040: Tiffany & Elissa
In this special episode of Tiffany & Yu, we’re sharing a conversation that happened in the Diversability Leadership Collective, Diversability’s members-only community to accelerate disability leadership, influence, and advocacy. We were joined by voice and presence coach Elissa Weinzimmer and DLC member Alissa Lauzon to discuss the ways in which we can speak our truth about our disability and access needs at work.
We discussed:
How Elissa became a voice & presence coach
Alissa’s experience speaking her truth at work
Acknowledging the emotions that may come with speaking your truth
Speaking up when we experience microaggressions
Elissa’s repeatable process to speak mindfully
Protecting your boundaries and safety when speaking your truth
Sharing your story
How speaking your truth elevates others around you
How to continue to speak your truth while protecting your energy
Show notes:
September 15 free masterclass on speaking your truth: https://www.voicebodyconnection.com/a/2147494525/d7M62uKP
Diversability Leadership Collective: http://diversability.mn.co
2020 Accenture report: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-142/Accenture-Enabling-Change-Getting-Equal-2020-Disability-Inclusion-Report.pdf#zoom=40
The Body Keeps the Score: https://amzn.to/3z9ifrx
The Four Agreements: https://amzn.to/3k86KMt
About
Elissa Weinzimmer is an award-winning vocal health educator, presence coach, and the founder of Voice Body Connection. After suddenly losing her own voice at age 21, Elissa began studying the mechanics of voice. Over time she developed a unique, concrete approach that empowers performers, leaders, and speakers to optimize their voices and share them more authentically. Elissa's clients include Broadway stars, television personalities, politicians, and CEOs. She has led workshops for WeWork, Equinox, Microsoft, eBay, Instacart, and more, and has been featured in Thrive Global, Healthline, SheKnows, Adweek, and Kajabi. Elissa earned her MFA in Theatre Voice Pedagogy from the University of Alberta. Her teaching also draws upon her extensive training in Fitzmaurice Voicework®️, Hatha yoga, and Body-Mind Centering®️. Elissa is based in New York City, and is currently working on her first book.
Alissa Lauzon is a Youth Services Librarian by day who is passionate about diversity and inclusion and a member of the Diversability Leadership Collective.
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Website: https://voicebodyconnection.com/
Transcript
Tiffany Yu: Elissa is a communication, a voice and presence coach, and had reached out to me with regard to a masterclass that she's hosting for a much broader audience called Speaking Your Truth Doesn't Make You Unprofessional. And we became really curious about what this intersection looks like around speaking your truth through a disability lens. Elissa, if you want to introduce yourself, and how you came into this work as a voice and presence coach.
Elissa Weinzimmer: I really love the way that you offer that intro because it's very mutual that I think, especially having the conversation I want to have and for me to understand how it overlaps with having a conversation about disability and advocacy around making sure that we speak to, because of course that's my work is speaking to, speak to diverse abilities in the workplace. I'm really interested to hear input from you and this community too. So just to give you a little bit of a background to me, I'm a theater kid. That's my background. If we go far enough back in time, which you don't even have to go that far, I've been a theater person, trained in acting, dancing, and singing for my whole life. And that was just really what I wanted to do when I was a kid. And then when I was a senior at the University of Southern California, I had a incident with my voice, which actually it's so interesting to bring this conversation and this story here because essentially, I had an issue with my vocal abilities. And what happened was I had a vocal hemorrhage, which is a fancy way of saying my vocal cords bled. I had severe onset of acid reflux, and I also had, what it took me a long time to understand and discover, but something called muscle tension dysphonia, which is, that's really a fancy way of saying clinically that muscle tension caused my voice to clamp up And so I really lost my vocal stamina. I was put on vocal rest for a month by doctors. And because I had this health issue, I basically stopped performing at that point in my life. I was 21 years old and I had thought my career was going to go a certain way. I thought that I was going to move to New York, audition for Broadway. I was living in Los Angeles at the time. And instead, I pivoted to focusing on directing and ultimately voice teaching. And the reason I went into voice teaching of course is because I was like, okay, what just happened to me? I need to understand it. I need to help other people prevent it. And the other piece to the work that I do. And you said, Tiffany, when you introduced me, I call myself a voice and a presence coach. So there's like the specific voice, vocal health piece. If you look at my area behind me on the bookshelf, I have a larynx model and a skull, and a skeleton. I use all of this to help people understand the physiology of the body and the voice, but also a huge part of the work that I do that was ultimately something I needed to understand for myself was