Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Celina’s website is https://celinacc.ca. Her book is Can You Hear Me Now; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/494KzO9, paperback at https://amzn.to/49jrJmz, and audiobook at https://amzn.to/47QhWDm.

Books Celina referenced for further reading include Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (paperback: https://amzn.to/48Knws6 or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3OeP0ho) and Robert Livingston’s The Conversation (hardback: https://amzn.to/3UbQahp or audiobook: https://amzn.to/42awCf4).

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell
• Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy by Bill Griffith

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How Inner Work Transforms Your Leadership: Tools for Growth with Jonathan Reams
• How to Avoid the Bad Leader Trap with Barbara Kellerman
• Navigating the Global Storm: Rethinking Leadership for the Future with Cynthia Cherrey

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Celina Caesar-Chavannes is a highly accomplished author, speaker, and consultant, serving as Sr. Advisor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Initiatives and Adjunct Lecturer at Queen’s University. She is a former Member of Parliament (MP) with the Government of Canada, who represented the Town of Whitby, a suburb east of Toronto. As a Liberal MP, she served as Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from Dec 2015 – Jan 2017, and later as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Development et la Francophonie from Jan 2017 to Aug 2018.

Celina is also an astute academic with a commitment to service. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, an MBA in Healthcare Management from the University of Phoenix, an Executive MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and is a [Deepak] Chopra Certified Health Instructor. She is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Neurosciences at Queen’s University, exploring the intersection of equity and empathy.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
Just be yourself, that’s a meaningless phrase if you have no idea who you really are, and it can get worse as you rise through leadership ranks with cultural expectations of how to dress, style your hair, how to talk, and on and on, but today’s guest, former member of Canada’s parliament, Selina Cesar Chavan, finally found herself, and she shares what that means in this episode. Authentic leadership is a key principle at the Innovative Leadership Institute. We help leaders find their authentic voice and grow from there. Learn more after the podcast at Innovative leadership.com This is

Maureen 0:46
Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Nutkoff, the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. We’re recording this interview from the 2023 International Leadership Association Global Conference in Vancouver, celebrating its 25th year of impact. Today, we’ll be talking to Selena Cesar Chavan about her book. Can you hear me now? Welcome,

Speaker 2 1:11
Celaya. Oh, thank you for having me. This is really exciting.

Maureen 1:14
Tell us a little bit about your book, why you wrote it, and what you want leaders to take away from it.

Speaker 2 1:19
I was a member of parliament with the government of Canada in the 42nd parliament from 2015 to 2019 and the entrance and exit from that political sort of turmoil was quite an adventure for me. I call it the most painfully beautiful experience I’ve ever had. In writing the book, I wanted to capture what it was like while I was there, and I think for a lot of people, irrespective of whether they’re in politics or in business, if they have a real adventure, you want people to know what it’s like while you were there, and so I wrote that book, and really wanted to capture, especially because it’s so rare to have a story from a black woman’s perspective as a politician, or as a former politician, it was really important to really change the narrative, not only on what politicians can be, but what their lives could have been like before they got there, and what the adventure was while they were there. So, it was an important story to document that moment in history of the 42nd parliament. Yeah, that was a trailer. Now, so really it’s a story of my life. So, of course, when you get signed with a publisher, they dictate what you write. So I wanted to write the story about the political adventure, but I started writing it from the very beginning, coming to Canada from Grenada as an immigrant, and then working my way through all the ups and downs I had with school challenges as an entrepreneur, I owned a healthcare-based research management firm. How I struggled through that, what the highs were of that, winning the Toronto Board of Trade Entrepreneur of the Year, the Black Business and Professional Association Entrepreneur of the Year, like winning these awards, but still having that sort of self-doubt, still having that moment of imposter syndrome, and thinking I don’t know if I could really do this, and going in and doing my executive MBA, getting into a politics course in that program, and then pivoting, leaving the company 100% and then going into federal Canadian politics, and thinking, wow, if serendipity was an actual person, she’d be even confused by my pivot there, and then what that was like in politics. Why did you make the pivot? It’s interesting enough when people come into your life and they say something and it sticks. So, the story is, I’m in this class, and the professor says, if you have a business problem, you could use your political capital to fix it. And I was actually co-chairing Canada’s first national epidemiology study on neurological conditions. My background is in brain research. I’m currently doing a PhD in neuroscience. I love the brain, so again, why the pivot? So he says, if there’s a problem that you have with business, you could use your political capital to help. And at the time running this study, we were finding that Canadians, as I’m sure across the globe, people living with neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, or even children with epilepsy, or Rett syndrome, they were having challenges affording their medication, so having to move from province to province, or in your case, from state to state, and get it covered under the formulary, or individuals were divorcing their spouse because if they made just a little bit too much, their services weren’t being covered, and I thought, Where do we live? That can’t be possible here. And so I said, I clearly have a business problem, and this needs policy or political capital to fix it. And then I said to myself, Well, how do I get political capital real fast? Because I didn’t have any, so I ran, and you won. I, well, I lost the by-election. I ran, so that was in December of 2013 Okay, I Googled, how do you become a member of political party over that Christmas? In February, I became a member of the Liberal Party, or a Democrat in the US. And then on march 8, International Women’s Day, 2014 so less than three months later, I get this email that says invite her to run.

