Erica: Welcome to the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker, and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

Erica: Today's guest is tackling the invisible wound that sidelines so many brilliant diverse leaders, the psychological toll of code-switching. She's here to show us how we stop minimizing our culture and our story to get into the workplace. And what's revolutionary is that she's not just talking about mental wellness, we've heard about that before. But she's bridging clinical psychology with strategic equity and leadership development. Dr. Christine Coleman is the CEO and founder of Cura Wellness, a concierge firm dedicated to the mental health and leadership of high achieving diverse leaders.

Erica: With a doctorate focused on the psychological effects of intersectional feminism and over fifteen years of clinical experience, Dr. Coleman is the creator of the socio-relational healing theory. And yes, it's a mouthful, but she's gonna tell us all about it. Now her work is rooted in the truth of la cultura cura, the culture cures. And she's also the founder of a nonprofit called Soul Sisters. Soul Sisters' mission is to help women overcome societal barriers by providing educational and empowering experiences that promote personal and professional evolution.

Erica: But Dr. Coleman understands the truth. You don't have to fragment your brilliance or your story to lead at the highest level. Her mission is to equip the leaders who carry the most to thrive personally, professionally, and systemically. So Dr. Christine Coleman, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Dr. Coleman: Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing so well. I'm so excited to be here.

Erica: Alright. We gotta start with your socio-relational healing theory. Tell me about what it is, and let's talk about the core concepts.

Dr. Coleman: Okay. Working with women, diverse women namely, over the span of fifteen plus years, I have been collecting information as a clinician, as someone who got a PhD and had to do research as part of that work, really just an overall human with a lot of curiosity leaning into how the different parts of us manifest themselves into the everyday spaces that we take up. So with working with women who are in leadership roles, I became really curious about how these different parts can start to inform how they impact our mental health, and what are some ways that we can take some of the power that we lose through these parts back.

Dr. Coleman: It started off as the thriving framework. Essentially, how we integrate our socio-relational world, with our systems, how we relate to these different parts of ourselves, and how we heal through these parts that have the potential to harm us, are really where that term and concept come from. It is an inverted triangle with four layers. The top layer is systems, our relationship to workplace or leadership, our relationship to our loved ones or interpersonal connections, and at the bottom, the tip of this triangle, is our relationship to self.

Dr. Coleman: We as women know that oftentimes we are put last on the list. We carry these mounds of responsibility that have been placed on us and that we've taken upon ourselves. At the same time, the self is such a core foundational part to be able to withstand all that we carry above us and on us.

Erica: I love that you're talking about starting with self. Immediately where my brain goes is, I don't know that we were ever taught how to really have a good strong relationship to ourselves. And it's so important to me right now because I have a seven year old daughter. Do you think this starts young with us?

Dr. Coleman: Absolutely. My daughter just turned eight, so I was right there with you. I actually just had a call with my therapist this morning, and so much of our conversation was around my daughter and how so much of what I'm noticing about her is showing up in my life. It's bringing up a lot of my own connection to my childhood. We see so much of ourselves as adult women in our children. If I have the opportunity to parent in a way that is conscious and effective starting with my children young, there can be room for so much more positive outcome in their lives. There's also this real quick note of the reparenting that we can do even if we didn't get that ourselves.

Erica: I'm seeing it all over social media and TikTok, and it's like, man, we are reparenting ourselves, and we're all just trying to figure it out as we go.

Erica: But let's talk a bit about intersectional feminism, because this is where your work really thrives. How does the pressure of holding multiple identities, being a woman of color and a leader, or LGBTQ plus and a mother, create this unique, exhausting sticky floor, the kind of trap that leadership doesn't address?

Dr. Coleman: Such a good question. So much of that model came from wonderful scholars beyond me. Kimberlé Crenshaw, among other scholars alongside her, is the pioneer of intersectionality theory, founded in the late nineteen seventies, early nineteen eighties. Essentially, there were systems designed to give people access to privilege and others not. We remain in these systems still today that oppress us and that give us access to privilege, or privilege directly. We are constantly navigating between those.

Dr. Coleman: People don't do really well with privilege. In these conversations, I think it's an opportunity for us to recognize that privilege is an opportunity for us to lean into what we have, exercise gratitude, and then seek out the ways that we can offer it to other people that don't have the best access to it. That can come across race, that can come across as gender. There are specific ones on the intersectionality theory: socioeconomic status, so income, but also the ways that class shows up, access to things like education and resources. There are others like age. We know that there's age privilege, sometimes at a young age, and sometimes ageism exists when people start to get older.

Dr. Coleman: Especially as women, especially when we add on being a woman of color, my background is my mother, who passed away last year, was Mexican American. My father is Iranian and lives in Iran. I have had this not only tied to race and ethnicity, but also multiple identities on top of being a woman, and not knowing where I belong and how I move in the world. My mom was the first to go get her master's degree, so she had to break some glass ceilings that made it easier for me to have access to privilege to get a PhD. There are systems that were formed against us, which make it harder, but it doesn't make it impossible for us to break through them. One thing we have to be really mindful about is how do we not gaslight people, telling them it's just their imagination or they're overreacting. There are real systemic divides here that we have to take seriously and believe, especially for women.

Erica: A hundred percent. That's the premise of the podcast. These systems do exist, and yet I will still shatter the ceiling.

Erica: This kind of leads me to my next question, because you've often said there's no need to fragment your brilliance. I have gone through the ranks of corporate America in multiple industries, and I think a lot of people feel like they have to shape shift and change who they are. Absolutely, for women of color who have to worry about being coined the angry black woman if they express any kind of emotion. So what do you think women can do to stop fragmenting themselves and start leading with their whole selves while surviving and thriving in the system we have?

