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The Modern Independent
The Modern Independent
Thriving and Transformation: Insights on Education, Leadership, and Personal Growth with Dr. Kia Darling-Hammond
Curious about the true essence of education and human development? Join us as Dr. Kia Darling-Hammond takes us on a thought-provoking journey through her unique insights on thriving.
With a rich background shaped by educator parents and an insatiable curiosity for understanding human experiences, Dr. Kia illuminates the contrast between genuine elucidation in education and the often rigid, compliance-driven nature of traditional schooling. Discover how personal interpretation and self-actualization are pivotal elements in the learning process that can transform lives.
From the challenges of business development to the collective power of community and mentorship, this discussion is rich with practical wisdom. Dr. Kia's Bridge to Thriving framework and her upcoming book promise to inspire a vibrant and inclusive future.
Join us for an episode brimming with insights on love, unity, and the pursuit of a flourishing life!
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All right, everybody. As you just heard in our intro, this is another episode of the Modern Independent. As always, I'm your host, jon Almacy, and today I am sitting down with Dr Kia Darling-Hammond, who I am super, super excited to have on the show with me. We got the chance to bond over many office hours and conversations about her journey and what she's building, so I'm super, super excited to be able to have the conversation with her today. I'm going to give you a little bit of a brief introduction and start our jumping off point into the conversation, and then you'll hear directly from Dr Kia.
Speaker 1:So she is an educator, psychologist, researcher and coach with a specific focus on thriving and human development. Throughout her career, she has supported I am going way off, listen y'all. I am reading this live from a LinkedIn bio. Right now, we are going to kick that off from the beginning, because I keep saying it as if I am from Dr Kia's point of view. So she is an educator, psychologist, researcher and coach with a specific focus on thriving and human development. Throughout her career, she has supported an array of humans, from small children to college applicants, to organizational leaders and their teams. She believes that she has a gift for helping people find the common ground required to pave a way forward, which is why I think we vibe on so many different levels. So, dr Kia, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:It is so wonderful to be here. We do, vibe. Thank you for that introduction. I'm just really excited to be in conversation today. You know I'm a big Indie Collective fan, so this is exciting.
Speaker 1:Yes, and which I genuinely appreciate on so many different levels Having people. As you know, I try to bring as much energy as I can into every Zoom meeting, every conversation that we try to have. I'm really big on presence and being able to do that, every conversation that we try to have. I'm really big on presence and being able to do that and having members that just kind of embody that. Naturally, you know when they come into a room you can tell other members kind of gravitate or they're getting shout outs in the chat. They're like oh, like he is here, oh Brad showed up. Or oh, this person showed up.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm not discounting everybody that has been through cohorts two or three years ago. I haven't forgotten about you. Those are just the people that have graduated from the most written cohort. So I love you too. But it says something when you are able to step into that room and say something. And I think one of the big reasons for that is because I've heard from so many other indies that have had the chance to connect with you about that superpower that you have right Of being able to help people connect the dots or ask them questions that lead them to identify things in themselves. Maybe they didn't even know how did I mean? Is that something that you've always had? Is that a skill set that you've developed over the course of time? Can you tell us about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you were saying that, I was thinking how did that happen? I think ever since I was really young, my mother has said you're going to be a psychologist. So I think I've always had, personality-wise, an orientation toward curiosity about the human experience and I definitely was curious about everything and asked a lot of questions and made a lot of observations as a kid, sometimes very unfortunate observations that other people wished I didn't make. So my father used to give me this lecture about discretion, where he would spell it for me and tell me I needed it.
Speaker 2:But my parents are both educators and I think educators have a tendency to be oriented toward helping people find their way right. And you think about, like, the actual definition of education, elucidation, that's sort of you know, finding your pathway towards knowledge, enlightenment, understanding, and so I think it's my personality, I think it's how I was groomed, you know, raised by my parents to be thoughtful and curious and to be kind of an educator and that's just the way I'm oriented. Like I just I want to know what's important to people and I want to know what's exciting to people and I want them to move through discomfort and feeling stuck to getting and I want to know what's exciting to people and I want them to move through discomfort and feeling stuck to getting what they want and need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to go back and revisit the etymology of education there real quick, because that's not something that I'm super familiar with. But you said elucidation what was that word that you?
