Women of Ambition Alyssa Calder Hulme

Welcome to the women of ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Calder Hume. And today we are going to look specifically at ambition for women as per normal, but we're going to be looking at it through the lens of culture and how religion and socialization and so many other factors come into play for women and how we are socialized to be able to exhibit or not exhibit ambition.
And today my guest is Stephanie O'Connell Rodriguez, who is a fantastic journalist. Uh, Reporter. I don't know. How would you summarize what you do, Stephanie? I'll let you introduce yourself. Hi, thanks for having me here. And yeah, I feel bad because every time somebody asks my husband what I do, he has like the same very difficult task to summarize all of the different things.
But basically, yeah, I'm a writer. I cover women, money, power, and ambition. And I've written in like the traditional journalistic. Fear. I hosted a money podcast for real simple magazine called the money confidential podcast. And I also have my own newsletter [00:01:00] called too ambitious, where I D dive deeper into the data around women and ambition, which is really what I do a lot on my Instagram, where I'm most active at Stephanie O'Connell.
Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, that is your Instagram is fantastic. I first saw it several months ago and I admit I was very jealous like immediately because I was like she is doing exactly what I want to do she's sharing the exact studies that I'm looking at she's doing it in such an efficient way like you make it so accessible which is hard because like we're talking about like social science literature that you're sharing Yes, it is very hard.
I want everyone to know that as you think I sound really eloquent on Instagram, I promise you behind the scenes, it's hours, days, Google Docs upon Google Docs of deep research, not to mention the fact that I film forever. And I edit these videos, as you'll see on the podcast here, I have a tendency to be very rambly [00:02:00] because all these ideas are very interconnected.
And one thing makes me think of another thing. And these are really complex things. One thing about Instagram that's cool is because you have only 90 seconds, you can only tackle one idea at a time. And that's a really powerful mechanism for getting to the heart of the point. I think that's why these messages have really resonated.
Yeah. And you do it really, really well. Even, even just the, I think you said it's the name of your, uh, your newsletter, Too Ambitious. That is a phrase that comes up over and over and over again in the literature, even in non English speaking areas, which I think is so funny. Like even people who speak completely different languages are still using that phrase and they're Especially for women.
Oh, she's too ambitious. She's more than me. I'm unattracted to her. I can't be her friend. It's really incredible. The consistency there is there. Yeah. It's almost mute. It's almost exclusively women who that phrase is applied to. What does it mean to be too [00:03:00] ambitious as a man? This is always, it's called the flip test, right?
And you say this for another gender identity. Almost everything you say about women, like it's a red flag to be like, Oh, wow, saying this about a man would be ridiculous. There's no such thing. So, yeah, I think what inspired me with too ambitious to, to really claim that branding was not just the idea of always having felt Yeah.
Thanks. Too ambitious for many of the people and interactions I've had in my life and having my ambition framed as a bad thing when my entire childhood, I was told it was a good thing, but also it was around the time of the last election and Kamala Harris was. Was, uh, being criticized for being too ambitious and, and that her ambition was considered disqualifying as a reason for her not to be considered a vice presidential nominee.
And if there is anything that you need to run for political office, it is an [00:04:00] exclusive w

Alyssa Calder Hulme: [00:00:00] Welcome to the women of ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Culler Hume. And today we have a fantastic guest on our show. Nina Simons is co founder and chief relationship officer at Bioneers and leads it's every woman leadership program throughout her career, spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and.
Philanthropic sectors. Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust, and leadership development. She co edited Moonrise, The Power of Women Leading from the Heart and authored Nature, Culture, and the Sacred.
A Woman Listens for Leadership, which is the book we're going to talk about here today, was released as a second edition in 2022 with an accompanying discussion guide and embodied. Practice. Nina received the Goy Peace Award with her husband and partner, Kenny Ausubel for pioneering work to promote nature inspired innovations for restoring the earth and our [00:01:00] human community, which is pretty incredible.
So thank you so much for being here, Nina. 
