The Inclusive Networker
The Inclusive Networker is a podcast dedicated to helping small business owners, solopreneurs, and network marketers develop inclusive marketing and sales processes that help them authentically reach diverse audiences and subsequently grow large, diverse networks of customers, business partners, or team members.
The Inclusive Networker
Transforming Fundraising Narratives with Leah Leonard
What happens when a youthful spirit collides with the world's harsh realities, and the outcome is a beacon of hope? Meet Leah Leonard, an audacious figure outer who dared to shift her lens from the comforts of America to the heart of Tanzania. Embarking on a literal and metaphorical journey, she built a school that has changed countless lives.
Buckle up as we journey with Leah, navigating through her experiences and unpacking the importance of taking a pause, and adopting humility before initiating change. We challenge the traditional narratives around fundraising, moving from a pity-inducing cycle to one of empowerment.
Finally, we explore the essence of leadership and learning in service work, underscoring the need to break away from the hero pedestal. With Leah's insights, we engage in a meaningful conversation about self-reflection, self-trust, and the role of the community in project success. This episode is a call to action - to examine our own lenses, to be mindful, to be inclusive, and above all, to do good work. Join us as we challenge the status quo with Leah Leonard and explore what it means to serve and give back.
You can find Leah on…
Website https://leahleonard.me/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tanzaleah/ https://www.instagram.com/kisimanischool/
Want more from Dr. Raymona?
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drraymonahlawrence/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drraymonahlawrence/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/drraymonahlawrence/
Thank you for listening!
~Dr. Raymona
Hey, hey, hey, welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's episode of the Inclusive Networker podcast, where we help network marketers, small business owners and solopreneurs become aware of gaps in knowledge or awareness that could be keeping their networks and businesses small. Tune in as we give tips and simple practical tools to make your business more inclusive and we teach you how to build inclusive communities that support diverse customers, team members and business partners. So if you want to authentically build relationships with diverse communities of customers or business partners, you are in the right place. But be warned you will be challenged. But here's the thing you won't be judged. I'm your host, dr Ramona. I'm a speaker, coach, consultant, public health professor, wife, mom and a fierce challenger of broken systems that keep people from reaching their highest potential. I'm so excited to be with you on your journey to becoming an inclusive networker, so let's jump right in.
Speaker 2:Hey, hey, hey, welcome, welcome, welcome to this week's episode of the Inclusive Networker podcast. I am so excited that you all are here. I am your host, dr Ramona, and who am I calling into conversation? Well, it is Leah Leonard. Leah, I am so excited to have you here. I'm going to tell everybody a little bit about you and then we are going to get started.
Speaker 2:So, as a professional figure outer, leah looks through her lens from the creative, entrepreneurial and nonprofit worlds to deepen our understanding of what it means to do good work. She creates collaborative communities wherever she has the privilege of working and on the journey. So far, this includes more than 15 years in the top 1 to 2% of field leadership for Arban, her favorite B corporation. More than 10 years in artistic collaboration with New York City based broken box Mime Theater. And more than 13 years in partnership with the community surrounding Kisemani School in Arusha, tanzania, where she had the joy of living and learning for five years.
Speaker 2:With Kisemani School, she began as a parent led vision for education, access and equity for their kids, championing a charter to teach the private school curriculum in a public school setting, equalizing academic opportunity. Despite the economic disadvantage, it has grown to support over 1500 enrolled students, being ranked the number one academic performing school in the region. They had a fourth year in a row, 100% graduation rate, with all graduates being accepted to secondary school, and it is sustainable, run by the local government and community, with Leah's non-profit providing support for special projects that further their vision. Leah is most at home exploring the world, but currently lives in Boulder, colorado, with her family. In her podcast, the Good Work Podcast, and her consulting program, she harnesses her passion for people to empower us all to step into a purpose more fully and have fun doing it. So, leah, I am so honored oh my goodness, what a power pack bio you have of all the things that you've done, not only here but globally, and I'm so excited to have this perspective today. So welcome, welcome to the Inclusive Networker by GAS, thank you.
