Monthly Archives: March 2024

March 24, 2024

Rebekah Simon-Peter: The Encounter And Call With The Miraculous Jewish Jesus [Episode 469]

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Rebekah Simon-Peter | Faith

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Rebekah Simon-Peter | Faith

 

Rebekah Simon-Peter is passionate about reconnecting spiritual leaders with their God-given powers to co-create miracles with the divine.  Her award-winning group coaching program, “Creating a Culture of Renewal® has energized church leaders across the country to reclaim their calling and to grow their ministries.

Educated in Theology and Environmental studies and previously serving as an ordained United Methodist Pastor, Rebekah is uniquely prepared for her current consulting role to grow the Green Church.

The author of many books to include “Forging a New Path: Moving the Church Forward in a Post-Pandemic World,” “Dream Like Jesus®,” “The Jew Named Jesus,” and “Green Church,” her newest book, due out later this year is an invitation to a transformational journey from discipleship to apostleship where believers co-create miracles with Jesus.

Listen today as Rebekah speaks with Dr. Karen about how to bring out the best in the people who frustrate you the most, the multi-dimensional meaning of the sustainable green church, how to cultivate a miracle-making mindset, Five surprising elements of Jesus-like dreams, her personal testimony about discovering the Jewish Jesus, her journey and lessons from addiction, how to create a culture of renewal, and more.

Reach Rebekah at rebekahsimonpeter.com

Listen to the podcast here

 

Rebekah Simon-Peter: The Encounter And Call With The Miraculous Jewish Jesus [Episode 469]

Rebekah Simon-Peter is passionate about reconnecting spiritual leaders with their God-given powers to co-create miracles with the divine.  Her award-winning group coaching program, “Creating a Culture of Renewal®” has energized church leaders across th…

God still speaks to his people, and he is still a God of the supernatural, both in the church setting and at work. Our guest for this episode will share about the supernatural God she has come to know and invite us to a deeper walk with the creator of the universe. God stands ready to transform church leaders, their congregations, and his marketplace ministry leaders.

My guest, Rebekah Simon-Peter, is passionate about reconnecting spiritual leaders with their God-given powers to co-create miracles with the divine. Her award-winning group coaching program, Creating a Culture of Renewal, has energized church leaders across the country to reclaim their calling and grow their ministries. Known for teaching leaders how to bring out the best in the people who frustrate them the most, her work transforms church leaders and the congregations they serve.

Her insights, experiences, and recommendations also apply to corporate business leaders. Stay tuned to hear the business applications. Rebekah is the author of Forging a New Path: Moving the Church Forward in a Post-Pandemic World from Market Square Publishers in 2022, Dream Like Jesus, The Jew Named Jesus, Green Church, Green Church Leader Guide, and 7 Simple Steps to Green Your Church.

Educated in theology and environmental studies, and previously serving as an ordained United Methodist pastor, Rebekah is uniquely prepared for her consulting role to grow the Green Church. A dynamic speaker, Rebekah has engaged and challenged audiences around the country. She’s an avid hiker, dog mom, wife to Jerry, lover of coffee, and a gratitude junkie. Welcome, Rebekah, to the show.

Thank you so much, Dr. Karen. It’s such a joy to be here. I’m looking forward to it.

What Is A Green Church? Connecting Scripture, Science, And Sustainability

It’s a joy to have you here. I’m looking forward to diving right in with you as well. Since I’ve used that word in your bio so many times about Green, I’m going to start there. What is a Green Church? What are you attempting to accomplish with Green Church? Why is that relevant?

When I first wrote those books back in 2010, I wanted to connect what scripture had to say about taking care of creation and what science said about how we were doing at it. I brought those two disciplines together to help churches understand how to love the earth that God created and continues to create, and how to live sustainably. We’re not living at the expense of the earth but in harmony with the earth. It’s important.

Look at the changing environment and climates around us. Business has to pay attention to that. Church needs to pay attention as well. There’s another piece of green though, and that’s the ecosystem of the church. In the ecosystem of the church, we want a church that’s experiencing renewal that has vision, life, and living waters flowing through it, not just stagnant, which so many churches have become. It has a dual meaning to that.

When you talk about sustainability and living in harmony with nature, the environment, and so on, how is that specifically beneficial to churches? We understand what businesses are trying to do but what’s beneficial to the church?

It’s beneficial in several ways. One, people get to live their faith, where faith is not disconnected from the earth but has a deep, profound awareness of nature and gratitude for God’s energy that flows through it and sustains it, and they see themselves as part of it. There are benefits as well when people linger over dishes and wash dishes together. Try telling all the church ladies that, I’m not sure it goes over too well. There’s a sense of community when we’re not just participating in a throwaway and disposable society because then our relationships begin to feel like that, too. Quick, hurry, throw everything in the trash.

That’s an interesting perspective. We’re modeling in our actions and behaviors the sustainability we want to see at a deeper level, not just on the disposables, but we don’t have disposable relationships. We want to value people a bit more, take care of them, clean them up, whatever is necessary.

This is our only earth. It is the place in which all of human history has happened. It is the place where human history unfolds. To care for it and live as though it’s sacred, not just with our words and thoughts but with our deeds matters for the Church.

Co-Creating Miracles With God: Stepping Out In Faith And Collaboration

Thank you very much for sharing that additional perspective on that. One hallmark of your work with churches is to get them out of the mire and into the miracle so they can co-create miracles with God. What kind of miracles are you talking about? What have you seen?

The kind of miracles I’m talking about are like walking on water. Your audience may remember the story of Jesus walking on water. Peter, who’s in the boat, said to him, “Lord, if that’s you, call me to you.” Jesus says, “Yep, come on out.” Peter starts walking on water a little bit, starts to doubt, and then he begins to sink. What gave Peter the courage to swing his leg over the side of the boat was knowing that Jesus would have his back if his faith faltered.

This is our one and only Earth. This is the place in which all of human history has happened. It is the place where human history unfolds. We need to care for it and live as though it's sacred. Click To Tweet

In churches, we often don’t have each other’s backs. We operate in silos, as many businesses do, with little silos, little decision-making, and separate budgets. When we come together and work collaboratively, which is so important in the church and business, we have a sense of having each other’s backs. We can do what seems impossible, like walking on water. This could look like funding ministries that seemed out of reach. It could also look like reaching people we never thought we could, or those who are too different from us, or wondering what we have to offer them.

In our work together, we’re seeing that when people can enter into the miracle-making mindset, all kinds of things become possible versus that narrow little band of predictability and what can we afford cuts off limits vision. We find it important to put vision before budget, and that’s where the miracles can begin to happen.

That’s a very important concept because God is greater and bigger than what we can see and imagine on our own. If we only imagine what we think we can afford, that is a limitation. He is the God of abundance, owning the cattle on 1,000 hills and so on. He can make the miraculous happen like Jesus feeding the 5,000 with just 2 fishes and 5 loaves, or any of the other examples that we have in scripture of miraculous and abundance at the same time.

Amen. That’s it exactly.

What typically stops churches from seeing and realizing these miracles in today’s time?

The church has set its expectations way too low. We’ve seen a steady exodus from the pews since the 1970s. The group of people is known as spiritual but not religious, and also the nones and the dones. With that steady exodus of the people left in churches, the focus that is left on the church is they are the hardcore backbone of the church. They’re people who are loyal, cautious, and not quick to take risks.

We have a concentration of people who’ve aged in place. They have such a focus on caution, harmony-seeking, and stability that they don’t easily enter the realm of risk, adventure, or curiosity as easily. Part of the reason that there’s such a preponderance of caution and harmony-seeking in the church is that there’s been a steady exodus since the 1970s of the spiritual but not religious and the nones and the dones. Those are people who typically are more curious, risk-taking, and adventurous. The folks that are left in church while the backbone of the church tend to not possess those qualities as much. They’re seeking to protect what’s left rather than adventure to create something new.

Big, Bold, Kingdom-Oriented Dreams: Expanding Possibilities And Impacting Communities

That’s phenomenal and fascinating to think about. Let me ask this. In your book Dream Like Jesus, you write about the need for big, bold, kingdom-oriented dreams. How are churches impacting their communities with those levels of dreams? Why should business owners even care about what the churches are doing in their communities?

If I might mention the five surprise elements of a Jesus-like dream, these are the criteria for what a dream would look like. 1) It’s got to expand assumptions about what’s possible. 2) It’s got to be bigger than you are. It cannot fit on your to-do list. It can’t even fit on your people’s to-do list. That means it’s going to have a fear factor. It’s scary a little bit. All of that means it’s bigger and, requires the input of God. That means we can begin to move into the miraculous. 4) It’s got to be bigger than the survival of the institution. It’s got to be about the blossoming and flourishing of the community. 5) It’s got to inspire people and unify them.

We know from Jesus that even all of his beautiful dreams didn’t inspire or unify everybody. It doesn’t have to be consensus. Why should business owners and business leaders care about these five surprise elements of a Jesus-like dream? You can use those in business. Churches are out to make an impact. The churches we work with are doing everything from intentionally creating safe spaces in the community where vulnerable populations can feel safe or mental health needs are being addressed. Sibling groups that enter into foster care have a safe place to be together. Homes that care for sibling groups of families are being cared for and stewarded in important ways.

The church is more and more meeting needs in the realm of mental health, social services, and belonging. We live in one of the loneliest times we’ve ever lived in. Even with all the social media, people are so lonely. Churches fill a need and a gap that’s so important. If we’re going to have healthy businesses, we have to have healthy communities and churches. I see all of those groups working together as very important.

That’s an important point because those people in the communities if they’re not healthy, they’re not prepared to enter the workforce in a great way and be able to contribute to the community as employees or entrepreneurs and business owners. There may be a greater influx of crime if people aren’t on the right foot.

I think about corporations and their corporate social responsibility programs and how many of them are also trying to build the community and elevate the lives of the people who live near and dear to where they are building their buildings and corporations. It’s not just that we are in this community and we don’t care about it. Even the corporations are thinking about how they can benefit the community. What I hear from you is the church and business can partner together in some of that.

Why Should Businesses Care About Churches? The Vital Role Of Churches In Healthy Communities

Absolutely. We all live in the same community. We’re all contributing to the same community and the beneficiaries of the community, but we’re also impacted by the negatives of the community. We are in it together.

If we're going to have healthy businesses, we have to have healthy communities. We have to have healthy churches. Click To Tweet

My Journey To Jesus: From Jewish Roots To A Christian Calling

I’m going to shift gears a little bit because one of the most interesting parts of your story, at least to me, is that you grew up Jewish and later discovered the Jewish Jesus. How is it that you came to be a believer in Jesus as the Messiah? Tell us about that story.

Thank you for asking, Dr. Karen. Born and raised Jewish in an interfaith home with a Jewish mom and a Catholic dad, we celebrated all the holidays. We had Passover, Easter, Hanukkah, and Christmas. I knew about all those holidays. The Christian holidays were more opportunities to have the Easter bunny visit or get presents at Christmas. It wasn’t really about Jesus. I was raised as a Reformed Jewish.

When I got clean and sober, I was hanging around Christians who were talking about their faith for the first time. Being in that environment got the juices flowing, but I had a waking vision of Jesus. My eyes were closed but I wasn’t asleep. It wasn’t a dream. Here is this Jewish Jesus, curly, thick, dark beard and curly, thick, dark hair and olive skin and warm, crinkly eyes, looking at me, communicating such love and understanding with his eyes. I felt like he was saying, “I love you. I understand you. I accept you.”

It was an awkward moment because it was not like he had been on my radar screen. It wasn’t like a burst into song. That’s not what happened. I was a little freaked out. I called one of my dear friends, one of my spiritual guides, and told her about it. She said, “Jesus was Jewish.” It was like, “Everybody knows that.” She said, “Did you know the disciples were Jewish?” I was like, “What’s a disciple?” She said, “You haven’t read the New Testament?” I said, “It’s not my book.” She said, “I’ll get you a copy.” I thought, “I’m not going to read it.”

She got me a copy. I didn’t read it. She was in seminary at the time. I thought, “There she is studying Hebrew in the middle of the day. I thought you only did that when you’re getting ready for your bat mitzvah,” which I had done. This happened when I was 28, the vision of Jesus. I’d been confirmed, had my bat mitzvah, and all of that. I thought, “I’m going to go to seminary too.”

I went off to the Iliff School of Theology, where I got to study the Hebrew Bible, Greek, New Testament, and all of that. It was almost like I’d been waiting my whole life for that experience for everything to come together. I didn’t think I was ever going to become a Christian. That’s not why I went. I was just going to be a Jew who followed Jesus. In my second year in seminary, I got the call to ministry. That’s how I got started on that. The very first church I joined and served as a historically African-American congregation. It seemed the closest to my experience. It was the most passionate.

In some of the other churches I attended, I thought I was not going to be able to stay awake on a Sunday morning, let alone get ordained, because some of the churches didn’t have the passion and movement of the spirit. I’m very much about the passion and the movement of the spirit. My calling, after I did twelve years as a pastor, is to revitalize churches with passion, spirit, and that miracle mindset, because we follow Jesus, the miracle maker. Where are we truly in terms of living that faith? That’s a brief encapsulation but it gives you a sense of where I’ve come from.

