Rebel Hearts and Healing Paths

Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and Ibe 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. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehapen.couk. 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 87 with the title Rebel Hearts and Healing Paths.

And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Debbie Dannon. Debbie describes herself as a leadership coach, facilitator and rebel. When I asked Debbie to describe her superpower, she said, taking pain and transforming it through healing and liberation into love both her own and others. Hello, Debbie. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. It's so good to be here with you.

It's brilliant. I mean, we've known each other now four or five years, ever since we did a design for inclusion with Fearless Futures. Oh, that was a long time ago. Way before COVID Way before COVID You.

Are definitely one of the trainees that I remember. I remember we connected quite deeply there and I was so delighted to reconnect with you through LinkedIn in more recent times, as we're both striving for similar things in the world. So I'm really, really glad that we not only met but also reconnected.

Yeah. And I've been kind of secretly a bit of a fangirl of yours ever since. So, yeah, I was really inspired by that session.

Mutual fangirling is about to occur.

I can handle it. I can handle it. Can the audience? I don't know. So, Debbie debbie, tell me. Rebel hearts and healing paths. Tell me about yourself.

Wow, I love this introduction. It's really speaking to who I think I'm becoming in the world and who I'm inviting my clients and my co conspirators to become as well. So, my name is Debbie. My pronouns are she, her. I was born in South London, but I live in North London. I do believe you can be both. People are very binary about these things. But I'm first generation in this country.

My parents came from Istanbul in Turkey as Turkish Jews. So kind of minority within a minority living in a kind of predominantly white Christian or white atheist community in South London. So ever since I was really little, I found myself having to explain things about why we didn't have a Christmas tree. And people asking, do you speak Jewish at home or Turkish with your family? And you're like, I'm like, Well, Jewish is our religion and Turkish is the language, these sorts of things, where even from a very young age, I found myself in a kind of explanatory role. So maybe it's not surprising, the kind of career path that I've taken from there. I have always been fascinated in religion and identity and I guess what has people act as they do? I guess what has people act in ways that are compassionate and loving and affirming and kind of almost selfless, or, I guess, generous in those ways and then also ways in which human hearts can kind of close and we can become, by the same token, closed off. We can become judgmental, we can become disconnected, we can do harm to each other. And I've always been interested in that, but through different lenses.

So I studied theology and religious studies at university and philosophy. I was at the same time super active in a Jewish youth group where I learned a lot of the leadership skills. And the facilitation that I do has its roots really in a lot of that theory and that practise of youth work. Very trying to be very democratic, trying to kind of remove a lot of the power dynamics that exist in formal education settings, making it possible for different people to participate, removing barriers. And then my career has kind of had different chapters to it. So I worked initially in the interfaith space. So I was one of the co founders of an interfaith organisation. It was at the time called Three Faith Forum.

It's now. The Faith and Belief Forum. And we were developing a youth programme, a Muslim and a Christian colleague, and me as a Jewish colleague. We were highlighting and basically kind of imagining what it would be like to go into schools, particularly single faith schools, where they won't really meet people from different faiths and backgrounds. And we were experimenting with what kind of programming could we do with these young people and actually their teachers, too, in order to break down stereotypes. To help young people become more fluent and more confident. Having conversations about faith, without needing to abandon their own faith or without needing to change who they are in any way but making space for others in their world. And that led to developing a whole range of programming for businesses, too, around faith awareness, around how do we accommodate our Muslim friends at Ramadan? How do we not plan those meetings on the Jewish High Holy Days in September when everyone's back from holidays, but then Jews are taking off time? How do we ensure that there is vegetarian food if our Hindu colleagues who are vegetarian? How do we make sure that we're really making it possible for people to participate? And also addressing, at the really thin end of the wedge, anti Semitism Islamophobia, the kind of racism that kind of gets and prejudice that gets wrapped up with religion and the particular ways that plays out.

So I did that for about eight years and then I moved to the city and I was working, as you and I now do, joanne with organisations. So I was designing leadership pathways for the kind of, I would say early talent, so it would be apprentices graduates and maybe kind of the first step up into kind of a bit more seniority in those first two years of working for corporates. So I was doing stuff with Deloitte and Clifford Chance and the bank of England and Vodafone and these kinds of folks really looking at how do we not only equip those young people to become part of the organisation, but how do we foster a sense of belonging? So they want to know. Retention is a really, really big question. You spent all this time and money and effort onboarding these young people and really giving them the best possible start in their careers, but why would they stay? They might stay for the pay. But more likely, and particularly we see that with Gen Y and Gen Z is they're going to stay because the values align, because they feel they belong, because they are being appreciated and they aren't sort of experiencing sort of being undermined or being patronised or being done down, which in all workplaces there are pockets of that. Right, so how do we address that? So that was fascinating work. I did that for a couple of years and I've been working for myself since 2017 and it's looked a number of different ways.

I had an amazing partnership business for a couple of years, for about four years, with with my old business partner, Yasmin Akhtar. It was called Trust Lab. And we were experimenting with, how do we do really long term inclusion solutions with organisations who aren't just, wham, bam, let's do this on a Tuesday, and that can be that, but really looking at the long term path, of diagnosis of what's going on in an organisation, really listening to people and then designing bespoke interventions, whatever those look like, whether they look like training conversations, processes of defining leadership competencies and then ways of embedding them and then being able to communicate that internally. Lots of organisations want to rush to the bit where you shout about it to the outside world, but we were very clear that the first step is to start to do that internally, so that we're not kind of shouting about something before we've really achieved it inside. Including the learnings, right. Including the ways we mess up along the way. I think some of the best learning comes from that, if we can have the humility and accountability to get there. So it's worth saying that at this point in my journey, when Yassin and I were still working together, I went through a really difficult period in my own life.