understanding the human nervous system. Because our nervous system regulates our state of presence. And when it comes to speaking or communicating or authenticity or confidence or speaking our truth in any given situation, oftentimes, in addition to any physiological ability to actually make sound happen, the other thing that's going on is we need to regulate our nervous system state to actually be in a comfortable state to be able to communicate. If we're not in a comfortable state or even further, if we're not in a safe state to communicate, there's a whole cascade of things that happen that include our voice feeling like it's going to clamp up. We feel like we don't have the breath support to be able to speak. We may feel like we don't have the physical bodily capacity to just want to even be in the situation. And of course, in bodies of different abilities, I'm really curious how this shows up. Some of us have impacted nervous systems. Some of us have impacted physiology. Our nervous system is deeply connected to our mental health. This is all the stuff that I study and teach about. And I bring in a lot of different philosophies. My approach is always very integrative. So my background includes theater and singing, voice pedagogy, speech science, Ayurveda, yoga, Vedic philosophy, all sorts of different things.
Tiffany Yu: I want to bring in Alissa with an A, introduce yourself and share a little bit about who you are and what caused you to be interested in this conversation.
Alissa Lauzon: Hi, I'm Alissa with an A.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Nice, to meet you!
Alissa Lauzon: I was born with Erb's palsy, which is a brachial plexus birth trauma. And it has complicated my life in a lot of different ways, which I really didn't start to deal with probably until the last, I would say probably 15 years when I started actually having surgeries after surgeries after surgeries. Being able to tell my story and advocating for myself has become more important to me. And I've been much more vocal about disabilities and disability awareness. And I'm a librarian by profession. And so thinking about accessibility in a public building and making sure that my library is accessible for everybody is something that I'm shouting at the rafters about on a regular basis. I came to this conversation because I want to be better about not only telling my own story so that people can- maybe they don't see a person with a disability when they look at me most of the time. And so like, understanding that, but also being able to better advocate for other people with disabilities who may not be being served to the best of our abilities.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Alissa, thank you. Wow, there's so many pieces of what you said that are very powerful to me. Thank you for sharing.
Tiffany Yu: I'll just share some of the stats out there, which is about 70% of disabilities are not visible, so they're non-apparent. And then there is an Accenture report that came out in 2020 that said that about 76 to 80% of employees with disabilities are not transparent about their disabilities at work. And so Elissa had come to me, if I could share stories of how I felt like speaking my truth, and in this particular context through a disability lens, benefited me in the workplace and wasn't unprofessional. Alissa, have you advocated for yourself and it was embraced in a professional way? Have you shared, and it felt unprofessional, or have you not shared and what's the motivation behind that?
Alissa Lauzon: A little bit of both. I mean, I did not share up until I started having to have surgeries, because obviously if I'm out for six weeks because I have a muscle transplant, you kind of have to share a little bit more at that point. And as I've gotten older, what I can do physically at work has changed. And so I feel like I need to be more transparent with the people that I work with about, I actually can't lift that. It's gonna hurt me if I do. And 10 years ago, I would have done it anyway, but I'm not doing that to myself anymore. So all of my coworkers know that I have a disability. I actually have coworkers that run around and yell at me about doing things they don't think I should be doing. So the flip side of being honest about that is I now have like 15 mothers, which is a little bit frustrating because I am a grown adult. I do know my own limitations. I do push them, but I do know my own limitations. Sometimes it's hard because I had major back surgery a couple of years ago. And part of that was my surgeon said I really shouldn't be sitting as much as I sit. So he asked that I get a standing desk if I could. So I went to work and I said, my surgeon is saying I need a standing desk. Is this possible? And I had to jump through all the hoops for the paperwork, for the medical stuff, for the accommodation to get that. And now like, because I did it, and several people saw how beneficial it was, now standing desks are starting to appear in other administration offices. And I'm like, they didn't have to jump through all the hoops, but like, I don't begrudge them that cause like universal design, good for everybody. I hate having to be the person with a disability who has to advocate for the universal design that then is other people just get without having to like, and it sounds horrible to say, I know that, but I'm like, why do I have to fight to get the universal design?
