Shared Power and DEI Work Done Differently In Your Business with Mia Henry

Racheal Cook: Over the last few years especially, there has been a huge conversation about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of building more diverse, more equitable, more inclusive cultures in the world of work, but as small business owners, how does that apply to us? How do we apply those concepts and make sure that we are actually cultivating a sense of belonging within our small business team? Well, today I'm so excited to dive into this topic with Mia Henry of Freedom Lifted. Let's get into it.

Are you ready to grow from stressed-out solopreneur to competent CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent more than 15 years helping women entrepreneurs sustainably scale their businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEOs. I hope you listened to last week's episode because it was the very first one to kick off this mini-series about how we can build incredible, impactful, inclusive cultures within our small businesses. There is so much talk about the tactical part of building a team like how do you write your job description? How do you find people? How do you hire them? How do you onboard? How do you use your project management system to make sure everybody's doing what they need to do?

But I wanted to really elevate this conversation and bring in some more of the deeper nuance that really goes into how do we just build incredible teams, how do we build real cultures in our small businesses that people want to be a part of? Because when we're doing this intentionally, there's a huge win for us as the business owner, we end up with these incredible team members who do amazing work, who really take great care of our clients, of our community.

For them, they feel valued. They feel respected, they feel well compensated. They truly feel like this is a place that they want to be and that's what culture is. It's how do we make sure we are building a place where people come together and do the work that we do, and everyone wants to be a part of it. They want to stick around. They want to stay with us for a long time.

That's something that's happened both organically and intentionally behind the scenes here at my business. Most of the people on my team have worked with me for years and years and years. In fact, I would say Amber has worked with me the longest since 2011. Mary who just joined us just had her first year anniversary at the time that I'm recording this.

A lot of the people on my team have stayed for years and people are always surprised by that. They're always surprised how I keep people so long and how everybody seems to want to continue to grow with The CEO Collective. This is part of it. This conversation is a part of yes, some of the organic, but also a lot of the intentional pieces, a lot of the intentionality behind creating a culture that people want to be a part of.

Today, I am continuing the conversation with Mia Henry. She is the founder and CEO of Freedom Lifted, which supports justice-centered leadership development through online learning, training, and coaching. Through her unique approach, Mia has created educational spaces and practical tools to foster just ethical leadership for hundreds of private, public, and nonprofit organizations.

In addition to pioneering innovative work through Freedom Lifted, Mia has deep experience in organizations committed to promoting justice and equity, previously serving as the executive director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and founding director of the Chicago Freedom School.

Mia has also been a member of The CEO Collective. She just completed her first full year with us. Each time a new person joins The CEO Collective, one of the first things I love to do is do a deep dive into their work, to really pay attention to all the content that they're putting out there, all the conversations they're having. There was a conversation that Mia started that made me actually pause and stop for a moment where she talked about the importance of power for all.

The conversation that we're about to have today really is about this shift, this paradigm shift, a huge paradigm shift happening right now where instead of leadership being about top down, where you as the CEO are like the top of this pyramid and just dictating to everybody below every single thing, instead, this is a much more like flat horizontal structure where everyone shares in the leadership, everyone brings value and is appreciated for the value that they bring. Everyone is allowed and respected for their point of view.

This conversation goes so much deeper today. But if you are starting to grow a team and you have been feeling a little bit of this friction between maybe your previous work experiences, your previous understanding of leadership or management, and the type of business you know you really want to build, we have to have these deeper, more nuanced conversations.

I'm so excited to have Mia today and share with you her insights and how we can build more equitable, more diverse, more inclusive cultures that actually truly are a win-win for every single person involved in your business.

Alright, everyone, I am so excited. Mia Henry is here with me today. Mia, thank you so much for joining me.

Mia Henry: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Racheal.

Racheal Cook: Well, I absolutely wanted to have you as part of this conversation because the world of work is changing vastly right now. We are just seeing a lot of conversation in the larger zeitgeist about how people are tired of the way work has been done, leadership styles of the past are no longer working, and the people who are the ones doing the work are actively wanting to take back some of the power that has been taken from them.