Speaker 2 5:21
Do you know a woman who is absolutely fantastic, stunning, really? No, I’m just saying, do you know a woman who you know it would be great to run to serve in our federal parliament? And I said, I don’t just know this woman, I am this woman. And so I took that one concept of having a business problem and translating it into something that you could change with policy and I ran all the way across the finish line with it.

Maureen 5:48
Wow, so first, and I make it emotional, my mom passed yesterday from Alzheimer’s. Thank you for the work you’re doing.

Speaker 2 5:57
Oh, my condolences. That is tough. It is so challenging. My life has been involved before politics involved in adjudication for the Alzheimer Society of Canada research programs. Really, my first foray into research was looking at nutritional needs for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Wow, then going into cognitive neuro rehabilitation, looking at helping people put their keys in the same spot, write lists when they go to the grocery stores, right. So help them with that transition through dementia and then into Alzheimer’s. So it really has a beautiful space in my heart.

Maureen 6:36
Thank you for your work. It’s really meaningful to me personally, as well as the question of for those of us with parents with this condition, how do we make sure

Speaker 2 6:46
yes,

Maureen 6:47
we extend our cognitive lives.

Speaker 2 6:49
Well, that is what was really important. So, getting into politics, what I wanted to do was ensure that we had a national brain strategy and a national senior strategy. So, you might think, well, why not have a national Alzheimer strategy, which we could do that, but what we were finding was there were so many commonalities between people living with dementia, people living with Alzheimer’s, people living with Parkinson’s, people living with all of these neurodegenerative conditions or neurological conditions that we thought if we have a national strategy that not only looked after the person who oftentimes had a comorbid condition like depression or something else and looked after their caregivers, then that would be a better strategy than just looking after the condition in a silo, as if the brain doesn’t have more than one condition that it could be dealing with at the same time,

Maureen 7:43
and the idea that we promote health,

Speaker 2 7:45
that’s correct,

Maureen 7:46
rather than cure sickness, because if I attend to my brain health now, hopefully I don’t end up in a nursing home for a number of years.

Speaker 2 7:54
Yes, so learning a new language, taking up a musical instrument, it’s use it or lose it, right? You know, even doing something as simple as Sudoku, or just really challenging yourself, downloading Duolingo, learning it seems so innocent, but when I was doing some of that cognitive neuro rehabilitation, it was those things that people thought were, oh, I would look like I was crazy if I did that. If I did self-talk, so when I’m walking to the grocery, saying, “Oh, I have to remember I need to get apples, bread, cheese, milk, or putting it in some kind of list, some kind of alphabetical list, or something like that. People would think that that was, “Oh, I shouldn’t do that, because that makes me sound crazy. But no, it actually is a strategy for brain health. You’re not putting stress on your brain because you’re actually writing things down. Why stress your brain out? You don’t need to, but you also have to have the strategies to use them. So, as you keep using that cognitive function, you keep trying to increase that neuroplasticity that helps with your brain function.