Tiffany Yu: So I personally haven't needed any accommodations in the workplace. I spent a long time navigating in a non-disabled where I learned how to type with one hand, and exactly like you said, Alissa, doing things that I probably shouldn't have done. I remember I was in investment banking and I was carrying like 50 pitchbooks, which weighed a lot cause they're on fancy paper. When we come to a point where your surgeon or your doctor is telling you like, Hey, you can't sit that much. Then you kind of get a permission slip to say, I need you to go advocate for my accommodations. But then what we're also noticing is that if you can present as a non-disabled person, we're not advocating for ourselves. But then on the plus side of that, what we are seeing is that Alissa was able to model for a lot of other employees at the library that they could advocate for a standing desk as well. That's what I think people are missing a little bit with this speaking your truth doesn't make you unprofessional is when you're able to model that for other people, then it creates an environment that invites other people to advocate for what they need as well.
Elissa Weinzimmer: I'll respond a little bit. I really appreciate everything you're both saying. It's so helpful to have this conversation and the more I'm having conversations like this, the more I realized that I think we're in a really pivotal moment in human history in terms of truth-speaking, and in terms of what topics are allowed to be discussed. So part of what I heard you say is that as one of the first people in your workplace, stepping up and advocating for what you need, which ultimately actually becomes something that's better for a whole group of people. I think I hear a certain amount of frustration. I wrote down the phrase, why do I have to be the one? Why do I have to be the one to do this? Yeah.
Alissa Lauzon: Frutstation that I have to be the one to get all the medical paperwork and then nobody else has to provide the medical paperwork necessary to get a standing desk. They're just buying them now!
Elissa Weinzimmer: Right. Exactly, which by the way, the desk I'm sitting at right now is a standing desk, because I'm one of the people who has hopped on board and I'm like, this is great. I can stand up and teach and I can sit down and teach. As the world is changing, which really is especially to our benefit, those of us who need any form of accommodation. And by the way, I don't categorize what I've been through with my voice as a disability. But if I were to go back into certain environments that I have been in, in the past, like performing a show six to eight times a week, I would have to be transparent with the stage management team, et cetera, and be like, look, I have certain limitations as far as my vocal stamina. These are the things I need. And actually this is a huge conversation I have with people in the performing world, because really, I think people don't realize how athletic voice use is, and how we all need some support around making sure that our voice doesn't tire out. So for those of us who are on the cutting edge of advocating for whatever these things are that we need, I think it's actually super important to acknowledge that it's very likely that frustration will come up. And that's actually part of speaking your truth. Because in addition to the act of speaking your truth and saying, Hey, I need this accommodation. It's another level of truth-speaking to be like, Hey, whether at the time or later, it's really frustrating that I had to work so hard for that accommodation, and now everyone's getting it. And no one else is having to work so hard. This is part of the reason we give people awards, is to be like, wow, you did the really hard work at the beginning of making this thing happen. And now so many people get to follow suit. A lot of times the process of speaking our truth is just even being able to, in our own personal experience, inside our own psyches or at home with our friends or spouses, whoever, just say like, oh, this is really frustrating. If we can at least go to the place where we get to feel acknowledged that it's frustrating, even if it's not actually our boss being like, that was frustrating that you had to go through that, then there's a certain amount of vindication that I think we get to receive from that experience. So what I'm going to teach on Wednesday in the master class, because we can sit around and talk about these issues and what's wrong with the world all day long, what's wrong with the ways in which we're currently supposed to be professional, but also what I'm very interested in all ways is okay, when we say speak our truth, what does that mean? And how do we do it? And just having very concrete capacity to actually do that work. The process of speaking your truth involves understanding your feelings on all levels. And that includes physically what's going on in your body sensation-wise. That includes thoughts that are processing in your head. That includes emotions that are happening with which a lot of times we've been trained that emotions are supposed to stay out of the workplace. And it includes desires, things that you want to ask for. So when we understand that all of those things are feelings that we are going to have as humans, and we get to at least acknowledge it for ourselves and then potentially acknowledge it with our colleagues, our bosses, et cetera. I think that's when we start to feel like we're really being seen and heard.