As an expert who works in diversity, inclusion, and equity, I wanted to make sure to have this perspective in the conversation because I think a lot of people maybe don't understand what that work actually is. Can you share a little bit from your perspective about why diversity, equity, and inclusion work is just so important within the culture of a company?

Mia Henry: Sure, it's a little difficult for me to completely identify as a DEI person or consultant. I'd consider myself as part I think of that field but I'm that outlier, or I'm the one who's constantly giving loving criticism to it and I never felt like I was doing the work in this way that’s defined often by corporations.

I come at it from this space of really wanting people to anchor their organizations in justice work. Even organizations that are doing social justice work or they're doing social movement campaigns, they have often a great analysis of power externally, how they want to build power, and change the world, but they still struggle with how they understand and relate to one another within their organizations.

I came really into the work doing a lot of talks with organizations who already maybe were fully staffed with people of color or people from other marginalized identities. They really understood anti-racism, they understand ableism, and all of what needs to change in the world to achieve equity, and they were still having problems with how they're related to one another within.

For me, I found that sharing a framework around the connection between identities and how we relate to identity and power, and then talking about oppression, how it can show up in a world but how it also shows up in our relationships, and even how we can internalize it, then talking about what I call liberation work is which is with a power analysis is bringing more power to more people.

Regardless of how they identify, that framework of connecting identity, power, oppression, and liberation is how I began doing training work. It was very much influenced by the tours that I took previously. My company's called Freedom Lifted, and we started it doing civil rights tours to Alabama where I'm from, and to Mississippi and Memphis.

I really wanted to have stories from that history, be able to inform how we build power today. I was very fascinated by the conflict that happened in the civil rights movement and in other social movements, the struggles that people had with them. We know that there was homophobia and misogyny certainly present in the modern civil rights movement. We know that there are racist threads in the women's movement, racist threads in even the gay rights movement.

What was happening where people were actually actively building power to bring more justice in the world but yet they were still struggling with power struggles within their movements. That's really how I approach the work is we use a historical lens and we use a power analysis to think about what does it look like to build more just organizations, not just what organizations are doing, again, in the world, but how they operate and how they relate to people who lead them, relate to one another.

Racheal Cook: This is such an interesting conversation. As a fellow history nerd, I love that you take this historical lens because historically, power has always been very concentrated at the top, and it's like people are afraid to share it. They're afraid that if too many people get a hold of it, then all hell's going to break loose and everyone will just be unhinged or something.

But that's not what justice work does. It's not about just give everybody the power, then no one's in charge, and it's just complete chaos, which is what I think the select few in power really fear. They fear that there will be retaliation or something if more people have access to power.

When you're talking about bringing this into organizations where there's more shared power, what does that look like within an organization and within the dynamics of teams working together or management working with people instead of controlling everything that they do?

Mia Henry: Yeah, absolutely. What happens often when people are thinking about power is they're thinking about how power has been used against them, or has been used to oppress, which is to restrict power from others.

I like to back up a little bit before we even start talking about shared power to define what social power is, what is it? And that's one of the first questions I ask any group that I'm working with or in any training that I'm doing, what do we have when we have social power?

Often, the response is, and I usually give one example, I'll say resources and I put a dollar sign where the S because money obviously is a resource, and in a society where you need money in order to survive, money is a resource and money is power. But there are also other resources like land and space and there are so many other different types of resources, but we're not going to leave money out of it.

I start with that. Then people say, “Well, when we have power, we have voice, we are heard. We have power. We are seen. We have visibility. When we have power, we have choices. We have self-determination and we have safety. We're safe, both physically and psychologically.”

Amy Edmondson, I believe, is really leading the work on psychological safety in the workplace. There are some other scholars thinking specifically about psychological safety for Black women and other marginalized identities in the workplace. But that's really also about power. How are we bringing more power to more people? That's how I define social power. We have resources, we're seen, we’re heard, and we're safe. There's nothing wrong with those things.

Racheal Cook: No. The way you just laid that out, first of all, I love that because it makes it very clear, because again, I think a lot of people when they hear the word power, like you said, they're thinking of how they were oppressed or how power has been used against them or to control them, and this definition makes so much sense because when we don't have access to those resources, when we don't have access to that psychological safety, being seen, or being heard, we do feel we're completely powerless. We aren't able to ever get to the point of the whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs, of self-actualization because we're not even included in that pyramid.