Maureen 9:00
For all of our listeners who are also struggling with parents and the concern that they will also become the person that they are now caring for. Yeah, so National Brain Strategy. Let’s go back to that.

Speaker 2 9:12
I wanted to have a National Brain Strategy. I really looked into some of the work that was happening in the United States around the investments. If you made an investment in research related to the brain, $1 would have a $4 return, meaning you could have a decrease in the number of people living with Alzheimer’s, or the cost to health care. What ended up happening was that it didn’t go very far, and you might be wondering, Selena, well, what does that mean? It sounds really great. While you’re in the federal government, why couldn’t you push that over the finish line? I just don’t think we were ready for it. I was appointed parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I had some real challenges as being the only black woman elected in the 42nd parliament, so out of 300 30-eight members of parliament, I was the only black female there from 2015 to 2019 and it became very clear that even my title as parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister often does not protect you from some of the isms that we experience, and that was almost like a shock to me, like I’m not protected. I have this great title, I have all this status, I’m this big time person now. I have a pin that says I’m a member of parliament. I still experience racism, I still experience tokenism, I still experience sexism. That’s wild, and it was wild that we were still having these kind of basic conversations that we need to get over, and so it was a challenge trying to utilize my brain while at the same time being very cognizant of the fact that the only thing that I felt useful for was the color of my skin and the fact that I had a chest that would make me angry. Oh yeah, that’s why the book is entitled, Can You Hear Me Now? Yes.

Maureen 11:05
How did you navigate this? Because you also have a voice at that point, right?

Speaker 2 11:11
Yes. So, this is the interesting thing: you have a title, you have the status. I’m Parliamentary Secretary to the leader of a g7 country. People are saying you are one of the most powerful women in the country, and yet I still feel this small, and if your listeners could hear, I’m like pointing my fingers together and pinching my nails together, because that imposter sometimes takes a hold of you at the most incredible moment, so even when something happens to you, like you experience a microaggression, or you experience sexism. It might be a small act, but it throws you back, throws you off balance. In those moments, I just felt I felt small. I still felt small, and I think I felt small because I didn’t actually know who I was, there was a title of leader, but what does that mean? What does that mean under the surface? What does it mean when you pull the title away? What does it mean to your value, to your, your sense of self? And if you don’t have that value or sense of self in a firm and strong way, then that title really means nothing.

Maureen 12:20
There’s a couple things I’m taking away. How do we help people build that sense of self?

Speaker 2 12:25
Yes,

Maureen 12:26
and how do we have a platform to have the conversation, so that when someone feels minimized, we can explore it, so the person who is often unintentionally, let’s make the assumption of that.

Speaker 2 12:41
Yes,

Maureen 12:42
can reevaluate their behavior, because if they’re doing it to you, they’re probably doing it to other people as well.

Speaker 2 12:48
So, there’s two things that I’ve done after leaving politics, so we could probably get back to politics later, but two things that I did. The first is I enrolled in the Deepak Chopra Center for Global Health and became a certified meditation instructor, a certified health instructor, a certified coach, not because I wanted to teach it to anyone, but because I wanted to learn about me, I wanted to understand me, I wanted to go deep down inside and figure out, I think I’m doing pretty okay, but as I’m going deeper and deeper, I’m realizing, oh my god, look at all the baggage I’m carrying. Look, all the stuff.

Maureen 13:24
And you’re one of the most powerful women in Canada. Imagine the young or not so young woman or man, even

Speaker 2 13:32
anybody, irrespective of gender or identities. Yes, you’re carrying stuff that you think you’ve dealt with. It is clearly right there, and I went deeper and deeper, and you know, when I came out of it, what I recognized was the most powerful version of Selena, the most powerful version of myself was three to five year old Selena, three to five year old Selena was uninhibited, unapologetic, she used to sing at the top of her lungs. Her voice still cracks, but she didn’t care. People were saying, “Shut, stop this, and she would just be belting out Rod Stewart. If you want my car, we did not care. And then what ended up happening was, as the world told Selena that you need to be seen and not heard, as I started pushing her away, I started to her boldness used to get me in trouble. So I used to hide her and push her away and put her in a dark place and just leave her there. And eventually I forgot her.

