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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Further Forward podcast.
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I'm your host, Ashley Mitchell.
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Thank you for tuning in.
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These are the final episodes.
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It's like its own little capsule collection.
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And then, and then we shall see how incredible.
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I mean, I'm someone who just given various events in my life, I seek safety and certainty.
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And we know that neither are necessarily guaranteed and in creative work, even more so, right?
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You just have to put it out there and see what happens.
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And so, regardless of how I come out of this maternity leave, I'm just super, I'm super proud of myself that I've been able to begin to climb up and over my own cringe mountain.
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I hope that if you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard that thread that uh from a lot of guests that there is a cringe mountain in their experiences or an insecurity mountain of some sort, or obstacles that they've had to overcome.
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And what it teaches me is that you can overcome damn near anything and everything, right?
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If you keep going, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other.
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How do you just take the small steps?
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It's kind of in a weird way what this episode is about, right?
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Like evolution, growth.
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You know, this is this episode specifically is for people who have experienced being the only in a room.
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And it's also for the people who hold power in these rooms and and who are willing to open them up.
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This episode came to me because some weeks back, a colleague in another city sent me a message thanking me for speaking up about my experience in 2020 about being black in fitness and how it inspired her, gave her permission to do the same thing and to take up space and to claim her gifts and her offering as a woman of color in her own city.
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And I was 100% so flattered and so appreciative that A, someone felt that way, but B that they would actually reach out and tell me about it.
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But I also had a moment to reflect back to that time, right?
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Here we are six years later, and I just feel so different.
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And I should, right?
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It's not, I shouldn't be standing in the same place that I was in six years ago, but but it made me kind of do like an internal investigation of why am I less bothered?
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Not necessarily less frustrated, not necessarily less angry at times.
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And I wouldn't say unbothered either.
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But why am I less bothered?
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I have seen things happen.
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I have seen more instructors of color and specifically more black women instructors.
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I've seen more folks creating their own stuff.
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Black led this, black owned that, BIPOC this.
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It's it's really incredible.
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And it gives me energy to know that that people are occupying lots of different spaces and lots of different lanes that I didn't see six years ago.
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And the other side of that is that very often I am still the only person of color when I am teaching.
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And if I'm lucky, there's a couple of us, but it's not something that is guaranteed.
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And so I started to think about just the the whole experience of it.
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I I haven't I haven't kept it a secret that living here hasn't been the easiest.
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It was a huge culture shock when I first got here.
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And now I think something that's always stuck out to me is that there's this, there's this promise, there's this like facade of being liberal.
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And it's not, I say facade, but it's it's not like that's not true, right?
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The the voting data is the voting data.
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However, just because an area votes a certain way, it doesn't mean that that belonging is felt in the people, right?
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So it's like maybe you don't feel physically unsafe, but that but but but feeling safe versus feeling like you belong versus having a feeling of home, like this is the place, right?
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The place that's gonna hold me and the place that I can hold, those are two different things.
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Thinking back, I'll never forget the microaggressions.
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I'll never forget the entitlement.
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I'll never forget how some folks would, and when I'm saying some folks, I'm specifically talking about white people and mainly white women, just so that we're clear how uh people would treat me, how people would talk to me, how people would talk about me, how people would touch my body, touch my hair, touch my muscles, refer to my body in my presence.
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Sometimes being treated like as if you're the help.
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Sometimes it's the people with like the most, the most money, the most this, the most that are arguing with you about pay or about, you know, what your rates are as a trainer.
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Um and and I swallowed it.
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I swallowed
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it all because I thought that I had to, because I thought that that was the only way that I was going to make a living, make a name for myself, get the prime time slots at a studio where you know the classes are most full, things like that.
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And the thing that no one tells you is that being the only one, it costs you something.
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And sometimes it is that very self-betrayal that costs the most.
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You're always on guard, you're always translating yourself for different audiences and living in that sort of fragmentation of how you walk, how you talk, how you present, how you joke, how you show different sides of yourself, how you tell stories about your life to be shape shifting all the time, several times a day, is not how or who we were meant to be.
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Always having to decide in the moment when someone says something that's off, whether that's it could be a little bit racist, might be a microaggression, it might just be uncomfortable, it might be downright sexist or misogynist.