Mia Henry: Exactly. That's where people feel more comfortable talking about power after we've been able to define it as something that everyone not only deserves but can have. I always say the belief in justice work is a belief in seeing power as abundant. That it's actually possible for everyone to have resources, voice, visibility, and safety regardless of how they identify.

That's how I define equity as well. I define equity as we are detaching identity from power. Racial equity means that race is no longer an indicator of power for me. Gender equity means gender is no longer an indicator of power. It is no longer how we identify, no longer is the reason why we might have resources, voice, visibility, and safety or not.

If we back up and just define powers, then think about how we bring power to our processes of hiring, how do we bring power to our processes, how do we share power and our processes of performance assessment or even how we conduct meetings. How do we make sure everyone is seen, everyone is heard, everyone has the resources that they need in order to do their job well?

That doesn't mean everyone has all the same resources, but how do they have what they need in order to do their job well, and of course, does veryone feel safe? Physically, of course, that's a non-negotiable, but also psychologically, how do people feel like they can be vulnerable, they can contribute without being shot down, that they are absolutely protected by the people that they work with, and how they show up at work, and they're not going to be attacked for speaking a certain way or walking a certain way or undervalued or devalued based on identity or identity markers. Those are the things that we are telling everyone. That's the lens.

Racheal Cook: This changes the whole understanding of this conversation for me so much, although my first thought is it takes somebody who's done some of their own inner work, who is emotionally mature, and is honestly like if you're in this situation, I'm a White woman, I have a lot of privilege, a lot of rooms, and a lot of spaces, that means I've got to be comfortable with the discomfort of making space, holding that space, and respecting that space for other people in a room where I might be on both sides.

I might be in a room full of men where I'm the one at the disadvantage or I might be in a room full of women from a marginalized background, Black women, Indigenous women, etc. It's really interesting to think about this because I think in traditional work environments, not everybody is ready for this conversation. There's like, “What is the groundwork that has to start?”

If you're working in an organization, or you're wanting to build an organization where there is this new lens of everyone has access to this power, everyone is using their power collectively to move towards whatever the goals are, how do we make sure that we're ready for that? Because this is an uncomfortable process. Thinking through all the organizations I was a part of before starting my business, this was a huge reason why I left those organizations because it was not psychologically safe.

There was an imbalance of power. Very much if you're a woman, when I was in corporate, I was one woman in an office of 50 men where it wasn't just psychologically feeling unsafe, it was sometimes physically feeling unsafe. How do we start these conversations? Is this a conversation that can be started from within? I don't know, it feels like this is just such a big thing to tackle. How do organizations come to you when they think they're ready to do this work? How do they know they're ready to do this work?

Mia Henry: Oh, that's a good question. Two questions I'm hearing and first of all, I want to thank you for even sharing your past experiences in work and the discomfort that you felt either because power is being used against you or being challenged on maybe the power that you held because of privilege. Thank you for that.

I think you demonstrate what is necessary for people to be ready for the work is honesty and vulnerability and a willingness to really reflect on their own experiences. I find that using power as a prompt for reflecting on experiences is actually much more effective than using privilege as a prompt, which is what I think is one of the weaknesses of a lot of the DEI work that I've seen is that we move to privilege. We see that privilege is the only vehicle to power.

We do start with looking at our multiple identities. One of the key activities that I have people do, and people can do this for free on my website, it’s called the Power Flower, where they actually have to name or put language to how they identify according to multiple identities: race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, age, geographic location, and there are some blanks in there they can put in body size, military record, immigration status.

There are all these identity markers and people put their language to that. We start there but we [inaudible] in there. We talk about, “Well, what do we think about the most and what do we think about the least of those identities?” Normally, what we think about the most is where we lack power, because we have to be thinking about those parts of our identity.

You might be thinking, Racheal, more about your gender than you're thinking about your race on a regular basis, like your daily decisions or how you walk into work. I will be thinking about I identify as a Black cis-gendered woman who is heterosexual and an American citizen.

I never think about my citizenship. I never think about my sexual orientation. I think about gender. Often I think about being a cis-gendered woman never, I never think about being a woman often. I have both the privilege to not have to think about being cis-gendered. I think about race quite often. I never think about disability because I identify as a person without disabilities.