Speaker 2:just threw out there Illuminate, like to shed light upon right To illuminate, to kind of make visible, make clear, make.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like bringing things into focus for people in some ways, as you're educating. That makes a lot of sense. I like looking at education that way rather than helping somebody figure out how to properly fill out a checklist, you know, actually illuminating parts of the world or, you know, allowing them to see a new perspective and then integrate that and be able to act on it in the world versus. You know, sometimes people think of education and they think of school, right, and the structure of school, versus what it actually means. That's why I was so curious about going back and exploring that just for a second, because I was like, oh, that's actually kind of a cool little distinction there.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, and also I think part of what education offers that schooling doesn't always offer, because it's so structured and compliance focused is that each of us brings our own self to whatever it is that we're doing. So even if you gave me a checklist and I gave you a checklist, we might actually interpret and understand it very differently, and how we would even implement the things on that list would be different, and so everything is very individual and subjective in a lot of ways, and so I think that's an important piece of the self-actualization puzzle.
Speaker 1:Right, right, For people that are listening that may not have ever heard of the term self-actualization what in your mind? How would you explain that to somebody that maybe is hearing that for the first time? Sure, that's a deep question.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, people have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and so I'm going to actually cite Maslow, and I won't problematize the hierarchy of needs in this space, unless you want me to. But Maslow talks about people being able to become all that they could possibly become. In other words, you were saturated in opportunity for becoming, and that becoming is anchored in all of your potential and possibility, but it's also anchored in your desire. So who do I want to become? Here are all these opportunities. Okay, great, I can become that person self-actualize, to make yourself possible, to make yourself true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've always. Yeah, we definitely don't need to. I have my own thoughts on the hierarchy of needs, but again, maybe we just have a separate podcast episode where we go deep on, like some psychological concepts. That would be a lot of fun. Yeah, I think that, especially hearing about the work that you do and we'll get we'll dive into your career path here in a second but, you know, knowing the stuff that you're working on and the way that you choose to approach it, I think it's important for people to realize that those concepts they've kind of been around for a while but they are so malleable and there's still ways to find ways to improve them and how to communicate them, or things that you just found inside of your framework that I think touch on things in such a different way. And so that's a little sneak peek. If you want to hear about the framework and everything else, keep listening to the episode until the end, because we're definitely going to dive into that at some point.
Speaker 1:But to kind of rewind, I'm always super curious about how people started their path and then eventually ended up finding indie right. So I saw when I was doing my pre-episode work and stuff that you didn't really go independent right away. You just kind of had like a consulting gig. That was originally a side hustle. It sounds like it was like a specific project, kind of getting people to come together um for a I guess a consensus statement was the phrase that you used Um, so I don't know if that is like the proper place to start, but what was your entrance into the idea of, oh, I could actually do some work on my own or I could consult? And then how did that eventually evolve into, oh, I'm going to build my own practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so 20 plus years ago, a friend and mentor needed. So I've always been a little bit of a data head needed who? So I've always been a little bit of a data head. I really, really love spreadsheets, I love information, I collect information. It's probably like if you think of hoarding I don't hoard physical objects, I hoard information and I just love it, love it, love it.
Speaker 2:So this this mentor, John Snyder, knew that about me and he had a project that he was doing. He was at Bank Street College of Education and he had to work with the New York State it was the New York City Board of Education and the chancellor's office and a bunch of teachers and he was like, oh, Kia would be great to bring in and play with this data. And so that was my first consulting gig ever and it was actually really fun. And I found was my first thought like consulting gig ever, and it was actually really fun. And I found myself in these rooms and, like I said, I'm I am a child of two educators. I've been in the public schooling universe my entire life, right Because of my mom. So here I am in this room full of educators and administrators who are not getting along and me little budding mini psychologist is going oh, let's talk about these things. So I'm having one-on-one conversations, group conversations center. So that's how that all unfolded. And then I took, you know, small little projects over the years, but I always had these sort of W-2s as we moved.
Speaker 2:So I'd say, probably graduate school was probably the, my doctoral program was probably the turning point, Because I'd sort of, you know, I did what a lot of people do you went to college and then I went and I got a job and then I said this isn't quite doing it for me and started to look for other ways to self-actualize. And I found myself in a Master of Arts in Teaching program and became a teacher and that for a time was phenomenal. But as many people know, K-12 education is a very exhausting space and the beginnings of my framework really started when I was a teacher, struggling to figure out how to create the conditions for my students to be whole and fully realized. So that was sort of the beginning. Then I was like, you know, I can't do this anymore. Actually it moved from teaching to administration and it almost killed me, literally almost killed me, because I wasn't sleeping and I couldn't take care of myself at all, but I was working constantly and it was high pressure, high stress.