I experienced a miscarriage and then subsequent termination for medical reasons. So I was having fertility troubles for about two, three years and I was really down and out. Joanne I was not able to get out of bed. I was really suffering I didn't want to see friends who were pregnant. I was really having a tough time. And I guess what I learned during that time through seeking support, first of all, that seeking support is super important and shouldn't be something that we put off, shouldn't be something that we think, well, I'm okay. I'm just about surviving. I think sometimes, all of us, particularly British people, I think maybe, Joanne, you can concur we can be very stiff upper lip about these things.

We can be like, oh, no, it's all fine. It's all all right. But actually, it's not really all right. So I got amazing support from a baby loss charity. But what I've really understood is there are parts of us that need to be heard. In each of us, there's sort of self inclusion that needs to happen. There were parts of me that I really didn't particularly want to acknowledge, that I was angry, that I was frustrated, that I was jealous, that I was grieving, that I felt alone. That's really difficult stuff to turn towards.

It's much easier to turn away from it. But what I found was, and this speaks to the superpower that you mentioned when I turn towards those things, first of all, no emotion ever lost forever. I know it feels like it will, the pain, but to this day, there's never been a difficult emotion that I've turned towards that has lasted forever. And the other thing is that by turning towards that pain, I've been able to move towards being an activist in that field as well. Around baby loss, not just around securing good provision for mental health support and perinatal mental health support, but also particularly around queer couples getting the support that they need when they go through baby loss. Because even the Miscarriage association in certain areas were very kind of, I think, insensitive in the way that there were certain chapters where there was some insensitivity around two lesbian mums, for example. Only one of them the one who had miscarried getting support, but then the other mum couldn't go to the men's group because it would be weird. It was just strange.

So trying to sort of support in that way as well. So I now I'm a trained integral coach, which is a very holistic school of coaching, which takes into account a lot of business coaching. If anyone listening to this has had business coaching before, a lot of coaching is kind of head and heart. It's what I'm thinking about and what I'm feeling. And there's a goal, and we remove the obstacles and we go get the goal, and then we kind of, like, have a few fall downs. Like, we trip over the hurdles, and then we get back up again and we keep going towards the goal. My school of coaching, integral Coaching, which I now teach as well. So I'm now one of the faculty of the Integral Coaching School.

Third space in the UK. This is a school of coaching, which takes into account much more of the human experience that kind of holistic. Joanne so we're talking about the spiritual I. E. What we believe our purpose to be, not necessarily religious, but our sense of purpose and community and connection with values, with the web of life. However you want to see that it's also about somatics it's about the body. It's about the fact that our brain is a physical thing living inside a physical body. And our legs are not just kind of like wheels that move things from place to place.

Our whole bodies are experiencing everything we're experiencing. When we experience emotions and all of that, that's really big as well. Yeah. Go on, Joanne. You're going to jump in.

I'm dying to ask you some things. First of all, you shared your experience through your pregnancy or miscarriages or termination, and one thing that jumped out at me there is that it's really hard for people to know what to say to you, isn't it? You must have found you're brave. You're this all these words, things coming out which are in danger of being patronising or not helpful or here we go again, almost verging on microaggression, experiencing the same things all over again. Reliving that trauma and having to explain to someone how you're feeling and how that sort of plays into I think a lot of things we talk about in the inclusion, the diversity space, is this fear of getting it wrong. I won't see Debbie this week because I don't know how to support her. I don't how to ask her that question. And fear of getting it wrong is a real paralyzer in the dei space. So how can people overcome that? I've just asked you that question now on the back of what you've said, and my brain's been running around overtime trying to figure out the right language to use.

So how can people overcome this?

Oh, that's such a great question, Joanne. And I think it shows such sensitivity to go, I know there's something to be said and I don't know quite what that is. And I think there's something to be said for affirming just going, that sounds really hard, right? Not trying to be trying to kind of make a hero of someone go, well, you're so brave. I could never do what you're doing. Or you hear when people die and people say, oh, I can't imagine what you're going through. Well, it is imaginable because it's happened. You're imagining it right now by empathising with me. So actually go to that space, imagine what it must be like, and just reflect back what you're hearing or what you imagine.

Just saying, that sounds really hard. That sounds really difficult. There can be a tendency, can't there, to try to minimise or rationalise so saying, well, it's good that you can get pregnant, isn't it? Or, oh, but don't worry because I have a sister who had five miscarriages and now she's got three healthy kids and it's like, that's got really nothing to do with me. But that sounds a lot like you trying to make me feel better, but also make yourself feel better, because wouldn't it be nice if there was something simple that we could say that could make it better? So I think rather than try to make it better. Because quite often with grief, with loss, even with some of the stuff that's going on right now, I mean, my family in the Middle East and my friends who I used to facilitate with in the west bank and in know people are really grieving and they're in a really tough spot right now. I think trying to go into well, let me make it better by trying to rationalise it is a really it's such a well meaning move, but it's not the one that's going to bring relief. I think the more we can almost hold the mirror up and say, I see you, I really do see that you're trying and I really admire you, for these are the characteristics I see that you're showing, but I just want to acknowledge that that must be really hard.