We take this time to just have people reflect on how they even understand their identities in the world and that being a window to where they may have privilege because we don't usually think about where the world is set up for us. Where we have power, where we have resources, and voice visibility and safety, we don't have to think about those parts of our identity but we do have to think about parts of our identity that compromise our power.

But that's not where it ends. It's not just privilege, which is unearned benefits that brings us power, we can also build power, which is what I was talking about earlier with social movements. We can build power, we can get positional power, particularly in our workplaces, which is based on the level of responsibilities that we have and the hierarchy of the organization.

We can be given or granted or earn that positional power. There are multiple ways to get those resources, voice, visibility, and safety. It's not just privilege. It's part of the conversation, but it's not the whole conversation. That is why we see some issues when people do have maybe identities that have been historically oppressed but then they get this positional power.

Because they have experienced oppression in the past, they don't even feel like they deserve that power. People talk about it as imposter syndrome or even having those positions of power. Other people are not giving them the respect they deserve because of the intersection between the privilege or the lack of privilege and the positions they hold. It's complicated and nuanced. But it's important for people to understand the difference between what power is and how we can acquire it.

Privilege is not the only way. Regardless of how we acquire it though, and I see you do this in your work all the time, Racheal, just even by noting and identifying where you have privilege and what your responsibility is to reach out and to bring more power to people who don't have those privileged identities, that's what I call using our power for liberation work, using our power to work for justice. Regardless of how we gain power, we have a choice on how we use it. Having privilege is not bad. What are you going to do with it?

Racheal Cook: Yeah. You have it because you have it.

Mia Henry: You have it so get over it and figure out how you're going to use it. Are you going to use it to hoard power? Which is where we see unjust practices in both our organizations and our government policies. Or are we going to use it to share power and think about how we're bringing, again, more power to more people, and particularly addressing historical harms? I hope that makes sense.

Racheal Cook: I love this. I think it makes so much sense to me. I'm thinking as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, there are two major stakeholders in my world. On one side, I have all of my clients, and that's probably the more visible side. People see the work that you do, they see all your marketing, they see all your messaging, they might talk to your clients.

They're a group that when I'm thinking through this framework you just gave us about how are we helping them resource, are they seen, are they heard, are they psychologically safe, that's a very clear framework that I can work with on the client side to ask myself and how my team ask, are we providing these things so they feel like they are able to be seen, heard, and taken care of while they are within our care, while they're a client, they’re within my care, they're in my little bubble here.

Then on the other side, there's the team. This is the side that I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, unfortunately, there are a lot of bad habits I see coming from previous experiences traveling into new businesses. I'm extremely sensitive to this too, to making sure everyone on my team feels like they have power. They're seen, they are heard, they can come to me.

We can have conversations, even if they are uncomfortable, even if it's making me have to really dig deep and understand where somebody might be coming from. But those are the two stakeholders that I think small businesses really need to consider because when it comes to conversations like this, unfortunately—this as a Rach rant slightly—I get really annoyed at the businesses that are using these conversations as almost like a marketing tactic, like, “Look at us. We're doing all this great work.”

On Instagram, it looks great. But then you go inside and you talk to their clients or you talk to their team and they're like, “No, I was not seen, heard, or felt like I could even share honestly, openly, and vulnerably.” That was not okay, that was shot down.

I think that's something really important because I knew I wasn't the person to change a large organization that was very sexist and misogynistic, I wasn't the person to change that, it wasn't safe for me to be that person, but I think within these small businesses, and that's who's listening, as small business owners, entrepreneurs, this framework you just gave us I think is just so powerful to think through how are we creating these spaces for our team and for our clients in our community?

How are we evaluating that on a regular basis? Because if we're not creating a dynamic where power is shared, then we're just perpetuating more harm. We're just continuing the bad cycles. I don't think that's what anybody who relates to me is wanting to do, wanting to build better businesses, or wanting to do this work better. It doesn't matter what kind of work you're doing. I think most of the women who are listening to anything I share want to do it better than what they have previously experienced.

Mia Henry: Yes. That requires unpacking what they previously experienced. I had to do that as well. Fortunately, I've been able to lead a couple of organizations, nonprofit organizations, and centers before starting my own business so I had practice in leading teams.

