Shaping Freedom With Lisane Basquiat Lisane Basquiat

This week I’m joined by corporate inclusion visionary and author, Deepa Purushothaman.

A former senior partner at Deloitte, Deepa spent more than 20 years helping clients grow. She was the first woman of color and one of the youngest people to make partner in the firm’s history. From the outside, everything looked like it was going well. But a severe health scare amplified by consistently working hundred-hour work weeks forced her to ask herself a big question: “Do I have to do a job like this to feel worthy?”

It was this question that encouraged Deepa to completely re-imagine and re-evaluate what she needed to feel healthy and whole. Eventually, Deepa left Deloitte and founded nFormation, a membership-based community for professional Women of Color. In 2022, she published her first book, The First, The Few, The Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America. And she continues to speak on the themes of power, inclusion, leadership and advancing women. I highly recommend her TED talks, which have almost 3 million views.

In today’s episode, Deepa and I talk about the experience of being first generation, the pressure that comes with being a woman of color in corporate America, and how we tend to use our careers to carve a sense of identity and belonging.

If you enjoyed my conversation with Deepa Purushothaman, I highly encourage watching her TED talks and read her book The First, The Few, The Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America.

This week I’m speaking with fashion designer and motivational coach Destinee Macklin or “Mack the Tailor.” Her focus on custom tailoring applies not only to the clothes her clients wear, but also to the habits and thoughts that rule their day to day lives. We’ll talk about how Destinee went from being a detective in the Baltimore Police Department to a mentor and designer. And how her decision to keep moving is about much more than meets the eye. We’ll talk about how she turned tragedy into triumph, how we can turn our struggles into the fuel to our fire, and what it means to raise a black son in this world.

Follow Mack the Tailor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mackthetailor/?hl=en

This week I am joined by a special guest and longtime friend Luke Iorio. Luke is the former CEO of IPEC, the professional institute of coaching where I obtained my certification many years ago. He is now a coach and entrepreneur, and he currently hosts his own podcast called “On this Walk.”

After going through what he refers to as an “epic burnout stage”, Luke realized that he wasn't in alignment with where he needed to be in life. This began a seven year spiritual journey, during which he stepped down from IPEC and explored different practices and modalities on his own walk toward a deeper discovery of himself and the meanings of Balance, Peace, Fulfillment, and Freedom.

In this episode, Luke and I had a much needed conversation about the sacred messiness of life. We talked about what burnout really means, how one gets to that point, and about how important it is for us humans to create a space to regulate, reflect and sit in the sometimes uncomfortable space of embracing the unknown.

If you liked our discussion, I encourage you to listen to Part 2 of our discussion on Luke's podcast "On This Walk": https://open.spotify.com/show/7yXk7J8ioPTIXSoN4L65oo

This week I’m joined by Keith Mitchell, a former professional football player in the NFL and now a meditation, yoga, and mindfulness teacher focused on sustainable living practices and whole body health.

After a spinal injury forced him to retire from his professional sports career, Keith was forced to reimagine his life. Since then, he has spent the last 20 years exploring the mind-body connection and bringing the tools of self-realization to people around him.

Today we’ll talk about the importance of sustainable and communal living practices in healing the body and the mind, the value of self observation and avoiding the victim state, and what strategies we can use to create the change we want to see in our lives. With the help of Keith Mitchell, we’ll discuss the healing power of being present, and what it means in our day to day lives.

This week I’m joined by Jadah Sellner, host of the Lead with Love® podcast, best-selling author, business coach, TEDx speaker, poet and entrepreneur. With her anti-hustle philosophy, Jadah helps people avoid burnout while building businesses that can flourish and focus on the humans behind the business.On today’s episode we are diving into hustle culture, why it persists and how we can do things differently. We talk about her new book, She Builds, and her tips on how to nourish ourselves while building a life of our dreams. Jadah guides us through how to listen inward and how to block out the things that don’t feel right to us. Plus, how she found a creative process that worked for her and how you can find that too.If you’ve been questioning if you need to go-go-go all the time, this conversation is for you. You’ll learn how to navigate the seasons of life, who to have on your support squad, and most importantly, how you can enjoy the process.

Get a copy of Jadah's book #SheBuilds now:https://jadahsellner.com/she-builds-book/

This week I’m joined by Dr. Robert Enright, a pioneering force in the scientific study of forgiveness and a professor in educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Over the last nearly 40 years, he and his colleagues have developed a pathway to forgiveness that has helped people who have endured severe personal and societal trauma. His recent work has been focused on bringing forgiveness programs to children so that they can apply these principles more easily as adults.

Today we’ll talk about what exactly forgiveness is and what it is not, how we go about forgiving even the most severe injustices, and what happens to us in our bodies and in our minds when we do. With Dr. Enright’s help, we’ll bring the healing power of forgiveness to the front of the conversation, where it needs to be.