See, I cheated by asking you a meta question, didn't I, about how to answer the question, how to ask the question. So I was able to talk about it with you without actually diving into your pain, because I didn't know where you were on that journey or whether that has healed within you or it's still there with you. So it can be tricky. I think what I would say to anybody is have a similar question. Just don't lean away from it. Lean into it with an open heart without being invasive and just be there for people. It's quite simple sometimes, but people do get scared. The other thing you mentioned right at the beginning, and there's so much in your opening to dive into, was the fact you're a minority and a minority.

And when we think about what's going on in the world right now, certainly in the Middle East area, you've grown up in a world as a person of Jewish faith, in a Jewish family, in a very Muslim country with probably different core languages, Hebrew versus Turkish, different character sets. And now you're in England or the UK, speaking English in a very kind of I suppose, again, our society is quite polarised. It's not all integrated, having to listen to what's going on in the world and people's opinions. And we obviously see marches in London at the moment, one against pro Palestinian, some anti Semitism, anti Semitic marches going on. We got far right people trying to dive in there and cause trouble for their own ends, and the government not able to make a cohesive statement of support. You must be really conflicted, not in your own community, because knowing as much as I know about you. You have compassion for all sides as.

Well, don't yeah, no, thank you for asking that, Jo. It's been really difficult, and I should say maybe this is the prelude to this, is that my rebel leadership practise now I run a practical rebel leadership is really about trying to show up in a world that is not set up for us to flourish, right? And I mean, violence is the absolute kind of sharp end of that. But for all of us, flourishing is something that we really have to work hard at. And I think you talked about thriving right at the beginning. And my whole philosophy is, what's the rebel move? What's the rebel move we can be making in a world that's not set up for flourishing, to create space for flourishing. And I do that through rebel authenticity, rebel balance and rebel courage. And I think I've been challenged in all of those areas with what's happened, what's been unfolding in Israel and the Middle East the last few weeks, because my instinct with that is like, rebel authenticity, I should speak out on what I believe in and my compassion for all sides and be a leader. Rebel balance, I should really ground myself and not get swept this way and that way.

Rebel courage, I should really have a clear sense of what it is that I want to say. And the fact is, Joanne, when the trauma is fresh and I was traumatised on the 7 October, I was on Facebook looking through, literally because the news was not fast enough to catch up with what was happening. I was just going through, looking at all my friends in Israel saying, where's this person? Where's this person? I can't get hold of this person. And essentially some of the attacks were broadcast live by the people committing them, by the terrorists. And I saw some of what was happening live and I didn't realise until about two days later that it had completely taken up resonance in my body and completely dysregulated me. And I mean, if you think about the prolificness of these videos and what we're seeing, the footage from Gaza, from Know, I think a lot of us are in a state of dysregulation. Our bodies are not able to hold this much pain. And I guess to answer your question, yes, it's been deeply conflicting.

It's been also deeply worrying to me that there's elements of the inclusion space where by taking sides in this, by saying, hey, if you support the Palestinians, then you support terrorism, or if you support the Israelis, then you're racist and you're supporting state terrorism, whatever. By taking those sides, there's a way in which also Islamophobia and anti Semitism are allowed to play in those spaces that has made it really unsafe for me and actually unsafe for my Muslim friends and colleagues as well. And we've actually shared a lot of experiences of being like because I have relationships with Muslim colleagues and friends and actually Arab friends who are Christian or who are not religious. It's like, yeah, this is really, really unsafe for us right now. My husband is Iraqi Indian, Jewish, so he's a brown man. I'm kind of white passing, brown passing, depending, whichever way you want to look at it. I'm kind of neither nor, but he's very much brown. And as well as seeing anti Semitic graffiti and having our Jewish bakery got smashed, the glass got smashed in.

As well as that, he got profiled on public transport by the London Transport Police for being brown and bearded and carrying a so, like, that's the kind of complexity that we're living in right now. So what I am realising, the rebel move, Joanne, is for me, has been a rebel. Authenticity is like surrounding myself with people who see me as a human and who understand me and who don't paint me well. Because you're Jewish or because you have family in Israel, because you spent time in Israel, you can't possibly be part of our inclusion party. Like, I've literally had to leave spaces because I've called out some anti Semitism that's played itself out and wanted to have a conversation about it. And you know what? I didn't have the energy. And I was like, I'm not going to sit here and educate you when I myself am traumatised and going through ongoing trauma. On the other side of it, I have friends and I have people who listen to me and who recognise who I am.

And I've had some of the most fruitful conversations about what's going on with my co conspirators, with whom I've facilitated dialogue in the region, because they know the complexity of it, because they're really committed to a different reality than the one we're seeing. In terms of rebel balance, I've just had to come off all social media, Joanne, like I have come off LinkedIn. I've decided I'm not going to retraumatize myself. I went on it for five minutes this morning and then cried for half an hour because I was like, this is just not it for me. And that's really hard for me because that's a big platform for me. I'm very, very connected to all my clients and co conspirators out there. But in terms of the way that the dialogue is unfolding, I'm not okay with it and it's discard. Bobby led into my system and I'm getting also somatic trauma support.

So I'm having weekly trauma support again, reaching out for help. Do it early. I did it within two weeks. This time, I didn't wait months and months. And then in terms of rebel courage, I think the rebel move here is actually trying to imagine, I think, violence numbs imagination, Joanne, like, when things explode to the extent that they have, and when people are making statements about other human beings that are so dehumanising and who are actually when I think about. I've really experienced talk about turning towards difficult feelings. Like, I've experienced deep, deep sorrow and compassion for the Palestinian people and also deep, deep, I'm going to say it like anger and fury at the people who committed this against it could have been me and my like, had we been in the south of Israel visiting friends and family, that could have been us. So it's complex.