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You're always deciding in real time like, do I say something to this?
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Am I safe enough to say something about this?
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Am I safe enough to stand up for myself?
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If I do, is anybody gonna have my back?
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Am I gonna lose my job?
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Am I gonna be punished?
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The the mental weight of just having to think through these things over and over again every day, in and of itself, is tough.
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And like the the funny thing about it is that when you peel all the layers back, and I I truly believe that what I do is so important and I live it and I breathe it and I love it.
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But at the end of the day, we're talking about fitness, all this work to fragment yourself and to be someone else to barely make enough money.
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It's right, so it becomes this mountain of stress.
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And and we know that stress leads to burnout, right?
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It's it's stress plus recovery that gives you capacity.
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But when you don't get that recovery, when you're living in that loop day in and day out, that stress starts to break you down.
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So we're not even just talking about a DEI problem or a race problem or an exclusion problem or a fairness problem or an equity problem.
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Capacity, burnout, stress, these are these are wellness problems.
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These also affect your quality of life.
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These affect markers of disease.
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This has a trickle-down effect, this constant feeling of not being safe in your body or in your environment.
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So I started to pinpoint what exactly are the things that are different?
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And right now I'm speaking directly to the folks who whose story mirrors mine in some way.
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This is why I said I'm less bothered, not unbothered, because I never know what I'm gonna get job to job, client to client, room to room.
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So for people like me always having to navigate the spaces and always kind of like needing to survey the land before fully stepping in with both feet.
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There are a couple of things that I think I unintentionally did that now I can I can go back and see the ways that in which I was trying to both grow and protect myself.
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So any of this feels like it would be helpful for you.
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Take the ideas.
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Take the ideas, take the feeling, take the thought.
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First, I stopped chasing some idea of success as it was handed to me coming up in the industry, right?
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All the messages were like, this is what a successful instructor looks like.
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This is the kind of content they post, this is the kind of money that they make, these are the kinds of people that they train, these are the kinds of people that they're friends with.
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This idea of success is very visible, very fame-centric, celebrity trainer-centric.
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And there's some just sort of imagined bullshit hierarchy, right?
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Lots of industries have this because lots of industries have their stars, their famous people, they're, you know, they're folks and frameworks that have become ubiquitous in culture.
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And when you start chasing that, you continue to lose who you are and why you started.
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And so there was certainly an energetic shift based on how I started to define what I wanted this to look like.
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And once my energy shifted, my experience of who I was attracted to in terms of like who I wanted to work for, who I wanted to work with, the kinds of clients that I gravitated toward, the clients that gravitated towards me, a lot of things started to shift into where it's really sitting right now.
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The second thing is that I stopped using my capacity to try to force a system or to force people inside a system to change.
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There are just several instances where I just went and and did the thing that I wanted to do, or tried to do the thing that I wanted to do, or collaborated with a person, a place, an organization that I wanted to collaborate with instead of chasing the industry, just going and doing what I knew to be true to myself and building things that felt
impactful instead of vapid.
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Hopefully building things or experiences that would stick with people, trying to be a real person and talking about the challenges of wellness and well-being, right?
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There's no, there's no magic pill or shot or whatever.
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There's no one therapist, one book, one thing.
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Your spouse isn't gonna make everything better for you.
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Your children are not gonna make everything better for you.
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We have to put work into this every fucking day.
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You're not just gonna wake up with an eight pack and suddenly all of your problems are solved, right?
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And and thinking long term like that, like what do people, what do I have that could actually help people?
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What are the skill sets, the strengths, the the passion that could actually do good in the world?
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Instead of it just being like, how can I put myself on a pedestal?
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What do I have to give?
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And then that's another part that brings you back into wholeness with yourself.
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Because then you also are able to start to let go of the anger.
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It's not like you stop fighting for justice, but you know that you don't have to hold the darkness all the time, that you are part of the light, that you hold a part of the light, and that there are other people out there holding that light with you.
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You're never, you're never alone.
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But you have to be able to give yourself some space and to start to create what you want in order to be able to see that.
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You have to have ownership.
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In the music industry, they say own your masters.
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If you're always working for someone else, if you're always um looking to someone else to tell you what right looks like, it's always going to be frustrating.
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We don't need to wait for people to tell us who we are and what we should be doing.