Maureen 14:33
And those words were the words I grew up with, seen and not heard.

Speaker 2 14:36
And we do not laugh out loud, we are quiet, we do not tattoo our bodies, we do not do any of this stuff. We are good girls.

Maureen 14:44
I got reprimanded as a senior manager at a large consulting firm for laughing too loud,

Speaker 2 14:50
laughing too loudly. Stay in your place, that is where you are supposed to be. And by the end of politics, that three year old Selena jumped at him. My body and said enough, enough of this hiding, enough playing small. So the first thing I did was go inside and figure out who I was, and the second thing I’m doing now with my doctoral work is the part that you’re talking. So, how do we start to train, and that is really understanding the praxis of humanization, and when I say the praxis of humanization, I think about what is the goal of being the leader, what is the goal of leadership, what is it for, and if it’s a selfish endeavor, if it’s only about me, then it’ll have very limited possibilities, but if your leadership is tied to the collective is tied to restoring our humanity in a world that is often driven by greed and selfishness and climate that is destroying us and geopolitical issues that are harming the most innocent of us and leaving people behind. If your leadership is not for the collective, then what is it for? And so this praxis of humanization is looking at the experiences, especially of black women who have left corporate settings and are now in entrepreneurship, and what those experiences are. Are they actually experiences? Are those acts of resistance actually acts of resistance, or are they moments of awakening, and is that journey towards entrepreneurship? Is it actually that you want to be an entrepreneur, be your own boss, make your own schedule, or is it you actually want to realize your humanity? And in taking those lessons and writing them down and developing a praxis for humanization. I think we could use those experiences that are painful and turn them into something quite beautiful.

Maureen 16:47
I love that, and I think, as someone who’s run her own business for about 23 years, there was absolutely a push against what I didn’t want to continue to experience.

Speaker 2 16:58
Exactly, I’m drawing from some work from Pablo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that I really love, of his book, where he talks about the fact that we need to start co-creating, we need to start looking at these different ways of knowing, these experiences, and being intentional about documenting what those experiences mean. So, you left corporate, and I leave corporate, and so and so leaves corporate, everybody leaves corporate, and we just say, oh, look, the largest growing segment of entrepreneurs in North America are black women, which is true, and we think, well, okay, and we just go on with our daily lives, and we don’t interrogate why, and so we assume, yeah, it’s probably due to racism and sexism, but really interrogate why, what happened on a consciousness level? What happened on that level of the moment of awakening? What transitioned? What transitioned for you? If you could go back and look at all those different moments where you said, ‘No, I’m gonna laugh out loud. No, I’m gonna be heard. I don’t care if you see me, I want to be heard. What happened in those moments? Are we intentional about looking at those little moments of awakening and saying

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Speaker 2 19:42
that’s leadership. Those moments, the

Maureen 19:46
one I want to add to that is creating space, so we can meditate and do yoga and heal and explore.

Speaker 2 19:54
The system is working as it should, and if the system works as it should, why would it give you five min. It’s to meditate, girl, please. How are we supposed to keep the capitalist engine running if you’re meditating?

Maureen 20:07
And will you stay in the capitalist engine if you’re meditating,

Speaker 2 20:10
right? But the irony of that is our creativity, our moments of innovation and inspiration come out of that rest. So Trisha Hershey’s rest is resistance. When you take that time and you sit back and you read and you give your brain.. we talked about it earlier, right? We de-stress our brain, and then those ideas start popping up. You know that this happens. You’re in the shower, and all of a sudden you have an idea pop up. It’s the most inconvenient space for that to happen, but you’re relaxed, and you look, you’re dripping wet, you’re trying to write it down, that’s when it happens, that’s when those moments happen. So, when we think about the fact that the World Economic Forum is talking about in 2025 that we’ll be losing 85 million jobs, where we’ll be gaining 97 million, so that 12 million increase. Where is that going to come from? It’s going to come from people that are going to tap into their creativity, they’re going to tap into that empathy, it’s going to tap into that emotional intelligence, they’re going to tap into the skills that are required of leaders in business that we often have forgotten because we’re too busy running in the grind and keeping our systems going while we are falling