I feel all these things very, very deeply. But in terms of the rebel courage element, it's like, where can I create space or where can I find space? And it's not going to be online, I don't think, in the kind of social media age of dumpster fire, just say something and then leave and get into the comments kind of broadcast only comments situation. I think it's going to be some kind of maybe online, but private spaces with people who are really committed to listening and being with each other and not turning away just because someone says something they disagree with. I'm really ruminating on what might be the right place to place my rebel courage and actually serving my clients right now, like being there for my clients, many of whom have connections to the region, because I work with a lot of NGOs and think tanks and folks who are in the space. I think that's the best use of my rebel courage right now. So I guess it's a big learning. And I think for those of us in organisations as well, that sometimes when we're going through something big, our capacity just gets a bit smaller and we have to work within that capacity. Trying to overstretch myself and trying to be on LinkedIn and trying to be here and trying to be there doesn't serve right now.

I've got very limited capacity. Sometimes I get triggered by something in the news and I cry for an hour and that's okay, I have to be mindful about my capacity. And it's actually kind of a weird capitalist extractive narrative that says that I have to be everywhere all at once and I have to be showing up in that way all the time. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but certainly very complex time.

One thing I go back to, the Design for Inclusion sessions that you facilitated all those years ago. One thing that I've learned is that where do I get my information from? I get my information from the media. Do I trust the media? I'm not sure I can trust all of the media. I can't always unpack it. There's so many tropes, so many stereotypes, so many historical political angles on things that I've learned that what I need to do is find my own source of truth that I can trust. And even that is tricky to wade through. But one thing I have realised, listening to comments that you've made, other people I've made, that I know online and in person is that I don't know. I've learned that I don't know.

I've learned that I have no ability to make a judgement, therefore I'm stepping out of judgement and listening. I do know that I want peace. I do know that I don't want people to die, whoever they may be. I don't want families destroyed. I don't want infrastructure and the future hopes and dreams of people, whoever they may be, destroyed and torn apart. I do know that. So I do know that. I want Deescalation.

I do know I want Simplification. I do know that I want people to live. That's where I start from. And how we got to here is something I'm learning about, and I'm taking it as learning opportunity without putting you into any trauma. I saw something on the probably on LinkedIn or Twitter or something around a recently broadcast episode of University Challenge, and there's a ferraro around this blue octopus that uses a mascot. And there was information about the person whose mascot it was was wearing Palestinian colours on her dress, her T shirt, wherever, and superficially, I had no idea what the blue octopus signified and I.

Don'T have any I don't think I.

Even well, I say there was a lot for all around it. I did the research and it transpires that the blue octopus was a symbol used by the Third Reich, by the Nazis, and there was lots of cartoons around this blue octopus engulfing the world with its claws into everything. So it became a trope of antisemitism back in the 1930s. So I don't know whether this was the signal that someone's trying to put out or wasn't, but I then step back and say it's a problematic symbol for some. I don't have to debate whether it is or isn't problematic to me. If it's problematic to somebody else, I just go, thank you. I understand. Now, I recognise what you're saying.

I have the choice not to propagate that pain or that emblem, but I've learned about it. So I think we could all take a bit of that education to sort of take everything that we react to as an opportunity to learn and to dig deep rather than fall straight into judgement and taking aside, based on often, a lack of historic detailed.

Totally. Totally. And what Sus is really bringing up for me, Joanne, when you say, you know, I can take that on board and I can learn something new, rather than needing to dispute it because we're taking a side and we're like, well, but that side always lies, or those people aren't trustworthy. And I think there's a number of ways in which the way the current discourse is going kind of displays a number of the things that rebel leadership is really set up to stand against or stand to imagine something new. So, for example, performativity the idea that we have to perform or do something a certain way to get likes. Or strokes or to be appreciated versus who we are as human beings, how we show up, what we're about in the world being of intrinsic value. And that comes from industrial revolution kind of humans as machines kind of ideology of humans being productive and performing right. Your value comes from the output that you create or your performance.

And I think that activism has we talk about performative activism. I think that's something to really, really question and think about how do we do this in a way that's relational, in a way that's grounded. Another thing that I think rebel leadership stands to kind of innovate, let's say, is this idea of scarcity. So you talked about kind of like, oh, you can just step back and say thank you. There's lots of things I don't know and that's okay, and I can say I don't know. And that's not a sign of weakness, that's just a sign of the world being really complex. And there's been lots of things I didn't know. I didn't actually make the link with the Blue Optimus until you mentioned it.

And I'm like, oh, thanks, Joanne. Okay, that makes sense. But what I see even in the spaces that I facilitate in organisations is sometimes there's a sort of scarcity, is scarcity of budget, scarcity of space. There's only so much space that we can give people. There's only so much support. There's this way in which capitalism, again, and I guess kind of the mindset that we have of there's only so much to go around and we see this in the refugee narratives, stuff that gets turned out about, oh, well, refugees are coming, they're going to take our jobs or they're going to take this from us. And it's like, actually, what if we could look at this from a place of abundance? What if there is an abundance of compassion? What if there is an abundance of understanding to be had? What if there is an abundance of nuance? What if there is an abundance of resource? How can we come from that place? And that doesn't suddenly add three zeros to a budget. I'm not saying that this is kind of magical thinking, but it does change our orientation towards what's possible.