I love your story. To me, it’s amazing. It’s the picture of how God will reach us wherever we are and he’ll send us to places where we can experience him at a greater level. Who would have known it would have been at the seminary where he was studying, not to become a Christian necessarily, but to learn more about this? He showed you more. That’s miraculous in and of itself, as far as I’m concerned. I have a lot of Jewish friends and grew up in a very Jewish environment. There are very few of my Jewish friends who have come to see the Jewish Jesus as the Messiah. When I hear a story like yours, it’s exciting and inspirational.

It’s interesting to me. It came out of the blue. I wasn’t asking or looking for it but the way that miracle and vision inspired so many of my friends who had spent so much of their life praying for a visitation like that helped them understand that the age of miracles was not over. I feel like I’ve entered the Christian journey on the tide of miracles. That’s been a theme for me. Understanding the God of miracles and how to co-create miracles with God has been so important to me.

You also mentioned the role of the black church. Tell us a little bit more about that. How did the black church inform your early years as a believer? You talked about sensing the spirit there and the connection with your Jewish roots. Say more about what that was like and how it was different from being in churches that were not necessarily African-American or black churches.

For me, it was very interesting to be a minority among minorities. Here I am, a Jewish Christian. Already, it’s not any sort of classic profile. I don’t care what people say about conversion. For me, it wasn’t about shedding one identity and taking on a new identity. It was about adding another layer or lens through which I saw the world and see the world. I think of myself as a Reformodox Methodeutic, which takes into account all of my spiritual history.

Adopting, and understanding Jesus as Jewish, as Messiah, entering into the black church, and being a minority among minorities gave me a greater sense of safety than what you might think of as passing in a white church. “She looks white. She’s like one of us.” I can’t describe it but it was an interesting journey for all of us. We all worked on biases. We worked on preconceptions or stereotypes that we had about each other. It was a very fruitful time in the life of that church. I’m so proud to have been part of it and for God to have given me that extreme blessing.

In my whole life, I had that longing to be more a part of black culture and in the black church. I didn’t even know that but when I got there, I realized this was like a dream come true that I didn’t even know I had. It was very interesting because I was in seminary at the same time and taking studies under Dr. Vincent Harding, who had marched with Dr. King. I was learning so much about the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, I was at Scott. It sharpened my understanding of privilege and power. I felt like I got an inside view of things that I don’t know I would have had any other way. It was such a beautiful gift to me.

When I left after three years, I left as a valued member of the community and part of the family. It expanded my sense of connecting with the human family. I was part of a community where kids were bused in from another larger urban area into my community. I always grew up with Black friends. I always had Black friends. That was a deep part of my understanding of what it meant to grow up in my family, grow up Jewish, and grow up going to my school. I always had that diversity, even though it was a community that didn’t have a lot of diversity inherently in it.

It is very important to understand the value of bringing people together and giving people the opportunity to work together, create partnerships together, and to create a new future that our families get to live into together. Click To Tweet

I’ve always had those connections with the Black community that have been important to me and feel natural to me. It’s been such an important part of my journey as a leader and human being. That’s important for businesses to think about. The church is one place that can be very segregated. Businesses, however, tend to be intentionally diverse. That’s very important to understand the value of bringing people together, giving people the opportunity to work together, create partnerships together, and create a new future that our families get to live in together.

It’s interesting that when we have diversity and an opportunity to interact with one another, we can see the commonalities in our histories, backgrounds, and stories. Many Black people relate to the struggles of the Jewish people, particularly in the Bible, being enslaved in Egypt, suffering there, crying out to God, having God send a deliverer to get out of that, and so on. Later, in modern times, the Holocaust, there are many parallels to circumstances and situations that Black people have faced as well. I see a natural connection between the histories of different people groups, between Jews and Blacks.

Those commonalities, the focus on the Hebrew Bible, slavery, and the coming out of slavery, were huge parts of my feeling at home and comfortable.

Lessons From The Pastorate: Cultivating Faith And Empowering Laity

You were a pastor for some time. What lessons did you learn as a pastor? How do those insights inform how you work with churches today?

I think back on all the wonderful churches I got to serve and the fabulous people I got to work with. I learned that people have a deep and abiding faith. It wasn’t my job to teach people faith. My job was to help them cultivate their faith journey and take their next step. We didn’t have to agree theologically. I didn’t have to see the world exactly the way they saw it. They didn’t have to understand God exactly the way I did. That mattered much less than that I was an advocate and a champion for them on their journey of faith and that they continued to take the next step.

The way that translated for me in my coaching and consulting as I work with church leaders is to help them understand their job. It’s not to change their people. It’s to cultivate what’s already nascent within them, what’s already in their hearts, what’s already in their spirits, and to draw that forth. I hate to say it but too many times, church leaders don’t understand the full value, the life experiences, and the richness of their laity. I want to help them see that and partner with their laity.

These people are not only the backbone of the church, they’re the visionaries. Even if they don’t see themselves as visionaries, they have a deep vision within their heart about the church. They want that church to survive and flourish. It’s the pastor’s job to tune in at a deep level to those dreams and draw them together so that the vision is not just their vision but representative of all their people.

I see two things in this that are exciting to me. As God has put the body together with eyes, ears, hands, feet, and legs, different members, and we’re not all the same, that vision that you were talking about becomes collective if you understand that each body part has something to contribute to what that vision is. It’s not the pastor being the Holy Spirit because there’s only one Holy Spirit. It’s seeing what the Holy Spirit is doing in each of those lives. As you say, leveraging that and helping each person take their next step in the church collectively, moving together. That’s a beautiful picture of it.

The Significance Of Passover And Easter: Bridging The Gap Between Jews And Christians

When I think about certain holidays, particularly Passover and Easter, there’s an enriched perspective that comes from understanding both of those holidays from both a Jewish and a Christian lens. How has your understanding been enriched about both Passover and Easter because of having both a Jewish and a Christian perspective?

What comes to mind is that Christians have not always understood how vulnerable Jews can feel during Passover. During the Middle Ages, blood libels, pogroms, and riots against Jews took place often during Passover because the story, which was not true, was that matzahs were made with the blood of Christian children. There’s a long history of suspicion and caution. It’s much less so today. There’s been great denouement. There’s been a long history of painful relations and the connection between Easter and Passover.

Holy Week was often a week in which, in the Middle Ages, pastors encouraged their parishioners to demonstrate their faith in Christ by harming their Jewish neighbors. It’s a terrible history. It’s not what’s happening now but it’s interesting because when you talked about those two together, it’s first there for me. We can’t forget. How do we move forward?

Many Christians have been so interested in Passover. I’ve done many Jewish-style Passovers for Christians because they want to know the history. It’s not like there are automatic bad vibes or bad feelings. They want to know the history and they’ve been as surprised as anybody else to discover some of that negative history. It’s helped them understand historically why Jews and Christians haven’t been super tight. That’s important training and education for all of us. I do think, generally, there’s been a great coming together of Jews and Christians, a deep appreciation for each other.

We’re in very hard times. Anti-Semitism has risen disproportionately around the globe, even before the war happened. It’s been very painful for people to understand how we bridge the gap. That remains an important conversation to understand our commonalities. As we talked about Blacks and Whites, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, how do we understand all of our commonality and not be divided and conquered, not be polarized by world events? How do we maintain our commonalities as human beings and practice intentional love and respect, even as we dialogue about difficult things?

For sure. There’s a real connection between the symbolism in the Passover and the picture of Jesus as Messiah. A lot of Christians like to see the Passover. They can see those connections because they understand the Christian side of it. Sometimes, people get trapped in what I’ll call an institutional view rather than a true Jesus view, who certainly would not have promoted the torture and torment of Jewish people, being Jewish himself.

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Rebekah Simon-Peter | Faith
Dream Like Jesus

He came to bring light and love and to bring us all under one umbrella instead of division. Many have lost sight of that and sometimes focus on the division part as opposed to the love and unity part that Jesus did bring in coming to earth for us. This brings me to another question. I’m thinking about the Apostle Paul, who was Jewish and always had a heart for his Jewish brethren no matter what city he went into.

He was supposed to be the apostle to the Gentiles but he always went to the synagogue first. He always wanted to talk to his Jewish brothers. It’s like, “If I could give an arm or a leg that my Jewish brethren would come to see Jesus as the Messiah, as I do,” that’s what he wanted to see. What is your heart for other Jewish people? What is your message for other Jewish people about Jesus?

My real heart about that is to see Jesus as a friend and not as a foe. Just as you say, institutional identities or histories get adopted versus biblical or historical understandings of events. It’s important to reclaim Jesus like so many have, as our Jewish brother, and separate the church and Christianity from Jesus. By that, I mean the Christian history about Jews separate that from Jesus himself. Understand that the things that have been done in Jesus’ name, that have been hurtful and harmful, were not Jesus doing that.

When we begin to tease those things apart, we can claim Jesus as our elder brother and as one of us. So much of Jesus is contained in Jewish history in the sense of His genius, faithfulness to God, chutzpah, love of the Torah, and being a Torah teacher. There’s so much Jewish about that. When we can tease apart the Christian institutional history of the church from Jesus himself, we can begin to get a truer picture of him. It’s easier to welcome his insights and perspective. Wonderful Jewish authors are writing about Jesus in ways that Jews can appreciate and that Christians can appreciate as well. There’s been a tremendous contribution made in this ongoing work. I feel very positive about the task of re-brothering Jesus.

It’s also important to recognize that not only did Jesus not do these negative things, He did not teach us to do those things either. That’s important because sometimes you can have a faith tradition where people are teaching that it should go this way. However, He never taught those negative things that we see occurring, supposedly, in His name. He’s probably up there in heaven like, “I never told you to do that. You’re off base.”

Addiction And Leadership: The Value Of Community And A Deep Spiritual Path

It’s important to make a distinction between who He is, what He’s about, and what He’s taught as well. Earlier, you talked about how your original foray into meeting some Christians had to do with a time in your life when you were going through addiction. I know you’ve wrestled with addiction in your life. Tell us about addiction and the impact your struggle with it had on your journey as a leader.

Addiction is primarily about isolation. When a person is addicted, whether it’s to food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, or pornography, it’s an isolating behavior. Even if it seems to take place around other people, like in restaurants, donut shops, or bars, it’s still isolation. The antidote to addiction is community. Many people are wrestling with addiction of various sorts. We live in a society that specializes in isolation. You do your thing, I’ll do my thing. It sounds good on the surface. I’m not saying we shouldn’t accept each other but there is a way in which our society is prone to addiction. What I’ve learned is the value of community.

My group coaching program, Creating a Culture of Renewal, teaches church leaders about leadership smarts and congregational intelligence and how to dream like Jesus but a big part of what we’re doing is providing a community for church leaders to share. It’s amazing how isolated church leaders feel. Even if they’re part of a denomination where they connect with other church leaders, there’s often a sense of competition and not letting down my guard because I might look bad. Church leaders often don’t know each other across denominations or regions.

I’ve come to understand that one of the values that our work provides for church leaders is community, where they can let down their hair, so to speak. They can dare to look bad or tell the truth to be authentic about what’s happening to them without being judged or reported. We’re not talking about illegal behavior but without somebody saying, “Gee, I don’t know if so and so is doing a great job.” There’s this safe space for them to grow.

That combats isolation, which both leads to addiction and is promulgated by addiction. I’ve learned the value of community. I’ve also learned the tremendous value of having a deep spiritual path that goes beyond going to church. I love church but I’ve got to be doing stuff between Sundays to be working on my spiritual path every morning, every day, having that deep, inner, authentic relationship with God. That’s key to overcoming addiction as well.

That’s an important point you’re making. You talked about community and making connections across regions and maybe even different faith groups. You’re starting to talk about the more personal, deep daily connection in terms of faith. Say more about that and how the addiction experience has informed your faith at those deeper levels.

I’ve learned to turn my will and my life over to the care of a power greater than myself. That means I don’t spend all my time in my head thinking and planning. I’ve got to check in with God. What I’ve learned is to trust the random thoughts that I get. I used to think, “Random thought? What’s that about? Go away.” I’ve come to understand that’s the deep, intuitive thought that God is placing on my heart. I’ve been trained through my recovery process to pause when agitated or doubtful, ask God for the next right thought or action, and allow my day to be shaped by promptings from the Holy Spirit in my heart.

It’s amazing how easy it is, even as clergy, to get one’s to-do list together, thank God very much, bye-bye, I’ve got this, and go about the work of ministry without checking in with God regularly and ensuring that I’m on the right path moment to moment. If that’s true for church leaders, how true is that for non-church leaders and business leaders?

The thing I’ve learned is God is always there, at the ready, waiting to prompt, comfort, guide, give a word, and even give that word of affirmation. All I have to do, all I need to do, all we need to do, is pause and tune in regularly. It doesn’t require special words, special clothing, special body postures, a special room in the house, or a special time of day. It doesn’t require any of that. It’s simply a tuning into what I call one’s inner divinity.

The Role Of Faith And Spirituality In Business: Bringing Wholeness To The Workplace

I love that. You mentioned business leaders. Let me go back there again. As you know, most of the audience of my show are executive business leaders. What role do you see for faith or spirituality in the world of business?

