Strong Feelings

Latest Episodes:

Remaking the World with Samira Rajabi Nov 18, 2021

Show notes

The pandemic broke our understanding of the world. How do we put the pieces together again? Samira Rajabi joins us to point the way—and it all starts with getting comfortable “sitting in the shit” with each other.

Samira Rajabi is a researcher, writer, and assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado. Her work focuses on the intersection of trauma, social media, disability studies, and feminist theory, and her book, All My Friends Live in My Computer: Tactical Media, Trauma and Meaning Making, came out earlier this year.

I think this impulse to compare comes from this sense that what you're going through is not legible to other people. So we often sort of demean our own suffering because we don't think that it's worthy in the eyes of society, or culture, or our peer group. I think the way to cope with that is to listen better. So rather than being in a space, where it's like, "Oh, you say you're suffering? Well, listen to my suffering," it's, "How might I hear what you're saying with a recognition of who you are, and where you're coming from, and what you need in the moment, and then also offer my testimony about where I am, and what I need, and who I am in the moment?"
—Samira Rajabi, author, All My Friends Live in My Computer

We talk about:

How Samira’s desire to understand her own experiences with trauma led her to working at the intersection of gender, disability, and media studies
How a brain tumor diagnosis and treatment led Samira to find online community, and how that community helped her process grief and trauma
Why comparing trauma is futile, and how to “sit in the shit” with the people in our lives instead
The politics of trauma and traumatic experiences, and how power plays a role in who gets access to care
What ambiguous grief is and why it matters

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers ideas for how to listen more deeply and stop trying to “fix” things for the people in our lives. For more tools and practice tips for staying present to others’ pain, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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Feeling Ourselves with Alla Weinberg Nov 04, 2021

Show notes

Take a moment to check in with your body—yeah, right now! Do you feel tension in your shoulders? A clench in your jaw? A heaviness in your chest? Those feelings have something to tell us—and it’s time we tuned into them at work, says Alla Weinberg.

Alla Weinberg is a work relationship expert and culture designer who coaches teams and leaders to build relationship intelligence skills, create cultures of safety and trust, and move past toxic work environments. She's also the author of A Culture of Safety: Building Environments Where People Can Think, Collaborate, and Innovate.

What needs to change: we have to shift from this mechanistic mindset around work that people are cogs in a machine, or resources, or capital, and understand that we are biological creatures that get sick, that have chemical hormonal changes in our bodies, that have emotions, that are messy, honestly, in a lot of ways we're very messy, and design around that piece. That we have differences in ability in how we think, in how we function and start from that place. Because everything was designed around the idea that people are machines, and we're not.
—Alla Weinberg, author, A Culture of Safety

We talk about:

Physical, emotional, and psychological safety at work
How our feelings manifest in our bodies, and how recognizing these emotions helps us process them
How to create a true "safe space"
"Stress" as a euphemism for "fear"
How the modern workplace was never designed for people who menstruate or get pregnant, and what needs to change to accommodate all bodies at work
Alla’s personal story of feeling unsafe at work and how the road to healing from trauma led to her finding her life’s work
Rituals and practices for processing feelings and fostering connectedness

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara walks us through how to do a body scan. For more on using this tool to release tension and feelings in our bodies, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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Nice White Ladies with Jessie Daniels Oct 21, 2021

Show notes

When do white folks learn they’re white? And how do they start to understand the scope of benefits that whiteness affords them? For Jessie Daniels, these uncomfortable questions are only the beginning.

Jessie Daniels is a Faculty Associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a professor of Sociology, Critical Social Psychology, and Africana Studies at Hunter College and The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a world-renowned expert on Internet manifestations of racism, and her latest book Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It is available now from Seal Press.