Speaker 2:So I went into my doctoral program that's where my research really took root and I came out and I tried to do W-2s and I couldn't. I couldn't do it and part of the problem was I was so focused on thriving and I'd done all this work on flourishing and thriving and wellbeing and resistance, and I went into these kind of corporate settings and people were not taking care of themselves or each other and the cultures were often toxic, even though all the individuals were lovely human beings who were doing their best. And I couldn't. Now, with my new sort of clarity about what it was that I thought humans needed and where I needed to be to continue to recover, I couldn't be in those spaces. So that was when I thought can I do this side hustle thing full time? Because I don't know how I'm going to make a living if I keep being in settings that they were depleting. You know, and I know I'm not alone, I know a lot of us in the indie space got to a point where we're like I can't, I literally cannot live this life anymore because it's not living, it's not a life. And so then the pandemic hit. So here we are and everything's changing and a lot of the ways that I would have moved through the world had to shift right.
Speaker 2:I was a big networker. I was always at coffees and teas and meetings and panels and doing all the things and all of a sudden everything went shh and I had to figure out how to translate all of what would have been in-person work into digital work, like so many of us did. And I realized that I could do that, but I needed help to shift to full-time. So the first thing I did was I struggled and, struggled and struggled and got an accountant and finally, you know, a bookkeeper and accountant, and finally stopped struggling that way.
Speaker 2:Then I got clarity about what was going on, sort of internally, infrastructurally, and thought, oh, I don't know enough about business to build a whole business. And then so the accounting firm was Collective and they advertised Indie Collective and there was a discount which I needed to be part of the cohort, and I thought, okay, I'm just going to do it to be part of the cohort. And I thought, okay, I'm just going to do it. And the big epiphany in that moment of time was just recognizing that it was. I've been used to doing everything myself, but it was okay to ask for help. It was okay to get help. It was actually going to accelerate me if I could get some meaningful guidance, and so I did meaningful guidance, and so I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, before we dive into continuing, you know, into the indie collective journey and, you know, start asking questions about that. I want to rewind to something that you said, because you have this habit of just like going through and I don't think, I don't know if you even pick up on it sometimes when you say stuff. But you say some like prolific stuff, uh, and then it just like kind of glances over. So I want to hit on this idea and maybe get your input on it for people that are listening, that are in a culture or they're trying to build a culture, and the idea that every person individually can be a fantastic person, but then the culture can still be toxic. I guess two part why do you think that is? And how is culture different than the individual personalities of the people involved in that org? How can people kind of separate that stuff inside of their head?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think one critical dimension is beliefs. So much of it is about mindset and beliefs and so often, especially in organizations where you're trying to meet the needs of underserved populations, there's a sense of urgency and a sense of scarcity, and that is manufactured. Right, that comes from you know. Anybody who's ever worked in a nonprofit that depends on grant funding knows you are at the mercy of the grant cycles. You're at the mercy of the foundation and their priorities. You're at the mercy of all of these factors and anybody who's worked in K-12 knows that that school year is like a bulldozer. Right, you're in go mode constantly and I think that it's like the energy is very hot and scarce and fast. Right, like go, go, go and the resources tend to be insufficient to the need. Right, there aren't enough people. I've only worked in one organization that did a phenomenal job matrixing roles so that if two people were out, everything just kept going. Right, it was fine because they just trained across roles and so on. It was really brilliantly, beautifully done, masterful.
Speaker 2:However, most places don't have that and it's not to cast dispersions, it's a really complicated, intricate thing to do to manage that kind of you know, training, staffing, et cetera. So when somebody's out sick, something grinds to a halt, right, there's not enough subs, there's nobody to put on that event, there's something, something, and it creates this stress, right. So there's the stress of the conditions. We're trying to get this thing done. It's so important. Then there's the stress of you know whatever's happening in real time.
Speaker 2:And then when we're under stress, when humans are under stress, especially if it gets really, really high, we tend to go into autopilot. We become what we've experienced. We sort of go into the training that we've experienced, and most of us have been trained in contexts that are very punitive. Right, school has a tendency to be about compliance and control you don't want to get in trouble, you don't want to fail, and so on. So there's a lot that sort of is wrapped around scarcity, scarcity mindset, scarcity thinking. And when we are under duress, we're usually less patient, we are usually less creative, less curious, because we don't feel like we can slow down, we feel like we have to speed up and the place where we take care of each other is actually in slowing down, right.