Addiction is primarily about isolation. Click To Tweet

A business can’t cultivate somebody’s spiritual life but it can acknowledge it. Even if the words that are used are slightly different, we talk about mindfulness and well-being but we can also talk about spirituality in the workplace. When businesses, managers, or whatever, permit people to tap into or acknowledge they are spiritual people or have a spirituality, that creates a sense of wholeness in a person. They don’t have to leave maybe their best self at home or in the car before they come in. They can bring all of who they are and all of those qualities with them to work.

That’s hugely important. The spiritual but not religious have taught us that spirituality is key and it’s part of the community. It’s key in everything they do, especially true in business life. I’d say this is especially true with younger generations that expect mentoring at new levels and their whole being to be welcomed. We need to pay attention to that to be effective as we go forward.

Business leaders, like church leaders, also face challenges with difficult people who frustrate them the most. What advice and counsel do you have for Christian executives working in secular contexts about how to lead difficult people?

First off, I’ve learned to take away the sense that that person is difficult and more that we’re having a difficult time connecting. It’s easy to say, “It’s you. You’re the problem. If you would just blah, blah, blah, this would all go well.” What we’re discovering as we work with personality types, and I especially like the Everything DiSC model, that’s what I use in my work, is that some people are results-driven, others like to be influencers, and they’re very optimistic and happy, positive people. Some people are cautious and systematic.

If you can acquaint yourself with those different styles of being, and then practice what I call the Platinum Rule, frame your conversation in such a way that their needs, motivators, and skills are being addressed, rather than your particular need for results or accuracy. If their qualities can be lifted as important, they’ll begin to hear you in a new way. You’ll find that you have more of an ally than an adversary. That’s how quickly things can turn when you begin to preference their motivators and strengths. Not that you still don’t want your results but frame it in a way they can hear it. Those difficult people can transform and become some of your very best allies.

You’re mentioning two things here that are important. One of the concepts I call it is putting the issue, whatever it is, in the middle of the table. It’s not in you, it’s not in me, it’s right here in the middle of the table, and we’re going to partner together to figure out how to address it, which means that your needs have to be met and so do mine. That’s speaking the language, if you will, of the other person that you’ve been talking about.

That’s huge and I’m so glad you articulated that. The difficulty is not the person. Like you say, the problem’s connecting, and let’s look at that part. Let’s figure out what we can do about it. Since you’re doing your work of creating a culture of renewal with church leaders, what can business executives learn from that work about creating a culture of renewal?

Creating A Culture Of Renewal: Lessons For Business Leaders

Our work is threefold. First, we teach congregational intelligence, which is applying emotional intelligence to the life of the congregation, and seeing how stuck or small thinking is coded into the very life of the church, whether the worship service or the way ministries are done. Businesses can learn from that because businesses that are having a hard time growing or meeting the needs of their constituencies may have stuck coded in ways they haven’t even thought about. Always looking at things through the lens of emotional intelligence is very important, understanding the needs of your people.

Secondly, we teach leadership smarts. That’s everything from learning to understand what your fears are and how your fears may be holding you back. You may be leading from a place where you’re protecting your fear rather than leaning into the fear with courage. When we lead from a place of protecting our fears so they don’t get triggered, we’re missing very important opportunities. That’s true for the church and true for business as well. We teach productive conflict. It’s important to understand conflict is not going anywhere. There are ways to engage it productively.

That’s a level of emotional intelligence that’s required. You have to understand that the way I’m dealing with conflict may be exacerbating this. Even if it looks like, “I’m smoothing things over. I’m soothing people. That’s not a problem, is it?” Yes, that can very much be a problem because then you’re not getting down to the real issues. Lastly, we teach how to shift the culture and that’s the big, bold dream, getting people aligned with that vision and then executing the vision so that people aren’t left with dashed hopes or unfulfilled promises.

Lessons From The Bubonic Plague: Finding Innovation In Times Of Crisis

The cultural piece is essential and making sure the vision is infused in everything as well. Business leaders use that as well. In your book, Forging a New Path, you wrote about what the modern church can learn from the bubonic plague. What are some of those lessons for churches and then also apply that to business leaders?

They were asking the same questions back in the Middle Ages that we’re asking. “When do things go back to normal? How do we get people back to church? How do we do more with less?” One of the biggest issues and lessons is that they had less of a lot of things back then. Churches, too. Businesses certainly have had to deal with fewer employees. It was such an age of innovation at the same time because they had more of many things.

Yes, they had less of certain things but they had more of other things. It was that looking at what they had that allowed great innovation to happen. We wouldn’t have the printing press if it wasn’t for the bubonic plague. We got Zoom during the pandemic. They got books back then. Always look for the new technology that’s emerging. Look for unexpected resources. Back then, they had fewer family members. They had a whole lot of extra clothing. Guess what they did with all that extra clothing? Rag cloth and made book printing cheaper.

Literacy soared. Ideas could no longer be burned at the stake. The whole world changed because there was extra clothing and the idea of the printing press. Always look for innovation. I tell this to church leaders, “Make a list of everything you have less of and a list of everything you have more of. Focus on that list and watch where the innovation can come from.” Business has certainly shown us how innovation can happen even when times are very tight and squeezed. That’s when the best stuff comes forward. There’s much for us to learn from pandemics past.

Innovation can happen even when times are very tight and squeezed. In fact, that's when the best stuff comes forward. Click To Tweet

I love that. It reminds me of the Great Depression and how many people flourished during the Great Depression because they had to think of new ways of providing services and products to people that they needed at that time. It’s a very similar thought process that you’re bringing up. That’s phenomenal. Let me ask you this. Your name has a special meaning, especially your last name. Tell us about the meaning of your name and its significance for you.

The Significance Of My Name: A Journey Of Transformation And Faith

When I went to seminary, following my friend there, when I got the call to ministry, I felt like God whispered a new name to me, and it’s my name now, Rebekah Simon-Peter. Rebekah was a biblical figure who didn’t follow the order of the day. She followed God’s prompting instead, which I did. Simon was a Jew who followed Jesus. In the process, Jesus changed his name from Simon to Peter. Carrying that spiritual transformation within my name has felt very meaningful to me. It’s very biblical. When big things happen in the Bible, people usually get a new name.

New Book And Contact Information: Resources For Church And Business Leaders

I love the name that you have and that you’ve been given through your transformation. It has deep meaning. Thank you for sharing that with us as well. What’s next for you, Rebekah? Tell us about your upcoming new projects or new directions. What’s going on?

I’m working on a new book. This is my passion project. It’s going to be a 40-day journey of transformation. I’m passionate about Christians advancing from discipleship to apostleship, not only believing in Jesus but learning to believe like Jesus. If you can believe like Jesus, you can be a co-creator of miracles. It’s the coming together of many years of research, study, teaching, writing, and preaching in this book. It’ll be coming out in October 2025. I don’t have an official title yet but look for something along the lines of 40 Days of Transformation.

How exciting. You might have to come back and tell us about it once it’s ready to be released and come out. How can people reach you? Who should reach you about what? Tell us also about your latest book before your current book comes up.

Please reach me at my website, RebekahSimonPeter.com. There’s a place to sign up for my blogs, reach out to me, or get me a message directly. I look forward to hearing from you. I’m especially interested in working with church leaders and other leaders like faith-based leaders and nonprofit leaders who are interested in creating cultures of renewal in their setting. I also coach entrepreneurs because this has been an entrepreneurial, spiritual endeavor for me for many years. I love speaking to audiences to inspire them, inform them, and give them tools to take away so they can begin to put their big dreams into practice.

You mentioned my book, Forging a New Path: Moving the Church Forward in a Post-Pandemic World. That’s available on Amazon, as are all my books. I love teaching the three S’s of post-pandemic community, which we can learn about being social, spiritual, and of service. Also, the three forms of spirituality the church needs and how that relates to business. Those are some of my passion ideas that I’m sharing with others and infusing into the world.

Closing Words Of Wisdom: Living Your Faith At Work And Letting Your Light Shine

Thanks for planting that seed for people to go and read that book and learn more about these three S’s post-pandemic and all the other wisdom you’ve built into the book. It sounds like people can call you for speaking engagements and your consulting work. That could be church leaders and also entrepreneurial leaders. That’s RebekahSimonPeter.com. That’s a great deal. Rebekah, you’ve shared many insights that are relevant for business executive leaders. What additional or closing words of wisdom would you like to leave for my community of executive business leaders?

Thank you so much for asking that. You have the power of God within you. God has placed you in the position you’re in right now for such a time as this. This is a time for innovation, caring about people, bringing unity, and lifting our highest values in a time when those are challenged regularly. I encourage you to live your faith at work. Let your light shine. It may sound trite and small but it is not. Be salt. Be light. Let your light shine. Take the courage that God is using you in very powerful ways.

Thank you so much, Rebekah, for being here and sharing those words of wisdom. They go with the word of the year, which is light. We’ve been talking about how light leads to love, and leads to life. Being the light at work is a good deal. Thank you so much for everything you’ve shared. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Dr. Karen. It’s been such a pleasure to be with you.

Likewise.

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We’ll close this segment together with Rebekah Simon-Peter by reading John 14: 12-14, which says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will also do, and greater works than these he will do, because I go to my Father. Whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.”

I want to remind everyone that Rebekah has been talking to us about miracles, being bold for Jesus, and stepping out for those things beyond our reach. That fits with Jesus’ notion of greater works because we have the power of the Holy Spirit within us, as God leads us to whatever those greater works may be. Sit at the feet of Jesus. Hear the message. Step out boldly in His power and do all He has called you to do. Have a fabulous day. We’ll see you next time.

Not only believe in Jesus, but learn to believe like Jesus. Because if you can believe like Jesus, you can be a co-creator of Miracles. Click To Tweet

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I’m here with Jos Snoep, the CEO and President of the Bible League. The Bible League is a ministry that provides Bibles and English instructional materials in the Word of God, as well as trains teachers in their local language and culture to share the Word of God and disciple people. Jos, tell us a little bit about the impact of the Bible League. What’s going on out there?

I met a lady named Nimia. Nimia was born in 1949. She became a Christian in 2002. We were able to invite her to one of our trainings. At the end of the meeting, she stood up and shared her testimony. She said, “This is the first time I’ve received a Bible of my own. I’m equipped to share the Word of God with others.” I thought to myself, “That’s why we are the Bible League. That’s why God called us to be in ministry, to serve people like that and equip them with the right materials and the Word of God.”

Thank you so much, Jos, for sharing that story. I want to let everyone know that you can be part of this movement as well. You can go to BibleLeague.org to find out more about the ministry and also donate. There are many more stories like the one Jos shared about lives that are changed and impacted by God through Jesus Christ.

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I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles, ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip, teaches and trains local people in how to share the Word of God. The President and CEO of Bible League, Jos Snoep, is here to share a little more about what the Bible League is doing.

The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit calls the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As Bible League, we come alongside local pastors. I met a pastor named Rolando in the Amazon. He has a great vision to reach 200 communities with the Word of God. We were able to come alongside him and help with Bibles and resources.

Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You, the Bible League, are the hands and feet of the local people on the ground. Some partners and donors can be hands and feet to you as you share with others. For those of you who want to be part of this ministry, and I invite you to be a part of it, I’m a part of it, go to BibleLeague.org. See more about the ministry and how you can participate and donate.

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I want to tell you a little about Spirit Wings Kids Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The organization provides profound services for orphans, widows, and families across the globe, especially in Uganda. I’m speaking with Donna Johnson, the Founder of Spirit Wings Kids and a board member. Donna, tell us about some examples of the profound work you’re doing in Uganda.

Thank you, Dr. Karen. We were there and it was incredible. It’s more than an orphanage. We have a soccer academy that keeps the boys off the street. We have a Windows program that matches them with children. It’s a thriving network of entrepreneurs. It’s been such a meaningful blessing to see the work we’re doing there.

Donna, what I love about what you said is that you’re talking about their whole lives. You’re creating families between the widows and the children. You’re also making sure they have recreation and something to do with the soccer academy while looking at the job situation and the entrepreneurial aspect. As a businesswoman yourself who is very successful, you’re right in line with being able to make that difference. Thank you so much for the difference you’re making. I’m inviting everyone to go to SWKids.Foundation and donate. One hundred percent of everything you donate goes to those in need and those receiving services. Thank you so much for donating. Donna, thank you for this ministry.

 

Important Links

 

About Rebekah Simon-Peter

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Rebekah Simon-Peter | FaithRebekah Simon-Peter is a visionary leader, acclaimed author, and dynamic speaker dedicated to empowering individuals and faith communities to embrace their divine potential. The author of seven books, including Believe Like Jesus: Rising from Faith in Jesus to the Faith of Jesus; Forging a New Path; and Dream Like Jesus, Rebekah challenges and inspires others to move beyond discipleship into apostleship—boldly co-creating miracles with God.

Over the past eighteen years, Rebekah has transformed the lives of thousands of leaders through her award-winning group coaching program, Creating a Culture of Renewal®. As an ordained Elder in the Mountain Sky Conference of the United Methodist Church, she combines deep biblical insights with practical leadership strategies, helping individuals and organizations cultivate spiritual growth, resilience, and innovation. Rebekah holds a B.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Vermont, and an M. Div. and M.A.R. from the Iliff School of Theology. She is a Certified Renewalist.