Nina Simons: Thank you, Alyssa. It's great to be with you. Um, 
Alyssa Calder Hulme: this is your beautiful book. You can see it behind her if you're watching the video. Um, it's beautiful. This artwork is fantastic. Um, and I, I'll just start by saying that, you know, I, I get reached out to by a lot of PR teams and different people wanting me to promote the material.
And, I'm really picky, but yours is the first one that I, I read and I really loved and am deciding to share it because, um, I think what your, your message here is, is really incredible. It's really holistic. And I think it's something that we really need to talk about. So thank you so much for, for me, for writing this book and publishing it.
And. Talking about being like a feminist as a white woman who's trying to, um, decolonize perspectives, understand privilege, um, and also, [00:02:00] um, someone who's been in that space for so long. You have a lot of wisdom to share and a lot of experience. And I, I'm just really grateful that you're putting that out in the world and being vulnerable.
So thank 
Nina Simons: you. Oh, it's my honor and privilege. I feel really grateful to get to do it. Thank you, Elisa. Okay, 
Alyssa Calder Hulme: so, I, so this book is about women's leadership, um, and you talk about it from your own personal experiences and then in working with other, with other leaders in, In lots of different communities, um, can we start maybe talking about, uh, what Bioneers is and where that word comes from, because I was really intrigued by that.
Nina Simons: Sure. Sure. Well, the word was coined by my husband and partner because it's a contraction of biological pioneers. Okay. And the idea behind it was he started looking to find really innovative and effective [00:03:00] approaches. To healing our relationships with ourselves, each other and the earth and what he found was that some of the great innovators out there, many of them were looking to nature to heal nature and so there were nature sourced solutions and that's where the word Bioneers came from.
But. Bioneers started as an annual gathering. Um, we started it in 1990 and over the years it has grown and grown and evolved tremendously so that now there is an annual face to face in person conference of about a year. 2500 or 3000 people, but there is also an incredible wealth of media that we put out.
So we produce a radio series that wins awards many years and, um, a great newsletter and a lot of what motivated Bioneers in the first place was the recognition. [00:04:00] That the mainstream media tends to carry the bad news, but not the good news of the world. That's being born. And especially in this time when there's so much destruction and violence and coming apart, we all need to remember to give some of our time and energy to the world.
Tha

Alyssa Calder Hulme: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Women of Ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Calder Hume, and today we have Whitney Knox Lee. Whitney is a civil rights attorney, an equity and inclusion consultant, a mother and wife, and the host of the Empatrix podcast. 
Whitney Knox Lee, Esq.: Yes. 
Alyssa Calder Hulme: Thank you so much for being here, Whitney. Tell us a little bit about your podcast, because I think that encompasses a lot of these, uh, these different roles that 
you fulfill and passionately.
Whitney Knox Lee, Esq.: It really, yeah. It does. So, um, Impostrix podcast, we are going to be affirming the lived experiences of professionals of color who navigate imposter syndrome, white dominant culture, and racial toxicity at work. Um, and so really what that means is we're going to be diving into all that it means to be a professional of color, um, acknowledging that we are working within systems that sometimes were created to exclude us.
Um, so we're going to be talking about like, how do we identify when we're [00:01:00] working within these systems and if these systems are like actively working against us and we are being gaslit about that, then what do we do? How do we deal with those types of conversations? Um, we're going to talk about the historical context of race and racism, um, here in the United States.
And what that has to do with where we are now, um, as folks of color who are working in professions. And then we're also going to talk about like the science behind how racial traumas. affect us, affect our brains, affect our bodies, and in turn affect how we show up to the workplace, and whether or not and when we might be triggered by circumstances that are happening around us, whether that's within our work environment.
Or like for me, it's mostly, uh, external facing when I'm working. Um, so I work as a civil rights attorney in the South and I represent folks who are incarcerated. [00:02:00] And what that means on a day to day is that I'm constantly going to jails and prisons and seeing people who look like me, who are behind bars and living in cages.