Speaker 2:So I had at one point I was the chief of staff in an organization briefly, and I got in big trouble for sending staff home. One person was having heart issues, the other needed an appendix surgery, but both of them and I sent them home because they were sick in real time and I got in big trouble and the response that I got from my boss was you know, everybody has to be able to do their work right. So when we orient towards the work instead of the humans, what's possible together, we lose, I think, a lot of the beauty and the warmth and the vibrancy that is possible in collaboration. And when your idea of how to get people to do what you need them to do is punitive, controlling or coercive, you're going to create toxicity. It's immediate. And then you have to move through repair, and most of us don't know how to move through repair. Okay, I could go on and on. I'll stop.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, I'd love to just listen to you ramble on that all day, but there's, I'd love to just listen to you ramble on that all day, but there's. Oh man, you just reminded me of something that I think is a huge I don't want to say huge, but I've encountered it quite often that like there's a misconception about the way the military operates. Right, having served for seven years in the Air National Guard and obviously I can't speak for every military unit I can speak for my installation, my experiences across. You know units that I've observed from the Air Force in Aviano, italy, alaska, kuwait, you know the different places that I got the chance to spend time.
Speaker 1:But there's this perception that the military is extremely punitively oriented, and it's not except for the part that gets publicized to the public the most often, which is basic training. Bootcamp is very much so about taking you down to the bare bones. You are the same as everybody else that walked through that door. Now everybody is starting fresh and you're going to have this life and you're going to have these values and these are the things you're going to hold yourself to. And here's the standards. And you know they really kind of implement more of a value system or a belief system, right, and it can be punitive at the time because you're trying to iron out a lot of these kinks between people being able to bond as a unit and all this other kind of stuff. But outside of boot camp, which is like the major place where people are like you're going to do pushups because you did something wrong, right, that's like the standard military vision that a lot of people hold, vision that a lot of people hold once you're on the installation.
Speaker 1:I had the blessing of serving under this lieutenant colonel, lieutenant colonel phil brown, um, and his big message, pretty consistently, was if every single person along the chain of command understands exactly why they're there, why their role is important, why their role affects the roles peripheral to them and above them and below them in the chain, and then we're able to intrinsically get that person to want to do the best possible job they can at that thing, then we will run into way less circumstances where we will have to be punitive. And so there was a lot of times where he would send people home that were sick from duty, right, and then we would have to kind of the unit would have to shift, but the goal was to keep the unit healthy, not sacrifice the individual wellness of the individual people of the unit. It was at the unit level where that mentality was happening. And then I would I remember having conversations because my last two years of working under him he put me in charge of something called the student flight program and it was basically everybody that comes back for basic training as a part of this program for the first six months on base. So I did that for two years and, kind of you know, watched people develop from coming home from basic training to six months into their career, would assign them mentors and we'd have conversations about conflict resolution and ego management and context of your position and all this other stuff.
Speaker 1:And I remember one time Lieutenant Colonel Brown was talking to one of the master sergeants. That was a transfer from another base and this is what really showed me that I had a blessing of growing up under his mentorship. This master sergeant was saying like, sir, I have never been in an installation where new recruits are so excited to sweep the shop floor. And Colonel Brown's response was he was like well, they're excited to sweep the shop floor because they know that by them doing that they're allowing a fully certified staff sergeant to work on a plane. That's going to make that plane safer for transporting a hundred of our people across, you know, seas, sometimes lines. It's going to allow this person to do this like they understand exactly where it's at.
Speaker 1:So, no matter how medial the task, it was wildly important to them inside of that context and I really love that. It's always stuck with me. It's always something that I'm the one that takes the trash out at our agency's office. There's stuff that I do consistently to just make that a part of the culture. Anybody in any part of the chain of command should be able to jump in and help take care of the unit. So that's just you going on. That trend really reminded me of that conversation with him and I always want to shout him out whenever I get a chance because he was a big impact in my life.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm bursting because you'll know this from my framework, I'm always looking for the common thread and it occurs to me that there was a lot of really important sort of work happening there. So ego management you mentioned right, and I thought of basic training as a space where part of what's happening is people's sense of individualism and ego are being stripped out so that they can operate as a collective. Individualism and ego are being stripped out so that they can operate as a collective. And then you see that through line to the collective to sort of later when you're at the installation and everybody understands they have a role to play, because the collective is what makes people strong and successful.
