Unlocking Human Potential

Episode Transcript

SB S1 E6 – Gayatri Agnew

[00:00:00] Kelly: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. Each week I get to chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills and they’re inspired, or they’re improving, how they’re – I can’t even talk today, honestly. And how they’re,

Gayatri: That’s why we do this live.

She just got through reminding me, we’re doing this live. So just go with it

Kelly: Right. Whatever happens, happens on Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. That’s exactly the words that I just said. Lastly, we get to talk about all of these wonderful ways and innovations that people are doing to improve skills-based hiring and learning around the world.

So I am super thrilled today to welcome Gayatri Agnew, and I hope I pronounced that right after I’ve known you for all these years and I feel like I never say your name.

Gayatri: You got it. Nailed it. Yeah you got it.

Kelly: Thank you so much for joining us today, we are super excited to hear about what skills help you live your best [00:01:00] life.

I want to give a, I say quick brief introduction, but I feel like I’ve known Gaietry for a while now. So I get to say some fun things that she would probably never let me say. So I’m just going to say them so obviously-

Gayatri: I’ll just sit here and smile while you awkwardly introduce me.

Kelly: You do that. Okay. So Gayatri, of course is the senior director of Walmart Giving at the Walmart Foundation, where she focuses on innovations in workforce education and delivery to better enable learners to gain the skills they need to grow their careers. But she fulfills her personal passion of enhancing access to quality education and the empowerment of women and families as a board member of pathforward.org. Path Forward is a nonprofit on a mission to empower people, to restart their careers after taking time for caregiving, which we’re very familiar with.

We’re both mothers. And she is also a board member of Vote Mama Foundation. That’s focused on ensuring that all parents and children in the [00:02:00] US have access to safe affordable childcare, and that candidates running in all 50 States can use their campaign funds for childcare, which is amazing, especially.

In this particular situation where we’re all finding ourselves with the childcare work situations that we’re having, not sure if schools are opening, we’ll get into that later, but Gayatri also being a mother of two, started something called the Mother’s Monday Movement, which I am a proud ambassador of.

It is to change how motherhood and work, work. Very simply. But of course, again, something that is super prevalent right now, the inaugural events happened the day after this last Mother’s Day in 2020, and will continue going forward. And her super exciting, latest venture, which I am so thrilled to be the one to say, is running for city council where she is, in Bentonville, Arkansas.

This is like scratching [00:03:00] the surface. I’m fully aware that I have missed a lot of the things that I know about you, but to me, you are –

Gayatri: I mean, Kelly, I also do karaoke and I can make a mean Indian fish Curry. These are things you’ve left out. But I think, I think you covered, you covered the basics. I feel appropriately embarrassed.

Kelly: Okay. Okay. Perfect. Then I did my job. Well, listen, before we jump into this, I also wanted to share one other and it’s not embarrassing at all, but I thought I would share a story of one of the early days that we met, because it’s something that stuck out in my life.

And I don’t think I’ve actually ever told you this. And so I thought I would just run out here.

Gayatri: Oh here we go, a live podcast is a perfect time to tell me.

Kelly: Yes, it’s totally is isn’t it? I know. I think it was actually the second time that we met, but I want to say this was a good eight years ago that we were both, I mean, we’re 30, [00:04:00] I’m just kidding.

So we were at the The Clinton Global Initiative and we were on a working group session. I think it was like apprenticeships and industry partnerships. It was like all the rage at the time. And it was funny because the reason I wanted to share this was because it’s a moment in time that like actually shaped how my life going forward was, which that’s why I said I really probably haven’t mentioned this to you.

 But I still felt very young and inexperienced and kind of like unsure of myself in these situations where I was supposed to voice ideas. And I’m like feeling like the super young buck in a room of PhDs that are all super seasoned and I’m sort of trying to navigate this and all I remember, and I had met you and I had known you already, but all I remember is you with your voice loud, clear you being confident and voicing these things that were like fantastic ideas.

You know, every idea to me now is [00:05:00] fantastic, but at the time I remember thinking like, “Okay. If she can do it, I can do it.” And that was just a moment for me in this world.

Gayatri: You’re going to make me cry.

Kelly: I did get little teary-eyed when I said –

Gayatri: Well like, what’s your one mission in life as a human. Not as an employee, not as the title that I am not as, any of that. What do I seek to do in the world? It is to make sure that everyone around me knows and that people that interact with me know that their potential is limitless. Not that I can do, but that you can do.