Speaker 3:I'm so happy to be here. I'm honored, I'm delighted, and thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:So the first question that I always ask my guest is what is your lens, what's your background? How did you get to this point? How do you kind of see the world?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was thinking about this before we started and if I had to describe my lens, it is a person that didn't really know she had a lens before. She had to examine that and my lens is middle class and then later upper middle class, east Coast white, presenting liberal, jewish, female, cis-het person, from what I didn't know until I left it, at the most educated county in our country. So I grew up in Montgomery County, maryland, surrounded by a lot of PhD people and I was kind of in this very high achieving ecosystem and I didn't really realize that until I exited it which is interesting.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I think that's kind of the origins of my lens and kind of what I look through today is a curious learner trying to have a lifelong learning mindset as I expand and try new things along the way. So yeah, that's me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so welcome and I love hearing that and I'm really interested in Kind of the evolution of your lens, because you talked about where you came from and how you didn't realize how much you know it was the most educated Place in the country. It there was certain privilege that you had there and that you were surrounded by, and now you're going to other countries and setting up schools and all of that. So there had to be some sort of process that happened in between there. So talk about the evolution of your lens.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know, I think, I think there's, uh, there's, there's two sides. You know, we hear a lot like you can't. You can't view what you can't see, right, we talk a lot about representation, particularly these days, and and.
Speaker 3:I think what, um, what I can see in hindsight that really involved Along along my journey is not, is not really realizing the models that I had um Along the way for what it looked like to give back and to use my you know, my privileges as a source for generosity and a plate coming from a place of responsibility. I was always told that, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, and I had a lot of wonderful models.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, in my family I think of my father and my grandfather and seeing, seeing them kind of, you know, bring themselves up and how they, how they expressed, um, their own ways of Of serving and quote unquote giving back. I had those models. I had a lot of models within the network marketing industry of what does it look like to Do the most good with the time freedom that you have once you've built a sustainable business right? I had those models. I had models of um, you know what it what it looked like to go and help Internationally. I remember reading a book called three cups of tea. Um, when I was in college and I had all of these models and they were inspiring and when I felt this nudge to go and collaborate with this community.
Speaker 3:I think it's human nature we kind of look for okay, well, who? Who are my mentors? Who's gone before me? Who you know, who has already figured out this process and how can I shorten my learning curve in order to Do this, do this new work right, whatever kind of work it is that we're stepping into, and the interesting thing about the evolution of, you know, of the lens in from that perspective, is that Some I didn't, I didn't really realize along the way that some of those tracks that I was given to run on were not necessarily, you know, in line with With my personal values, and I would have these little gut feelings and kind of gut tugs along the way of feeling well, working in this way doesn't feel quite right, or talking about this project in this way Doesn't feel quite right, sharing photos of the kids who live in the community that we're working with in this way doesn't feel quite right, and I would have a lot of gut tucks that I didn't really have the words to name it yet.
Speaker 3:And so I think, looking back, you know, realizing that, oh, you know, some of the models that we have for how to Do good work are in fact perpetuating, you know, harmful narratives around, certainly around saviorism and and and when we have those gut feelings it's a little. It's that innate trigger when we all have this internal sense of. We know, we know right from wrong.
Speaker 3:Um but sometimes it's hard to separate that from Thinking okay, but this is what this is, how it's been done by the people who've gone before me and they've been recognized Right.
Speaker 1:They've received recognition for doing something good.
Speaker 3:So I must have to follow this model and I think, uh, I think we can crack that right open, and I think we can re-examine. And we can re-examine, yeah, those tracks to run on. So I don't know if that, if that made sense it's. It's kind of broadly talking about what you know about specific things that I've worked on, but it's definitely shifted over time.
Speaker 2:No, it's actually perfect and it's a great segue into what I really want to bring out in this particular conversation with you, lia, and it's what you were saying is that A lot of times, people want to do this good work and I'll keep using that because that's the name of your Podcast. You know I want to. I want to talk about that as well, but we want to do good work and, especially in network marketing, we often have something that, as you said, we're we're kind of trained to have some type of mission, to have some type of real, real reason that we're doing the work. What is our why? What is the thing behind why we're doing this in this business model?
Speaker 2:And a lot of people see what has happened before and they perpetuate those the the wrong, instead of doing good work. They think that they're good doing good work, but they often don't, and so, um, what I really want to delve deep into is kind of some of those lessons learned that you talked about. You bought up terms like saviorism and these issues of Taking pictures of people and putting them online and and those types of things, and so we often talk about you know, how do we do the work, the good work in our teams. How do we build an inclusive culture? But for this I really want to talk about, how do we build that inclusive mission when we're going out and doing the good work and we're really being Inclusive and kind of checking ourselves. So what, first, what were some of those good chicks that you started to get?