Speaker 2:And I was thinking also about understanding the stakes. So you know understanding the stakes, so you know there's a reason why we have to figure out how to come together. And some of that is primal right, like the fundamental, like survival right, but fundamentally we are stronger when we can come together as a unified whole, as a collective. And what I think is really distinct about what you described versus what I see in a lot of organizations is that everybody, in any position, maintains their dignity right 100%.
Speaker 2:And I think, because we do tend to organize ourselves hierarchically, but in a whole host of ways in society, across a whole host of identities and roles. There's then, unfortunately, a tendency to attach value and dignity according to status and sort of position on a hierarchy, and what you've just described sounds like the opposite of that. You know, everybody is as important as everybody else, because nothing works well if everybody is not able to show up at you know, at their best, and that requires mutual support. I think that's actually powerful.
Speaker 1:I remember seeing him. This was actually. It wasn't him, it was a major shiflet. She was one of the first. No, no, yeah, it was Major Shiflett. She was one of the first female vice wing commanders at our base Baller of a human.
Speaker 1:And I remember her talking to a lieutenant like a fresh lieutenant when they came back from Officers Training Academy. That is, you are enlisted, which means you're kind of in like the entry level, slash, junior management class, right, and then you go on to training and you become kind of you know, a management level or director level, if I'm comparing it to the corporate world. But this person had never worked at the bottom of the food chain. They graduated school, they went and they came back and they were immediately an officer, which means that they were in charge of a unit of like 30 people right off the bat.
Speaker 1:And Major Siffitt was having this conversation and this also has really stuck with me too. She said if you have to pull rank in order to motivate your team to have a productive day, you've already lost the day. And I've always thought about that Because you know, you start your own company and you're hiring people, you're doing stuff, you're I was being called boss by like a group of five people at 24. And so I was like I don't know what I'm doing, but having that in the back of my mind is like okay. But if I have to say, well, well, I'm running this company, so we have to do this, I've already lost Right.
Speaker 1:And so I having that in the back of my head, I think, has been so valuable along the entrepreneurial journey, not just and really anywhere that I've gone, where I'm having to work inside of a hierarchical system. Right, it's the moment that you decide to lean on that hierarchical system. You know, maybe you can lean on it in acute situations, Like if it's really intense, and you just need to be like, hey, we need to follow orders right now. They would talk about that in the military all the time too. You're in an acute situation. Hey, I need to follow this order right now because it's, you know, life or death. But then when we get back to the base, now we're not outside of that acute situation. I'm not just pulling rank 24-7, because you only have so many times that you can do that with a team before they start to think that that's your default mode.
Speaker 2:That's right, and I think what you're saying is reminding me of an important relational rule, which is, whenever you're in relationship with someone, you can choose to be. You can choose to try to kind of control, and that undermines everything. It undermines trust, it undermines well-being, everything or you can choose to be in collaboration right and so I've encountered more fear-based organizations where you're afraid to get fired, you're afraid to get demoted, you're afraid to get it wrong and fear-based organizations than collaborative, dignity-based organizations, and I think you're right. There are moments where it's.
Speaker 2:I would say this to my students when I taught ninth graders and anybody who knows ninth, you know 12 and 13 year olds. They are unruly, chaotic humans and I love that right, and so one of the first things I would say to my students is what you do is not up to me, right. How you behave, what you say, what you do is actually not up to me. I don't have control over that and I don't want to. However, we are here together in a classroom and I hope that this can be a wonderful experience for all of us. So I'd really love to hear from you what would make this wonderful, and so we would work together to craft a culture together.
Speaker 2:But my caveat was when it's a matter of safety, I need for you to listen to me and trust me and do what I say without asking questions. So let's work on that. And I actually did drill my ninth graders on like we did fire drills. Until we got them right, we did evacuation drills. I think I was one of the only teachers who did this. Other people were teaching and my kids were lining up quietly outside, but it was because I knew if we did hit an emergency, I needed them to listen to me, without question. But that meant I had to earn and maintain their trust Right.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I love the idea of allowing them to build their own culture, especially in a classroom setting. We used to do that in student flight. Every time a new class would come back from basic training we would say, okay, here's the core values you have to operate in because you signed on the dotted line. You know, welcome to the US military. But you know how do you want to embody them as the class? Right, and typically they would focus on one thing. So the three core values are service before self, excellence and all we do in integrity, and so sometimes a class would choose to focus on service and they would be like okay, well, over the course of our trend this period, we're going to redo the flower beds on base. So we're going to do this. You know, we're going to do some of this other stuff. So, even just drilling, you know, one of the byproducts of of practicing the fire drills and stuff is the fact that they know how to do the fire drills. But after building their own culture, participating in a group activity where everybody has to play their part, everybody has to, you know, do the thing. We're going to go through this process. We're building that trust. Oh, you know, our teacher actually has our best interest. We're going to go through this. What a great way to anchor everything together with something that's super simple as an activity. You to get them to collaborate on something really easy.