I imagine there are people who are going to read this book and throw it against the wall. And that's okay. But I would just encourage you to pick it up again, after you've thrown it against the wall the first time, and keep reading and sit with the discomfort and also ask yourself, why are you uncomfortable? I would argue that, to the extent that white people are uncomfortable hearing what I have to say, and white women in particular, is because we're holding on to whiteness in some way. We want that to not be a problem. We want that to mean that we're innocent, that we’re beautiful, that we're better than other people. And it just doesn't mean that. Let's let go of that idea of whiteness.
—Jessie Daniels, author, Nice White Ladies

We talk about:

How feminism and white supremacy often coexist and how “gender-only feminism” always ignores race
White women’s complicity in slavery and its lasting effects
The “meme-ification” of the Karen archetype and the real dangers they pose
The path Jessie took to discovering her own whiteness
How to divest from the culture of whiteness
The power, and necessity, of sitting in discomfort

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara discusses how white women hold onto whiteness in the workplace, and the hidden meaning in terms like “professionalism,” "culture fit,” and "niceness.” For more on reckoning with whiteness in your workplace, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

Links:

Jessie Daniels’ website
Nice White Ladies
Racism Review
They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers
Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr.
The Red Record by Ida B. Wells
Living with Racism by Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes
Jasmine Stammes’ talk, “The 'Subjective' Researcher”
Active Voice

More resources on shame and resilience:

Read Natasha Stovall’s “Whiteness on the Couch”
Find a local chapter of Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)
Attend Robin Schlenger’s Shame Resilience Workshop or an Ambient Noise event

Life-Affirming Productivity with Paloma Medina Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

What if spending a few minutes each day touching a plant or staring into space could change your life? Paloma Medina has seen it happen—and tells us why it’s the first step toward radical, equitable change.

Paloma Medina is a management trainer, public speaker, coach, and entrepreneur who uses neuropsychology to help leaders develop more inclusive and equitable practices. She joins us to talk about trading cortisol addiction for life-affirming productivity, the power of tracking equity metrics on your team, and why she recommends everyone spend 5 minutes a day doing nothing.

Inclusion is a sense of belonging. It is how we pick up signals from others that we are valued, liked, that we belong. That we have friends, that we've got people on our side. A ton of the work that I did in the beginning in researching equity and inclusion and how it intersected with the kind of manager trainer I could be was realizing there is all this neuropsychological research that shows that belonging is this absolute core need. Humans are wired to scan for it, protect it, and freak out fully if there's any threat to their inclusion.
—Paloma Medina, management trainer

We talk about:

How the neuropsychology of productivity relates to equity and inclusion
How to transition away from hustle culture and into life-affirming productivity
The difference between equity and inclusion
How leadership can use the three E’s of professional development to combat bias in the workplace: education, exposure, and experience
How closing down Paloma's retail store, 11:11 Supply, helped her find a renewed sense of self-worth in the midst of uncertainty
The power and protest of doing nothing
The BICEPS model of core needs

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara shares a post from Desiree Adaway on the connection between overwork and white supremacy: “White supremacy knows that when we're exhausted, we remain obedient. And when we're overworked, we tend to stay quiet.” For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

Links:

Himpathy with Kate Manne Sep 23, 2021

Show notes

Why do so many people mention Brock Turner’s promising swim career, or the many Oscars Harvey Weinstein won—instead of focusing on the stories of their survivors? Why do women often feel guilty telling a mansplainer to stop? For Kate Manne, the answer to both comes down to a single concept: entitlement.

Kate Manne is a professor, writer, and moral philosopher whose research aims to more closely define and combat various forms of misogyny. In her newest book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate offers a bold new perspective on the ways in which men’s entitlement to sex, power, knowledge, leisure, and bodily autonomy are used to police and disenfranchise women and other marginalized populations.