Speaker 3:specifically, Well, one that I can think of is when I, when we, reached a certain point in our kind of fundraising process with Kesey Monty School. We were starting to expand more and so we needed to do more fundraisers, and I hadn't fundraised at that level before, and so I went looking for Other models of how it had been done. And we again, it's like we we gravitate towards what we can already see instead of imagining what you know what could it look like, because I mean that bless us.
Speaker 1:None of us want to start from scratch and try to think of something from the ground up it's like, okay, well, this, you know, this person ran a fundraiser.
Speaker 3:in this way, maybe I can reach out to them and see, you know, and see what worked, what didn't work and how I could follow that same model. And I'm not talking specifically about this particular fundraiser that I have in mind, but as we went along on that process, I I would get advice as I went exploring. What are some of the, what are some of the ways that I could, you know, help us reach this goal of Raising the money that we're trying to raise to build this kitchen at school for example right.
Speaker 3:And as I'm exploring and having conversations with other folks who have Fundraised, essentially, I'm realizing wait a minute, you know, some of the, some of the strategies that I'm being suggested and encouraged to do, like gut check this, you know, this doesn't feel, this doesn't feel right. And one of the classic examples I can think of you know is you know, let's, let's make sure that we show the you know, we show the object poverty, right, let's show, let's show the hardship let's, let's, let's make sure that we highlight that so that we activate a sense of pity in a donor and then they give. And I realized I do not want to participate in perpetuating that kind of fundraising cycle and.
Speaker 3:I'm sure that someone more academic than me probably has a name for that, but I Didn't want to participate in perpetuating this.
Speaker 3:You know pity inducing, you know Cycle, where we're giving out of a sense of pity, because pity feels to me like a looking down on and we and I wanted to find a way and I still do it's always a work in progress Find a way to shift, you know, the pity cycle to an empowerment cycle.
Speaker 3:And how can we, you know, see our, see our shared humanity and realize, you know what it's? Just by the random, you know random Selection of the universe that I was born, where I was born, and you know you were born were you were born, and this is all you know we. There's a lot that we can't control there. And let's, let's, recognize our shared humanity between people that exist in very different contexts, and let that feel empowering and let it be driven by empowering people versus Pitying them. So that's, that's one example that I can think of where I realized I need to make sure and check every step of the way, when we are sharing the story about this school, when we are communicating with other people about it, that when I see that cycle, I need to be the one to To interrupt it, and sometimes finding the words to do that can be very challenging.
Speaker 3:It feels really foggy.
Speaker 2:There's a video that I often play and it's called the danger of a single story, and it's so good, and and she talks about how she was told the story of this little boy, and the story made her think that he was just poor, he had nothing to give, he had no resources, and when she met him she was like wait a minute, he has all the things that I have and he is, you know, really resourceful and he has a lot to give, and so I think that that is what happens is that we, we give the single story instead of the the full story of people, and then that perpetuates this, the thought about them.
Speaker 2:We even do it in the history of our country. Right, we tell a single story, we don't tell it from all perspectives, and there is serious danger in telling a single story, and it brings about this issue with power, because the storyteller has the power. Right, they have the power to, you know, change mindsets and thought processes, and so it's really important for us, to the first, to think about who's telling the story, what pieces of the story are they telling, because that tells us where the power is and we need to differentiate. That, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, and I think I think that what you're bringing up right now is it makes. It helps me identify where some of the roadblocks have come certainly in my nonprofit work, when I have really felt blocked around, you know, working on our next project or fundraising. It is because, yeah, I realized that in that role, I am the storyteller and that comes with a great.
Speaker 3:You know a great amount of needs to be treated with a great amount of respect and care. And so you know, for the first time in 13 years, you know I am I am bringing in consultants and you know, not just branding consultants, but you know I'm bringing in consultants to help me hone in on how I can, how I can approach my role as storyteller about this project in a way that that keeps the integrity of how we want to be working, yeah.