Tiffany Yu: We talked a little bit about microaggressions and I would acknowledge that the frustration that Alissa felt could be a little bit of a slight and a little bit of a microaggression. And so I was curious if you could talk about why speaking your truth is so important with regard to these microaggressions that are happening pretty much on a daily basis because we are living in an ableist society.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Absolutely, I'm very glad that you brought up that topic. It's so helpful to label these things as microaggressions. Something that has really helped me understand what kind of impact a microaggression has is it's like a marble being placed on top, on top, on top. And the weight of it adds up. The weight of it really, really adds up. And a lot of times we can uncover something as a microaggression by going into our brain and being like, what are the shoulds in my professional life? What are the, I should do this. I should do this. Because even those, even if someone's not like aggressively imposing a microaggression on you, if you walk through the doors of your workplace, which many of us aren't doing these days, but just for the sake of argument. If you walk through the doors of your workplace and now I should adjust my voice in a certain way so that I code-switch into the accepted vocal patterns. I should adjust my expectations. I'll give the example you gave Tiffany about if someone asks me to carry heavy things, I should not speak up and say like, I'm not able to do that. I'm not able to lift these things, et cetera. I should not even acknowledge that I have the disability that I have. We talked in our last conversation, Tiffany, about the incredible stigma around mental health. Because of course, I think so many employers and people think, that if I'm transparent about whatever's going on with my mental health, that it's going to affect and impact my ability to do my job, which pretty quickly makes the employee feel like, okay, my job's at stake if I'm transparent about this. So all of these shoulds are actually like ways in which we're almost- there can either be something that's actually happening or we're just keeping ourselves small in fear of the consequences of a microaggression. Like, don't talk about that at work, carry this, et cetera. One of the examples that I think of a lot that can show up in terms of microaggressions is you're in a meeting and someone turns to you and says like, you're going to do this. This is going to be your assignment. And we're just not given space for consent around, why does that have to be my job? Maybe there's some sort of assumption around like, you should do it because you're the representative of X, Y, and Z in this room. When that type of thing happens, going back to those levels of feeling, it's really important that we acknowledge what's going on. So I actually will talk us through it right now. If you experience a assumed or actual microaggression, ask yourself in that moment, when you get small or the thing happens, what reaction do you have in your body? What sensation comes up in your body? Is it like a, my heart flipped over type energy? Is it my belly turned? Is it my hackles went up? I know we don't necessarily have hackles as human, but it felt like the hair on my neck stood up. What is the bodily reaction you have? And I'll just focus on that step for a moment right now, because when you notice the bodily reaction, the really powerful thing is that then you can later reverse engineer. So something that you might not have even realized was bothering you or felt microaggressive, in the future, if you know that you get this like sensation of tingling, like my hair is standing up on the back of my neck energy. Then next time you maybe notice the tingly back of your neck energy, and you didn't even register that something not cool had happened in your workspace. You can be like, wait, why is the hair on the back of my neck standing up? My body is telling me something might be off. What feels off about this to me? And we can start to uncover, unpack the layers of like, wow, I've been acting in this way for such a long time where I don't speak up when someone asks me to carry something that I really honestly probably need to be transparent is not something I should be doing. I'm actually, my body is telling me I'm uncomfortable. This is a moment for me, an opportunity for me to go, okay, there's something I want to share. That doesn't feel good. It's not something I'll be able to do moving forward. And I just wanted to let you know.