Maureen 21:26
well, and so to build on that sentiment, I am hopeful that we as leaders recognize that we need to make that pivot. Lots of leaders are trying to, how do we at scale make the pivot so we can re attract many people who exited with no intention of returning, because returning is too painful.

Speaker 2 21:46
I will reference work by Daniel Goleman, who’s done research on emotional intelligence, as many of us know, and looking at technical skill and cognitive skill and emotional intelligence, and saying that that emotional intelligence piece is twice as important as your technical or cognitive skill, and as you elevate in an organization, as your leadership becomes more and more necessary and apparent, that emotional intelligence becomes more and more important for companies to succeed. So, if you want to succeed, why aren’t you? Why aren’t you doing it? We

Maureen 22:23
did a beautiful interview with someone who runs a firm measuring emotional intelligence. We can all cite the statistics from Daniel Goleman, but we’re not all making the step and the introspective step that you’ve talked about. How do I unpack that baggage? The emotional intelligence comes not from adding more into the system. In a lot of cases, it’s a shedding of

Speaker 2 22:46
that’s correct. Yeah, so I got asked a question yesterday. You know, how do you let little Selena integrate into your light? Like, I’m 49 years old. I left little Selena, like, when she was six. Like, that’s 43 years of conditioning of saying no, I’m not going to be bold, I’m not be outgoing, I’m not gonna be this, and people say, well, you are kind of bold, but I’m not really. How do you start to pivot? It’s like practice of meditation, you practice, you practice self-awareness, you practice self-reflections, you practice empathy, you practice social skill, you practice your motivation right. In particular, when we talk about empathy, it’s not just a practice of empathy I feel with you, but you look at other research around compassion, it’s taking that empathy and adding action to it, and saying I’m going to use my power and my privilege in an action with my empathy to create compassion, meaning I don’t only just feel with you, I’m now going to help you,

Maureen 23:45
and that’s where advocacy and sponsorship,

Speaker 2 23:48
that is correct, that’s where we want to be going, and so if you’re not cognizant and you’re not intentional about that practice, which leads to the praxis of humanization, that is where you’re wrong, so you take the theory and you take the practice and you start to really be intentional about saying yes, this is what I’m going to do, this is how I’m going to act. The

Maureen 24:09
word intention to me is so powerful. Yes, it requires a level of consciousness, presence in my body, and continually checking in on this was what we intended, a couple of members of our team text each other every day with our intentions for the day. What do we want to do, but how do we want to be in that doing and offering support to one another for that intention? Yes, it’s powerful.

Speaker 2 24:34
It is very powerful, because that intention now has a degree of accountability. So, let’s bring it back to like business vernacular, right? So everybody over the last few years were talking about let’s DEI everything, let’s DEI the whole kit and caboodle. Where was the intentionality around that? Where was the accountability around some of those? Where was the metrics? We sort of put it in as. An altruistic, it’s nice to have. We want to have diversity, want to have equity, but where were the measures? Where were the accountability? What did that look like? And how did some of those lessons manifest in our day-to-day lives? And so you think, well, I’ve learned all these lessons related to DEI and equity, and you know we’re supposed to be going well as a company, but you look at research by Ella Washington, who says that less than 20% of companies globally, less than 20% actually have sustainable practices around DEI. Why? Because there was no intentionality around it. Why? Because you didn’t know how it impacted you on a day-to-day basis, when you look at some of the work by Leicherman, who talks about decision making, there are six facets of decision making. At least four of them are disrupted by our biases. Do we know that? No. So, how can you then use the lessons from equity, the lessons from diversity, the lessons from inclusion in your everyday, if you don’t even know where they manifest,