I know that a lot of my peers in the small business world have not led a team before and they're in a position of having to build a team and it really does take a moment to pause and think about what were the best environments that they worked in, what were the elements of that, and what does great leadership look like to them, shared power, what I call just an ethical leadership, looks like to them, and what has been spaces they've been in that have been super toxic, and where they didn't feel seen, heard, resourced, or safe, and what was happening there and making sure that they do not repeat the patterns of the toxicity but they are intentionally building teams of people who are, I'm very fortunate to have teams of people who are smarter than me in all the ways that I am not smart, which is important, and humble, and ready to be honest with one another through feedback.

There's that term steel sharpens steel. We want steel. I want steel on my team. That does not mean people are coming in super aggressive, it’s actually the opposite of they’re assertive, that they're humble, and they see because our mission is also about bringing more power to more people.

We understand that we're trying to prefigure that in our organization and our business. We have to practice what we are teaching other people to be courageous and adopting. Everyone on my team just actually took my training again, and went through it and told me what's working, what's still super relevant, how we can build and grow on pieces of it, and what parts might we need to dust up or eliminate.

That, to me, is so important, because, again, they went through the process that the client goes through in doing our training and they said, “Okay, this is how we felt taking the train. These are the things we discovered about ourselves. So what does it look like for us to make our client experience even better?”

I think that they're so connected. I came to you and The CEO Collective after doing a little observation and testing because I had been part of a mastermind in the past, Racheal, that was not as solid on the inside. Unfortunately, I didn't know that until after I'd already signed up.

Then I started asking more questions and finding out about another person, I read their book, and I was going to join their thing, then someone was like they can't keep anyone working there because the leader is like a tyrant. I was like, “Oh no.” It really does matter. It will get out there if we are not really living our values within our organization.

I know you've had some great conversations with your coaches and others about the value-based piece. I loved what Erica Courdae has said about value-based business. That's so important. It's not just having the values though, it’s living the values.

Racheal Cook: I think this is the thing that I want more people to understand as small business owners, this whole conversation I'm sharing this month on the podcast is about how do we create these cultures in our companies, and how culture just really becomes so, so critically important.

There are layers and layers to this conversation I could unpack but I think one of the things I'm hearing right now is these are not meant to be like keywords that you slap on stuff. This is not like a marketing tactic.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of people who don't understand that this work takes time, it takes so much vulnerability, and I think it also takes getting the right people in the organization who it's not just that they believe what you believe, that you share values, that they're all about your vision, it truly is that they are invested in creating this thing bigger than just themselves or yourself. It really is a collective thing. That’s why we use the word collective in The CEO Collective, because it truly is about bringing people together, whether there are the people on my team or the people that we're working with, it just takes a lot of effort.

It reminds me of I've gone through a lot of trauma work in breaking generational trauma and cycles of generational trauma, it's very similar if you think about it like that. We're breaking cycles of power over types of leadership that have been modeled for us for the majority of the patriarchy and everything else.

We have to be willing to sit in that discomfort in order to break that cycle and start something new. It does mean that we might backslide sometimes and find ourselves saying something and then really being like, “Oh, no, I should not have phrased it that way. Let me come back and actually apologize to this person, make it right, and say Hey, what I just did there was that okay, I apologize. I'm sorry. I want to get back on the same page and let's move forward.”

This is work. This is hard. This is deep emotional work to lead in this new way because we don't have very many great models. Most of us were not brought up in leadership roles that showed us how to do it.

Mia Henry: Right. It's very similar, I feel like the workplace generational trauma, it's very real. That same work that we have to do to look back at our past and the very painful work that can be in our personal lives, it's the same work that we need to do when we're looking back at our past work lives.

It's so interesting, you bring up apologies because that's one of the pieces of homework for all of my clients. I work with organizations, staff, full staffs do my training, and I asked everyone after our second training before our last one, after we've talked about oppression and how power has been used against people and maybe even against us, where have we may be used our power to limit resources, to limit voice, to limit visibility?

I've had to apologize to my children has been my homework, because I knew that I took power away from them in the way that I communicated with them. I took the power of making decisions that they can make themselves. I took that power away from them. I had to go back and make an apology. Going back to generational trauma, my parents didn't apologize.