Dr. Coleman: Let's talk about the fragmentation, otherwise known as code switching, especially in different spaces including the workplace. Even to this day, even as DEI continues back and forth, there are calls to action and there is action being put forth in helping make these workplace institutions more inclusive and psychologically safer for people to show up as their full selves, with their full racial identities and ethnicities, with their full language differences. There are different ways that we show up that have the opportunity to be penalized, and other ways where we're seeing, I have the space to come as I am.

Dr. Coleman: The system has to continue to uphold its responsibility to what they said they were gonna do. I'm fascinated by the HR perspective of how people teams can continue to really stand on what it is they are promising to do for their people. It starts with really understanding, I am here of service to the people who are here to provide the professionalism, the product, the service. That starts systemically there, which is a beautiful, important, and also challenging responsibility.

Dr. Coleman: But when it comes to the individual, I want to call in a bit of my mental health background. We have to pay attention to how this is impacting me mentally and emotionally. Let's do a scan: when I step into work, do I feel a sense of peace, or is my anxiety through the roof? Am I overworking just to be heard and seen? Is that causing me a heightened level of anxiety? Am I burned out because I'm performing so much more just to be taken seriously? There are ways that our mental and emotional well-being are impacted, and they're really serious. The risk if we don't address this is a detriment to our well-being and our survival. Many of us are actually functioning in survival mode.

Dr. Coleman: If we are not able to have a sense of belonging in our workplace, we have to seek out spaces that do promote belonging outside. This is why community is so important. My nonprofit, Soul Sisters, has really been about creating sisterhood and community across diverse spaces. Affinity groups are really important, around women, around women of color, around women with different family structures. And of course, taking care of the individual self through different self care practices is important too.

Erica: You know what, community is like the word of the year. It really at the core of it teaches that belonging. This whole time you were talking, it brought me back to a training years ago, when DEIB was just starting to emerge. They had everyone write down the top five things that make them them. Then they said, now imagine you have to leave one or two of those things home, and you can never bring it to work or talk about it. It gives you this perspective of what people who feel like they have to minimize their cultural identity might actually feel like.

Dr. Coleman: That's a really great activity. As you were sharing that, it made me think of how we have our own silos that promote belonging where we feel a sense of safety and ease. We found out our daughters are close in age, we found out I used to be a Zumba instructor. Unless we put ourselves in these situations where we say, I am willing to be in community with you and learn about somebody outside of my familiarity, we're not closing the gap that tells us we're not worthy of being in spaces with different people. I am a woman of color, you are a white woman, there are different things that you have access to that I don't. It doesn't make you any better than me, and it doesn't make me any better than you. But how would we know that if we continue to just stay separate?

Erica: You mentioned some of those self care rituals or things we can do. So lay them on me.

Dr. Coleman: We are really busy. We really need to prioritize some me time and take that seriously, because there are so many women I speak to who have the paid leave and the support and don't take it, for a variety of reasons. A lot of that is around boundaries, around what it is that we are willing and unwilling to give of ourselves. It's a hard one, especially from different cultural groups where boundaries can be seen as a form of disrespect. Many cultural groups, especially those of color from different parts of the world, have a collectivistic approach to family and community. So while I still believe it is important to take care of self, we also have to put in parallel community care, because self care alone can feel very individualized and uncomfortable for some communities. What does community care look like? I show up for my community by helping somebody take care of their kids so they can go take a shower by themselves, or I go show up at a community event where there is dance or food.

Dr. Coleman: There's also this other part, which is the way that we treat and talk to ourselves. Some of us have a history of people not treating us very well, and we internalize those things. So how can we continue to have a refined narrative of how we speak to ourselves? So there are body mind connections as well as outward community connections.

Erica: Any pivots or mantras for women who struggle to actually take that time for self?

Dr. Coleman: I like to have my clients write a column list of I will, I will not. That is essentially the root of a boundary. I am willing to still be the person who drops off the kids, I understand it's a responsibility, I have time in the morning. Some things we have to do, but there are also some things we could hand off and are just having a hard time handing off. But also, where can we draw in some boundaries of, I'm actually not willing to do that anymore? When we recognize there are some things we actually have a say in, it can give us more control and power over our voice and our actions.

Erica: You know what I'm no longer willing to do? Be a lunchroom parent.

Erica: What is the one takeaway you want women to know about the work you do, and how they can utilize it to go from this fragmented existence to true authentic self?

Dr. Coleman: To end where we started, we talked about systems, we talked about self, we also have a relationship to our work and our work identities, and our relationships to our children and loved ones. If I can offer anything, use that model as a guide. What is my relationship to these systems? In what way do the systems serve me and not serve me? Who are the people with privilege around me that I can call in to show up for me when I need access or support?

Dr. Coleman: Similarly in the workplace, what is our relationship to our work? I use a visual called the identity pie, a pie chart of all your roles and responsibilities. If work has become 75 to 80% of your pie, and that's a season you're proud of, that's your choice. But if you're recognizing work took over more than you took over it, are there modifications you can make? So many women of color I talk to have bosses who say, you don't actually have to give this much, but they feel such a sense of panic and fear that they've been operating at what they think is 70% when it's really 90 or 100%. Really reassessing our relationship to work matters. And then coming back down to self, having the process and the moments, even a five minute walk, can be little pockets of opportunity for self reflection that lead us to the outcomes we're seeking.

Erica: This was amazing, Dr. Christine. Thank you so much. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, share this episode with a friend and drop a review. Remember that your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are your sticky floors. But you have the power to break through them.