2022 Favorites: Bits and Bobs
We are circling the final days of 2022, and I am looking back at the year that has happened. We entered year three of a global pandemic, and personally we hit some big milestones in our house. As we approach New Year’s Eve, I look back at our family calendar and recall what has happened. It’s part of a collective family reflection practice. Then we discuss the list and rediscover how we changed during the year. Today I’m sharing items that don’t fall under certain categories like books or podcasts; these are the odds and ends that really impacted me this year.
Black Women Thriving
Ericka Hines and team released the Black Women Thriving report this year and held monthly debrief sessions to discuss the findings. Wow, I have learned so much from her leadership and the collective gatherings. The report specifically reflects how organizations are specifically failing Black women and how to change the path to thriving experiences. Here’s a great article about the work - How to Support Black Women in the Workplace | Bridgespan.
Institute for Radical Permission
I was NOT looking for a 12-week professional development experience when I first heard about this collaboration between Sonya Renee Taylor and adrienne marie brown. However, I have learned so much from these two thought leaders that I couldn’t turn down the chance to learn directly from them. The Institute for Radical Permission is an online course designed to help you reflect and reframe your life into a liberatory narrative. After the course completed, I took another 12 weeks to dig deeper into the resources and bring forth new practices for my own liberation.
Pay transparency
So many conversations are happening about pay transparency, and I am so excited to see the changes happening within organizations and state laws. Transparency involves multiple levels of communication and consent throughout an organization. I am launching some exciting research in 2023 around pay transparency. Until then, you can read more about pay transparency and equity in these articles:
Why Cost of Living Matters for Employee Pay — Loftis Partners
HR Hacks for Leaders: How to Conduct a Pay Equity Assessment — Loftis Partners
Loftis Partners also offers pay transparency assessments. Read more here.
Email Newsletters
I am one of those people who is really strict about my email inbox. I don’t want a bunch of junk that clutters my thinking or emails that stay for months because I don’t have time to read them. However, this year I subscribed to several newsletters that caught my attention and made it to my inbox. These included Salary Transparent Street, Brave New Work, Priya Parker, and Interrupting Criminalization.
Celebrating People Now
I went to a celebration event for a dear friend in August 2022. She was leaving an organization where she had been the leader for 10 years. One of the event speakers discussed the importance of letting people know NOW how much they mean to us and not waiting until they die. This sentiment really struck a chord in me, and I’ve carried that forward into several activities and trips this year.
Television Shows
I have several categories of watching television shows – ones as a family, ones as a couple, ones with individual children, and ones for myself. My favorites this year have been The Bear (season 1), Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls (season 1), Stranger Things (season 4) and the Dropout (limited series). Here are some others that have kept me busy: The Handmaid’s Tale (season 5), Dopesick, Under the Banner of Heaven, Succession (seasons 1-3), Winning Time (season 1), Welcome to Wrexham (season 1), Never Have I Ever (season 3), All-American, All-American: Homecoming, Million Little Things, Survivor, Peacemaker (season 1), The Righteous Gemstones (all seasons), Grace and Frankie (seasons 1-3), Inventing Anna, WeWork, and Harry & Meghan.
We Call It Soccer
If you know me well, then you know our family’s obsession (passion?) for soccer. We have a family fantasy league for Premier League (English football), and our weekend mornings for 9 months out of the year are all about watching football. On top of our regular English football season, we had the glory of the World Cup, a global football event that happens every four years. Besides attendance at watch parties, I absolutely loved the After the Whistle podcast with Rebecca Lowe and Brendan Hunt. Plus, huge news – the US Women’s National Team won their pay equity lawsuit this year. BOOM. Now, we just need another season of Ted Lasso; until then, enjoy my post about leadership lessons from this show.
Prioritizing Radical Care
Self-care has looked differently this year as year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic has raged on. We are dealing with levels of burnout not seen before, and these are being experienced at multiple levels – individual, family, teams, departments, communities, organizations, and sectors. I’ve seen this in my own life and definitely in my clients. We all just need more help than pre-pandemic times.
For clients, this has looked like embedding personal coaching sessions within client work. This year Loftis Partners launched specific DEIB work for nonprofit boards and a DEI Learning Group for White Women. We’ve also encouraged clients to focus on their teams and use this transitional time to reboot some leadership practices. Finally, we launched a LinkedIn newsletter titled Fully Human | Resources to share people-positive practices for any person working with humans.
Personally, I’ve made a commitment to deeper levels of self-care because I am learning that extraordinary work requires extraordinary self-care (lessons from black queer feminists). These new practices are varied, but the biggest one has been moving houses. Previously, we lived on the campus of a children’s home where my partner worked. We had 9 glorious years in a beautiful home on a 90-acre campus in the Blue Ridge mountains. However, we found that we needed more separation from work, so we bought a house just down the road from my partner’s office. This move has breathed new life into every aspect of our lives, and we are so grateful for it.
Some other new practices have included workouts during business trips, seeing friends and family in-person for the first time since the pandemic began, live theater and music performances, and getting closer to nature. In fact, the picture posted with this entry is a picture that I took on the Blue Ridge Parkway in October 2022 while travelling to a client event. May the end of this year bring reflection and renewal to each of you.