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ALIDA: Welcome to Care Work, a podcast about what it means to offer care for a living. I’m your host, Alida Miranda-Wolff. For most of my career, I’ve been a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging practitioner focused on teaching, love, healing, harm, and scaling belonging. In my books, Cultures Of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last and the First Time Manager: DEI I explored what care inside of organizations means. Join me as I continue this journey with guests who take meeting the needs of others on as their colleagues both inside of organizations and in any other way.
So this is an interesting episode for me to record, because I’m celebrating almost two years of developing, launching, and recording this podcast. And today I’m talking about taking a break and a rather long break. The podcast is going on hiatus, and it’s going on hiatus for a few reasons.
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If you have been listening to the podcast, you might have heard me mention some of the things that are going on in my life and in my work. And one of the things that we always talk about in every episode is how do care workers take care of themselves? And for me, right now, that means minimizing the amount of commitments and responsibilities that I have.
To put it simply, I have a two year old who doesn’t sleep, a business that is still recovering from a traumatic event that completely shifted and changed the organization, which had run pretty much the same way for almost five years before it happened. And I’m experiencing a lot of loss.
The reality of the situation is that I have been going and going and going, and I haven’t taken the time that I need for grief. And that’s not aligned with one of the commitments I made to myself.
So every year, I put together a vision board, and it’s pretty elaborate. I actually cut out the magazine pieces all year long. So catalogs come to my house, and I open up every catalog every time I get mail, and I cut up words and phrases and pictures, things that I think I like. I store it in a box. And then on my birthday, December 19, every year, I spend, like, the entire day making a pretty elaborate collage. It’s a good sized poster. I’ll post a picture of it with this episode. And at the very center of that vision board for 2024 are three words: repair, regrow, regenerate.
Throughout 2023, I felt like recording this podcast was helping me do that, but I also had more support in other areas of my work. And now that I am promoting a second book, working on a third book, more in the client work than ever before. And let’s just be honest. The world of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is probably the hardest it’s been.
I hear this from DEIB practitioners every single time I talk to them. The politicization of what we do makes it high stakes, means there’s a lot of resistance. Every other day there’s some attack on basic employee support programs by the House of Representatives or in election speeches. We have folks calling diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t earn it, and just fundamentally invalidating all of the strides that people of all different groups have made since the civil rights movement, the disability rights movement, the women’s rights movement. It’s a slog.
And I spend a lot of my time coaching, facilitating, mediating, and consulting with people who are right in the middle of this, trying to make things work so that the workers in their organizations can feel like they are treated with human dignity and have the balance and respect that they deserve.
In other words, I’m also doing a lot more care work. I have to understand the cost of that. One of the things we talk about on this podcast, too, is that this isn’t a net sum game, and we can come in and out of the things that we do as times change. So the plan is that the podcast is going to come back in 2025, between January and February. Hopefully that gives me enough time to start to rebalance and settle, get into a routine that makes sense for me.
And in the meantime, I just wanted to share some things that I really enjoyed about three seasons now of the podcast. For one, the guests on this show have really taught me things that have fundamentally shaped the way that I do work and think about work. And a few that I want to point out, so if you are new to the show or have been sort of picking and choosing and would like to engage more, the first episode I want to point you to is the one with Dr. Alexandra Solomon.
In that episode, she said one thing that has been absolutely transformational to me. I think about it at least once a week, and that is that shame is what happens when you fail to metabolize and deal with disappointment. Being able to understand when you feel disappointed in something or someone or in yourself, and then sit with that disappointment before it sort of metastasizes into shame. That is game changing. It’s difficult, but I found myself in different situations. Maybe I’ve made a mistake where things haven’t gone the way that I wanted to in a relationship. And instead of attaching judgment, I’ve let myself sit and say, this is so disappointing. I’m so sad that this happened. And not trying to fix it, not trying to hover around it, not trying to push it away, but just living with it.
In order to show care for other people, I think we need to learn to, as Micky ScottBey Jones said in the very first episode of this podcast, accompany them. The thing that is most valuable that we can do for others is just be with them when they’re going through something difficult or exciting or challenging or frustrating. And in that episode, Micky talks about the health outcomes that are a result of midwives and doulas just being in the room with pregnant people giving birth. And that the health outcomes are significantly better even if you just have someone sitting there with you. Not doing anything, not coaching you, not tending to you, not giving you medicine. That has been another big learning for me from this show. Which is, if we are to provide care to others, we need to be in community, we need to be in durable relationships with others where they can show up and be there for us, and we can do the same for them. But it can just be that. It can just be. Be sitting there with you when you are dealing with your disappointment.