Speaker 3:Because a lot of it would kind of unfold organically, but I think, once you realize that while there's really something to work on here, then we need to be more intentional about it and not just keep kind of tripping over ourselves and thinking ah well, I'll make mistakes and there's there's a lot of room for mistakes, and absolutely mistakes should be made and will be made. But if we can see the pothole coming, let's let's steer around it and not just drive right over it Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I'll back up then just a little bit, because we talked about your work that you do with Arbonne and kind of, how did you come to this point where you knew that you wanted to work in Tanzania, that you wanted to build these schools? You wanted to have that as part of the mission, of the overall work that you do. So talk a little bit about how you combine what you did with network marketing with your bigger social mission.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, when I started my business so you know, backing up to when I first started my Arbonne business I was a recent college graduate. I'd gone to school for theater, I was pursuing an acting career, right, I was going on auditions and I was doing plays in Chicago and as my day job I was teaching. So I worked as the permanent substitute at a K through eight school and then I had my own, you know, tutoring students, and I was really busy, being really broke, and I thought I need to figure out another way to support myself so that I can follow my passions, because, as it turns out, most of the things I was passionate about did not come with a steady paycheck, and so that's what opened my mind to network marketing and it was actually my dad who told me about Arbonne.
Speaker 1:He's not a consultant, but my dad worked when I was a baby, he ran. He was a college dropout and ran a auto parts shop in Vermont and by the time I graduated from college he was, you know, the CEO of a multi billion dollar finance company.
Speaker 3:So it was fascinating and inspiring to kind of watch his career as I was growing up and the changes that he made for himself. So that built a lot of trust in my, in my dad's recommendations is my point. Sometimes we all have family members where we think, oh, we should take your advice and your opinions really matter because you're just a close person in my family yeah, and I'm sharing that because he's my dad, but also he had some serious bona fides.
Speaker 3:So when he called me up and was like I think you should take a look at this company. I just reviewed Arbonne. I think you should take a look at doing a business like that. I bet if you worked hard at a business like that, you could have your cake and eat it too. I bet you could build something sustainable where you could have your time free to do all these things that you really love to do. That you're starting to feel like maybe I have to give them up because I can't pay my rent, and so he just planted that seed, and that's what sparked my curiosity about our industry and and from the beginning it was always a vehicle to connect the dots. It was never an end in and of itself.
Speaker 3:It was this is going to be my vehicle to give me control over my time, so that I can pursue my passions and I can, you know, be an artist without being a starving artist. And by the time I, by the time I, reached the sustainable point in my business where it became my main source of income, I was in my you know mid 20s and I didn't have a ton of responsibility and I thought well, I'm a person of integrity, I'm going to do what I said I was going to do.
Speaker 3:So, if I have, if I have enough and I'm and I'm good right, instead of just going and trying to build bigger and more and more and more. I thought I have my time free, now I don't have to go back to my teaching job. What am I? What am I going to do next? One of the first things I did was go and teach for free at this wonderful organization that did after school programs for kids in Chicago, where they would do homework help, followed by circus training. It was called Circus Team, if you're still out there.
Speaker 1:Circus Team. I think they're amazing.
Speaker 3:And I and it was really. It felt empowering to me to offer, to say you know what, I would love to come and be a after school teacher at your program and you know what, you don't have to pay me the $15 an hour, whatever it was.
Speaker 3:I want you to just turn. I want you to turn it around and put it back into this organization and for me, that hour that I would spend working at that program, the feeling that I got of being able to give my time, was such a good feeling that it made me it really made me want more. And you know giving and that's yeah. Giving feels good.
Speaker 3:And so I wanted more of that, and when we had the chance to go to Tanzania for the first time, I just thought well, I better say yes and go with no agenda and see if any opportunities arise, and it turns out that they did.
Speaker 2:Yes. So I know that you help other people to kind of fulfill their mission and to do the same types of things, and so, now that you had Learn what you wanted to do, you knew you love teaching. You did it in this smaller scale here in the US and with schools, and then you knew that this is what you wanted to do globally as well. So then, where does a person start? So what are some things that you look for when you're wanting to be a truly inclusive network or you're wanting to be global and to really expand? You know that you've done it on a small scale here, but now you're ready to expand and start to do this globally.