And it actually takes a lot of self work and it's what I work with my clients in kind of leadership spaces, is how to ground yourself in that space of abundance rather than scarcity. I don't know if that's something you come across in your work too, Joanne.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying there and it is. It's trying to focus on those things that are more than just self promotion or self declaration of allyship and self declaration of yay, I'm going on a march, yay. Because I'm a good person. And yes, do take part, do be visible, do stand up, but do, do more than just be there. It's about tomorrow and the day after and the week after and the year after about how you can really do the lifelong learning. And I'm sure you do talk about allyship. I always talk about as holding the rope. If you're in a tug of war competition, if you just let the rope drop, then it's going to get pulled over.

So you just got to help that tension with everybody else and recognise that your hand on that rope is a valuable resource and a valuable support, no matter how much you're pulling, as long as you're not letting it go. I think that's really important. And I think the thing I'm concerned I don't know if concern is the right word, but where we are now, this is what, November 2023, we saw a couple of years ago, just before, around the COVID time, we had Black Lives Matter with George Floyd, we had that murder. We had some too. We had violence against women and girls, we had the Met police, we had all these things going on, we had vigils organisations were very focused on well being, mental health, lunch and learns and making sure that everybody was kept in touch and nobody knew what was going on. We're all in the same storm, but different boats, all these kind of analogies coming out. We're now, what, a couple of years later, is the world forgetting? Is the world forgetting? I don't know about you, but I'm seeing DNI people budgets being more limited, budgets being cut, reprioritized. I'm seeing we see it in the UK, this kind of war on Wokism, this anti wokeness of right wing tropes.

We see rise of right wing power across the world pushing back on. What I quite rightly think is progress that we've made over the last few years being etched away, and suddenly we've got people who hold power and privilege feeling threatened. What's your take on that? That's what I want to know.

Oh, goodness, yes, of course. And I guess that's sort of how the rope moves, isn't it? It's like, oh, gosh, they're pulling on it, we'd better pull harder in the other direction. Right? And I think it can be a real struggle sometimes, working in the inclusion space or campaigning. A lot of my clients are campaigners or activists, for example, whether they're in dei roles in organisations or whether they work for NGOs or think tanks or startups with a social mission. And really, I hear them talking about this same thing of, like, does it really make a difference? I feel like the people who aren't listening are still not listening and so forth. And the way I think about it, Joanne, is I'm not a campaigner. So when I see how things play out someone I've worked with an LGBTQ charity that has had a lot of struggles with the media and with all the sort of antitrans rhetoric and stuff and their staff being traumatised and all sorts of things. And when I see that, I get so angry and upset about that that actually in a way that by saying things that are hurtful and that are known to be hurtful by the people of power and privilege against people who are marginalised and who've been historically marginalised and still marginalised.

They are knocking them off balance so they can't do their work properly. And it's kind of this weird, I don't know, jujitsu move or something where it's like, oh, and now you're so traumatised or you're so incapacitated or so angry that you can't really do your work well. So a lot of my work is around, first of all, kind of keeping the faith, like keeping the home fires burning, that this work is worth doing, and bringing people together in community as well, to say like, look, we can all see the value in it and look at the impact and the wins that we've had. So not losing sight of that, but also giving people the tools to co regulate and self regulate when we get knocked down. Because I think what you're talking about when we hear about, oh, well, maybe it's all been for naught and there is this quite pervasive narrative of Dei is dead, which I actually think we need to wholesale reject because we know that that's not the case. It's out of the bottle now. No one's putting it back inside. And what I see is the need for us to regulate ourselves.

I absolutely love this book called The Politics of Trauma. Maybe we can put it in the show. Notes by Stacey Haynes. And it's all about the somatics the body stuff of doing this work, where actually our bodies take a know when we're putting ourselves in spaces where we're speaking about our lived experience or where we're standing up and being allies for people and we may be attacked or made an example of. Right, so how can we get really wise about that? And then when I look at my campaigner friends or colleagues or clients, it's really about recognising that this just hasn't happened by accident. The right is extremely well organised, they know what they're doing, it's very deliberate and it's very political. And I think there's ways in which and I'm not that person and I think this is something that I really believe in, Joanne, is the vision is big. There's a massive, massive vision that we've got to bring about and we can't all be everywhere.

I can't be in reproductive health and trans rights and this and that. I can stand for all those things and I can support my colleagues in all of those things. But as one human, you just can't be everywhere. So you've got to pick where your contribution is. And I know that my contribution is being the unblocker for those people who are making that change, like you, like people like the dei leads and the CEOs who really want to make a difference. And the project folks who are really leading this work. It's how can I unblock them, give them the rebel authenticity, the rebel balance, the rebel courage they need that they already have, that just needs awakening and unblocking, so that they can show up and do the difficult but absolutely necessary and absolutely alive and kicking work of inclusion and building flourishing for all.

I see myself in a very similar light. People accuse me, and I use that word, accuse me of being an activist, because I don't see myself as an activist. I don't see myself as a placard, waving, shouting, angry person who is speaking from a wound. I don't feel wounded or challenged personally in that way. I mean, some of that is my old privilege. Some of the fact is, as a trans woman, I've experienced very little personal discrimination in my life, so I am very privileged in that respect. So I've never felt that I've needed to get angry about anything. And I think that's actually a privilege in its own right, not feeling the need to get angry about something.