Tiffany Yu: One of the things that we chatted about was how to adapt this in the context of being in a disabled body. You talked about sensations or lack thereof. At least for me, I know I'm doing a lot of work now to try and come and re-centered and re-grounded in my disabled body. But I had disassociated for a long time. So I'm wondering about doing that check-in with your body, because also some of us who have certain types of disabilities experience pain in our bodies all the time. And so maybe we don't want to connect in that way.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Tiffany, go back and forth with me if you would for a little bit here cause it helps me to know what- you have a much wider lens on the disabled community and what the variations of what people are dealing with. I think it's really important for me not to generalize right now and say like, this is what we do. Because each body is different and certainly each disability is different. So for instance, I've talked about the nervous system to a large degree. Of course, there are people whose nervous systems are impacted and you mentioned pain, and pain is one way that the nervous system can be impacted. If we have continual cues of pain from a certain region of our body or a certain system in the body, then that's something that, of course, we would start to dissociate from. It's a survival technique. And also what's more, if something's constantly present in our body, then it is not necessarily going to give us the most nuanced information about what's going on in the present moment. So I'll go to something that a somatic teacher said to me at one point that I think is really, really powerful, which is, in any given moment, if we're sitting here breathing as human beings, then there is so much going on that is right in our bodies and a lot less going on that is whatever word you want to use, like wrong. I don't love that word, but that isn't working as optimally as it could. Or isn't necessarily as the standard design is. If there's so much going on that is right in a human body, then that means there's so much that we can pay attention to that will indeed give us lots of cues. For instance, if someone knows that their left leg is going to send them a pretty consistent signal that they're familiar with, then maybe that's not the place that we pay attention to when we're going to this place of noticing sensations in our body. So perhaps the question, a more nuanced version of the question could be like, what is currently the most prominent novel sensation in your body? Like new sensation in your body? We will get a lot of information at all times from all parts of our body. And it may indeed be the sensation that you're really, really familiar with, that you feel often. That also can give you information. But if we ask ourselves, what's going on in my body that feels new or different to me, that's probably going to give us a lot of information.
Tiffany Yu: That was super helpful. I just finished reading this book called The Body Keeps the Score. But because my particular disability is the result of a traumatic event. I'm also understanding and trying to learn and be compassionate that trauma can get stored in my body in places that isn't my disabled arm. And so for me, it's also saying. It's okay that trauma is showing up in this random part of my body that isn't related to where the actual trauma happened. But I do like this reframing of saying, what is a new sensation that is coming up when these slights or these microaggressions are happening.
Elissa Weinzimmer: We use the word dissociation and the opposite of dissociation is re association. And that's really the process that no matter what body I'm dealing with as we're going through this process, it's a re-association process. It is a process of going like what in my body, psyche, soul is going on, that it is currently safe for me, comfortable, okay for me to re-associate with so that I have more information about what's going on for me right now so I can speak up and advocate for myself. And a re-association process does not mean that you need to like turn the knob all the way up to a hundred percent and fully reassociate with every corner of your body in that moment. I think for any human being that would be completely overwhelming, but to start to just re-associate, re-tap into and pay attention to different corners and layers and parts of our human body is really, really powerful for getting more information about what's going on with us.
So we'll keep going through the process then. So we spend a lot of time talking then obviously about our embodied experience. So once we know what's going on with our embodied experience, and it might be something, it might be familiar pain, or like we talked about, we might be paying attention to what's new and novel. I'll just give an example. I actually don't feel so hot today to be totally honest. It is the first day of my menstrual cycle. And I would love to reduce the stigma about talking about such things. So I will tell you that a huge part of my physical sensations today are cramps and a headache. I'll give that as my example. If I were to ask myself, so the next layer of understanding is the thinking, is the what's the story behind all of this. And mine's pretty simple. It is, it's the first day of my menstrual cycle. I often call this step identifying the stimulus, because if we identify the stimulus, as opposed to say, what's going on, the what's going on answer can become what I call a thought train, where we're like, well, this is going on. And she said this, and he said this, and I'm so stressed and I have all these things. But if we just go, what is the stimulus, like one simple thing. It's usually really simple. To go back to an example you gave Alissa, it would be, my coworker asked me to lift a heavy box. Period. End of sentence. That just is the stimulus that happened in that moment. So next we ask, what are my emotions about noticing this? So I'll continue with my personal example. As much as I don't want to feel this way, I feel frustrated right now. I'll admit that. I feel lethargic. I feel angry is another version of frustrated. I