Racheal Cook: I know, I'm like, “I’m still waiting.”

Mia Henry: Apologizing with kids sounds like it’s revolutionary. This is part of the work. That's why the homework is whether it be small or big, if you need to make an apology before we come back together, I want you to attempt to make that apology and it may not be accepted.

Racheal Cook: Right, and you have no control over that. All you can do is control yourself.

Mia Henry: That's all you can do but it is the first step to repairing harm. Apologies are so critical to social justice work, and it has to happen over and over and over again.

Racheal Cook: And it doesn't make you a weak leader to apologize, which I think all dynamics of leadership are very much if “I am not as aggressive as possible and as strong as possible and have no chinks in my armor, then I'm not a strong leader.” I'm like, “No, strong leaders are willing to sit in vulnerability and discomfort and be willing to be humble and treat everyone with the same level of respect. It's not hierarchical anymore.”

I'm really loving this framework you've shared with us. I think this is so incredibly powerful, Mia. I really encourage everyone to go check out the Power Flower because this is such a cool tool that you've created.

It gives us so many different layers of context and nuance for this conversation for how are we really becoming better in our own leadership as we're growing our business because everyone listening to this podcast wants to grow their business, wants to work with more clients, wants to have a bigger team to support them in that work, and a huge part of your learning is the leadership component. I think this is the growth edge for a lot of us because the examples are a little harder to find.

As we wrap up, Mia, I would love to know, thinking of examples of leaders who are leading from this new paradigm of power with, of shared power, who do you look up to and learn from when you are looking at leaders to model and to be your go-to voice when you're thinking of new ways of leadership?

Mia Henry: I want to make sure I can say people will be okay with me naming them. I'm sure they would. There's someone that we just interviewed on a podcast that we're launching on Shared Power, a mentor of mine, Deborah Harrington. She led a foundation in Chicago for the longest time and was one of the first in the country to really think about how philanthropy can advance racial justice.

I watched the way that she gave feedback with compassion, was able to show how we could write our grants better, and show how we could budget better because she was on our team. She was in our corner. I love that she taught me how we can cheerlead with love but also with honesty.

I also learned from people that I used to work with when I did youth organizing, of just how to bring power to everyone in the room. Just even facilitating, sharing the facilitation of meetings, rotating the facilitation of meetings, or holding circles anytime that there was conflict.

I always say there are three main things we need to get clear on our organizations, more sharing powers, how we communicate, how we make decisions, and how we navigate conflict. I was like, “If we can figure out ways that everyone in the room can be responsible for that.”

I learned a lot of that working at the Chicago Freedom School and learning it from young people, that we were set up to support their leadership, but they pushed back on us quite a bit because I said, “You care about our leadership, but you're not letting us leave.” How can we be part of the board? How can we plan a program? How can we do these things? That to me was, again, that loving pushback from people that we trust, building the trust, and we can constantly be challenging each other to do better, sharpening steel. I want to give it up to the young people from the Chicago Freedom School and my mentor Deborah Harrington.

Racheal Cook: I love that. I'm sure you see this, you also have kids about my kids' age, but I am very hopeful about the future with how smart these kids are. I could never imagine being the age like my children are now and standing up for stuff. That was not a thing for me.

Now I'm watching these kids and they're fighting for what they believe in. They are very outspoken and they are very on top of current issues. They care so much. I think that's one of the things that makes me hopeful. As we're building businesses, I'm hoping these are the new businesses that these younger generations step into and they feel that sense of “I'm here and I make a difference even if I'm just getting started.”

Mia Henry: Yeah. Well, we should not only be encouraged by them, but we should re-up our own commitments to be a model for them because that is what they see. They see you as an outspoken business owner that’s value-driven, which gives them the models that some of us didn't have when we were young. That's why they're able to do it so young.

We had talked earlier about that driving analogy. I love that because we used a driving analogy for leadership when we worked with youth, but now with anyone when we want to teach others leadership, one of the best lessons we teach is how people drive as a society, we teach people how to drive.