And so, it’s very moving Kelly for me to hear you say that you interacting with me made you feel a deeper sense of confidence. Cause that’s a really powerful idea that our presence in the lives of one another may actually not be about us all the time. Right? It’s about how you show up with, and for [00:06:00] others and how that makes them feel. 

Kelly: Totally. Totally. And I’m so glad you said that. Cause I know that you care about those things and I’m just so glad that everyone else is able to hear that you also care about those things. But it did, it changed.

It also changed how I then showed that. It’s sort of like you have this natural gift that’s given to you. I realized that I have this and I can also use this to help other women and other people.  It was that moment for me, where it all sort of clicked.

And so it’s fascinating now, and I’m so grateful for the friendship that we’ve been able to develop and all of this amazing work that we’ve been able to do around this, but it was that moment for me. So thank you.

Gayatri: Yeah. No, it’s my pleasure. It’s really interesting. I think there’s a mantra I sort of play in my head, which is like, what right do you have? You mentioned, you and I both in our [00:07:00] lines of work often find ourselves in rooms of global CEOs, of PhDs, of the preeminent global expert in economy, and that is an environment where it’s so easy to feel intimidated and you can think to yourself like what right does that man have to pontificate on this aspect of the economy?

Oh, well, he’s the leading global expert on this topic and you can turn that back on yourself and you can say like, well, what right do I have to weigh into this and to have, and voice a strong opinion? And so I’ve started to say to myself and to others, what right do you have? Every right. Every right. Like there’s nothing in the external ethos of somebody’s expertise that makes them any better, able to have an opinion on a topic. And I think we live in a culture that is so about who gave you a right to [00:08:00] know what you know, rather than valuing and expecting that as humans with different lived experience, we all bring value to the table.

Some of that value has been credentialed in different ways, different people over time. But that core of, I know that I am valued, that I value myself. Therefore, I can bring value to conversations, discussions, environments that I engage in, and that just that little repeating, what rights do you have? Every right. Like we all have every right.

Kelly: That is such a fantastic thing. It makes me think, and it’s so funny in the world of innovation that we live in. The interesting thing is that, just like you’re describing right now, that everyone has a voice that they should use and we should respect that. It really is truly a necessity and innovation, because if we don’t start hearing all of these things from people that have different backgrounds, I can’t ever remember the name of the book that [00:09:00] talked about  the era with where in the Renaissance era, where they brought together, all of these like amazing minds into one place to start to foster different ideas.

It wasn’t just scientists. It wasn’t just artists. It was all of them brought together because they wanted to hear how all of those things meshed together. I think that is just a fantastic message. I want to take it back though. I want to hear, I want everyone else to hear more about your journey and sort of your life and how you’ve kind of come to this point. All of the things that you’ve done over this time for everyone that doesn’t know you.

Gayatri: Sure. Well, I was born in California. So I think just the quick background, which is important cause I am, as a dear friend often says, ambiguously Brown. I am a biracial woman, my father’s from East India, born and raised in India, first-generation American. Lived in the States briefly and then moved back overseas. My mom is Caucasian America and she’s [00:10:00] Italian, an Italian Jew from Chicago. My mother and father met overseas in India. And when my mom became pregnant with me and found out, which at the time you weren’t supposed to be able to find out, but she found out that I was a girl.

They had planned to stay in India and to raise me in India. When she found out I was a girl and this was, a few years ago, she had sort of this moment have been, been raised as an American in American culture where women have had, and have very different rights than women in India. She just like, I can’t do it.

We have to move back to the United States. She came back to the US when she was three or four months pregnant. I was like born in East Palo Alto, California and pieces of the rest are history, but I share, and I’ll share a little bit of it. I share that context because I am cognizant always that we are born into the whole first set of opportunities that we find.

I was born into the right and the way and the will to do things as a woman in the United States that I might not have had access to had my mom and dad [00:11:00] chosen to stay in India. That’s changed and evolved over time but those parts aren’t controlled by us. Those are our situation, our circumstance, and we’re born into that. I think my own personal story is one that’s rooted in the fact that, that talent, that capacity, that potential is equally distributed across this globe, but opportunity to pursue that potential is simply not.

 Most of the rest of my story kind of mirrors that. My mom was on welfare, my parents divorced when I was young, and things were tough. Things weren’t as tough as they were for some, but we moved a lot. We finally landed in stable section eight housing when I was five years old, right before your kindergarden.

And I lived in that house until I graduated high school. Having that stable housing environment in, in Palo Alto, California. So we moved from East Palo Alto to Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto, California is the hardest Silicon Valley, it at the time had and still has today one of the best public school systems in the [00:12:00] US. I was again, sort of dropped into a place of privilege and opportunity and access, not because of a unique talent that I had, but just because I happen to have access to schools that could help me grow and develop.