feel annoyed, those are all kind of versions of frustrated. There's probably a part of me and this is kind of an emotional layer too, that feels accepting because of course, I'm in a female body and this happens once a month. There's that. So those are all the layers of my emotions. And then the fourth step is desires. And desires is okay, now that I have all of this information, what do I want? So actually I did have to do this practice today. I'm very excited to have this conversation, but there were other things on my calendar today that I was like, my brain's not functioning at a hundred percent. So there were a couple of things I took off my calendar today. I was like, I have a headache. I don't feel well, this isn't super pressing. I'm going to rest. And then the question I can ask myself is, depending upon who I'm communicating this information to, do I say, it's because I'm on the first day of my cycle, or do I not say that it's like, is that relevant or useful information for them? In most cases, just because I feel comfortable and want to de-stigmatize the issue, I did share. I was like, it's the first day of my cycle. I even put it on Instagram live today. I was like, I don't feel well. I'm going to tell you this and do an experiment and be like, if I speak my truth about this, will you think I'm less professional? And then the cool thing is, and people responded and were like, no, I don't think you're less professional. A lot of female-bodied people I know also don't feel well on the first day of their cycles. I think it's really interesting that in the process of identifying really clearly what's going on, we then can of course ask the questions like, is this relevant? Is it necessary? Is it safe to say? If I jump to a little bit more of a charged example. Let's say that there's a cognitive processing issue and someone who hasn't been transparent about that cognitive processing disability that they have is being asked to meet a deadline that they just know they're not going to be able to meet. Okay. So let's model what that person might do if they go through this series of questions that we talked about in their head, they go, okay, right now, I feel like all of my skin feels tingling and my hair is standing on end. And I think it's just it's because I just got given a deadline that I know I can't meet. And it makes me feel afraid. It makes me feel sad. It makes me feel ashamed. It makes me feel overwhelmed, all of these things. And what I really want is to not lose my job is usually what it really boils down to. I really want to retain my job. Now we have a lot of choices about what we would actually say. You don't owe anyone the information about anything that you don't want to share about, but even just to come into a conversation with your boss and say, Hey, out of everything you just learned for yourself about what's true, maybe all you do is you come in and you say, Hey, I know that I won't be able to meet that deadline. In order to do a good job for you, I'm going to need this amount of time to be able to return work that I will feel really proud of. Can we please move the deadline to blank? And there's no further explanation that you give because you don't owe anyone that explanation if you don't want to give it. That's still a version of speaking your truth. And you were able to get there because you identified all the pieces for yourself. And then also decided I don't want to give that information because if I give that information about my cognitive processing, then I feel that my job might be at stake and I don't want to put my job at stake.
Tiffany Yu: I want to share something that I came across. There is a potential partner that we're working with, who in their auto-response to any emails they write, I have ADHD which comes with short-term memory and organization barriers. Please excuse any delays in my response. There are way too many communication platforms for me to keep up with. Please bump the thread and tag me in the email body if there's a delay. And I loved that. And I was curious if-
Elissa Weinzimmer: I want to give that claps.
Tiffany Yu: Um but when I saw that, and I loved the example that you shared, because again if we look at this stat where four out of five disabled employees aren't really transparent about their disabilities. But you can be transparent about your needs and your desires if we look at your process without having to disclose medical things. And on the other hand, I love that this person who worked at a very large tech company also felt comfortable to put in their auto-response to name, Hey, I have this, and here's how I work. This is how it manifests in the workplace. And these are my own access needs in order for me to best serve you. And I think that both of those examples are really powerful.
Elissa Weinzimmer: They are so powerful. And I think the difference, I always come back to this and I know there is so much about this in Your Body Keeps the Score, which is really ultimately a book about somatic psychology and trauma processing. I think what it always boils down to is safety. So the question we can ask ourselves is, do I feel safe sharing this piece of information? And the tech company that you described and the situation you just described, Tiffany, is super inspiring to me and what I would discern and guess from that situation is that there's a company culture that people have a reaction like we just had where we're like, applause. That's awesome. Go you. Thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on and your best methods of communication. There may be other work environments where that same message would be like, oh my God, did you see, did you see, where it just becomes like, okay, we don't know what to do with that because the culture is not that transparent. And that's where I would say someone's probably gonna feel a lot less safe being the person to step up and say, I have ADHD, and it's totally, totally fine for you to make the decision to not share more than you feel safe and comfortable doing. And yet you can still, exactly, you can still speak your truth at the level of advocating for what you need and sharing your boundaries.