Um, and so this, the science component I really want to get into to better understand for myself. When I'm leaving these jails and prisons and I'm feeling triggered and worked up and having to, um, Utilize all of these tools to kind of bring myself back to safety, um, why I'm feeling that way. Mm hmm. 
Alyssa Calder Hulme: That sounds, I think that's so important that like, it sounds like you're talking about like embodiment, like mindfulness and being aware.
And I would venture to say that no HR in America is set up to help people understand those. Pieces of themselves. 
Whitney Knox Lee, Esq.: No. And somebody recently asked me, we were talking about like the DEI profession. So diversity, equity, and inclusion. Sometimes there's a B at the end, which means belonging and [00:03:00] why that's important.
And this was some, this was coming from a black woman who owned her own law firm. Um, and so she was asking really as an employer, like, why is this important? Why do we need this? Because these days, like. People aren't showing up to work and just being like overtly racist. And, you know, to answer that question, it's really about creating a community or a space within the workplace where we can feel like we belong, where we're seen and where it's psychologically safe for us to show up.
And so if I am experiencing being triggered because of the work that I do, feeling safe. To talk about that, to raise that, um, and then having systems in play within our workplace that can support me in that, you know, it's, it's part of. The, the reason or the, the need for D E I B. Do you 
Alyssa Calder Hulme: [00:04:00] see, I I've heard a lot of different things about diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, um, and we'll get to ambition.
I always get off track, but I really want to ask you, um, as you know, per the normal way it goes

What does it mean to be a good ancestor? Why should we reckon with the horrible stories of our ancestors as well as the peaceful ones? How does colonization affect how we think about family, record histories, and relate to our relatives? Join Alyssa Calder Hulme and Miyamoto Loretta Jensen, the Polynesian Genealogist, in a chat about data sovereignty, cognitive dissonance, dreams, joys, pains, and healing.

Alyssa:
[00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to the Women of Ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Calder Hulme, and today we're gonna do something that we haven't done for a little while now, and that is a PostPod, and this is where we. Look at the last podcast that got published and digested a little bit, talk about it, contextualize some things.
 We had such a fantastic time tracking together, Natalie and I, and there just really wasn't time to dig into some of the more complex ideas and some of the sources that we were drawing on, or, or I was drawing on really in my questioning. So I wanted to share some of those today because these authors and these people that we're drawing from, especially in looking at Latina ambition, are really incredible Chicano feminists.
 That I've really enjoyed learning and studying with. So I'm gonna share some of those citations today and discuss a little bit more about some of the vocabulary and some of the themes that are used there, because I think it's useful and really helpful to hear the voices [00:01:00] of the people that are coming up with these theories and these ideas to describe the experience of so many people.
So here's a little synopsis of. Four different texts that have been really helpful for me. Okay.
So the first text that I wanna look at is called Methodology of the Oppressed, and that's by Chela Sandoval. And this is a really interesting mapping that Sandoval does of us feminism's feminists of color, and she shows this differential mode of consciousness that she shows is located in these women of color and that their unique positions and perspectives and abilities and experiences as women of color in the United States gives them this really unique angle and existence in these in-between spaces. And she says that the, these perspectives are so essential and she, and she shows it like this is.
She proves it in this essay. It's really fantastic. But we need these [00:02:00] perspectives of women of color because they live in these liminal spaces and they, out of necessity and out of creativity and out of survival, end up what, this is a quote, weaving between and among oppositional idol ideologies. And it's.
I love that concept and that like visual of weaving in-between spaces and things to kind of create like a new tapestry of color and meaning and blending things together that other people who don't have that perspective wouldn't be able to do and create. And it's a very heavy text. Like it, it's a very technical, but it's really it felt really inspiring to me because it's showing how.
Feminism can be done with an intersectional lens and how it can be a place of creation and insight and hope in a way that like white feminisms in the United States really can't do.[00:03:00] It really does take all of us to have quality and to have. You know, have everybody's needs met. We have to have all the different perspectives and these feminists, women of color, how this really unique perspective is being some of the most disenfranchised populations in the United States, where their ideas and their perspectives are really going to make it better for everybody.