Speaker 1:Um, okay, without the risk of like sticking inside of this uh loop the entire rest of the podcast episode, because we could totally do that. I do want to get into um, you taking the leap into indie, and I think you are someone that I would love to hear from about the pros and cons of the speed or intensity of the program. You know whether that was kind of what you expected or if it was different than what you expected when you came in. But also you're someone that in our conversations, I think at a point in the cohort I can't remember which week it was, but there was like this drastic turning point where it was like, oh, this is no longer intense. This is like I'm just letting it wash over me at this point Now I'm just acting on stuff, so I'm super curious about what the Indie Collective experience was like for you.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the first thing that I would say is you all did a very good job of saying you're going to need this many hours a week of additional time in order to do the work Like it really is like being in school, where you have class and homework. You have class and homework, and I was really lucky because I actually had the spaciousness and time to do the work. If I hadn't, I would have been completely bulldozed, I would have been overwhelmed, but that is an important dimension for people to pay attention to. You really do need those hours so that you can let stuff sink in practice. I did some additional research. That's how I found that sales funnel that I I'm so excited about that sort of thing, because it's impossible to give people all the information everybody could possibly need for their particular situation in that little program. But what you all do a great job with is giving folks a sense of the landscape right as an independent sort of business owner, as an entrepreneur. These are the kinds of things that you're going to want to be paying attention to and then giving us all these really beautiful and inspiring possibility models. This is how this person implemented, and so I really loved that and I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know what the what the turning point was, but I do remember like I don't remember exactly what happened or whatever, but what I do sort of remember happening was things started to click for me and one of the things that was important was me figuring out where to prioritize. So, you know, everybody's in different places in their business development and their sense of what they want to do. Some people are still just like imagining a business into existence, right, like you know. But I sort of already had a thing. I had too many things and I had to figure out which thing to focus on, because that's what 20 years does, right, and three careers. You know, I'm almost 50. I've been around a little bit, so you know. Now I'm like, where am I focused? There's too much going on. And one of the things that was really helpful was I would talk to people in Indy, you know, peers, to you, to Sam, and I'd start talking about all the things I was doing and you would all laser focus in on one thing, right, and that was my college program, which was the accidental thing I didn't even plan to do. Right, and everybody would just focus and that's the thing. That's the thing. So it was really helpful because it gave me a clear sense of what was viable and a clear anchor and that allowed me to prioritize, and then it shifted from there. But, yeah, I think there is a speaking of the washing over you.
Speaker 2:I do think that there's a power in releasing the idea that you're going to learn it all all at once, cause you're not, you know, and releasing the idea that you have to get it right right away, because there's so much power in experimentation and making mistakes.
Speaker 2:However, being an independent like is risky and not everybody has the runway to make mistakes, and so I think there is a tension between you know, if I've got no seed funding and I'm doing all of this in my spare time and I have a full-time job, I have just such a I need the like fast track, streamlined, precise method to get from here to there, and the problem is that doesn't quite work all the time, right, so it's not.
Speaker 2:There's no guarantee that you can safely get from you know, here to there in that tiny little, you know tube of time and energy that you have, and that is difficult. But because there are stakes, because it's kind of hard in the world right now right Economically and so on, there are stakes. So you're going to people bring that stress and tension and urgency in and I think that does deserve space and attention and I think the program moves at quite a pace so there's not always space and attention for that piece, you know. I think you all do a good job of saying like, don't think you're going to have to, you know, know it all or get it all right away. And I think maybe the A-team is one of the places where people could do some of that processing which will work in some contexts and not others. I think it's a little bit of a tricky balance and I want to acknowledge that it's a tricky balance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. I mean running a community and the amount of the way that me and Sam talk about it at this point right is the community is evolving because it's been around, coming up on its fifth year, fourth year, fourth year, so at this point we have fresh new grads coming in twice a year every year.