Speaker 3:What do you do first? Well, what I would do first is take a big old pause, okay, and give some creative space to investigating why am I drawn to this? Work Me and also right Our why is important, for sure, and also, if there's something that I feel drawn to doing, pause, give some perspective. Is there also a need that is arising without me that I could meet? Is there a need out there that actually requires my lens, my skill set, my, you know, my drive? And if you can marry those two things together and approach it with humility and as opposed to swooping in and saying I'm here to save the world, then you'll know what the next right thing to do is and that's why.
Speaker 3:I say start with a pause, because when we when we jump to. I know what to do, I know what all the answers are, I know how to help and I know what it looks like to help and we swoop in, we miss the nuance of a community, of a situation, of a world where we're not alone.
Speaker 3:We're in a situation of a relationship that we are entering into Because certainly for volunteers you know, voluntary volunteers only get thanked, right, and don't often have to, don't often have to answer to the same, the same I don't want to say standards, right, but volunteers usually just get thanked and don't have to approach a work relationship or a project in the same way that we would if it was our paying job or if we had been hired to do it or invited to do it, and so it's really important to remember that when you're in a volunteer capacity or you're ready to give your time, that we keep the same, keep the integrity of the same standards we would bring to our work, to that work so that we don't kind of default to the models that we have in our culture of you know particularly white folks swooping in and trying to save the day.
Speaker 2:That's so good as a first step and I really want to emphasize what you just said, because it was so good to pause. And I often talk about this when I'm telling people you know they're like well, what do I do first with my diversity, equity, inclusion work, or how do I build an inclusive culture? And I say the same thing you gotta know your own lens, you gotta know your own why and why you're doing things. And often saviorism happens because people do, they get excited, they go swoop in, they're like I know exactly what you need.
Speaker 2:But then the issue with it is is that it's self-serving because it's something that we can say, oh, I feel better, I did something about it, versus really being there to tackle the true issue. So you know, if we're like, yeah, we're going and we're helping people and these people are marginalized, they've been dealing with racism, and then we come back and we don't want to tackle the systems and the structures of racism, then that saviorism because it's only something that's helping us, it's not really tackling the real issue. It's let me come swoop in, do what I can do to make myself feel better. And I think that's so important for us to address and an excellent first step that you're talking about, because we often think, well, what place do I go to to start the work, who do I get to coach me through this process? And it's like you really gotta just reflect first, right, yes, I love.
Speaker 3:That, yeah, reflect first. Let that process take as much time as it takes, because the challenges of the world are not gonna go to sleep in that time. They'll still be there when you finish that process and when you do and it is never and again, it's never complete.
Speaker 3:But when you feel like, all right, I have taken ample respectful time to self reflect and to hopefully marry the thing that is lighting me up with a true need that requires my skill, then you'll be able to more rapidly affect the change that you wanna see anyway right, rather than kind of bulldozing your way through.
Speaker 3:And causing sometimes unnecessary collateral damage, and I say this with all of the knowing that I made so many of these mistakes and I can only recognize them in retrospect and some of them are going back 15 years and realizing oh well, of course, little baby Leah in a new country with only these models of how to behave, felt like this was the very next step of how I should help here, and, of course, we made this mistake and this mistake, and so I say this not from a space of perfectionism where it's like well, I've done all of this perfectly?
Speaker 3:it's no. No, I have made all of these mistakes, and so it's insight that is uncomfortably earned sometimes, but we have to be willing to embrace that discomfort, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as we're doing this reflection because I really wanna make this practical for everybody and to help them to see what kind of things they should be thinking about and we talked about the why, we talked about the reason for going in what are some things that we really need to think about before we take on a project where we want to really be a global, inclusive network.
Speaker 3:Who am I centering Right If we're thinking globally, really being aware, really being aware, like you said at the beginning, of our own lens and being able to just kind of zoom out from ourselves and kind of looked down on ourselves as we're having experiences, let's say, you know, you're entering into a new culture, a new country, a new context and being able to recognize, oh, I'm having these judgments, thoughts, assumptions, ideas, intentions, and how does that relate to the lens that I'm looking through and realizing that that's normal and there's nothing. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not a character flaw that you have a lens. We all have one. That's the point. It's being able to be self aware enough of how your lens is affecting the ideas that you're having, the assumptions that you're making, the feelings that are coming up for you, and having the capacity to you know there, if I, if I go to you know I live in Boulder, colorado now.