So I recognise and hold that. But I always see myself as an educator, if you like, an advocate, a supporter, a champion, a voice of the centre rather than a voice of the edge. I really want to bring people to the middle of the table, not on the edges all the time, which isn't easy. And we talk about this frustration and I always take it. There's a phrase in one of these videos, the essential one. Inclusion starts with I and towards the end they say it does start with I, it starts with me. And I can be the one as the message out of it. I can't change the world, I can't change everybody, but I can change me, I can change how I show up.

And then I can be in a position of social influence, leadership around me. And if I can influence one other person for the better, who then spreads that on, then that's the infection level of inclusion, if you like. And I'm also great. Another 01:00 a.m. I saying is a snowflake on its own will fall to the ground and melt on the pavement. A billion snowflakes are an avalanche. An avalanche changes landscapes. So it is about coming together for social change and not being frustrated that we can't do it all on our own because we won't.

But we can find other snowflakes. And I'm proud to be a snowflake. Call me a snowflake all you like.

I'll take it unique and resilient in community. And I totally agree with you that solidarity is the way. And that's how I see the vision. When I think about Rebel Courage and what the vision is and I do this with organisations, it's like the vision is so huge. But just because I'm not over there and over there and over there and over there and I found my little patch doesn't mean I can't support know her mission over here and I can't support Fahana over here and I can't support Mariam over there and Gary over there. I can absolutely be in community and in solidarity. And I would say, actually, I don't see activists as I think maybe there was a time when I thought activist was a dirty word or activist was just like so far outside my world. In a way, I am an activist and I embrace it.

And I also think that certain powers that be have kind of framed activists in that kind of slightly negative light or demanding light. I would say going on marches and being kind of public in that way, it doesn't feel like the best use of my energy. What I do kind of like you, is bring people around. So I'm a facilitator. I'm a conversation starter. I'm just brewing an idea right now about what it could look like to create a space for Jews, Muslims, Arabs, folks who are affected by what's going on right now, who are willing to be in spaces with people they disagree with. Not to come and discuss the conflict itself, but to share and listen and be present with what's happening for each other from a perspective of building the muscle of empathy and building the muscle of compassion and building a sense of imagination, of actually, the world is telling us we shouldn't be able to stand each other. And yet here we are, listening to each other and validating each other and affirming each other and seeing similarities in our experience.

That's the kind of activism that I want to be up to and that I know is going to make a lot more impact in my mind. And this is entirely me, and people can disagree with me and they can have their own ways of making impact that's going to make more impact for me. When I think about the kind of effort for effort exchange, effort for impact exchange, than going on marches for me, which could be traumatising for me anyway. So, yeah, I'm really hearing that. Yeah, I think we need to reclaim the term activism.

I think yeah, I think it's because it's been weaponized as a trope and a term. It's used to denigrate or put you down or you hear about trans activists and that conjures up this rebel, degenerate, sort of non constructive group of people, whereas the people on the other side of the fence are the decent, upstanding, middle class people who are perfectly reasonable. So, yeah, it's how you frame it. And I think sometimes the word activist is thrown in there as a slur and a pejorative and I think not celebrated. I think that's probably where I don't identify with it because I don't want to identify with it as a slur. It's not my identity. It may be something that people perceive me as, but are they perceiving me? As I say, in a negative way or using it against me negatively. So, yeah, maybe that's why I reject it.

But I guess I activate and activize myself in ways every day.

You activate each other about other people, too. Don't diminish that, too. And actually, funny enough, until about three years ago, I didn't really identify with the idea of a rebel. And now I'm, like, wholeheartedly 110%, down to my toes, up to my head rebel. Because when I was younger, I was like the girl who was voted in the yearbook, most likely to keep in touch with her teachers. And lo and behold, I did, because they were really cool people. That's not very rebel, right? And I was never, like, the one pushing boundaries. And I still sometimes have a bit too healthy respect for authority, and I have to catch myself, and it's something I'm learning to unlearn my respect for authority.

But what I will say is, when I was certifying from the Integral Coaching Programme, my dear friend, now friend, and my coach Justin said to, you know, reading your cases. My cases were I submitted cases from folks with really diverse identities and I spoke about the systemic factors that were affecting their ability to flourish as well as, obviously, their own choices and trying to expand the range of choices available to them. And he said to me, Debbie, I just see you as this giant rebel, like, tall as a mountain that is like, I'm not standing for this anymore. This is not how things should be. And that was the seed of rebel leadership, which has been revealing itself to me ever since, which know how in a world that doesn't allow for flourishing, how can we bend the rules? How can we create spaces that say, up yours to some of the things that the world is saying we should be doing or is professional or is right, is moral. It's like, actually, who said that was moral? That might not be actually moral. That might just be power, holding on to power. So I'm learning, too, and I say this for folks listening who might be like, oh, I'm not a rebel.