It's everyone's responsibility. They have a class in school, the people in your family are going to teach you. It's a scaffolding experience. Children, watch your parents drive for years and years. Then one day they get a chance to get in the driver's seat, but the parent stays in the front seat and stays in a parking lot. You just don't go get on the highway.

You'd have all of these different scaffolding ways that we make sure that everyone can drive well because we know that the entire society needs people who are able to drive well. It's all of our responsibility to teach that. Even the car itself has evolved to make it more safe for driving.

Businesses have made it their responsibility to create safer drivers. Families make it their responsibilities, schools make it their responsibilities to make everyone a safe driver because it has everyone at this corner of it. But the first step is watching people drive. That's what your children do, and they're watching you drive. That's how they will learn how to drive.

Even when I'm feeling, Racheal, like, “Oh, I want to quit. I can't do this anymore. It's so hard” [inaudible] for our children, including children in our village in our lives, because I want them to see that it's possible, but we don't do it in isolation.

Racheal Cook: This is another thing that we need to make more visible because when this work is more visible, when we're more openly sharing and talking about it, and having the conversations out loud in public, these are the conversations that I think start to drive and shift the larger culture of leadership, not just the internal culture in our companies, in our businesses, but when we start having these conversations out loud, when we say these things in front of people, I'm so excited you have a podcast coming because this is why I love having a podcast or sharing content is now we can have these conversations out loud and really let people see what it could possibly look like. When is the podcast coming, Mia?

Mia Henry: September, I hope.

Racheal Cook: Awesome, I cannot wait.

Mia Henry: September 2023, yeah.

Racheal Cook: I cannot wait to learn even more because I just think you are so incredibly brilliant. As we start to wrap here, you have been part of The Collective now for a year, I would like to ask you quickly what has been your experience now that you are coming up on your one year anniversary in The Collective, what has happened for Freedom Lifted and what has happened for your business since you started working with us?

Mia Henry: Oh, well, since I started working with you, this is not the only indicator but it's a nice one, my revenue has increased a great deal. It really actually almost doubled since I started and I learned how to plan better. I love our CEO dates. I love the methodology you teach around the value of the task that we have and where I shouldn't be spending my time.

I always say that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned from The CEO Collective is how I spend my time is directly related to the impact and the success of the business. I take the time I spend so seriously, not that I didn't before but before I was just trying to do everything.

I had my fingers in too many pots and I was not trusting people to help me as much as I did now. I think that also being in The Collective and being able to be in community with other really serious, focused, and humble women business leaders and to be able to come into mastermind and just be completely honest about how I'm feeling and where I'm at, I just felt very held and welcomed and I'm not alone.

There's no feeling powerful in isolation. Even those who we think have all the power when they're lonely, they do not feel powerful. I promise you that. That's what The Collective, just by the community, gives us that ability to be seen, heard, valued, and safe.

I'm so grateful for the community you create, the methodology that you have, and the feeling that I've had and I've been able to just link arms with other people, other women who are trying to do cutting-edge work and battle our own demons as we're building it, trying to do this important work, and grappling with the fears that are part of the human condition.

Racheal Cook: Yeah. I love that you share that. Thank you so much, Mia, because that is our intention is to create a space where you're seen, heard, and held and you feel like you are in a room with, like you said, steel sharpens steel, and there are times where you want to be open and vulnerable to your team, to your community, or your clients, but also there are times where leaders need to get in a room with other leaders who actually understand what you're going through and what you're feeling because they've all been there too.

I think that's one of the hardest parts of leadership, of being the person starting, running, and growing a business is while you do want to be open and vulnerable with all the people involved in it, sometimes you need to get yourself in a room full of people who also really understand what you're going through. It's been amazing to have you in the room and to have your brilliance, insight, and support to all the other women in there as well. Thank you so much for sharing that, Mia.

Mia Henry: Thank you, Racheal. Thank you for everything truly.

Racheal Cook: Well, everyone can go to freedomlifted.com. Make sure you grab the Power Flower exercise and keep an ear out for Mia’s upcoming podcast. What is it going to be called?

Mia Henry: The Shared Power Podcast.

Racheal Cook: The Shared Power Podcast. It should be very simple to remember and we will make sure to link all of those things up in the show notes for you. Thank you so much, Mia, for joining me today.

Mia Henry: Oh, thank you, Racheal, for having me.