Another lesson that has come up for me is that when it comes to care, it’s fundamentally tied to social justice and social justice movements. Because who is afforded care is just as important as the care they receive. And so I love all of the episodes that I’ve made, and I recommend all of the episodes I’ve made. But if this is something that is interesting to you, I recommend that you specifically listen to the disability justice arc. And I recommend listening to the episodes with Tim Villegas, María Emilia Lasso de la Vega, and Lauren Schrero Levy. As well as the minisode that I made on disability justice and the history, the history of how disability came to be a concept, because it wasn’t until relatively recently. Listen to those episodes, to not only understand the ways that we don’t care for people with disabilities societally the way that we should, but also what strategies exist to change that and how people are doing that.
Tim walks us through what inclusive classrooms that bring disabled and non disabled students together can look like and what those positive effects can be. Lauren really emphasizes the importance of not only reconceptualizing our relationship to time, but also to the agency of disabled people. And María Emilia focuses on some practical, tactical tools for how you can design spaces for everyone, truly. So I encourage you to take a listen to those and to see what comes up for you as you do.
The last thing that I want to reflect on is I feel that I’ve grown in putting this podcast together in a few different ways. The first is, and I don’t know how many of you have heard this story from me before on one of the earlier episodes, but when my first book came out, “Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last”, originally, especially because I’m a speaker and a facilitator, the idea was that I was going to read my own audiobook, and that was what the publisher wanted to do, and I was excited to do it. I had a vocal injury at the time, so I was worried about my voice. But at the same time, I was excited to be able to read my own book in my own voice. And the sound engineer came back and said, nope, we absolutely need an actress. And I wanted feedback. I was working with a vocal coach, and she was helping me through my vocal injury. And the feedback was that I had vocal fry and a grating voice.
And after that, I felt really shy about talking. I mean, I had to work through the feelings that brought up in me, because I’ve spent my whole career being told that my voice is not the voice of a professional, that I have a high, girlish voice. When I try to make it less high in girlish, I have vocal fry, because that’s what happens. It’s how vocal fry works. And it really set me back in some ways. I found it difficult to listen to myself when I was on other people’s podcasts. I didn’t want to watch recordings of my live sessions with my client companies.
But making this podcast changed my orientation to my own voice. For one to review these episodes and edit them, I’ve had to listen to myself. And I’ve listened to myself enough that I don’t hate listening to myself anymore. It just feels natural.
I think what has also done is made me appreciate how my voice represents me and who I am. Somebody who cares, somebody who is not trying to perform a version of themselves that’s different by adopting a different voice or tone or cadence. But also, I think it’s made me a better facilitator because I have listened to myself enough to know when I need to slow down, when I need to enunciate, and what I need to do to sound more clear to people, especially those who may not be speaking English as their first language. So that’s been really transformational for me.
And it’s also been transformational to realize that I enjoy recording solo episodes. Even though I’m an author, even though I write content, even though I facilitate sessions. The idea that somebody would want to listen to me for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, talking about something I care about, that I know about, that I have expertise on or I’m interested in. That seemed far fetched to me. But as I was playing with the structure, I realized one some of my most listened to episodes are solo episodes. So clearly, at least some people want to hear from me. The other piece of it, though, is making those episodes has given me so much clarity on what I think and what values I hold and want to stick to.
I’m going to go back to that disability justice episode. A lot of the way that we structure consulting engagements here at ethos around disability justice has firmed up after I made that episode because it was so clear to me what I would not compromise on. And that has been wonderful for me.
So here is what I’m hoping for in the future. I am hoping for rest during both a tumultuous and busy season. I’m hoping for a sense of renewed inspiration. And I’m hoping for ideas coming into next year and restarting this podcast of how to continue to weave together a community in new and exciting ways.
So I hope to see you all between January and February of 2025. And in the meantime, thank you so much for listening. Goodbye for now, but not forever.
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ALIDA: Thank you for listening to Care Work. Please share this podcast with your community to help uplift and advocate for more caring cultures everywhere.
This podcast is a collaboration between Ethos and me, Alida Miranda-Wolff. I’m also your host.
Theme music vibing introspectively was written and recorded by Logan Snodgrass.
Audio editing and post production assistance was provided by Organized Sound Productions.
If you want more of me, be sure to order my books. Cultures Of Belonging and The First Time Manager: DEI.