Maureen 26:03
to me it’s the systems thinking kind of culture, action, behavior, and attention. I intend, am I aligned with action? Is my intention aligned with the culture that I’m leading, and are those systems then aligned with intention and culture? If they’re not, how do I create that align that,

Speaker 2 26:21
but before you even think about the outside, so throughout my time at Chopra, we practiced Ayurveda was the foundation of our practice, 5000 year old ancient Indian healing system. One of the principles of that is, as is the microcosm, so is the macro. You want equity, fairness, diversity, compassion, empathy, love in our systems, in our communities, in our corporations, but we don’t have it inside. Do you understand justice inside? Do you understand fairness inside?

Maureen 26:57
And if you don’t, you can’t create the systems,

Speaker 2 26:59
and if you don’t, you will never be able to create the systems, and how do you start to do that? Well, read Robert Livingston’s book, The Conversation. Robert Livingston is a social psychologist and leading expert on equity in spaces from Harvard Kennedy, wrote this beautiful book called The Conversation. I think everybody should read it. It’s about having those conversations with not just the usual suspects, but the unusual suspects, the people who are going to get you thinking. Huh, I didn’t realize that. Huh, I didn’t know that. Huh, that’s what justice looks like for you. That’s what unfairness looks like for you, not from a judgmental space, but from a space of saying I want to understand what that means, I want to understand what it’s like to feel pain. What does your pain feel like? What does it mean when you get left behind? What does it mean when you feel like you’re going to be judged by the worst thing that you ever does? What does that feel like? How does that barrier prevent you from doing the things that you know your humanity should allow you to do, and that’s where the microcosm of who you are really impacts the macrocosm of where you are. What were some of your most

Maureen 28:14
impactful takeaways from

Speaker 2 28:16
that

Maureen 28:16
introspection? You talked about three to five year old Selena, and you talked about kind of reclaiming your voice,

Speaker 2 28:22
yeah, it was the actual reclaiming of my voice. So, in “Can You Hear Me Now, it says, “How I learned to live with passion and find my voice, or something like that. That’s not true. I didn’t find my voice when I wrote the book, I found it after. Yeah, I thought I had found my voice in Parliament and with Bold, but I recognize that if Selena now were to enter politics in 2015 totally different game, totally different game. This Selena is not about to be pushed around. This Selena could stand on her own two feet and not have to do the mental math of am I afraid, am I not afraid? No, no, it’s not the same thing. So I actually learned that, but I learned to deal with that with a degree of humility and grace and compassion, because I first give it to myself and then I give it to the macro, so I’m not as hostile about it, I’m not as combative about it, I’m not as pushy about it. I’m still getting the results, but I know how to ebb and flow with that grace and ease. I’m not fighting for justice, I’m loving through the journey towards justice. There’s a difference. I’m not struggling. Why am I struggling and fighting? Just saying the words make me tired.

Maureen 29:41
I interviewed Joyce Beatty, who’s now in her 70s, I believe, who’s a congresswoman who happens to live in Ohio, black woman, and she talked about, as a young girl in a segregated Ohio, how her mom would say, “You can’t do these things because you’ll get injured. And so her voice was silenced, or tried to be silenced. I think she was pretty rebellious, but she talks about going into a meeting and someone did the traditional, you know, hey honey, get me coffee kind of thing, yeah, or some variation of that, and she was gracious in her response, and then sits down at the head of the table, grabs the gavel, and in that position of authority, she doesn’t need to hit him over the head with the gavel. Yes, her position is clear. But for every young woman who doesn’t have a gavel yet, how do we help get the voice earlier?