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This is something that was very, very present in my acting training as well.
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You know, sitting around waiting to get picked is really good way to have a shitty career, right?
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You don't you don't wait for people to pick you.
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You go create work, you go put your stuff out there in the world.
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You have the agency, you drive the bus.
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And I think like this was a huge thing for me of like there are so many choices.
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I'm not stuck here.
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Other people might be, but it's not going to be me.
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And for the people who hold power, so there's a couple of things.
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There's one, just sort of understanding the ways in which injustice works, especially when it's not overt discrimination, right?
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There are lots of different ways that people can feel excluded from spaces.
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Some of that is price, having scholarships, having sliding scales, community classes.
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This is the difference between equity and equality, right?
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It's equity is giving the people what they need versus giving everybody the same thing.
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Everybody doesn't need a discounted class.
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But some people, if they don't have some kind of access point, they're never going to make it into the room.
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And the point is to get the people in the room to have different kinds of bodies and perspectives and races and genders and all that stuff.
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Because at the end of the day, it makes your instructors better because now they're seeing more, right?
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They're able to work with more.
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And so they learn.
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But also the more you widen, who is welcome.
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You know, folks who come from historically marginalized identities, we talk.
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So knowing that your place is a safer place, knowing that your place has different access points for folks, we share that with each other, right?
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So then at the end of the day, it also affects the bottom line because now you have more people supporting your business.
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If you know that structurally folks are going to be excluded and discriminated against, then that means that you have an opportunity to find your lane of how you're going to participate and change.
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Another part of that is through community engagement.
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What does that, what does that look like?
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How are you embedded in the community, other than I attend the Chamber of Commerce meeting once a month, right?
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Great.
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But who else is in the neighborhood?
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What do people need?
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What services does the neighborhood offer?
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Is there a way to partner with a soup kitchen or a nonprofit?
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Or there's so many ways that you could be a part of where your business is that benefits people in a way that's that may not always affect your bottom line, but that's a part of your integrity and an act of service.
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The third thing that is that always needs to be talked about are recruiting and hiring practices.
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If you are in a place that's homogeneous, that means that it's going to take a little more effort to find, recruit, retain people who are different.
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And that means it might take a little more effort to create an environment where these people feel seen and safe and brave.
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But if you know anything about history, if you know anything about how change works, no one has ever been able to just sit around waiting for positive change to just happen.
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People have to go and do the work.
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They have to make it happen.
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So in the same, in the same vein of telling a person who's the only in the room, like, hey, you're gonna need to take responsibility to move yourself up and out of the space where you might be feeling like your life is fragmented and you're performing and you're code switching and like this is not healthy for you.
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You need to figure out how you're gonna move up and beyond that.
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It's the same thing on the other side.
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And then when you're holding the power, you have to figure out how to fucking dismantle these hierarchies, these systems of oppression.
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Everybody's got work to do, right?
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That's the real gag, is that nobody, nobody just gets out of this unless you're intentionally saying that it's not a priority, which is a completely different thing.
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I I don't feel like I chose fitness.
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I feel like fitness chose me.
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I feel like this has given me you know everything I've ever wanted since I was a little kid, since I can remember.
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There's been nothing in my life that hasn't been made better through moving my body, through sport, through physicality, through breath, through exertion.
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Every good thing has come from this because these are the moments where I learn how strong I truly am, how much endurance I truly have, how smart and strategic I am.
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And these are the moments where I also learn not to accept less than optimal from people, from jobs, and it's an ongoing process, right?
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We don't we don't get to a certain point in the gym and just stop going.
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It's like, okay, I can I can curl a 50-pound dumbbell, I'm done.
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That's it, right?
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Fitness, like life, everything always changes.
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It's like a series of of new lessons, of revisiting old lessons.
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This is why I love it so much.
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It's not just it's not just fitness, it's it's it's well-being, it's how to live a good life.
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And so, yeah, six years ago, I said a lot of things.
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I don't regret a fucking word.
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I know good came from it.
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I'm proud of myself.
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And the anger, the frustration, it's so useful because it reminds you of who you really are and where your values are and what you want to fight for.
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It lets you know that it's time to go be the light somewhere.
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So you just you see the signal and you follow that thread.
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Okay.
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Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.