Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.ukl, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot Uk, you can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 88 with the title Adversity and Authentic Leadership, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Samreen McGregor. Sam reen describes herself as an executive coach and a strategic advisor to leaders and organisations.

And she encourages others to see diversity and trauma as a catalyst for empowerment. When I asked Samarine to describe a superpower, she said it is her unique blend of multicultural insight and transformative executive coaching expertise that she brings to the world. Hello, Samreen. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jo. It's great to be here today.

Pleasure. It's really great. I've had a great time chatting to you in the green room before we've gone live here. I can't wait to find out more. Really excited about this. So Samreen adversity and authentic leadership.

What does that great. Great start. Well, look, there's two different words there I guess I want to speak about. One is one that's very core to me and certainly been core to me in my conscious life over the last six or seven years. And that's diversity and in the current backdrop that we all share, whether it's the last four or five years before and during and after the pandemic, or whether it's the very current, what I would call polycrisis of a sociopolitical economic, environmental, health, all of those factors in the current reality are volatile. They're changing, they're significantly altered. And although that may have been true 100 years ago, for those who lived, our access and our experience of those factors are particularly magnified at the moment. And so adversity is really something that I would suggest not many of us escape.

And those adversities can span from being very personal, very internal, very intrinsic to us all the way through to quite externally driven and manifest in how we live, in our behaviours and how we work. And I feel that the skills needed to learn how to navigate adversities and live with them and work with them are truly critical at this time. And then authenticity. Well, I work with many people across many industries and many organisations and businesses, and I have done for well over 2023, 24 years. And throughout that time, whatever the context, I have experienced a number of factors that get in the way of how we connect with one another. And to use some psychological terms like masks and even metaphors like shields, we bring them with us to the places that we socialise. We work even in our own homes, in our own families. And there are very legitimate reasons why these masks or shields or barriers support us at times and that can get in the way of us being our true selves.