Speaker 3:so I just have to say to woo, woo for anybody but you know, being able to actually like hold space for those feelings so that they don't spill out and, you know, get all over everybody else all the time, I think. I think that's where we need to start is just with a sense of self reflection and self awareness, as you start to walk on that path of doing whatever next, you know project or work that you're stepping into is so that you can, like you said, you know self, reflect, check back in.
Speaker 3:You know certainly trust, have have some self trust, and and don't let all of this completely paralyze you, otherwise, otherwise, we wouldn't get to learn from so many of the change makers that are out there if they thought. I haven't gotten it right yet, so I can't really do this, then don't let it paralyze you from doing anything. But, just keep that awareness as you move through and be open to learning and realizing that you know news flash we are not the center of our own universes. Yeah, I love this.
Speaker 2:This is kind of a framework that's coming out of this, because first it's let me understand my why, let me reflect on myself and why I'm even doing this, and then I need to think about who am I centering? And I love that question. Who am I centering Because? Is this about me, or am I really focused on what I need to do for these individuals and how do I learn from them? Even though I'm looking through my lens, how do I separate what's happening in my lens to their reality? Right?
Speaker 2:So often we see things and we're like why would this person do this? Oh, my goodness, they're oppressed, these things are happening, but in their culture it doesn't feel that way to them at all, and so when we come in with our lens, we really can offend or just harm, as you said before, and so I think that's really really good to truly look at who am I centering and how is my lens affecting my perception of this environment and in this context, yeah, and it's been so interesting to be in collaboration with this school for so many years now and to also see that some of these narratives go two ways, where sometimes you know there are kind of expected, there's an expected dynamic and there's a framework that's kind of already been modeled about how we interact.
Speaker 3:You know how we interact with a donor that's coming from abroad to support our project and we must need to perform to in order to continue receiving this support, and so sometimes my role, as it's unfolding now, is also to to name that, you know, within a culture that is not my culture and say, you know, hey, we have. You know we have a group that would love to come and visit school. I'm being very thoughtful about. You know who we open the gates to and you know give them a very clear guidelines around how.
Speaker 3:You know how it's appropriate to interact, you know, with our school and also I want you to know, you know when I talk to our school headteacher and our staff and when we are connecting, saying listen, you know, you don't need to, you don't need to uphold these dynamics on your side either.
Speaker 3:And you will still receive the support that we've agreed on, without you know, making your culture performative or making or making sure that you, you know, put donors, you know, and even me right up on a kind of hero pedestal in order for our work to continue together. And that's been a really yeah, it's just, it's a really interesting and nuanced process to figure out how to also break down, how to break down some of those dynamics in both directions.
Speaker 2:So that's been it's been a fascinating and humbling learning experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that's interesting because a lot of times is, people go in with the idea of saviorism. They think that they know. So how do you help individuals who are about to embark on these types of projects or service that they want to do? How do you help them to see that they aren't the savior and that they really need to listen and learn and take that time not only to reflect on themselves, but just to observe in the community. Don't go in, don't say anything, just observe. Let the community be the lead in this. How do you help people to get to that point? Because I think that I often say it's not your skill set, it's how your soul sets right. That really moves you forward in the work that you're doing and yeah, and so how do you help people to see that it's not your skill set, it's how your soul set?
Speaker 3:Oh, I love that so much. It's. It's just a wonderful way of looking at all of this. Again, I always start with pause, but if I, really, if I were to kind of bread crumb it out, I would say I'm gonna. I'm gonna actually use a term that I learned from my friend, daniela Poppy Thornton.
Speaker 3:There's also a guest on my podcast recently, but she she talks about Apprenticing with a problem. So Apprent being an apprentice and and really Saying, even though I might be in a position of leadership right in this context, let's say Right for me, I'm a leader in my network marketing business. Right, I'm a leader in this new context. I'm a learner and shifting and being able to Do that dance between being you can be a leader by being a learner, so going in and apprenticing with a problem.
Speaker 3:No doubt there are problems, there are challenges. We need all hands on deck right. It's time for everybody to pitch in and we need to work together to To solve some of these things 100%. And where you can start is having that learner as mindset Instead of and and realizing that you can be a leader by being a learner, and that being a leader To help solve a problem doesn't always mean coming in with all the answers.