Tiffany Yu: That's so powerful what you talk about in terms of safety, because the majority of disabled employees aren't having that level of psychological safety. And I love that you shared that there is this nuance where speaking your truth isn't, I'm going to share everything about my health and my body and stuff like that, like reading the room a little bit in a way to better the nuance of understanding, here's the environment or the system that I'm currently working in. And here are the adjustments that I have to make and I can still speak my truth, but not overshare or overindulge things that may make me feel unsafe.
Elissa Weinzimmer: What I want to circle back on based on what you did share at the beginning Alissa and also where we've gotten to now in terms of the question of sharing our story. So when we share our story, what it does is it creates a situation where people have a model for the possibility of being vulnerable, of sharing openly. They get to see hopefully someone sharing their story in a way that is safe, that they don't get attacked. And that we see like, oh, actually there's a lot of support for situations like this. Oh, that person has either the same diagnosis as me, or I feel connected to them in X, Y, and Z way. And that makes me feel empowered to step up and advocate for what I need as well and speak my truth. I think what I want to circle back to is it is really vulnerable to share your story because we have to very gently tread that line of being like, are people going to use information that I'm sharing against me? Are they going to become my parents in the workplace? Are they going to take away my own autonomy with the information, or are they going to not give me certain assignments that I actually could and want to handle so on and so forth? It really genuinely is very vulnerable to transparently share our stories. And also when we do transparently share our stories and we deal with being the person out there in front forging a path. I think it's really important to acknowledge that there can, and probably will be some frustration that comes up. Some like, why didn't someone do this ahead of me for me? Why do I have to be doing the hard work right now, the world and all the people in it should be different so that this is more acceptable so I don't have to work so hard putting myself out there. I think if we can acknowledge that it's hard work and there may be some frustration and discomfort about the hard work, at least we can then have compassion for ourselves when the frustration and discomfort come up. Because they will. That's very human. I sometimes just in terms of thinking about family dynamics in my family, and what's been passed down from generation to generation in terms of how we treat each other and all of the work that I feel that I'm doing and I think that our generation is doing around healing intergenerational trauma. I often in that realm come up against like, oh, why didn't my parents, X, Y, and Z? Why didn't my grandparents, X, Y, and Z? Why haven't we gotten further with all of this work? Why is so much falling to me and my generation? And it's really reasonable to be frustrated. It's reasonable for those of us living on planet earth right now, working to change some very large systemic issues that have been present for many generations. It's reasonable for us to be like, why didn't people who've came before us, why didn't they do a better job? Part of me wishes they had done a better job. And also part of me thinks it's really, really incredible that we're living in the moment in history and time that we are, where we have the privilege and capacity to the extent that each of us does have, to speak up about these things and to make changes. So anyway, this is really just advocating for the fact that when those shadow emotions come up, when those like yucky things come up about frustration and anger and fear and sadness, we don't think, oh, those are the bad ones that we need to get rid of so that we can be better people. We realize, oh, all of this is what I have to integrate to be in the body that I've been given in this lifetime and to move forward and advocate for myself. And ultimately once we have advocated for ourselves, we have more capacity to advocate for everyone around us.