I'm just cracking on. I don't identify with this idea of rebel activists. I guess the thing that I ask people in my workshops or in my coaching too, is, what are you a rebel for the sake of? What do you stand for? What is a norm in the world that you think I'm not about that. That's not okay. So I always say that I'm a rebel for the sake of breakfast, because I think breakfast is very culturally conditioned and people get very like, you're eating what for breakfast? And it's like, well, hello, colonialism. Like, cereal has been around, what, like 200 years or something? Not even. And people have been eating rice and soup and noodles and fish and all kinds of things for breakfast for years. So I'm very much a rebel for the sake of the breakfast revolution, of eat what you want for breakfast and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

But I'm also a rebel for the sake of healing, liberation and love. And that's something that really has come clear to me this year, and you mentioned it in my superpower, is I'm here for healing, which is taking our pain, turning towards it, witnessing it, validating it and moving through it and helping others to do the same. Liberation, which is about getting through all of these systemic factors, these past life experiences, factors that the ways in which we're participating in a broken world that have kept us trapped and stepping into liberation. And then love, which is really about realising that we're not disconnected. Human beings are not disconnected. Our nervous systems, it's been proven, are not disconnected from each other. And this idea that we are no longer divided and that we can find, we don't sort of squirrel away or kind of fall into the scarcity narrative around love. How can I really train myself to love others? And I think where you might think, oh, that's a weird thing to talk about in a corporate context.

I talk about love with my clients a lot. And actually, when we break it down into what it actually looks like, it's really showing care, showing empathy, like you said, with the miscarriage question of, like, how can I support you? What's the best way that I can be supportive to you? That's love in the workplace, reaching out to a colleague six months after they've had a bereavement, just checking in, because we know that grief has no timeline. And it's not just like the three days after their compassionate leave that affects them, it's recognising and listening and believing to people when they say that they've had a hard time, rather than trying to minimise or rationalise. Yeah, so those are things I'm a rebel for. So I really encourage folks at home to think, what are you a rebel for the sake of? And what does it take to stand up for that?

I'm with you on breakfast, although I'm not a constant rebel. I was in Thailand many years ago at a hotel, and the selection of breakfast food, or early morning food there was curries. It was basically what I would consider an evening meal, but for breakfast, and it was like, wow. It allowed me to just try different things at a different time of day. I'm with you on that. If I go to a hotel and they have something different, let's give it a go. I don't have this at home every day. Let's go and try a bit of black pudding, which, when's black pudding been breakfast, it's kind of only in England, maybe, I don't know.

But, yeah, it's all arbitrary, isn't it? Someone made the rules and we now have to break them.

See if you can help me out on this. You've probably experienced it as well. But I experience it often where people feel like I owe them an argument or I owe them a debate. What's your view on this? What's your view on that? Or I think this tell me. I'm and then they want to argue it, whether it's trans people in sport or trans this or trans that. Lately I've just reacted to people said, I'm sorry, I don't owe you an argument on this. This is not something that I really want to engage with. So how do you rationalise that? Because that could be seen as deplatforming or shutting someone down, whereas what you're trying to do is bring people to that centrist area of the table to have these conversations.

My reaction, as I say, is walk away and stop. I'm not having that conversation. How would you handle that? What techniques have you?

Yeah. Oh, such a good question, Jared. And yeah, I am sorry to hear that and not surprised that people act that way. I love your response. I think that's really an act of rebel balance, respecting your boundaries, respecting your limited resource by saying, I don't owe you an argument. And I think that is a completely legitimate thing, particularly when they're talking about it in a hypothetical way or an academic way, and you're talking about it as in, like, your right to live a normal life way. So I think that's completely legit and as a completely understandable way forward. So I'm not big into my take on social media is that it is broadcast only.

So even when you're in comments with people and you're having a conversation back and forth, it's still broadcast only because you broadcast a response and then someone else broadcasts a response. You're not in a state of listening. There's not a lot of listening on social media. I reserve myself for spaces where there is listening, where I can facilitate that listening, or where that listening is present already. And I think that's what you're tapping into when you say, nah, not doing this. And I guess some people would say that's chickening out and running off, or some people would say that's maybe leaving an educational opportunity untapped. But if someone has already said to you that they want to fight you on this or they want to get into it with you, we've got to assess how safe that is for us and whether there's listening present. I always say there's a beautiful model in integral coaching, and I use this with my clients all the time.

And it's this idea of like, there's children's toys that there's like a stick and then there's three rings of decreasing size that sit on top of each other. So there's like a big bottom ring. And that's relationship if you're going to create change in the world, first you need relationship with people, which is why I'm big time investing in my relationships with my Jewish, my Muslim, my Arab Christian, friends right now because that is what's dependent. Having that in place means that we can move to the next ring, which is possibility. It's like, okay, let's go somewhere, let's learn something, let's figure out if there's something we could do together and then only then can we move to action and collective action or wanting to do something together. But actually people skip out the relationship bit and I think it's such a shame. I think sometimes people do it because they don't want to be vulnerable. Sometimes people do it because they don't think there's time.

But we know this intrinsically, right? You've got to have relationship with people. I'm really grateful to folks who have the patience for it, who will actually have those conversations. But personally, for me, it's about is there listening? There? Is their relationship there? Does this person matter to me? I've had some conversations with people who matter to me in the last few weeks. I would not have given the time of day to someone who just wanted to have it off the bat. But because I care about them, I did enter the conversation. So yeah, that's where I stand. I don't know what that brings up for you, Joe.

Yeah, no, I resonate with that. To me, a lot of it is context, motivation, trajectory. What's the outcome for this? If the outcome is just being told that I'm wrong and as you say, there's no listening, there's no education to be had. They're not really interested in my perspective. They just want to tie me in knots with their views. I think those become unproductive arguments that's edge conversations, not censors conversations where the trajectory is one of curiosity, one of looking for education misunderstanding? Not sure. Worried, nervous, or just want to find out more then you can tell. The trajectory of that conversation is positive.