Speaker 1:And we have one-year alumni, two-year alumni, three-year alumni, four-year alumni, up to five program participants. So there's all of these different layers of people that have been involved at different levels and we've been talking about. You know what is it? What does it mean to have people fresh to the community and then, like the sage elders?
Speaker 1:you know, and the people that are in the throes of building their business and figuring it out and, you know, trying to provide opportunity and context and continuing education and networking and camaraderie and all of these things to everybody across all those different levels. It becomes really, really complex over time and I really enjoy it because it deals with people, you know, and bringing people together and watching them have these epiphany moments and stuff together. And watching them have these epiphany moments and stuff. And something that you said that I hear very, very consistently across office hours is that first 10 weeks for people that you know, at the end of that 10 weeks they have to make ends meet.
Speaker 1:You know, I was one of those people. I came into Indie Collective and invested the last like four out of 10K in my bank account 6K in my bank account or something Like I was squeezing by at that point and it is like you go through that cohort and you're just trying to implement everything as fast as you can, throwing stuff, hopefully it works and everything. But I think, even if you're in that position, putting yourself into a place where you're now acknowledging as an independent Brad actually talked about this on his podcast the necessity to continuously invest in yourself as an independent. When we work at jobs, if it's a decent structure and they have opportunity for advancement in education, they tend to prompt you when it's time for additional education.
Speaker 1:Or hey, you've been in your career now two years. It's time to take this certification so that you can keep up on your skills. In the RN field, we've got continuing education credits right, you've got continuing education credits in pretty much any medical profession, psychological profession, things that research is constantly being published and updated. You want people to be able to update information and we've had such an influx of people in the last year that are coming into the program and saying I've been a consultant for a decade and I have not been to an education-based community or I've not put myself through a curriculum in 10 years.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm community, or I've not put myself through a curriculum in 10 years. I don't even know if I necessarily need this per se, but I know that I want to invest in myself and I know I'm going to learn stuff when I put myself through this process. And then the final thing that I'll say that really hits home out of what you just said is you get done with those 10 weeks, and so what if it didn't all happen in those 10 weeks? The amount of office hours calls that I get a month out, two months out, six months out from graduation from somebody that's saying, holy shit, I got it and it's, I nailed it, you know, or wow.
Speaker 1:I thought that this was where my life was headed and now I'm doing this thing. Sometimes it's something completely different. It's like a 180. Sometimes it's literally like 20 degrees to the left, something adjacent. But I didn't realize it until I started talking to other community members that were facing the same problems similar spaces, similar issues, dealing with the same emotions, all this other kind of stuff, and they all kept pointing out this one part of me that I didn't even, I didn't even notice or lean into. So the like that being something that you brought up makes me so happy because I, it, the community is so much more than just me, sam. The education, the speakers, all that other kind of stuff. I mean it is an amazing group of people that act as this big brainstorming power group for you to be able to bounce those ideas off to, and be a reflective mirror to you and maybe unlock parts of yourself that you weren't necessarily looking at with as much intensity, but people are just consistently pointing it out and we're back to the word collective yeah, look at that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder. Oh, I was gonna dive into the thrive framework for a little bit, but were you gonna add something onto the end of that?
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say that's how learning works. You know, sometimes you get a thing a seed is planted and your brain just chews on it for a while and your spirit just chews on it for a while, and then all of a sudden you have an epiphany. And that's why I'm going to sign up for Office Hours, because I had something similar happen and I have to share it with you. But we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, I was just going to ask. You know we have 10, 15 minutes left on the show here. I know that the Thrive Framework is something that you know, you've put a lot of time into and we've kind of touched on different pieces of it throughout the conversation so far, but could you give everyone just kind of an idea of why you're so passionate about that word specifically and then what the Thrive Framework is meant to accomplish or what it is?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean I am. I think I became really laser focused on thriving when, as I mentioned, I was teaching and then I was a school administrator and I was watching all of these structural institutional pieces come together in ways that just squished human beings into little boxes, even when, like again, you had all of these deeply caring, enthusiastic, creative educators, you had all these vibrant young people sort of theoretically had control over your curriculum. There was so much that was being left out, and a thing that's important to keep in mind about schools is that everything that is happening in the world and in society shows up in that classroom and in those hallways. Everything a kid is going through shows up in that space. We are, as educators, enacting a critical developmental relationship with young people and we see them most of the half the year right for most of the day for half the year and change right we. They are in our care, and so I was experiencing watching young people trying to figure out how to be come right and noticing that the conditions really made it impossible for them to explore certain aspects of their brilliance, their talent, their genius, their interest, their curiosity, because everything was laser focused on these big milestones and moving people really to the workplace and that's actually too limited.