Speaker 2 30:36
I call that something different. I call that a strategy of disruption, so I could take the gavel, and I could choose to whack over the head, which I’m not. Joyce, you follow my tweet, be prepared for some comments. It’s not as sweet and then cherry, but I call this strategy of disruption, so I know my role as a disrupter on sort of the one end of the spectrum, you want something done, you want me to tell off somebody, easy, it will happen, no problem, but that’s one very extreme, we need to also understand that there are several people that are involved in that strategy, some that are often quite quiet, and they sit, and they do their work, and they try to dot different i’s and cross different t’s and move commas around, so that policy and systems can change, and there’s a whole variation of people in between, people who protest, people who are a little bit more vocal inside spaces, people who eventually get to where I am, where I could tweet something out publicly to any world leader, and I’m okay with it. So, I think what our young people need to recognize is that the creation of networks of individuals who are intentional about their support for whatever it is that they’re doing, whatever it is that you’re passionate about – healthcare, education, the soil – it doesn’t matter. Surround yourself with the people that are part of that strategy of disruption that can allow things to move forward, because at the end of the day, look, if you’re young, you’re 2030, something, you got to pay the rent. Do not go tweeting anything to your boss. Leave that for me. Find me in your network and let me tweet something. Do not do that. You will get fired.

Maureen 32:31
And this interview with Joyce started with me working with a client. Holiday party gentleman comes in, young black woman in a black dress, and he gave her his coat, as if she was the coat check lady. She was devastated, went to the bathroom, and cried, and then left.

Speaker 2 32:48
Yes,

Maureen 32:49
as soon as she left, she lost her voice, she lost any ability to have power.

Speaker 2 32:54
Let me give you the advanced version of that.

Maureen 32:56
Okay,

Speaker 2 32:57
I have my pin in parliament, and I’m walking up the stairs, I’m parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister. Oh no, I don’t have my pin at this point. I didn’t have my pin on. I’m walking up the stairs. I’ve done this a million times, because at 1o’clock we have question period front, so I have to sit in question period prep. Black women, we change our hair, that might be it, but my face pretty much stays the same. You didn’t get surgery. I didn’t get surgery. So I’m walking up the stairs, and in front of me is Bill Morneau, the Minister of Finance, and his whole team, and they walk in. And then I walk up, and they say, “Oh, are you Bill’s assistant? And that was a long pause for me, and I recognized at that moment that even as Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister of Canada, I was still to help, and I had struggles getting into every building up until the last day that I worked. I was still asked, Can I help you? Like, what are you doing here? I’m like, I’m a member of Parliament. I’m still going to be a member of Parliament for at least four more months. I’m going to go into my building and take my last boxes out, and I’m going to leave. So, there’s that part in my book where I quote Nita Simone’s song, I say you gotta learn, you gotta learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served, and I’d feel really guilty about that because I was the one black woman there and I decided to leave, and if representation matters, then why was I leaving, but love was no longer being there, you know. When you have a dinner party, you invite the people that you really like to sit beside you. At one point, I was sitting beside the host, and then I found myself sitting at the end of the table, where, you know, geez, we gotta invite her, but we don’t really want to talk to her. Let’s put her down at the end. I found myself at the end of the table, and then I went on, holy, I’m sitting at the chairs behind this, what, sitting at the table, like around the table, and then I found that I was on the menu, and a thought point, I don’t care who you are, you gotta learn, leave the table when love is no longer being served, and be okay with that, be okay with that. What I say is, you know, your value is never determined by your title, your value to. The world, the powers always belong to the people. It is time that the people recognize their power. Your voice is not gone when you leave that space. You have now have a lesson by which you could start to appreciate, because if that was a terrible experience, there has to be an equal and opposite beautiful one. So then how do you take that terrible experience and turn it into a beautiful something?

Maureen 35:26
What has that journey been for you? Because we’ve heard the terrible one you chose to leave. What’s the equal and opposite beautiful?

Speaker 2 35:34
The equal and off of the beautiful is my dissertation work is the praxis of humanization, is taking all of these experiences that we think are resistance and struggle and fight and turning them into awakening and love of self and self care in the most intentional way and then saying let’s take this theory and formulate these different levels of practice that we could use that we could share with other, not just women, gender diverse folks. I don’t care who you are, what your identity is, because everybody at some point in their life feel that weight of oppression, and there’s some people that feel it a handful of times in their life, and there’s some people that feel it every day. That praxis has to be I’m in love with my dissertation. I’m in love with it.

Maureen 36:26
Share more about your dissertation and some of the practices that have been personally meaningful to you.