But if it's going off a tangent or like to bounce off the Earth, it's not worth having. So I tend to walk away because you know, they're not never going to be productive. That's kind of my take on it, you know, when it's going to be productive and for mutual benefit rather than just somebody else wanting to tell you. I think I often describe it's a bit like road rage. Someone wants to get out their car and tell you you've been driving badly. They want to police you back into their box of their rule set. And I think that's what people do. They want to put you back into their rule set.

You don't conform with my ideals of society or my sense of right and wrong, my whatever it is. If I'm going to tell you like road rage, you've done wrong and I'm going to get angry with you until you give in and say, I'm sorry, that's kind of how I see it. Often these people just it's just road rage or graffiti. Someone's spraying something on the wall. Not at me. They're just angry. I go, that's fine. So I can step away from those using that context.

I can just wind my window up and wave, smile, drive off, see you never. Well, yeah, I'm just going to continue being me, you're going to continue being you, and that's fine. I can live with that. I didn't need to fix you.

And yet those people who we are in relationship with, that's such a beautiful contrast, isn't it? What if you're in the same car and you actually have a relationship with someone who's in the same car who's like, oh, you nearly run over that cyclist or whatever, you're actually in conversation with them because you're in the same car and you have some kind of shared destiny, so it's worth having a conversation about it. But the person in the other car, forget it.

Yeah. It takes an educated and grown up mind in my mind that you don't have to be right. Nobody has to be right. We have perspectives, we have opinions, we have our protective beliefs, whatever they are, but they are based out of our head and our sense of self and our lived experience. So once you accept that I'm right in my own head, not necessarily writing anybody else's head, and everybody else has a view, a perspective, an opinion and lived experience, and it's about trying to find that shared understanding about why someone thinks something rather than just arguing about this outcome, that we get so hung up on this. You've got to agree with me. I want to understand why we disagree, actually, first. If I can understand why we disagree first, the fundamentals, then we can get closer by going, okay, I get it.

So that's how you were brought up. That's the community you lived in. That's what happened to you in a younger age. That's the lived experience your parents or your community told you that I didn't experience. Now I can get close to you and understand the passion or the motivation behind where you stand on that. Got you. Yeah. Now I can have a conversation.

And that's what we don't do, as you say. It's about those layers, that relationship layer of understanding and willingness to engage, not just wanting to be right.

So true. So true. I think there's oh, gosh, I'm going to forget who said it. It's a poet who wrote, there's a field beyond right and wrong. There's a field and I'll meet you there. Right. Which is like it's sort of surrendering the need to be right or make someone else wrong.

Yeah. It does take some enlightenment to get to that point. And I'm sure you do. I certainly do. I get to the point sometimes where I go, hang on a minute, I'm entrenched in this. I'm kind of nailing myself to this stake here. I need to get off this quickly and step out and go, I don't know, I need to think more.

I.

Need to understand you more, because I think it's a human thing. Protectionism, judgement and all these kind of things that we threat analysis, we want to be right. And I think if we could fix everybody not wanting to be right, then we'd be mean scientists. They're only right until another scientist proves them wrong. It's like Pluto. Poor Pluto. It went for not existing to be a planet, and then for a few years it was a planet, and now suddenly it's not a planet anymore, for sure. And this was right.

You're so right, Debbie. It's been absolutely fascinating having a chat with you and it's been great to connect with you after many years. And I know we keep bumping into each other on social media and other platforms. We did. But we have to keep in touch a different way now. So you mentioned earlier you had a programme and a website, so tell our plethora of listeners how to get hold of you.

Yeah. So if you would like to get in touch with me, well, you can absolutely connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm still there, I'm just quiet and I am in my DMs. So if you want to be in touch with me, DM me on LinkedIn, say hello, say you've listened to the podcast. We'd love to hear what you thought and answer your questions. So Debbie Dan on debiedanon. And you can also find me on my website of the same. So WW dot.

Debbiedanon.com and I offer leadership coaching with an intersectional liberatory lens and also a programme called Rebel Leadership Mastermind for leaders within one organisation to go through a process of developing rebel leadership together. So if you'd be interested in that, feel free to get in touch. And I have a little invitation for you, a little free something something. So, I've just developed a 30 minutes video coaching session called Well Being Reclaimed. And it's not your average well being session. It's really looking at the systemic ways that our well being gets compromised and also looking at a really holistic set of ways that we can start to develop the practises and the relationships and the supportive mechanisms to make sure that we're taking care of our well being in the world that we live in that is broken, that doesn't support our flourishing. So if that's of interest to you, we'll make sure that the link to Well Being Reclaimed is in the show notes. You can download it.

It's yours to keep with a workbook as well, and I would love to hear what you think of it. And it's just an absolute pleasure to be here with Joanne today. I so admire your work. We are definitely co conspirators in the same field with lots of solidarity and, yeah, it's been a great pleasure.

Yeah, it's been an absolute honour to spend this time with you. Just recharging my belief in society, recharging my belief in humanity, and I often describe this as like a scale electrics track. If you go too fast, sometimes you get flying off at the corner and I think you just help put you back on the track again for another lap. And it's been really powerful. And so hope also that you, the listeners who've tuned in, you've got to the end have been inspired as well, because there's been a lot here today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Please do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends and tell your colleagues. Please subscribe. Love to hear from you. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest on the show yourself, then please do drop me a line together with any comments, feedback or suggestions on how we can improve to jo.lockwood@seachangehappenco.uk. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has been an absolute pleasure to this podcast for you today.

Catch you next time. Bye.