It can really change the course of your life to say, "I do not have to feel bad for certain people, and I do not have to feel guilty for my refusal to prioritize the emotional needs of the most privileged people.” Rather, I can actually look toward people who are more marginalized, who are genuinely in need of my solidarity and support. So that's where it's both personally liberating not to feel those illicit sources of guilt and shame, and it can actually, I think, completely redirect where your moral energies go. Because so much of patriarchy, as well as white supremacy, is misdirecting moral emotions that are good things to have. It's good to be sympathetic, and compassionate, and empathetic in your life. But where those emotions get funneled, and in service of whom, that is something that often goes awry under white supremacist hetero-patriarchy.
—Kate Manne, author of Entitled

We talk about:

Common forms of entitlement, and how privileged groups have been deemed entitled to certain behaviors
Why men often assume the role of “the knower”
The concept of “himpathy,” and how labelling injustice is often key to dismantling it
How having a child and finding solidarity in community helped shape the writing of Kate’s second book
The difference between being entitled to speak up and being obligated to speak up

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers advice on how to tell when you are obligated to speak up against misogyny in the workplace, and how to assess the risk of speaking up in those circumstances. If you’ve ever kept quiet about injustice and then wondered if that was the right choice, this bit is for you. For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

Links:

Design for Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog Sep 09, 2021

Show notes

We’ve all heard about unethical tech products that track and surveil users. But there’s another kind of harm happening in tech: abusers co-opting apps and other digital products to control and hurt their victims. Eva PenzeyMoog explains this growing problem—and shows us how to fight back.

Content warning: This episode features discussions and specific anecdotes of tech-enabled abuse and interpersonal harm, including domestic violence.

Eva PenzeyMoog is the founder of The Inclusive Safety Project and author of the new book Design for Safety. Through her work as a tech safety consultant and designer, Eva helps people in tech design products with the safety of our most vulnerable populations in mind.

In terms of trying to talk about this stuff at work, or just with other people who work in tech, it was honestly kind of awkward because this isn't a topic that people like to think about. I talk a lot about domestic violence, there are other ways that this happens. There's issues of child abuse, and elder abuse, and things like unethical surveillance of employees and workers. But domestic violence is the one that I focus on. And just bringing that up, kind of out of nowhere, during a brainstorming meeting, it's kind of weird. And now, you know, my team is very used to it. And they're all really on board and are actually helping with some of this work, which is great, but at first, I think people just aren't used to saying, "Hmm, what about someone going through domestic violence?" It's kind of like, "Wait, that's dark. Do we really need to talk about that?" And yeah, actually, we really do.
—Eva PenzeyMoog, author of Design for Safety

We talk about:

Issues of safety in tech products and how abusers misuse them to cause harm
The importance of destigmatizing conversations of user safety in tech and design
Who is responsible for ensuring user safety?
What qualifies as authentic consent?
How to use techniques like a Black Mirror brainstorm and abuser archetypes to uncover and address harm potential in your product
What it was like to publish a book in the middle of a pandemic, and how Eva strives for a sustainable approach to doing this work

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara discusses how feelings of powerlessness can lead us to look for things we can control. This can often manifest in some toxic workplace behaviors: micromanaging, inability to delegate, obsessing over data. If you, like so many of us, feel these behaviors creeping in, look for places where you can assert control over things that you can actually take ownership of: set a regular hour for a walk each day, institute “no Zoom Thursdays,” schedule a shutoff time during weekdays. And if you find something that works great for you, send us a message. We’d love to hear about it! For all this and more, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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Become a More Courageous Leader Aug 26, 2021

Show notes

Strong Feelings returns September 9th, but in the meantime, we wanted to share something with you: the Courageous Leadership Program, Sara's six-week group coaching program. It's all about stepping out of self-doubt and into your power as a leader, and it's designed specifically for people in design and tech who want to be bold, inclusive, confident leaders—but maybe need a little bit of help shaking off some of the societal messages they've absorbed that keep them playing small. If this sounds like you, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/group-coaching. Groups run Tuesdays starting September 21, or Wednesdays starting September 22, and enrollment is open now.

Tuning Inward with Rachael Dietkus Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

Most of us think of trauma as the capital “T” kind: war, natural disasters, serious abuse. But day-to-day life is full of smaller traumas, and those need to be processed, too: bullying, work stress, the aftermath of the pandemic. Rachael Dietkus of Social Workers Who Design is on a mission to help us do just that.