 The next text that I wanna look at is called Monstrosity in Everyday Life, Theories in Flesh and Transformational Politics. And that's written by Robert, Robert Gutierrez-Perez. And this is another one of these really cool concepts nepantleras. And remember, my accent is awful. I haven't spoken Spanish out loud in like a decade.
 They are the people that dwell in that in between space. And Robert goes into detail about how they mediate the borderlands and the borderlands is kind of the topic of our [00:04:00] last episode with Natalie. So. Mediate the borderlands, and that is in the physical spaces that they live in. And having borders of countries cross through spaces where people are living and people are forced to literally cross a border.
 But also that metaphorical border that we talked about that is

Alyssa: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Women of Ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Calder Hulme , and today we are going to be beginning a little bit of a shift in our podcast experience together where we've been examining ambition, how women experience that and talk about that. And we're gonna continue on that same path, but I really want to start looking at how culture, ethnicity, religion, all these different things that influence our socialization, affect the way that we think about ambition and manifest it.
And then some of the barriers that make it harder to be maybe. Who we want to be. And so today we're gonna look at a little bit a personal experiences of ambition, certainly, but also looking at it within the context of being a Latina in the United States. Today our guest is Natalie Alhonte .
[00:01:00] Natalie was born in Bogota, Colombia and moved to the US when she was six months old. During her upbringing, she always had a passion for languages, storytelling, culture, and intersection of public policy and entrepreneurship. She moved to Washington, DC in 2001 to attend American University in their school of international service.
After graduating, she began a career in global public affairs, including leading the work. For clients looking to build campaigns around ideas, not just products. After that, she moved to New York City to build a social good incubator working directly with Ariana Huffington, while in New York. She also hired, she was also hired to assist with all aspects of communication for the Brazilian government ahead of the World Cup and the Rio Olympics.
Wow. Natalie then returned to Washington to help build the Latin American. Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council for her former boss, Peter.
Natalie: Schechter
Alyssa: Schechter. Okay, thank you. She's now the director of strategy for the Latin America Practice [00:02:00] Group at Wilkie. Also founded by a Latin. Latina and an investor in immigrant foods, a gastro advocacy restaurant dedicated to celebrating the contribution of immigrants to the United States, and she resides in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Not too far from me with her husband son, Sammy and their two dogs. Thank you so much for being here today, Natalie.
Natalie: Thank you so much for having me, Alyssa.
Alyssa: Sorry If I, I messed up some of those words there. Reading and podcasting at the same time is rough. I'm used to just kind of going off the cuff.
Natalie: It's hard.
There's a lot of tongue twisters
Alyssa: I'm also very, very aware that you are trilingual, at least correct Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and so, I have very minuscule knowledge of those languages, but my pronunciation is horrible at this point. No. So please forgive me and correct me. Please correct me.
Natalie: Yes, absolutely.
I, yeah, we're here to learn from each other. [00:03:00] Absolutely. Yes.
Alyssa: Well, thank you so much for being willing to come on the show and talk about just this complex world that, that you live in and that you navigate and that you're so knowledgeable about. So to start, this is our first question we always ask, do you consider yourself to be ambitious?
Natalie: Oh, I love this question. And actually I think you know, when I received the invitation to be here with you today, it really set me on sort of a journey of sort of trying that word on. I think it's been a while since I've sort of categorized myself as ambitious, but, you know, really getting familiar with the, the definition and, and.
To, its very core and maybe not so much of the archetypes that maybe we have associated with it. I would definitely claim it. I, I would also say I'm very driven a funny story about that. I actually, if I had a memoir, I think I would have. Titled it Driven because I learned to drive so late in life.
I actually just learned [00:04:00] to drive six months ago after being, you know, a, a, a true and blue New Yorker. But yeah, so driven, ambitious are definitely things