Known for her engaging storytelling and thought-provoking perspectives, Rebekah is a sought-after keynote speaker who delivers impactful, unforgettable experiences. She leads transformative workshops that equips leaders with the tools to navigate change with confidence and clarity.

A featured blogger for top faith-based outlets, Rebekah’s work resonates with those seeking deeper purpose, spiritual renewal, and meaningful action. Whether speaking to church leaders, faith communities, or individuals on a journey of self-discovery, she invites others to embrace their inner divinity and rise to new heights of leadership and faith.

March 18, 2024

Judi Sheppard Missett: Founder Of Jazzercise Shares Her Leadership Secrets [Episode 468]

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Judi Sheppard Missett | Leadership Secrets

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Judi Sheppard Missett | Leadership Secrets

 

Judi Sheppard Missett, Founder and Executive Chair of Jazzercise, is a youthful, inspiring fitness and business role model. With $2 billion in sales and over 8,000 franchises worldwide, she has built a successful empire focused on improving bodies and lives while empowering others to create their own businesses.

She states, “It’s important to surround yourself with the best people, including those who are more talented than you, and to watch for signs and signals in your life about where to go next.”

In this episode, Dr. Karen highlights the remarkable life, achievements, and innovations of this visionary leader. She also shares Judi Sheppard Missett’s 10 success lessons, her bonus “3 G’s,” and more. Key lessons include living out your passion, embracing change, evolving, and being ingenious.

Tune in to uncover all the leadership secrets and strategies shared in this inspiring episode.

Special thanks to Sandra Yancey of eWomen Network for interviewing Judi Sheppard Missett at a recent eWomen CEO conference.

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eWomen Network
Jazzercise

This post, Judi Sheppard Missett: Founder of Jazzercise Shares Her Leadership Secrets [Episode 468], first appeared on TRANSLEADERSHIP, INC®.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Judi Sheppard Missett: Founder Of Jazzercise Shares Her Leadership Secrets [Episode 468]

Judi Sheppard Missett’s Early Journey With Jazzercise

I have attended a business conference for women CEOs sponsored by Sandra Yancey, the Founder and CEO of eWomen Network. At the conference, Sandra Yancy interviewed Judi Sheppard Missett, the Founder and Executive Chair of Jazzercise. Let me tell you, Judi is an amazing inspiration. First of all, she is youthful and beautiful and can still dance with the best of them, including those 30 or more years younger than she is. She’s an excellent role model for her product, Jazzercise.

I didn’t realize it, but Judi started Jazzercise several years ago in 1969. The company now has more than $2 billion in sales, more than 8,000 global franchises all over the world, 32,000 classes a week, and a strong online presence. They even have a licensee company in Japan, which started several years ago and has more than 1,000 instructors.

They create and teach fitness classes that transform your body and your life. They also believe you can create a stronger, healthier, and happier life through fitness. Judi’s been dancing since she was two and a half years old. Her mother was a strong supporter and practiced with her, and at fourteen years old, she got her first professional role in West Side Story.

Her passion for dance has fueled her business. Judi says, “Passion can fuel everything for you, and no one can stop you.” She says, “I was an artist and dancer, and I let it evolve and decided to keep it going and to go big.” From a business perspective, Judi says Jazzercise shouldn’t even be here. She didn’t have a master plan or a blueprint for the business when she was a college student at Northwestern University and working on her BS degree in Theater and Dance.

Judi was also a part of a professional dance studio where she taught dance classes. She noticed that her students would come for a while and then drop out, so she started to inquire about their goals and objectives. Although Judi was a serious student and practitioner of dance, her students wanted to look like professional dancers without being one. I’d say this was her first foray into marketing research and finding out what her clients wanted.

How Jazzercise Started And Attracted Hundreds Of Students

She got a new idea for making bodies better and asked the dance studio owner if she could use an empty studio to try out a new class. The new class was Jazz Dance for Fun and Fitness. The first week she had 15 students. The next week she had 30 students, and the week after that she had 60 students. People were telling their friends, and the class expanded by word of mouth. Judi would say they built joy, camaraderie, and community. Judi says there are always signs and signals in your life about where to go next. She ultimately moved from Chicago to Southern California and kept teaching so many classes that she lost her voice after she developed nodules on her vocal cords.

Like Moses in the Bible, who got sound advice from his father-in-law Jethro, she got sound advice to train others who could also teach the classes. This way, she could expand her reach without burning herself out. That is a lesson that Moses learned when he trained other people to also be judges in Israel. She selected five women in her classes who had dance backgrounds and trained them. Jazzercise is about creating stronger, healthier lives, and she always believed that it would work. That’s one of her keys to success: her belief in her business and making it work. She would say to us, “Believe in your business, your success, and that you can make it work.”

Believe in your business, your success, and that you can make it work. Click To Tweet

Judi also said it’s important to surround yourself with the best people, including those who are more talented than you are. Another key to success is innovation. Jazzercise constantly changes and innovates. They don’t get stuck in what they did yesterday. Although the company started based on jazz dance techniques, they added cardio, then strength training, stretch and strike classes, and High-Intensity Intervals known as HIIT classes. The common thread in all of it is dance.

They also went from video classes to streaming the content as technology changed. Her model in creating Jazzercise was to create a mechanism for women to own their businesses. In the 1980s, the top franchises were Jazzercise and Domino’s Pizza. She believes her business influenced the feminist movement.

In this business model, the company provides new choreography every ten weeks. Judi says, “Choreography is the core of what we do.” They provide programs and they also provide a business plan to profitability. There is a system of business advisors that helps those in the field with their businesses. They hold franchise conferences, Zoom meetings, weekly member calls, road shows, and the use of multiple platforms to get the education and expertise disseminated.

Class owners are the ones who run the business and they hire instructor associates to teach the classes. The work Judi says is gratifying and rewarding because of the giving back to health and wellness, even if it’s not the highest-paying career out there. To stay top of mind with customers, Jazzercise focuses on excellence and they are good at what they do. Judi shifts her business model as she expands, and again, that’s her innovation at work.

She says, “You look forward to where you want to go, more than behind you to see who’s gaining on you.” She says, go for it. Keep moving to keep going. This point is extremely important because so many people are so focused on competitors that in my words, they forget their creative advantage, and you know when you are looking backward over your shoulder, that slows you down from moving forward and getting to your creative advantage where you are doing something better than anyone else can because of how you’ve been gifted by God in order to succeed.

Jazzercise also has a family connection. She’s got a 55-year-old daughter, Shanna Missett Nelson, who’s the company President and CEO. Her daughter did solo Jazzercise performances in the 1984 Olympics. While she was studying journalism and English literature in college, her daughter took the instructor training and it had looked initially like the daughter wasn’t going to come into the business, but somehow she got the bug to also be in the Jazzercise business.

Judi’s oldest granddaughter also is in the business she did her instructor training online and she created a new branch of the business called REVEL Dance Fitness. There are also two nieces who are executives in the company. Judi would say that there are people in place to carry the business forward. In other words, she has a working succession plan.

Judi further says, “Surround yourself with people who lift you. A great and positive group around you, believe in and invest in your purpose, and also attract people who believe in and invest in your purpose.” She says it’s never about one person but rather a village. Bring in new people. Like all the rest of us, Judi has also had employee challenges and she says it’s all part of the journey of life. Learn from the situations and move on.

Believe and invest in your purpose. Attract people who do the same. Click To Tweet

About her business life, Judi says, “I have loved this journey.” Her mother advised her to use her gift and not take anything for granted. Judi discovered that she had a head for both financial figures and the body figure, so I would say she’s into double figures or figures, take it to the second power, although at the outset she did not see her financial figure acumen or her business acumen.

In her years of running Jazzercise, Judi has raised more than $33 million for charities. I would say that’s pretty profound and awesome. Also, her 1981 Jazzercise LP was certified gold in 1982. She’s also on the advisory board for Enterprising Women and she’s in multiple Hall of Fame inductions and has too many honors and awards to even name. In this particular show. Judi is also the author of three books, Jazzercise: Rhythmic Jazz Dance-Exercise: A Fun Way to Fitness, which was written by Dona Meilach in 1983. Her second book, Jazzercise Workout Book: Your Customized Fitness Program–For Life. Her latest book, which is of particular interest to you and also to me is Building a Business with a Beat: Leadership Lessons from Jazzercise―An Empire Built on Passion, Purpose, and Heart, and that book came out in 2019.

Key Leadership Lessons From Judi Sheppard Missett

Judi also has some additional success lessons that she would share with you, and those are, 1) Live out your passion. 2) Change, evolve, and be ingenious. 3) Make your mind, body, spirit, and connection, work. Have a focused mind. Take care of your body. 4) Learn something new every day. 5) Feed your spirit. 6) Use your gifts. 7) Give back, including mentoring other people. Judi’s husband of 57 years is recovering from alcoholism and has been sober for 29 years and he says that giving back helps him with his sobriety. 8) Listen to your gut. 9) Think with your head. 10) Follow your heart. Judi has a bonus of 3 Gs, and the 3 Gs are guts, grit, and gumption. She says with those three, it’s go, baby. Go. There’s no stopping you when you have all three of those together.

I want to give a special shout-out and thanks to Sandra Yancey, Founder and CEO of eWomen Network, for her wonderful interview of Judi Sheppard Missett at that women’s CEO event that I attended, and I got introduced to the founder of Jazzercise, Judi Sheppard Missett and I’m so thankful for that, someone new to be inspired by, and I hope that you too are inspired by Judi’s life and the leadership lessons, which I shared with you from her.

As we close, I want to close with a couple of Bible verses that relate to what we have been talking about, and these come from 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” That’s profound. It fits with what Judi said about the mind, body, and spirit connection, and when we are doing the right things with our minds, with our bodies, and with our spirit, we then also glorify God. To your health, to your fitness, and the glory of God, have a blessed, healthy, and fit day.

When we are doing the right things with our minds, with our bodies, and with our spirit, we then also glorify God. Click To Tweet

How Dr. Clarence Shuler Builds Strong Marriages Globally

Dr. Clarence Shuler is the president and CEO of Building Lasting Relationships and his wife Brenda Shuler, the two of them together, were speakers of the year for the Family Life Marriage Conferences. They know a lot about marriage as at the time of this recording, they have been married for many years. I have Dr. Clarence Shuler with me. Dr. Shuler, what’s the word on marriage? What would you like to tell people?

Thanks so much for this introduction. I would like to tell them that in our nonprofit, Building Lasting Relationships, we get wounded people in God’s word into wounded people, primarily by memorizing scripture. Then we heal them, equip them, and empower them to become reproductive disciples who do the same for others.

One of those venues that we do is use marriage, and we have done marriage ministry all around the globe, we refer people to our resource, which is Keeping Your Wife Your Best Friend, which is written for husbands, but also their wives, so they can go through the book together. There are questions in the back. Whether they have a tune-up or their marriage is in crisis, we feel this resource can change their life forever and they can use it to help change other people’s lives. We love marriage. We think marriage is designed to be for a lifetime, and no matter where your marriage is, there’s hope for your marriage. It can be better than it’s ever been if you put some work into it. We love marriages, and marriages put a smile on God’s face.

Marriages put a smile on God's face. Click To Tweet

Amen to that, and if you keep your wife your best friend, you have an even greater chance of being married for the long haul. If you would like to know more about the ministry, please go to Clarence Schuler and you can give a donation there or you can sign up for a marriage experience yourself.

Terence Chatmon’s Mission To Transform Families

I’m here with Terence Chatmon, who is the President and CEO of Victorious Family, and also the author of Do Your Children Believe?. Victorious Family has a goal of reaching 9.2 million families by 2030. Terence, tell us, how far along are you on that goal?

We are very excited. We reached 133,800 families and prior to that, we were right on around the 400,000 family mark towards our 9.2 million goal in the second. We are extremely excited.

That is very exciting news, and I know there are many new initiatives that help you to reach even more families. Tell us what’s new in the ministry.

What’s exciting, on December 7th, 2023, we had a national newspaper cover Victorious Family, and it went throughout the country, and that has exposed us to over 30 million families in the US From that, we have received a great deal of responses, and one of those responses is a new partnership that we are forming with Hampton University to come alongside them and work in eight counties in the Hampton Roads area. We are excited about that. Millions of families will be exposed to what it looks like to have family transformation taking place in their homes.

How can people reach you, and how can they reach your weekly resource that you have as well?

They can reach us at Victorious Family. Our resources are there, and we are excited because we have a brand-new resource that came out. It’s our weekly rhythms guide. It gives the parent and individual a day-to-day rhythm and how they might walk in Christ, so we would encourage them to get a copy of our weekly rhythms guide for parents and individuals.

Thank you so much, Terence. I’m so glad that you are here with me, and to you out there in the audience, please go to Victorious Family, donate to the ministry, get the weekly rhythms guide, and see what else is new in the ministry. See you next time.

Celebrating The Global Impact Of The Bible League

I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles, ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip, also teaches and trains local people on how to share the word of God. The President and CEO of the Bible League, Jos Snoep, is with me to share a little bit more about what the Bible League is doing.

The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. Click To Tweet

The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As a Bible League, we come alongside those local pastors. I met a pastor. His name is Rolando, in the Amazon, and he has this great vision to reach 200 communities with the word of God, we were able to come alongside them and help them with Bibles and resources.

Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You, the Bible League, are the hands and feet to the local people on the ground, and there are partners and donors out there who can be hands and feet to you as you also share with others. Those of you who are reading, if you want to be part of this ministry, I invite you to be a part of it. I’m a part of it. Go to Bible League, see more about the ministry, and see how you can participate and donate.

 

Important Links

 

March 11, 2024

Ame-Lia Tamburrini: Beyond Tolerance And DEI To Create A Culture Of Belonging [Episode 467]

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Ame-Lia Tamburrini | Culture Of Belonging

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Ame-Lia Tamburrini | Culture Of Belonging

 

Ame-Lia Tamburrini is the founder and CEO of HUM Consulting based in British Columbia, Canada. She moves organizations and communities beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion into cultures of belonging.

Her clients include non-profits, corporations, those in government and education sectors, and rural, remote, and Indigenous communities. Ame-Lia holds a Master of Science in Epidemiology and a BSc in Kinesiology, and she is a certified facilitator of restorative justice, circle dialogue, and trauma-informed practices.

Today she speaks with Dr. Karen about cultures of belonging, self-knowledge and understanding, vulnerability, the value of feminine leadership for all genders, and the lessons she learned from her cancer journey.

Reach Ame-Lia at her website or on LinkedIn or YouTube. E-mail Ame-Lia at Ame-Lia@humconsulting.ca

The post Ame-Lia Tamburrini: Beyond Tolerance and DEI to Create a Culture of Belonging [Episode 467] first appeared on TRANSLEADERSHIP, INC®.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Ame-Lia Tamburrini: Beyond Tolerance And DEI To Create A Culture Of Belonging [Episode 467]

Do you want to go beyond tolerance to create a culture of belonging from the inside out? What are the benefits of a culture of belonging? My special guest, Ame-Lia Tamburrini, talks about how to create a culture of belonging and why belonging is vital to a healthy workplace. Let me tell you a little bit about Ame-Lia. She is the founder and CEO of HUM Consulting based in British Columbia, Canada. As an inclusive leadership speaker, author, and master facilitator, she moves organizations and communities beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion into cultures of belonging from the inside out.

Her clients include nonprofits, corporations, and those in the government and education sectors. Her unique approach appeals to diverse sectors, especially traditionally male-dominated industries such as mining, engineering, education, and law and government institutions. For more than 20 years, Ame-Lia has also engaged with rural, remote, and Indigenous communities around the world in resource extraction, housing, public health, restorative justice, and education.

She holds a master of science in epidemiology and a bachelor of science in kinesiology and is a certified facilitator of restorative justice, circle dialogue, and trauma-informed practices. She brings all of herself to work and receives the highest ratings at conferences and leadership retreats with her approachable and engaging combination of humor, vulnerability, and intellect. Ame-Lia sees the light in everyone and ensures participants leave better equipped to shine their light. Ame-Lia, thank you so much for being with me on the show.

Thank you, Dr. Karen. It is a true honor to be here and a joy.

Understanding Belonging: Going From DEI To Belonging

Thank you so much. I am delighted. I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation with you as I think it’s very important and vital for the workplace. Ame-Lia, I’m just going to jump right in and ask you, first of all, to let us know what is belonging since that’s such a core part of what you do. What does it mean to go from diversity, equity, inclusion, and DEI, to belonging? Tell us about that.

When I think about diversity, equity, and inclusion, I immediately go into my head and I get busy thinking about definitions and how I’m going to do that right. When I say belonging, there’s something that settles into the body and it becomes a feeling sense. For me, fundamentally, that’s what belonging is. When you enter into your workplace, there is a feeling sense that you are valued just as you are, and that you have wisdom to share and contribute. You are connected to this community that can lift up and support you and help you to be your very best self while contributing to whatever the organizational goals happen to be.

I think it’s fabulous if people have an opportunity every day to contribute their gifts to the workplace in the way that you’re talking about. Wouldn’t that be wonderful in terms of the cultures that we all get to live in and also to create together? When you think about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, does it feel more like a formula or as if you’re looking at just metrics that may be absent the heart? What’s the difference?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion for me feel like definitions. It feels like policies. It feels like exercises and checkbox approaches to getting things right. This whole getting things complicate the journey of diversity, equity, and inclusion, like creating those spaces where people can show up as themselves. It’s an old way of being, a way that’s been conditioned into many of us. Getting things right triggers that survival mechanism.

All of a sudden, we’re not relating to people as humans with all the messiness that is there, but we’re trying to be good. We’re trying to look good. That can shut down a conversation in a hurry. This is why I like framing this conversation in terms of belonging because it really talks about what this is at the core, which is love and joy and heart space versus something that you have to figure out intellectually or govern with a policy.

Thank you for saying more about that. I think that really gets to the heart of the difference as well. Share a little bit, Ame-Lia about what does it mean to do this work from the inside out, because I know that’s a core concept for you as well.

Again, I don’t want to sound repetitive, but it is coming back into that heart space and recognizing that it’s not so much about what we do with each other, but it’s how we be with one another. How we be is very much governed by a lot of programming, a lot of things that we’ve heard about how we should and shouldn’t be in the world, and things that we’ve learned about other cultures or other people that we bring forward, mostly unconsciously.

It is not so much about what we do with each other but how we are with one another. Click To Tweet

If we’re not aware of the stories that we’re telling ourselves, how we’ve been programmed, the conditioning that is in our bodies, and how that governs what we put back out into the world, then we’re not going to get very far. It’s going to be very surface-level. We’re going to find ourselves back saying things that we regret or not saying anything at all because we’re too scared because we want to get things right. When we can really get intimate with how we are as humans and see the commonalities in that, it becomes less scary. It becomes a very different conversation.

I think what I’m hearing you say is that we have to be willing to look in the mirror a little bit and do some self-examination. Even as we’re doing work in this space, it starts with us, as I would frame it, the instrument of our own leadership, because I know in my book, lead yourself first. That’s the whole point. If you’re really going to be effective in leadership and creating belonging, you do have to start with you. I really appreciate the fact that that’s a lot of what you do too, when you’re talking about it from the inside out.

I learned that through my own journey. I think all the work I do today is really taking the lessons that I’ve learned to live a life that has more joy, more fulfillment, and causes less harm, and just re-teaching people those gifts that I’ve been given over the years in interesting, fun, and sometimes really painful ways. I’ve learned the lesson and I believe that we come here to teach what we learn.

Restorative Justice: A Key Concept In Today’s World

Certainly to share with each other and then we can learn from each other because we will probably have some different experiences and different lessons along the way. Each one of us has to experience the exact same thing because if we’re in a community we benefit from all of our experiences. I really love that as well. Ame-Lia, you refer to some of your work as restorative justice. What is restorative justice and how is that important in our world today?

Restorative justice is an alternative to the criminal justice system. For me, I work with an organization called Restorative Justice Victoria as a volunteer facilitator, and we have cases referred to us from the police or here it’s called The Crown. Instead of having people go through the criminal justice system, they come to us and have very compassionate heart-centered dialogues about taking responsibility for harms that are caused.

If somebody does spray painting or maybe it’s an abuse of some kind or a fight that happens, those folks will come to us and the responsible parties. We don’t call them offenders or criminals. We’ll work with them. First of all to have us understand what was going on for them that day, and learn more about their life history so we can get clear on why potentially they showed up in the way they did in that moment. We have similar conversations with the affected parties. Again, we don’t call them victims because we want folks to be empowered in their lives.

Eventually, through these dialogues, we bring those people together to have conversations about what happened that day in that moment. We have people take responsibility for the harm that they caused. The affected party gets to ask for what they need. What would feel meaningful for them to repair that harm? It’s a beautiful approach. What I love about it is the transformation that occurs in both people. The affected party feels less fear at the end of the day because they’ve been able to connect to the humanity of the responsible party.

That responsible party heals in some way by being able to know themselves better, not feel so bad about what they did because they understand where it came from and they get to make that apology, which so many want to do. I think it’s important for today because it is that compassionate approach. It’s very easy for us to put up walls when harm has been caused and point fingers and blame but when we can see ourselves in each other, we stop perpetuating the same cycles.

It is easy to put up walls when harm has been caused. But when we can see ourselves in each other, we stop perpetuating the same cycles. Click To Tweet

What a beautiful description and example. It makes me think about healing more than punishment and understanding on some level and certainly making reparations of one sort or another, but from a deep place of knowing each other rather than you never see the person except for maybe in a courtroom where you’re not really speaking to them or whatever. “Yes, you must pay this fine or you must do this thing, but it’s very impersonal.” I guess that is what I would say about the criminal justice system. When you are doing restorative justice work, some of these outcomes, what have they been in comparison to what happens in the criminal justice system? Why do people still send individuals to you for this approach? They must be working in some way.

It’s definitely working. I don’t think I can comment on what’s happening in the criminal justice system, but I can say that with everybody that I work with, there is a huge transformation and we have these people that are causing harm in some way or another. They have 99.9% of the time never experienced true love in their life.

Somebody really has them, holding them, ensuring that they feel seen and heard and respected. There’s also generally some trauma in the background. They’re either ongoing or in their past. That healing that you talk about is really important. I think that’s what we create, that environment for them to do that healing. We also create a space for them to be seen and heard and not thrown to the curb, which is what happens in our criminal justice system.

We said, “You’ve committed a crime and then we lock you behind bars and remove you from society and your support and your social structures.” Those people end up becoming leaders in their community. They go back into whatever the crowds they were hanging out with and start to make different decisions and start to talk about what they learned in this journey. They become agents of change, which I think is fabulous. I don’t know, I cannot comment if that’s happening in the criminal justice system or not.

It’s a beautiful story, what you’re talking about in terms of restorative justice. It makes me think about this notion of how God is love. As people experience love, they’re experiencing more of God. As they are loved, they have more capacity to go out and love other people. It’s just a beautiful cycle that I see that you’re creating in your work. Thank you for doing this very profound work that I know is transforming lives from what you’re describing.

Building Trust With Indigenous Communities

Ame-Lia, I also know that you transform lives in the Indigenous communities, First Nations people and very often, at least in the United States, I don’t know if it’s the same in Canada, but I would assume it might be the same. Very often, Indigenous people don’t want outsiders coming in and showing them anything. There’s something about how you work that really resonates with them. Tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing with the Indigenous communities and why the connection actually works.

I’ve spent quite a number of years working alongside Indigenous communities, and that was through different work I was doing where it was centered in resource development, a lot of oil and gas, and mining. I got to travel throughout North America and overseas as well and work with Indigenous communities of the lands there. Firstly, I’ll say that I’ve actually learned from them and have changed my own worldview because of those experiences. Through that journey, I learned about different definitions of health. My background is in health, kinesiology, and epidemiology.

They taught me to expand what I was learning in university to consider environmental and social factors and spiritual factors and emotional factors. Instead of just like, “I have an injury or an illness and that means I’m not well.” They have this beautiful definition and concept of well-being. I’ve learned from them. I also saw how the trauma they experienced through colonization played out in their communities through addictions and domestic violence and a lot of things like that, which are still very prevalent today.

When I work with indigenous communities today, I’m not going in to help them. I’m going there to stand beside them in conversations, generally with non-Indigenous organizations that want to work alongside them. I think what works in my approach is that I come in and I’m curious. I simply listen. That has supported me a lot to better understand their worldview and also to gain trust.

The Indigenous communities have an oral way of being. They tell oral history and that can take some time. Often, non-Indigenous communities want to cut it off and get to the business and get to the agenda but that interferes with the relationship building. That’s also what Indigenous cultures are centered on relationality versus being transactional, which we tend to do in our more Western way of being.

I think listening, curiosity, and going in with that beginner’s mindset that I know nothing. I just want to learn in this setting. Those three things, they’re what I tell my clients as well. If you’re going to be working, engaging with Indigenous communities, to park your wisdom. It doesn’t mean you’re not smart. It doesn’t mean you don’t have knowledge. There’s an openness to potentially the Indigenous wisdom has something to teach us, especially in this moment.

The Circle Method: Fostering Connections In Communities

I think this is really captured that what you said about standing beside people. When you’re side by side, you can really share and exchange and learn from each other. One is not above or below your shoulder to shoulder, you’re next to each other. I think that’s a beautiful way of thinking about mutual learning and growth and development and being curious, as you said, having that beginner’s mind. That makes perfect sense. You also have as a primary intervention process something you call the circle method. What is that? What is the circle method and how do you use it to create more connections?

In its most basic form to describe it so people can get a visual. I envision it as people sitting around a fire, which is the root of all of our ancestry. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what color your skin is, or what religion you are. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, they started to gather fire and people gathered around that fire. In that moment, language was developed, safety was created, they shared food, community was created, and it really is the core of our roots.

We sit in chairs, there are no tables, we generally have something in the middle that is meaningful, and we pass a talking piece from one person to another person to another person. What this does, is this way of being, and it can be used in so many different settings, it allows, first of all, everybody to show up as a knowledge keeper. When you have that talking piece, everybody’s listening, there’s no back and forth or interrupting or advice-giving or anything like that. That person is just sharing their wisdom, and then the next person talks and it goes around like that.