Rachael Dietkus is a writer, author, and social worker focused on the ways trauma shapes how and why we design. Through her organization Social Workers Who Design, Rachael and her team work to normalize and codify trauma-informed practices in design workplaces.

We've demonstrated a certain kind of toughness and unplanned resilience that has really been built on this collective trauma of living through a pandemic. And so there can be some power and some comfort in that. I think that with all of the adaptability and need to be adaptable throughout the past several months, what it has really shown us is that we now need flexibility. So is there flexibility in scheduling? Is there flexibility in how and where we work?

I have sometimes used this phrase that I personally have a very high threshold, but a quick tipping point. I see that in a lot of people. You know, there's just this like, "Well, everyone else is doing it. It can't really be that bad." And the more that we just keep suppressing and deserting those cues that we're getting, the more it's just building, building, building. And at some point, the body is going to respond.
—Rachael Dietkus, founder of Social Workers Who Design

We talk about:

The parallels between social work and design
How designers can look to social workers to be more trauma-informed
What is trauma? And how can we become more aware of it?
Healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with our own personal traumas
How to build a trauma-informed, human-centered workplace
Why “bring your whole self to work” is dangerous
Relational empathy versus transactional empathy

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks about the importance of specificity in our feelings and how that can help us get out of “comparison mode.” Are you really “just stressed,” or are you feeling something else: shame, betrayal, anger? Ask yourself, what is my anger telling me? What triggered it? What can I learn from this feeling? What unmet needs do I have here? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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Practically Radical with Rachel and Travis Gertz Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

Most work environments prioritize profits over people. But there are other ways businesses can look—if we’re willing to imagine them.

Rachel and Travis Gertz are the founders of Louder Than Ten, a cooperative company on a mission to democratize the workplace through project management. Through their training and apprenticeship programs, they show digital organizations how to give power back to the people leading their projects.

When some people talk about this, it seems like such a radical idea, but it's actually so practical. It's just a very common-sense way to make sure that you're more sustainable. Worker cooperatives last longer, people stay longer, they ride out through the rough times. Because the first thing that a capitalist framework company is going to do is they're going to cut their workers, right? And then they're going to retain all the earnings up at the top. But if you're a worker-owned cooperative, everybody has to support and pitch in. So I just think it's just a very practical system.
—Rachel Gertz, CEO of Louder Than Ten

We talk about:

The history of cooperatives
How does a co-op work?
Louder Than Ten’s journey from “traditional” company to co-op
Steps to turn a workplace from profits-focused to people-focused
How gig workers and small businesses can leverage their power to build a more equitable workplace
Resources and readings to learn more

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers tips for how to foster transparency in the workplace. How could you experiment with transparency, with authenticity, with honesty around something that maybe makes you a little uncomfortable? Who do you want to sit down with and explore other ways of working? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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Platonic Longing with Kat Vellos Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

Even before the pandemic, Americans were experiencing a devastating loneliness epidemic. We talk to UX designer-turned-connection coach Kat Vellos about the longing for deep and meaningful friendships that so many of us experience, and how we can build deeper, more substantial connections in our adult lives.

Kat Vellos is a connection coach, speaker, facilitator, and author on a mission to transform loneliness and “platonic longing” into authentic human connection. She is the author of two books: We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, and Connected From Afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You're Far Away.

When we think about connection, we often turn our lens outward, and it's really important first to look inside and say, what is it that you really need right now? And what is missing? If you can wave a magic wand and have the kind of connection you want, what would that look like, and how would it be integrated into your life? And the way you answer that question helps you determine what to do and where to go when you then turn your lens outward and seek to cultivate that connection externally with other people.
—Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together

We talk about:

The loneliness epidemic and how COVID changed connection
The idea of “platonic longing” and the importance of identifying and talking about loneliness
Having passion for your job versus following your curiosity
How organizations can invite and facilitate connection within the workplace
What we can do to focus on reconnection in our personal lives

Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers tips for how to foster joy. Where have you told yourself you shouldn't feel joyful? What is that costing you? What would be different in your life if you were operating from a place of joy? What would shift, what would change? For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.

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