I finished high school, I got a full scholarship, went to a college out on the East coast and I experienced unbelievable culture shock. I had never left California and I didn’t grow up with a lot of means. I had never seen snow. I had never just. I found myself in Worcester, Massachusetts. And I was like, where am I? What’s going on around me? It’s very disorienting experience. And I dropped out of college.

Kelly: I didn’t even know this.

Gayatri: You know, I think life comes at you fast when you don’t have, when you don’t have the coping mechanisms. We were not raised with certain coping mechanisms or different kinds of exposure.

 You don’t know what to do and you sort of freeze. And so I froze, first semester in college and I dropped out. I moved home. I think being around my mom really helped me. I took a job as a [00:13:00] nanny. I went to community college. And then eventually, like I would say I had a winding path to, and through school.

I eventually found my way back to college, I ended up moving to Seattle and went to Seattle University, which is a Jesuit school. And the Jesuits believe that education is about the whole person. So it’s about the mind body, the soul and your faith. That holistic approach to education really served me incredibly well.

And I was at a university on a very generous scholarship that was awarded to me in part because of my background, both my ethnicity and my gender. There’s just this repeated pattern of an opportunity given, an opportunity given, an opportunity given again, and all of those experiences put me in proximity to kids and to students who felt every right to be where they were and to do what they did.

And to teachers who saw me, not as someone who came from background different than my peers, but as someone had infinite potential. [00:14:00] Every time a teacher poured that energy into me, it just, it kind of helped me stand up a little bit straighter.

 I left as a poli sci major. I love government, I love our civic process. My father was an immigrant to the United States and I have a sense of other culture and for all the flaws in our nation, and there are many. The Bill Clinton quote, that there is nothing wrong with our nation that cannot be fixed by what is right in our nation.

This resonates deeply with me and I’ve just butchered his quotes. I feel bad, but I think you know which one. My major, I left my undergrad and I went straight into campaign and elections work. I worked for the governor in Washington state. I left her office to run a nonprofit organization in an AmeriCorps program that worked with kids and youth.

And then from there, actually, this is an important bit in the story. I’ll share it. I actually got fired from that job. I did. I mean, I was totally, I just wasn’t ready. I didn’t [00:15:00] have the competencies and skills that I needed at that time to be successful in that role. And so I was fired, which was very confusing for me because I’m a driven person.

I like to do things right. And people who like to do these things well and likes to do things right, don’t like to get fired. But it actually helped me reset and it helped me really pause to say like, as much as we want to be able to do something, our capacity to do that thing is limited by the skills that we have, by the things we know how to do.

So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I figured out a way to hack my way through an MBA. So I got a job at the University and by working at the University, they paid for me to put myself through school at night. So I worked full time in the career center, connecting employers and students. And then I got my MBA at night.

And I think the most of the rest is history. My MBA program was when I discovered a real love for [00:16:00] the capacity of business, of business leaders and of businesses to drive positive change within the world, within particularly within the American economy. So those are some of my puzzle pieces, how I find myself here and how I’ve learned to sit up a little straighter in my chair.

Kelly: That’s amazing. And I really love that you share, thank you so much for sharing, sort of that being born into this privilege because I’m reading a book right now by Miki Agrawal, I don’t know if you’ve heard of her, but she talks about, I think it’s called The Disrupt-Her. She talks about being born, it’s like the lottery of life, it’s just all of these people that are born into different circumstances and if she was one of them, she doesn’t know if she’d be here and where she is today. And I truly agree with that and I feel that as well. So thank you for sharing that. It’s I think it’s a good, important point.

Gayatri: Absolutely

Kelly: Not only her, but for people to understand too well.

Gayatri: And [00:17:00] Kelly, you and I are both raising kids right now. And I think we’ve talked about this a little bit, but like raising kids, and my husband and I talk about this a lot. In a very different, like my kids are having such a different lived experience than what was my lived experience at that time.

Sometimes I worry. I’m like, ah, well, you know, I try to think about how can I help them understand what real adversity looks like and how do you get that grit muscle when you didn’t worry about where your family was going to sleep or you didn’t worry about whether you’d have new or clean clothes to start school with. These are worries that resonate to my early life and they have shaped me in ways that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I just wouldn’t. They build a reserve of capacity and strength and grit and ability. I think how do I make sure that my kids, who are facing their own set of challenges, but not the same ones I faced as a child, how do [00:18:00] I get them those lessons as I raise them, and get them in those values. It’s hard.