It also establishes that everybody in that space is a leader because you’re taking collective responsibility for what happens, and what gets created in that circle. The third thing that happens in that circle setting is a realization that we are interconnected with each other because I know you know this, as you’re listening to stories, you can learn about yourself through somebody else’s story. You can also feel less alone because you’re like, “Me too. I’ve also had that experience.” That sense of community gets strengthened in terms of what it is. It’s really that very intentional way of being together where one person is sharing at a time.

How Italian Heritage Influences Personal And Professional Life

I love that. Ame-Lia, we’ve been talking about culture, we’ve been talking about backgrounds and sharing and so on and so forth. I know that you have a background as an Italian. Tell us a little bit about how your own heritage and culture shows up in your life and in your work and talk about maybe the values or the experiences that you bring from the Italian culture and how you live every day.

I love it. If you interviewed me a few months from now, I would have a very different answer because I’m actually going to Italy for two months to learn more about my own heritage. My father did, he immigrated from Italy when he was eighteen but my parents divorced when I was pretty young. I mostly grew up with my mom, but I have this Italian like very passionate about the fact that I am Italian.

My father too, being an immigrant, and there was a generation there that thought it wasn’t okay for us to learn Italian. English was the root to success. We didn’t learn Italian growing up, my brother and I. I’m on this journey of learning Italian. I think learning a language is a beautiful way to understand culture on a different level. You can so clearly see the worldview in the words people use.

Learning a language is a beautiful way to understand culture on a different level. You can clearly see the worldview in the words people use. Click To Tweet

Today, my journey into getting to know my roots really stems from my work with the Indigenous community. When I speak with them, they always tell me, you need to get to know your lineage. You need to get to know your heritage. When Indigenous people introduce themselves in a meeting, they talk about their parents and their grandparents and the lands that they came from. My “lands” are overseas.

I’ve never really been on them. That’s what this journey is for me. I’m starting to incorporate Italian into some of the presentations or speeches that I give strengthening my holiday traditions like Christmas. I now cook a sausage and lentil dish. There’s something about it that feels amazing. I cannot explain it, but it does feel like I’m connecting to something that is in me. When I get back from Italy in a couple of months, I have this strong sense that it’s going to much more influence my day-to-day life and how I do my work in the world.

I think that our own culture and history, it’s part of the strengths that we come into the world with. The more we can understand those strengths and tap into the wisdom, if you will, of our cultural heritage is we show up in more powerful ways and we have more to share. As you very well know, Ame-Lia, you’ve seen me in many settings. I often am expressing some aspects of my cultural heritage and what I might be wearing. African American and also Cherokee on both sides of my family.

There’s always some hint of something African, maybe a hint of something Native American at the same time. It doesn’t necessarily have to be Cherokee. Most of my stuff is actually Navajo because I really love their beadwork and yet it speaks to me as well. I think that when you come back from Italy, it’s going to almost feel as though there’s been a pouring in. I would love to talk to you when you get back to see what that pouring in was all about. It’s just going deeper and who you are.

I love that about you. Like just the expression in how you be, but your look and the clothes and everything. Even planning my trip for Italy, I find I’m dressing differently. All of a sudden, I’ve gotten more of an artistic flair. I don’t know what’s happening. When I work with diversity, equity, and inclusion, the non-White population is often saying like, “That’s part of the White problem is that we’re not connected to our culture.” When we’re not connected to our culture, there’s no root, there’s no stability, like you were saying.

We’re very wobbly and we need to find safety by controlling others. When we are fully rooted in who we are, we know ourselves deeply and have the wisdom of our ancestors with us at all times, we will show up very differently in the world. I think that’s a call to action. I think for the listener is getting to know your roots, and our ancestry, connecting in whatever way you can is so important if you are truly committed to creating a world that is not more diverse, but is more accepting of diversity and feels inclusive and has that energy of belonging.

Feminine Leadership: Empowering All Genders In The Workplace

I hope people are listening to that call to action. We all can go a little bit deeper into our own roots and our own foundation and create stability today. Also, think about creating more to share across the different aisles. There’s more that often connects us if we take the time to look and find it and talk about it. It’s always surprising like you were saying earlier, many different cultures were around the campfire, so to speak. That’s a shared experience across many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and groups. Ame-Lia, you also are passionate about bringing feminine leadership to the corporate business environment. What is feminine leadership and how does it benefit everyone no matter what their gender is?

I’m part of this organization, a co-chair of Female Wave and Change Canada. It’s part of a global organization called Female Wave of Change. This organization really supports women, and people from all walks of life and wants to help them grow, and develop their leadership qualities. Doesn’t matter if they’re a “leader,” in an organization or of their own business, or in their families or their communities. Personally, I think we are all leaders. We just need to claim that for ourselves. That shifts how we show up in the world.

The principles that the female wave of change focuses on and that I think are considered “feminine” are compassion and creativity, collaboration and inclusiveness, emotional intelligence, intuition, and authenticity. I think what has been happening are the world that most of us have grown up in, is those values haven’t been at the forefront or they’ve been expressed less than or valued less than other qualities that were more controlling and more logical and less abstract, I think, that are generally associated with the masculine. What we’re doing is really trying to balance things out.

We don’t want to go above, but just equal the playing ground, so to speak, so that natural way of being that like we’ve always meant to have this balance, but because of the way things have transpired, that balance hasn’t been there. Einstein has a great quote, “You cannot solve the world’s problems with the same consciousness or thinking that created them.” I think that’s what this organization is getting at. It’s like, we cannot come at the world’s problems that exist today in the same way we have. We need something different. This is potentially one solution.

In a way, if we think about the challenges in today’s world, if we only bring half of our resources, it’s really not enough to really understand what’s going on and to be able to move the needle, so to speak, on whatever is happening there. The feminine way of leadership has been absent in some places, and I think sometimes we may move more quickly even to wars and fighting as opposed to sitting down and communicating and collaborating.

Maybe that could be more of a first choice in some cases, and we could avoid some of the other outcomes. When I think about the beginning and God creating the heavens and the earth, when he created Adam and Eve, he says he created man and he referred to them as male and female under that term man. It’s like man and woman, and the whole point being. They’re together. You cannot separate them in that sense. That’s what I hear when you’re talking about this.

I love that perspective. I was thinking about COVID and some of the leadership that came up through that time period. Certainly the New Zealand Prime Minister and our medical health officer here in British Columbia, she was a woman as well. What she demonstrated during that time was an immense amount of vulnerability. There were moments when she stood in front of the camera and cried because she was overwhelmed and just up at all hours of the night.

She allowed herself to bring that forward. Some people criticized her, but mostly what she did was brought people together. I think when we take that divide and conquer mentality, the fighting and going to war, I have this sense people are less and less okay with that anymore. We need something different. The feminine has something to offer in that space.

It’s interesting you bring up the pandemic because we did a podcast about Jacinda Ardern and her leadership during that time in New Zealand. One of the things that struck me about it is how much she communicated and shared with people about what was going on and what they needed to know. Often because people don’t understand and they’re in the dark, they make choices that are not in their best interest. Just being able to share with people relevant information and to give explanations and offer options and alternatives was a very powerful way to lead. She’s still in my mind because of that.

That’s amazing. Actually, this was a man. I gave a talk at a government ministry here at the provincial level. That’s equivalent of the state level. It was the assistant deputy minister of this ministry who had asked me anything for this branch that is under his umbrella. I used to work for the government. I was really curious to listen. He came on right before I was speaking, but Dr. Karen, he was so vulnerable and honest.

He wasn’t hiding anything. He just felt like it was a fireside chat with your best friend, but giving real-life advice from somebody who has clearly done that himself. I do see this shift because I don’t want to be male and female necessarily. I think men are learning new ways of being as well because everybody suffers when we’re not connected to all the parts of us. It’s nice that we’re creating an environment, speaking about belonging, where men too can tap into more of their feminine qualities and become more whole versus having to be this one-sided way of being.

I love that because this really highlights how it’s relevant for both genders, because both genders can embrace some of what we call feminine leadership, and both genders can embrace what we call male leadership and you bring out whatever needs to happen in that moment to benefit the community. I think that’s a great call to action for both genders really to think about under that term a rubric of man which is all-inclusive and when we think about God is also inclusive of the male and female qualities because he’s made us in his image.

Bringing Your Full Self To Work

That’s a good thing to keep in mind that even in God, there’s a both-and rather than an either-or in that sense. You mentioned and talked about how important it is for leaders to bring all of themselves to work. In your own case, what challenges have you experienced in bringing all of yourself to work and how have you overcome those challenges?

That’s a great question. I think I’m bringing more of myself than ever before, more of all of me than ever before. What that has required of me is getting to know myself more and being able to face the qualities that are generally deemed as unpleasant in our society or simply in how I was brought up. Things like being judgmental or being selfish, lazy even. For most of my life, I just wanted to keep hidden from people. I’m learning to really see those and embrace them as part of who I am and see the gifts that those bring to me at various times.

Every way of being has a virtue and every way of being then has more of a shadow or a dark side to it. In learning more about myself and embracing all the parts of me, I feel like I’m more easily able to just show up as I am and just name in the moment being like, “I feel like I was just being judgmental there.” I can start again. When we keep trying to hide that we have these parts of us, then we just create barriers and then we have a greater tendency to project them back out into the world. This comes up for me a lot in Circle because as a Circle host/facilitator, some people think that I need to be a certain way.

The people that pay me to support them in that work, that I need to be strong and not have weaknesses or qualities like that and not express emotion like tears. That’s the way that I’m really challenging myself to be myself in that moment. It’s hard for me to have a circle when there’s not but there is not a moment where I tear up because I am so connected to people’s stories. I’m also learning about myself in those moments. I am a human being, so people will say something and I’ll notice a part of me that feels judgmental, that wants to separate myself from that person.

I don’t always articulate it out loud in terms of what’s going on for me, but I will do my work in that moment to check in, to come back into the present moment, and to reestablish that connection. Some people will judge me for being that vulnerable in those spaces, but most people are being able to see it that is also their conditioning that needs me to be a certain way for them to be okay. I think when we can really get there when we don’t need other people to be a certain way for us to be okay because we’ve embraced all of our own uglier parts. That’s the world that I’m working toward creating in my spaces.

I think it’s pretty profound that you are modeling what it’s like to be honest and to be authentic and to recognize first in yourself, that you’re not perfect and nobody else in the circle is perfect either. It gives them permission to be okay sharing a word or two here and there. If something shows up that they weren’t expecting to figure out a way to include it in the learning at that moment, rather than because I have warts and moles and whatever, I better just shut up and hide and not engage today. I think that’s important that people know that it’s safe enough that they can come to the circle and share who they are, good, bad and ugly, or whatever at times. That’s great modeling. Do it that way. People know it’s okay.

That’s part of it. I love, I don’t know if you just said naming it, but that’s one of the techniques I use is when I come into a circle and we’re going to be talking about the hard stuff and people’s stuff is going to come out and there’ll be anger and there’ll be frustration and there’ll be tears. I name all of it right in the beginning to say, “Here’s what you might notice about yourself as we go through this.” What that does is in that moment, it actually has people relax and say, “Okay.”

When they notice it come up in them, they don’t feel the shame or the guilt around it. They are clear that this is just a normal part of being human and a part of this change process that we’re in. It’s a great way and I recommend that for all leaders as well to the more that you can simply name things, and bring them to the surface, the easier it’s going to be to have any difficult conversation in your organization. Do you find that as well? I know you work with leaders a lot.

Yes, absolutely, I find that’s true. The process that you’re talking about in psychology, we have a term that relates to it. We call it normalizing. You do talk about it upfront. People aren’t surprised and shocked. They know what to expect. When those things happen, they aren’t thinking, “Something’s drastically wrong or we’re off base or this isn’t supposed to happen.”

Cancer Thriver: Overcoming Adversity And Embracing Growth

Normalizing, talking about upfront, giving people permission, giving them a roadmap, a little bit about what they might encounter along the way in this conversation and the leadership journey.” Yeah, I resonate with everything that you’re saying about this. Absolutely. Now I know that life is not usually a straight-line function for most people and we do experience challenges that are also our growth opportunities. You refer to yourself as a cancer thriver. What did you experience? What was it that you overcame? What did you learn through your cancer experience?

Thank you for that. I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago and I had just quit my job at the provincial government and was launching into my business that I have now. I’m consulting. It was one month after that I received this diagnosis. I was in a tremendous amount of uncertainty at that moment in terms of will I live or not. Will this business succeed or not? What is my future? I have no idea. Gratefully, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, it’s very treatable. I did endure six months of chemotherapy, which was a really scary and very vulnerable time for me.

At that moment, I got to learn a whole bunch more about myself, both during the event. I think during this, I realized how resistant I was to receiving any support whatsoever. I lived by myself. My family was all out East. I had to make the, I didn’t have to, but I chose to make the decision to rely more heavily on my friends and receive their love and support. What I realized in that journey was that so many of them were grateful, first of all, because people want to help, but they generally don’t know how to help when such a diagnosis happens.

Opening my door to food and other kinds of support felt good for them. They also said, “You’re so much more relatable in this vulnerable state of receiving because otherwise we just thought you had all your stuff together. That you are untouchable.” It actually helped me deepen my relationships with my friends, which felt very vulnerable to me. I was very conditioned to keep a safety net around me. Speaking about vulnerability and having your shadows out in the daylight, they got to see me at some of my worst moments.