Speaker 2 36:33
I’m really looking at dehumanization and how we could start to be intentional about that humanization piece, in order for us to understand where we want to be, we have to understand where we are, so looking at, for example, Michael Foucault’s work on Discipline and Punish, where he talks about how we’ve evolved from the execution and torture of people in the public square to our penal system, where we use things like hierarchy, supervision, time, these structured elements that we’re supposed to, like, look after prisoners with, but they bled into every other system. Look at our education system, you show up on time, you get supervised, you have to do a test in order for us to get higher up in our workspaces, same thing, you have to do something to get a promotion, you’re supervised, everybody’s supervising each other, you’re supervising yourself. Have to show up at 9o’clock I have to leave at five. Oh my god, if I don’t leave earlier, I’m gonna get into trouble. So all of these things in which we have to understand the system and how the system operate, and then in understanding how the system operates, we could create what Bell Hooks calls the beautiful space on the margins, and understand that there’s nothing wrong with us. So, I’ve tried to straighten my hair, right? You straighten your hair, you make sure that your heels don’t click clock too much, but you’re wearing heels, but you have to walk a certain way, so they’re not clickety clocking all over the place, do I wear the jacket, the blue suit, or something like that? Who, I can’t, not gonna show up in that bright pink dress I had on last night, or this, this green thing. Why would I do that? Why would I like have my nails, or laugh out louds, all of these different things, all of these different ways in which our identity, our socially constructed identities that are not necessarily part of our humanity. These socially constructed gender, social contracts of race, social constructs of all these different things, the way that they are used against us. We need to put those away.

Maureen 38:37
So, you talk about what you wear, and for listeners, and even viewers that can’t see your tattoo on your neck because the camera’s on the opposite side, that was a conscious choice

Speaker 2 38:48
that was so conscious. So I have a big owl on my neck and I have a lotus flower and El Nepe de Rien on the side, which means she’s fearless. It’s my personality, and for the first time in my life I’m able to have a personality, because remember, like, this is not just about work, this is about your parents. Come on now, Selena, tattoo not happening. You need to get a job, don’t you? Yeah, it’s not happening, right? So, so even like your parents tell you, your work tells you that now you’re married and you have children, so society says what you have to look like in front of your children. Enough. Let me be. Let me be feminine. Let me be masculine. Let me be whatever I want to be, but just let me be, because that does not impact how wickedly smart I actually.. it doesn’t impact how loving and gracious. Does not impact that at all. This owl tattoo on my neck, it’s an ode to my aunt, who’s my angel. I have tattoos all over my hand, tattoos. My hand tattoo is really as a black gecko on my hand that reminds me of my husband, because his fingers are so big. Honestly, we need to get past. And this, what I think about, and what I’m hopeful for is the fact that we have a legion of young people that are coming up after us, that I hate to say this, but probably won’t need to go on to an ILA to understand leadership, because they are demonstrating it right now, they are not interested in whether or not we are black or white or gay or straight or sexual orientation or a gender identity. No, but they’re past that. They’re about how do we use your skills and my skills and their skills to change the world, to stop climate from killing us, to stop us from hating each other, and these geopolitical nonsense. They are leaders now, and that’s what gives me hope, because they’re not seeing my tattoo and saying, ‘Oh my god, you’re not going to get a job. They’re seeing someone who is able to be bold and transformative and say, ‘How could I borrow that from you and create it for me and build a 2.0 version of myself that is fearless and bold and can take all of my great ideas and save the world,

Maureen 41:03
that’s such a beautiful sentiment. Selena, how would people follow you? Because, as you said, your life is unfolding, so certainly read your book. But the next phase is, how do they keep learning from you?

Speaker 2 41:15
All social medias are the same at I am Selena CC, so I am c e l i n a c c, that’s Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, X, whatever it’s called now these days, and my Substack. So I write a lot on the praxis of humanization through my Substack, and on LinkedIn is easy to find me with my name, Selena Cesar Shaman.

Maureen 41:40
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker 4 41:54
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Speaker 5 42:23
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