Speaker 2:So when I went to my doctoral program I started trying to research. I was just reading, what do people have to say about this? And what I noticed was, especially for marginalized populations, the research mostly stopped at resilience. And I understand why. Right, when people are in distress and pain and scarcity and survival mode, there's a sense of urgency to like help right, to shift and mitigate that and to help people persevere through that, you know, through pain, all of those things, and that's real. And especially for multiply marginalized people, there was no conversation about their thriving, there was no future focus.
Speaker 2:Now I'm in psychology, you know so, and there's, there is positive psychology, which I think is wonderful. It offers so much. And so we've got methods, you know, sort of like frameworks, like PERMA-V and that kind of thing, really powerful stuff. But for some reason, once the focus started to shift to the margins, it just stopped at resilience and I thought that's not good enough, and it's not good enough for anyone, regardless of your position in society.
Speaker 2:I think part of what is very clear to me is that we as humans, regardless of our location on this planet, are facing a reckoning around how we have lived our lives up to this point, and we're facing the unsustainability, the meaningful, vital threat that exists with doing business as usual, and what we tend to do is we tend to reinvent the wheel. It's very difficult for us to be expansive in our imagining beyond the present, but every advance that we've made has been a function of someone defiantly imagining beyond what we know, and so that's why I, if they're extinct that already knew how to be vibrant and thriving but have been destroyed right, in many cases deliberately. So some of it's about casting forward and some of it's about casting backward and a lot of it is about casting inward, and that's what I'm focused on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I don't think that you can really truly have a chance in hell of having an accurate view of the future if you don't incorporate self and past I mean without getting too meta right inside that type of statement. If you think about what it means to think into the future, right, you're trying to eliminate potential possibilities or make predictions about things that may happen. What are you using for the context of that? Right, you're using your present experience. You're the it could be.
Speaker 1:Um, you know there's lots of studies about judges handing out harsher judgments prior to lunchtime. Yeah, it could be the state of your nervous system or your hunger level that affects your thoughts or ability to project forward. We just talked about being inside of the indie collective cohort and being under duress of information and that affecting your ability to think too far into the future. And if you can get to a place, I just love that three-pronged kind of outlook. Right, you have to acknowledge the past, you have to figure out where you're at in the present, to who you are as self, and then you're looking at into the future.
Speaker 2:And then I would add and we're back to the collective. It's not a one-person deal. We do need to know, we need to check in with ourselves and know where we're at right, we need to know what's happening here. But ultimately, as an example, rarely do people imagine a future through a disability justice lens. But the only way we are going to get the future we need is if we do it through a disability justice lens, because everybody becomes disabled at some point in their life and our failure to do that is harming people actively in the present and will continue in the future. Right, so this is an example. So I, if I'm not currently disabled or haven't been disabled or haven't taken care of someone who's disabled, I can't do that imagining effectively. Right, so I need other people. Right? Just like we keep designing schooling around adult ideas of what young people need and rarely consult young people about their lived experience, and that is a shortcoming right, that's a mistake that we continue to repeat. We don't have to do that. Right, so we can't do the that without the we. The we is the powerful thing. I wish more people understood that.
Speaker 2:The whole point is love. The whole point is us. We love. Like, if we really want to have a vibrant future. That's it. Separate doesn't work. Different, hierarchical doesn't work. It's us as a collective, so yeah.
Speaker 1:Again with the prolific stuff that you say, would you just go off on. I don't have anything to add to that. That was was beautiful. I think that's a great way to end the podcast. I'm super, super grateful for you being here, um, where could people get in touch with you if they want to? Um, hear about offerings that you have, um, and and learn more about your, your business?
Speaker 2:well, I think I am on linkedin at dr, linkedin at Dr Kia DH, I think, and my website is before the rebrand which we'll talk about is wisechipmunkcom, and you can learn a little bit about the Bridge to Thriving framework there too, if you're interested. I've also written about it. There's an article in Nonprofit Quarterly and a book forthcoming, and so, yeah, reach, reach out.
Speaker 1:I love it. And then, if you're listening to this and this conversation has sparked interest as far as the Indie Collective cohort, you have somebody that you would like to recommend as a guest on the show, somebody that is a potential partner organization. Feel free to reach out to me at Jan looks like Jan at Indie Collective, i-n-d-e, collective dot C-E-O. Have a great one everybody.