we can just pause and even ask, what. What is the. What are we trying to do here together? Right.
[00:38:57] Anna: So the question we want to end this with is, what is giving you hope right now about our capacity to bring more compassion into the workplace?
Is there anything giving you hope?
[00:39:15] Elijah: Yeah, I’m. I mean, the fact that three of us are sitting here right now talking about it like that, that’s really cool. Like, this is one of the great parts about having this conversation. Like, yes, I want to do that. Right.
I think people are becoming more warm and interested and looking to see how can we have the spaciousness.
And I think that it’s the flip side, right? Where at least in my experience with AI and technology and work, it’s just like, harder, faster. Go, go, go. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, because I’ve been trying to move in and out of AI and at some point, just feeling like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I feel so out of my body right now because I’m not a robot.
And I think most people, even if you want to say, let’s, you know, let’s be non binary about, okay, how can we use some of this technology in a beneficial way?
Is there a way that we can scale it so we can be human together? Like, there’s definitely a nuance there, but on the whole it’s. I think a lot of people are just saying, I don’t, I don’t want to be a robot. That’s not.
My system doesn’t like it, like, doesn’t give me room to have, you know, different human emotions of, you know, whether that’s joy or love or even pain or sorrow, all of it makes us feel alive. Right? So I do have a lot of hope that people, you know, at this technology edge are saying, okay, yeah, but how can we be human?
And I love that conversation.
[00:40:52] Anna: I love this conversation.
[00:40:54] Janel: I know, I know. It’s been a good one.
My goodness. Thank you so much, Elijah. This was amazing. And I have so much like that my brain is chewing on and just like happily snacking here and there and like already thinking about how can Strange birds introduce more pause into our own rituals?
We have different things that we do where we very purposely make space for feeling. But I think making space for pausing is also a really, really cool invitation.
[00:41:26] Elijah: Thanks for having me here. And I’m definitely going to hold on and hold some joy with being a charcuterie board of what I’ve shared here. So I’m going to just think about that. And.
[00:41:40] Anna: I, I just want to like, have a second podcast where can we just like, talk about queering business?
[00:41:47] Elijah: Yes.
[00:41:47] Janel: No, I know, like, but really, maybe we’ll just have you back on because like, once we got into. I’m like, shit, that’s not what the episode is about. But that’s all I want to talk about now.
[00:41:59] Elijah: And I got super nerdy there too. I was ready to go and then, you know, I could see. I know. You’re like the clock. We don’t have time to get so into this.
[00:42:09] Janel: Flying the coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic messaging co op for businesses who care loudly. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long term strategy. If you want your brand offers and experience to tell the same story, we can help.
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