Speaker 3:I think it means coming in with great questions and being able to ask great questions of the community or the group or the person that you are working with and you know offering yourself as a, as a helper, right. There's a. There's a difference in you know putting a hand out and kind of yanking somebody up, versus you know putting your head down, offering your hand and saying, you know, is this, what is this what you need, watching, learning, and then, when you join hands together, saying okay, let's go together.
Speaker 2:Let's work together.
Speaker 3:I think I think that's the process that I would apply, and I think you could probably apply To a lot of different situations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that that is phenomenal, that being an apprentice apprentice to the problem, and that leaders are learners. I think that you know that's the kind of drop mic moment, right? It's like that we really have to think about the fact that we are Learning in every situation. There are sometimes when we do have more of the answers, but to be an inclusive networker, you have to be an apprentice to the problem and Learner, a leader who is a learner. That is good, that's it.
Speaker 3:We found something there. Yeah, I think you know, with everything that you share and I love your podcast so much it's so needed In so many spaces and particularly for network marketers, you know. But we, we focus a lot on leadership in our industry and it's a, it's a helpful reminder, to me at least and I'll only speak for myself, as always To remember that you know leadership. Yeah, leadership sometimes looks different than we. Then we think it's going to, and sometimes Excellent leader means being willing to admit I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's being able to shift. This is kind of coming to me in this moment is like Sometimes, you know, with my child, I might be a leader and I might be able to say this is the thing that needs to happen, like there's no question. I'm coming in to tell you what to do because you don't, you're not able to to think in in a way that you need to Process this right and a level of an adult. But then when I'm going to someone in another country, then my role becomes being the learner and the apprentice. When I'm working in some research that I'm doing and I'm leading that team, maybe I'm saying, okay, students, this is how you typically would do this. But then again, when I'm on my Job doing another type of skill, then maybe I'm the apprentice again, but I'm still. I can still be a leader In every one of those situations. But I have to shift the context of my leadership or the approach of my leadership, based on the context.
Speaker 2:So, leah, this has been an absolutely amazing Conversation. I'm so very grateful that you took the time to be on the inclusive network or podcast, and so please Tell us how do we stay in touch with you? What's the big thing you've got coming up next. What do we need to do to Just follow you. Stay in touch with everything that you're doing in this space.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you. Well, right now I'd say you can head over to podcast Lea Leonard dot me and check out the good work podcast, and we have some programs coming up that are Really circling around, a lot of the things that we've been talking about today. So I am About to launch a program where I can explore some of these questions of I want. I want to start, I'm ready to move into a season of giving in my life and in my career. How do I, how do I connect those dots between you know, achieving my goal of doing good work and actually feeling fulfilled while I do it while also causing no harm along the way.
Speaker 3:So I'm gonna be leading a group through that process and actually modeling some of the some of the things we talked about in real time In Tanzania. I had a visit to my school at the end of the program, so I'm excited to share that and it'll all be on my website.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Thank you for the work that you've been doing, lea. I'm so happy that you are really taking this on and in the. The challenge of Ensuring that a different perspective is Bought to this work is is something that's formidable, and so I am very much Appreciative of the fact that you are a person that said I am going to stand against these, these traditional methods that have been Done, and I really want this to be truly inclusive and authentic to the, the, the communities that we serve, and so, thank you, thank you for everything that you're doing, and I know that the, the communities that you serve, will be blessed as well.
Speaker 3:Well, it's very kind of you to say I appreciate you. Thank you for having me system so fun.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, thank you all for listening to this episode of the inclusive network or podcast. Thank you again to my guest, lea Leonard you can see all of her information down in the show notes and I will see you on the next episode of the inclusive network or podcast. Bye.
Speaker 1:And that wraps up another episode of the inclusive network or podcast. I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners, for joining us on this journey of learning and growth. Your support and engagement are truly, truly appreciated. Creating a more inclusive network and beyond starts with us individually and Collectively. Let's continue these conversations beyond the inclusive network or podcast, engage with others, challenge your own assumptions, take action to make a difference in your own spheres of influence and share, share, share this Podcast with a friend. So here's what you can do next. Go to dr Ramona H large comm and keep up with me. Stay in touch. That's D R R a Y M O N a H L a w R E N C E dot com. Don't forget my why, and dr Ramona, and don't you dare forget your why, and I'll see you on the next episode of the inclusive network.