That was connecting fundamentally at the end of the day. When you’re going to a cancer journey, it really is a chapter of survival. You’re going from one treatment to the next and saying, “How you’re just managing all the symptoms and the side effects that come up from both the chemotherapy, but then also the drugs you’re taking to manage the side effects of the chemotherapy.” It’s a very complex combination of medication that you’re managing. That was survival mode. When I came out of those six months, it really did feel like I had been hit by a tsunami and was standing there in the rubble wondering, what is this life?

Who am I and how do I rebuild this? I don’t even know what I want anymore. There were a lot of questions in that stage and that actually felt more vulnerable to me. It opened the door to have me heal more of my own trauma, to really look back at my childhood and say, “Okay. There was pain there and that still does impact me. It had me heal the trauma of going through the cancer experience and so much more.” That opened up a window to the work I do today, which is very much trauma-informed and seeing division through that trauma lens of what is this division really?

For me, it’s all unhealed trauma. Fundamentally, the cancer journey gave me the gift of being able to do the work that I do today. It more deeply connected me to what was fundamental in life, which was love and joy. It’s the signature of my business. I have a hummingbird, which for me represents love and joy. When I was first diagnosed, I had this spiritual book that tells you the spiritual diagnosis of your physiological issue.

It said in this book, “This person has forgotten the purpose of life, which is love and joy.” I made the cancer journey, the journey of love and joy. That’s what I bring now into my day is that thriving concept that life isn’t about surviving. Many of us are stuck in that mode, the busyness of life. For me, it’s about where can I find the moment of joy in this moment, in the next moment. Even if there’s suffering and pain, there’s joy fundamentally underneath that.

Life is not about surviving. Many of us are stuck in the busyness of life. It is about where we can find the moment of joy in the next moment. Click To Tweet

That is a profound journey to a deeper sense and understanding of purpose, and meaning in life, and a more profound healing, not just of the cancer, healing of traumas from the past and other places that needed to be healed where you might not have shined the light in those corners maybe in the past. Also just that mutual experience of learning to give and receive. Recognizing that those who give to you are also benefiting in that moment as well. Sometimes we forget that for them to give is a joy as well.

The Story Behind The Name Of HUM Consulting

You learned a lot through this process and you’re bringing a deeper sense of living life to your clients because of those experiences. You know what it’s like to thrive, even through the challenges, and still see joy in the challenges. People need to know that because sometimes they think the joy is all gone when in fact it isn’t. That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned your company and the hummingbird being the picture of it and your company is called Hum Consulting. Tell us about the meaning of that name because it is relevant and how you came up with it.

It was a conversation with a woman. We were just bouncing ideas off. That’s how it came. It’s one of those words or acronyms. First of all, I didn’t ever want an acronym, but it ended up being one. It’s a word that I find more and more meaning in every single day. The deeper I get into my work, the choosing of that name makes more sense. I know it was a divine gift for me because of that. The acronym ended up being Harmony, Unity, and Momentum.

For me, Harmony is remembering that we are nature, nature is us, and there’s a beautiful harmonic balance that happens with diversity because nature is an ecosystem. We are ecosystems that require diversity to thrive. We also require knowing our purpose and our specific gifts that we are meant to give to the world and creating spaces for that to happen for everybody and that’s harmony. When we can work in that way together, there is this unity that comes when we’re sharing stories with one another, like sitting around the circle where you get to see the other in yourself.

You said earlier that we have more commonalities than we do differences. Creating those spaces for that unity to be known. The momentum piece, which is trauma it’s like stuck energy. It’s energy that needs to be moved. For me, the momentum is twofold. It’s how do we heal that trauma to get that energy flowing again in our more natural state? Also, how do you get just unstuck in your organizations that are often in this place of not moving forward because they’re not able to have the conversations that are needed to shift the dynamic and the culture?

Challenges Facing Corporations Today

That’s actually a great segue because I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you see as some of the biggest challenges that corporations and businesses are facing today, such that the work that you do would be really helpful to them. How would you name those challenges? What’s going on?

The biggest challenge I see is that all of the structures and systems that are in place today were created a long time ago. They’re these immobile hierarchies in organizations. I use the organizational chart as an example when I give my presentations because you have a visual of the organizational chart. That’s the structure that most organizations are working in where only some people are leaders, only some people are knowledge keepers, and there’s a separation between us all. It’s a beautiful visual because it’s something that is day-to-day in all organizations.

We don’t even think about it, but in some ways, it perpetuates a very divisive, segregated way of being in the world that doesn’t allow space for all of us to be leaders and for all of us to be knowledge keepers, to utilize that interconnectedness that we have. That is the challenge that I see and that I keep hearing is like, change is hard because we just have these systems in place that are ancient and archaic and holding us back.

My response to that is systems are made up of people. If you do the inner work and really get underneath at what is creating those systems and holding them in place by doing your own healing work, the systems will change. They’ll actually change way quicker than I think you can possibly imagine in this moment. We just need to have the courage to say yes to doing that inner work that is so essential.

I am finding that people are wanting that more and more. People are done with checkboxes, and one-off approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion. They want to see true transformation and people also want to come to work and feel joy and feel like they’re meaningfully contributing to the organization. To do that, you have to start unpacking yourself so that the structure can start to reform.

I think the concept that you’re talking about, and you said it earlier about leadership, not just being resident in one person. We all are leaders and we share the leadership role. We pass the baton, just like you pass the talking stick in the circle. Sometimes this person is leading and then they may step back and somebody else leads for a while and it’s a whole community. I mean, I think about the flock of birds. You’ve got the lead bird out there flying, but that lead bird is not always the same bird.

I mean, the bird goes back to back and rests a little bit and another bird comes up and flies at the front of the formation where you’re getting a lot of wind draft in that front space, but that’s not a place you stay in 24/7 or you’ll die and burn yourself out. I think it is important to think about how leading in the community leverages the gifts of all members of the community. It’s powerful to think that in organizations, structures may prevent the very kinds of conversations and thinking, and perspectives that are needed for this moment in time.

It just takes a visionary, somebody who can see just beyond what is currently there, what feels very real. I think really takes more of a spiritual approach to leadership to understand that when we look at this from a human perspective, it’s maybe seem like it’ll never change. We have so many powers with us that we can tap into to support us on this journey.

We’ve been given a lot of gifts along the way. Ame-Lia, how can people reach you? How can they learn more about you? Maybe they would like to engage you to help create a culture of belonging or have you be a keynote speaker at an event. Let’s talk about that.

My website is HUMConsulting.ca. That’s a great way to just have a view about what I’m up to in the world. Connecting with me, you can email me at my first name and I know you’ll put that in the show notes because the spelling is odd, Ame-Lia@HUMConsulting.ca as well. I’m on LinkedIn or YouTube. You can find me on both of those channels where you can get to learn more about me. My podcasts are up there as well that you can listen to those if you want to just understand more about how I work. I would love to connect and just have a conversation. I’m very much relational, so nothing is a commitment, but I want to hear what’s going on for you.

Yes, and I can attest to the fact that you are very relational. They will enjoy that conversation with you when they do connect. Your name again is Ame-Lia@HUMConsulting.ca, correct?

Correct.

Words Of Wisdom For Corporate Executive Leaders

Now they have it more than once. Amy, as we’re winding up now, you’ve shared a lot of words of wisdom so far. What additional words of wisdom would you like to share with my community of corporate executive leaders?

I think it comes back to what we were touching in on near the end about love and joy. When I do this work with organizations, that’s always what I tie it back to, that absolutely we have to do better for populations that are disenfranchised, left on the fringes, being left out. Yes. This is fundamentally for all of us to reclaim our wholeness. In that wholeness is enjoyment, is creativity, it’s contentment and love, and connection, which are all core human needs. Finding whatever that motivation is for you to do the inner work, to look at the shadows, and claim them for yourself because it sounds in opposition.

Going into the darkness is actually where you find joy in this life. We need that energy to go out into the world. We don’t want to get trapped in the stewing on all the bad things that are going on. The more bad things we see, that is just a call for more love and joy and for you to go and do more of your work to get to know yourself so that you can express that higher vibrational energy into the world, which we all need so much right now.

Going into the darkness is where you find joy in life. Click To Tweet

That’s wonderful, Ame-Lia. What it makes me think about is it’s really easy to see the sunshine when it’s high noon and the sun is shining really brightly, and yet we need the sun at all times. To be able to see the sun in the dark and to bring out the light in the dark, that’s what the world needs is people who are committed to that. Thank you for being committed to shining the light in the dark and showing others how to get there too.

Thank you, Dr. Karen.

Thank you for being here, Ame-Lia. I really appreciate everything that you shared and I know people will benefit from it. We will close today with Bible verses, a couple of them that come from James, the first chapter, and it’s verses 19 and 20. “My beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” As you heard from my special guest, Ame-Lia, you heard from her that what produces results is listening, hearing, deeply understanding people, and showing love. Showing love, connection, and belonging. Have a blessed day as you live and walk into all those spaces.

Victorious Family’s Goal: Reaching 9.2M Families By 2030

This is Dr. Karen. I’m here with Terence Chatmon, who is the president and CEO of Victorious Family and also the author of Do Your Children Believe? Victorious Family has a goal of reaching 9.2 million families by 2030. Terence, tell us how far along are you on that goal?

We’re very excited. Last year, for example, we reached 133,800 families and prior to that. We’re right on around the 400,000 family mark towards our 9.2 million goal in the second year, really in a year and a half. We’re extremely excited.

That is very, very exciting news. I know that it’s many new initiatives that help you to reach even more families. Tell us what’s new in the ministry.

What’s exciting in December 7th of 2023, we had a national newspaper cover of Victoria’s Family and it went throughout the country. That has exposed us to over 30 million families in the U.S. From that, we’ve got a great deal of responses. One of those responses is a new partnership that we’re forming with Hampton University to come alongside of them and work in eight counties in the Hampton Roads area. We’re really excited about that. Millions of families will be exposed to what does it looks like to have family transformation taking place in their homes.

That’s phenomenal. How can people reach you and how can they reach your weekly resource that you have as well?

They can reach us at VictoriousFamily.org. Our resources are there and we’re excited because we have a brand new resource that just came out. It’s our Weekly Rhythms Guide. It really gives the parent and individual a day-to-day rhythm and how they might walk in Christ. We really would encourage that they get a copy of our Weekly Rhythms Guide for parents and individuals.

Thank you so much, Terence. I’m so glad that you’re here with me. To you out there in the audience, please go to VictoriousFamily.org, donate to the ministry, get the Weekly Rhythms Guide, and see what else is new in the ministry. See you next time.

The Bible League: Spreading The Word Of God Globally

It’s Dr. Karen here, and I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles, ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip also teaches and trains local people in how to share the Word of God. The president and CEO of the Bible League, Jos Snoep is with me to share a little bit more about what the Bible League is doing.

The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As Bible League, we just come alongside those local pastors. Last year I met a pastor, his name is Rolando in the Amazon and he has this great vision to reach 200 communities with the Word of God. We’re able to come alongside them and help them with Bibles and resources.

Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You, the Bible League, are the hands and feet to the local people on the ground, and there are partners and donors out there who can be hands and feet to you, as you also share with others. Those of you who are reading, if you want to be part of this ministry, and I invite you to be a part of it, I’m a part of it, go to BibleLeague.org, see more about the ministry, and see how you can participate and donate.

 

Important Links

 

March 4, 2024

Janice Bryant Howroyd: The First African-American Woman Billion Dollar Company Founder [Episode 466]

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Janice Bryant Howroyd | Billion-Dollar Company

The Voice of Leadership (Podcast & YouTube) /Dr. Karen Speaks Leadership (TV Show and iHeart Radio) | Janice Bryant Howroyd | Billion-Dollar Company

According to American Express, Black women start businesses at six times the national average. Black women also hold more advanced degrees than any other group of women. In this episode, Dr. Karen celebrates the life and journey of Janice Bryant Howroyd, a remarkable and inspirational African-American woman who was the first to create and operate a multi-billion-dollar company.

Janice Bryant Howroyd’s parents raised her with the admonition to “Turn challenges into opportunities.” Her lifelong personal motto is “Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally.”

Dr. Karen shares the amazing life and accomplishments of this great innovator, and she summarizes 10 leadership lessons we can all embrace.

Go to actonegroup.com to learn more about Janice Bryant Howroyd’s company

The post Janice Bryant Howroyd: The First African-American Woman Billion Dollar Company Founder [Episode 466] first appeared on TRANSLEADERSHIP, INC®.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Janice Bryant Howroyd: The First African-American Woman Billion Dollar Company Founder [Episode 466]

Introducing Janice Bryant Howroyd

According to American Express, Black women are starting businesses at six times the national average, and even in spite of the challenges that Black women face the double whammy of being Black and also being women they have unique abilities. They have unique experiences to share with others, and that includes the perseverance that it takes to be successful.

Some of the issues that people of color face in general include a lack of startup capital for their businesses. It is very difficult to get bank loans and to get the resources that are necessary because of both racial and gender discrimination, especially in the finance and tech sectors. Nevertheless, Black women are some of the most educated groups of women out there in terms of the number and percentage of undergraduate degrees.