Tiffany Yu: It is isolating that first time that you share your story. And a lot of the fears that I think come up within our community is exactly what you mentioned in terms of, are people gonna weaponize my story? Is it going to come back to me? There are versions of my story that I've shared where I've used language that I would no longer advocate for using. The way I talked about my body was not very kind. And so one of the questions that we had gotten was, how do you navigate that where now something is memorialized in a way in a video or something. And now you've changed. And the way I responded was at that particular point in time, I was speaking my truth in the information that I knew at the time. And now I have new information and I've changed and updated that a little. I know you've you have this free master class coming up on the 15th. I've posted a link to it in the Diversability Leadership Collective. I was looking at the takeaways of what you would get if you attended. And this last bullet says, why doing the work to express yourself authentically will not only change your life, but also elevate everyone around you. I was wondering if you could talk about that because again, many of our members in the DLC are trying to figure out, how much of myself do I share as I'm on this journey to become a leader or an advocate or an influencer within the disability community.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Thank you. That's a great note to end on. I'm very happy to answer that question. So I mean, actually, I'll go back to an example that you gave Alissa earlier on about, you did the hard work to ask for a standing desk and suddenly standing desks have started to pop up all around the office. That's a very concrete example of the work that we do can actually elevate quite literally everyone around us. This is actually a principle that I've learned from Vedic philosophy from the really ancient Indian wisdom that predates Hinduism and Buddhism. Essentially, and I'd call this stuff like truth with a capital T, like what is true in the universe? What we've been talking about for most of this time is like truth with a lowercase T. It's you sharing your individual truth and your truth can be different from my truth can be different from the next person's truth. The capital T truth of what happens when we all share our own individual unique experiences and perspectives is quite frankly, and literally, a frequency change. So if you think about it, my voice, what's coming out of my mouth is vibration. And the vibration, we've probably heard this cliche, this catchphrase, raise your vibration. The vibration of what I'm letting out into the world if it's actually in alignment with how I truly feel, if it's not like me spouting words that I'm supposed to say, but it's actually genuinely the stuff that feels like it's coming from my guts and my soul. You may know that when you share something that really feels aligned, sometimes we get that tingly feeling in our body, like, wow, that felt so good. That's literally a vibrational shift. It's a frequency shift. And it is very magnetic to other people when we do that type of thing. This is a nervous system term, through neuroception, which is my nervous system tuning into your nervous system. It's not necessarily anything that I can physically see, but I get this spidey sense that like, that person feels really authentic, that person feels really grounded, that person feels very true. We get that sense through neuroception. On a nervous system level, as in, in the cells of my body, makes me want to match the vibration of that, makes me want to be more authentic. To give another lens to how to speak about this, there's a book that many of us may know called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. And, the first agreement is be impeccable with your word. And if you read why Don Miguel tells us to be impeccable with our word, it's because it means that our inner life becomes in alignment with our outer life. And when we see beacons of people doing that around us, we just intuitively want to do it more too. Another thing to say that, we talked about intergenerational trauma is I think what we see when we see patterns happening throughout generations is we see that we actually learn most from what we're shown, not what we're told. Someone's state of being, what they model for us is what we learn from the most. So when you speak your truth, when you share your story, when you live the life that you are meant to be living on this planet more fully, you inspire people through the modeling of your state of being. And more people will want to be like you, but not like you, not exactly you, they want to be their version of living their fullest most expressed life. So if we can model that for each other, we're actually going to start this chain reaction of upleveling instead of trauma. And that's the inspiration is a lot of these systems of oppression that have come into existence over the last hundreds of years in our society, they've come into existence because people are just copying and modeling what they've seen, which means we have all the tools we need to just change the frequency of that.
Tiffany Yu: Wow. That was so powerful. I love this copying and modeling, because what you're highlighting is you can copy and model trauma, but you can also copy and model possibility. And so with that, Alissa, I wanted to turn it over to you to see if you had any final thoughts or questions.
Alissa Lauzon: I thought this is great. Thank you. My one last question in terms of putting myself out there, speaking my truth, being that like my authentic, honest. Suggestions on ways of doing that, but also in a way, protecting myself and my intersectional identities from that exhaustion that comes with putting yourself out there with marginalized identities, always having to do that heavy lift of the others around you.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Part of the reason I teach the voice body connection process, which is the four questions we went through is so that you can get good at doing it over and over all day long. And what I would encourage is keep coming back to your body over and over. And that'll tell you in this moment, do I have the bandwidth? Do I have the resource to share right now, or is now a time to protect my energy? When we get really good at checking in with ourselves, not every three months, but on a regular basis throughout the day. That's when we can start to understand. Okay. Right now my bandwidth is that I can just take care of my own energy. And then we fill our own cups so that when we get called to the moment that there's an opportunity to speak our truth and we have the capacity, the bandwidth, the energy to do so, then we can do it in those moments. But speaking your truth is not spewing everything you could possibly say always all the time. It's not, that would make you totally exhausted. I agree. So, I think it's just about consistently checking in. The masterclass is happening on Wednesday and it's the free intro event to an annual course that I teach called authentic voice academy. So if folks want to join that class, that's why there's like a deadline right now. But this idea for me, doesn't expire. So I'm happy to discuss it any time.
Tiffany Yu: I feel like I learned a lot, and this was super enlightening for me. Thank you again, everyone. And we will see you back in the Diversability Leadership Collective.
Elissa Weinzimmer: Thank you so much for having me.