One hard conversation at a time: Impacting change and leadership with Author Ash Beckham

Ash Beckham wants us all to have the hard conversations. The speaker, advocate, and author of Step Up: How to Live with Courage and Become an Everyday Leader sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she found her own voice as a speaker and a leader, and the qualities she believes everyone can tap into to grow their own leadership style.

Ash’s journey to advocacy started when her sister and friends began having children and Ash was thinking about how her LGBTQ identity might present challenges for them. “I knew I wanted to give those kids the tools and not bear the responsibility of having to advocate on my behalf,” she recalls. “So I did an Ignite talk which led to a TED talk and then all of a sudden the ball was rolling.” Her TED Talk, Coming out of the Closet, went viral. Her message was more than advice about coming out. She emphasized a universal truth that resonated with many: growth is possible when we commit to having those hard conversations.

She tells Sam that going on that journey of opening up via the TED Talk allowed her to have an understanding of finding the commonalities among people. “Empathy is so key in that our ability to connect is based on our ability to relate,” she says. “And I think we can get into the nitty gritty of the more difficult parts of the conversation if we start from a place of trust and really establish that from the beginning.”

Growing into the expert role

Once her talk went viral, Ash says her world started changing quickly. She experienced some imposter syndrome as media outlets started asking for her take on various issues. Coming to terms with the fact that she really could be an “expert” was a growth step. “Of course we are the expert in our own lives and I think a lot of us, especially when we step into leadership, we really downplay the impact of that,” she says.

“So I went through a phase where it was kind of like an aw shucks, who me?” she recalls. “And then all of a sudden there was this expectation of, okay, Where are you in the DEI space? What are your positions on intersectionality?” She soon learned to claim her expertise, and in doing that she says she made herself vulnerable, and, by extension, authentic—something she encourages everyone, and especially leaders, to do.

Continuing the conversation

In change-making, Ash emphasizes that winning someone over to your side is not the goal—the goal is to keep the conversation open so that people have room to grow and evolve. She uses a story to illustrate. A 15-year-old transgender teen was meeting with a state senator to talk about trans rights. The teen was nervous until a fellow advocate gave this advice: “You don't have to get him to change his mind, you just have to get him to question the certainty of his position slightly. That's all you have to do, and then all of a sudden you’re relationship building.”

As long as we’re continuing the conversation, she tells Sam, we’re making progress. And by being authentic and speaking our truth from a place of compassion or empathy, we’re leaving the door ajar for understanding and change. “Some things that people say, you can treat like they have broccoli in their teeth after a meeting,” she says. “You [can say], ‘I know what you really meant but this is kind of how it sounded. I thought you'd want to know. And if you want to talk about it, let me know.’” When you can broach difficult topics in a respectful way, you’re on the path to impacting real change.

Impacting leaders

In Ash’s book Step Up, she applies this concept to leadership: effective leaders, she says, need to have qualities such as empathy, courage, and grace. And they need to be flexible enough to be able to know when it’s time to employ which trait. “So to me it's kind of like a recipe or a tool belt,” she tells Sam. A good leader,