I want to talk about a particular Black woman who is exceptionally successful, and her name is Janice Bryant Howroyd. She is the first Black woman to own a $1 billion company, and that’s a multi-billion-dollar company. It is the largest privately held minority woman-owned personnel company founded in the United States. Imagine that privately held as well.

Janice’s Humble Beginnings In Beverly Hills

You might wonder, how did she start this business, and how did she grow it to over $1 billion? That’s what we are going to talk about a little bit about her story and how she made it happen. In 1978, she started a small office in Beverly Hills, California, a long way from her state of origin, which was North Carolina. She went out to California to do some work as an executive assistant, essentially for her brother-in-law, who worked for Billboard Magazine. While she was there, he introduced her to lots of executives, celebrity people, and other partners who would be wonderful for her to know for what she ultimately would start.

One of the things she did was she noticed that even at Billboard, it was challenging to find the right talent and to get that talent working in the way they needed to work. Seeing this, she saw an opportunity and a way that she could make a difference in employment, and that’s when she launched her staffing agency. She wanted to help her brother-in-law’s company be more successful.

He was the first client. As she worked with him and got success, she reached out to other people and got more clients. She ended up at some point having clients such as the Ford Motor Company and also other companies of a similar genre like Toyota. She worked in telecommunications, energy companies, and some of the top ones as well. What she noticed and how she made this all work was that she would look around and find out what her clients needed next. Whatever they needed next, she would end up creating it. That’s why her company is called ActOne Group because it is a constellation of many companies that have been put together.

Over time, she’s had companies like AgileOne, which focuses on management solutions that businesses need. She has a staffing company called AppleOne, and she has A-Check, which is a company that does background checks for personnel. She noticed that her clients needed to have background checks and to create a secure environment.

One of her secrets to success and one of her success factors is making the candidates, the applicants, the focus of her attention. These are the ones who are looking for the jobs, looking for the postings, and her objective is to bring great people together with great companies so that they can make their magic together. In focusing on the applicant, one of the things she did, which was different from a lot of staffing companies at the time, was that she trained her applicants to meet the employer’s expectations and to become and be a better fit. She said, “We can teach that. We could teach them how to be a better fit.”

People have to come to work with the right attitude. The rest can be taught and trained. Click To Tweet

What she’s looking for in the search, however, is the right attitude. People have to come with the right attitude. All the rest she can teach and train. She also focused on globalization because she does have a global company and localization. Not only was it global, and paying attention to the regulations and all that pertained to global, but she had to understand what was important in each local context where her applicants ultimately would be hired, where they’d be working, and where clients in terms of the big companies and employers would need in their workforce.

These were some of the things that she paid attention to. It’s interesting even though she had a wonderful Beverly Hills, California, address for the company, it was in the front of a rug store. So it was not glamorous, per se, but she did want a glamorous address that she could grow into and live into ultimately. That was the first office.

One of the things she did to get traction in the marketplace and she would have been an unknown at the time is that she would say to her prospects and the employers, “I’m going to send you the right employees, and if they are not and if they don’t work out, I will refund your money.” That’s how confident she was about the service that she could deliver.

How did she finance this operation? How did she get the capital? She started the business with $1,500, $900 that she saved, and $600 that she borrowed from her mother. That was the seed capital that she needed to seed this business. She believed in herself, investing the money in this idea, and her mother believed in her too, providing some seed capital in addition to her savings.

That’s an important principle because once she started the company, she realized that she needed other kinds of equipment, particularly tech-related equipment. Even though she started with a phone and essentially a fax machine and some basic kinds of business tools, she had to purchase more. She had to invest even more in that business in order for it to be successful. In about 1990, she relocated the business to Torrance, California, and by 1997 it was already a $75 million company. 10 years after that, she had offices in 75 US cities. That in and of itself is amazing.

Finding Opportunities In A Harsh Background

When we think about Janice Bryant Howroyd, it’s important to note that she learned her basic values for life and business from home. That’s important because, with that wisdom, by 2011 her company was number 3 on the industrial service companies list. It was a $1.4 billion company in revenue, and there were multi-billions at this point, but she had reached that point in 2011.

When you think about her backstory, she grew up in a small town in North Carolina. She was the 4th of 11 children and was born on the 1st of September in 1952 in Tarboro, North Carolina. The conditions at that time were challenging. It was a segregated place where she grew up. She was one of a number of teens and children who first integrated at the high school where she lived. The high school had been all White, and she was part of that first wave of African-American children to desegregate that school.

Never compromise who you are to become who you wish to be professionally. Click To Tweet

Even with this harsh and difficult background, her parents did not give her any excuses whatsoever. Their wisdom to her was to turn your challenges into opportunities. Her number one mantra for herself was never to compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally. She had a strong sense of ethics and who she was and what was important.

One story from her background is that she would get textbooks that were hand-me-downs from other schools. I remembered that experience because I also experienced that in my second elementary school, where I was getting hand-me-down books from the White students. They had markings on them. They weren’t always perfect, and in her case, pages were missing out of the textbooks.

Her father said to her, “You are smart enough to figure it out. Read the pages that exist and then research and discover what’s missing.” Her mother took it to another level and said, “When you discover what is missing, write that down, tape it into the book so that you leave a better roadmap, a better textbook, a better pathway for the next person who comes behind you. They won’t have to read the textbook with the missing pages. You fill in the gaps.” Her mother also said, “In order to be outstanding, sometimes you have to stand out.” That’s what Janice’s life was all about. It was standing out.

She also strongly believed in innovation. Innovation was what kept her ahead of all the others out there, and she took advantage of everything she saw. She realized when she started working for her brother-in-law that she had specific skills. She was very good in leadership, strategy, and being a consummate problem solver. That was going to be a benefit to her being this Uber entrepreneur, starting this company that would be a multi-billion-dollar company.

As she was going along, she was one of the first in her industry to be on the World Wide Web, and that also proved to be an advantage. She was one of the first staffing companies to be in that position, and that was in 1995. By 1989, she had opened her first office outside of the United States, and that was in Ontario, Canada. She was very much on the move and quickly on the move.

Throughout her career, she received numerous honors and accolades. The BET Black Entertainment Television honored her with the Entrepreneur Award in 2008. From the National Association of Women Business Owners, she was in the Hall of Fame as an honoree in 2011, and from the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame, she was listed in 2015.

In 2016, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to be a member of his board of HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She is a graduate of North Carolina A&T, and she’s very proud of that legacy and heritage, what she learned there, and how she benefited from an HBCU, which is a historically Black college and university.

In 2016, she was also the recipient of the Black Enterprise A.G. Gaston Lifetime Achievement Award, if you don’t know who A.G. Gaston is, look him up because he was an amazing entrepreneur who was also successful back in his day. Family life was also important to Janice. She had 2 children, and those 2 children, a son, and a daughter, are now involved in the business with her as well, and that’s a great thing that she brought them into the business.

Her son is the president of AppleOne, one of her companies, and her daughter does the online branding for the company. She was also married to her husband, Bernard Howroyd from 1983 until 2020, when he died. Again, the personal and family relationships, are also important, not the business aspect, and she included her children in the business as well in terms of what she does to resource the community around her.

Her business has never been all about her. It was about building a better community and providing opportunities for others that she didn’t have. When she was looking for jobs, she did not have what she now provides to the job seeker. She wanted to give them what was an A-plus, high-class experience that she did not have.

As you grow, find more opportunities to pay it forward to the people around you. Click To Tweet

When she’s giving to the community, she refers to it as giving forward rather than giving back, and she says, “You give as you grow, not once you’ve made it, give to others as you grow along,” and she’s always asking the question, “What’s next? How do I pay it forward?” That’s what’s important to her. She’s had the opportunity to serve on many boards, including the board of North Carolina A&T, the Harvard Women’s Leadership Board, and the board of the USC Marshall School of Business. She’s done a lot of campus work that keeps her Millennial spirit alive. She would say what’s important to her is community success more than even individual success.

10 Leadership Lessons From Janice’s Life

As I wrap up this brief overview of the career of Janice Bryant Howroyd, I want to reiterate some of the leadership lessons that she lives by and that we also can learn from and live by. Number one, and she has this up in her office, and it says, “Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally.” I would say this is maintaining your integrity. If your success is based on you compromising that personal integrity, Janice would probably say that’s not her definition of success. That’s number one.

Number two, which she learned from her family, was to turn your challenges into opportunities. Number three, I would say grow by providing what’s next that your clients need. Early on, when she discovered that her clients needed some temporary workers, not full-time, she started staffing for that as well. Whatever they needed and whatever she saw out there in the marketplace, she was paying attention so that she could be alive to that.

Then number four, innovate with few resources. She was a person who was used to not having a whole lot of resources. $1,500 is not a lot for starting a business, and yet she used that wisely, innovated with that $1,500, innovated with the resources that she had until she got more and more resources, more and more tech support and solutions for her business, and now there’s no looking back. Number five stands out to be outstanding, and she certainly did that. Number six, use your smarts to figure out what’s missing. When she got that textbook with missing pages, her father said, “No excuse. You are smart. Go get it done,” and she did.

Give forward and leave a better textbook and playbook for the next person. Click To Tweet

Number seven would be to give forward and leave a better textbook and playbook for the next person. She believes in mentoring, coaching, and advising, and that’s what she does through her board service, so she leaves things better for the next person. Giving forward. Eight would be what I’d call investing in yourself, and she’d go beyond that, not just yourself. Invest in your people, provide what they need, invest in your company, and have a mindset that’s work forward. Rather than focusing on what’s holding you back, work forward. That’s what she would say.

Number nine, I would say build on your unique gifts and talents. Everybody has unique gifts and talents, and she came to know that hers were strategy, leadership, and also problem-solving. Number ten would be to learn from live role models. She learned from her brother-in-law, role models in books, and role models in history. One of her primary historical role models was Madam C.J. Walker, who was the first Black woman millionaire, so she studied her and learned from her playbook as well, and that was part of her success in getting there.

Janice Bryant Howroyd is also an author. She’s written two books, and those books are The Art of Work: How to Make Work, Work for You, which she wrote in 2009, and then she also wrote Acting Up: Winning in Business and Life Using Down-Home Wisdom, and that book she wrote in 2019. She would define wisdom as knowledge plus experience. Knowledge plus your experience. We have a lot of people in our world who have a lot of knowledge. They don’t necessarily have wisdom because it’s not married with the experience and they haven’t leveraged the lessons from that.

Janice Bryant Howroyd is a remarkable and inspirational woman who is a speaker now encouraging other people. She is an author and she’s left a playbook for the rest of us to pay attention to. If you’ve never heard of her, do a little bit of study, a little bit of research, and be inspired by this woman who has created a multi-billion dollar privately held company and business, which is a group of companies.

Reflecting On The Word Of God

Congratulations to Janice Bryant Howroyd, thanks for being our inspiration as we continue to build our businesses. As I’m thinking about Janice Bryant Howroyd, I want to share with you familiar verses that come from the Proverbs 31 chapter, and this is the chapter we often think about as the Proverbs 31 woman. There’s some language here that does fit Janice and I’d like to share this, this is Proverbs 31 and I’m going to start with verse 13, which says, “She seeks wool and flax and willingly works with her hands. She is like a merchant ship. She brings her food from afar. She also rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and a portion for her maidservants. She considers a field and buys it, and from her profits, she plants a vineyard. She girds herself with strength and strengthens her arms. She perceives that her merchandise is good and her lamp does not go out at night.”

She stretches out her hands to the distaff and her hand holds the spindle. She extends her hand to the poor. Yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household is clothed with scarlet. She makes tapestry for herself. Her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known at the gates. When he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments sells them and supplies sashes. For the merchant’s strength and honor are her clothing. She shall rejoice in time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom and on her tongue is the law of kindness. She watches over the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise and call her blessed. Her husband also praises her.”

Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all, and that certainly can be said as true of Janice Bryant Howroyd, having excelled them all, having been generous to others, caring for the community, caring for the needy, caring for her own family and her children, and being willing to sell the best in the marketplace to make a difference for others. We celebrate you, Janice Bryant Howroyd. Thanks for being the best.

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Spirit Wings kids Foundation’s Work In Uganda

I want to tell you a little bit about Spirit Wings Kids Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and it’s an organization that provides profound services for orphans, widows, and families across the globe in many ways, especially in the country of Uganda. I’m speaking with Donna Johnson, who is the Founder of Spirit Wings Kids and also a board member. Donna, tell us about some examples of the profound work that you are doing in Uganda.

Thank you. We were there and it was incredible. It’s more than an orphanage. We have a soccer academy that keeps the boys off the street. We have a widow’s program that matches them with children and it’s a thriving network of entrepreneurs it’s been such a meaningful blessing to see the work that we are doing there.

What I love about what you said is you are talking about their whole lives. You are creating families between the widows and the children, and you are also making sure they have recreation and something to do with the soccer academy, and you are looking at the job situation and the entrepreneurial aspect, and as a businesswoman yourself who’s very successful, you are right in line with being able to make that difference.

Thank you so much for the difference that you are making and I’m inviting everyone to go to the Spirit Wings Kids Foundation website and donate now 100% of everything you donate goes to those people who are in need and who are receiving those services. Thank you so much for donating, and Donna, thank you for this ministry.

 

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