Kelly: No, it is hard, but it is something. I find that too, we tend to talk about this wonderful privilege that we’ve been able to have. But people that have to overcome challenges in their life, like you just described it, that is really what makes them what they are today, what they eventually turn into be today.

And I agree that a lot of times we see this and most people think of it as a negative. It is not negative, it is where your strength comes from. And I agree it’s hard to figure out how to do that for your own kids. But I do want to mention this because I think most people that are sitting here listening to this, or have family members that have struggled in their life with whatever’s been thrown their way that are struggling now with what’s going on. I mean, this is all the fuel that makes the strength build inside of you.

And don’t think of it as like a negative, it’s truly a positive as [00:19:00] you want those challenges.

Gayatri: I think that’s absolutely right. I think sometimes skills, the idea of skills get a little bit of a bad rap because we think about a skill being the ability to weld metal together. And it is, but it’s also the emotional intelligence to process past experiences and to use them as fuel, to shape and create your future. That is a skill. Confidently public speaking is a skill. Being able to show up in a room and not feel small because you perceive others to be large is a skill.

So I’ve loved this journey I’ve been on of discovering the power of skills to unlock human potential because all of those, all of those things are skills. And I think sometimes we skip those components that sort of, I began the emotional intelligence, the social capacity. I think social and emotional skills get a bad rap, but they’re so core to how you build the other more technical [00:20:00] skills that, that you’ll need in whatever you do.

Kelly: I call them resilience skills because it’s this resiliency that you need to build, but it has to be coupled. So now I’m curious, now that you mentioned it, it sounds like to me, everything that you’ve described, you’ve obviously very much flexed your resiliency skill building muscles throughout your life.

What else do you feel like were necessary skills for you to gain, to be successful? Like what did you find you needed to marry with that? I think the second part of that question, as you think through this answer, is do you feel like that was like a combination of life work and education, or do you feel like those were picked up in different ways?

Gayatri: I love that question for a host of reasons. So I think the first really tangible skill that comes to mind as you asked that question, is the capacity to be curious about the world around me. So I think [00:21:00] maybe said another way, is the capacity to seek to learn versus to seek to know, and that’s a hard one.

I think it came to me sort of later was more in my graduate work and after getting fired for thinking, I knew everything because I didn’t. That really sort of came to be a skill that I understood how to use. And so it’s not that you must know everything, it’s that you must know that you don’t know everything.

And there’s real power in that. So I think that capacity to be curious, and that ability and openness to learn. You need real skills to build that in yourself. So that’s one that comes to mind. I think another one is the ability to build relationship, but using it using sort of the muscles of both empathy and need.

So a theme that I’ve talked about in every job I’ve ever interviewed for, and it’s about the mutuality of human [00:22:00] need that, like, what I love to do is understand where something that is needed, like an employer’s need to hire a certain kind of potential employee and a potential employees’ capacity to do a job like that.

There’s a mutuality in the need that they have. So this process connecting that employer and that individual, or the process of connecting the right therapist to the right patient, right doctor. It’s this constant quest to address the mutuality of need, rather than constantly feeling like you’re moving through the world trying to sell people something, which can feel weird.

Like, I don’t, I don’t –  I’ve raised money. I raised money for years as a political and a nonprofit fundraiser and I never felt like I was trying to sell people something. I always said, I’m giving people an opportunity to invest in what they believe in, which I believe. Even today at Walmart, one of the things that drew me to work at Walmart was that I believe Walmart is solving a persistent social problem that our [00:23:00] nation faces, which is access to affordable food and goods wherever you live in the United  States. I really believe that. And so I’m driven by this mutuality, but it took me a while to learn what that means.

And so I think there’s also this skill of unpacking what drives you and what drives me, Gayatri, it’s going to be different than what drives you, Kelly. I think we get confused when we ask people like, well, how did you do what you did? Well, I can tell you, but that’s going to be my story that’s packed full of lived experiences. That’s packed full of my unique skills and gifts and how I’ve given those gifts to the world, is my story in the same way, how you’ve done that is yours. And we can give lessons across, but you actually can’t give someone –

Kelly: It’s not like there’s a special key that unlocks –

Gayatri: Yeah, I wish I could sometimes. Like students will be like, how do I [00:24:00] get into corporate social responsibility? And I’ll be like you work hard and if it fits with what you want to do in life, that’s a trite way to say it. I think it’s hard to be prescriptive with someone about how they can do exactly what either you do or what they think they want to do.

Kelly: I think you mentioning that sort of like emotional capacity, because really like tapping in to yourself and like you’ve been around now long enough to know the changes in our life, like children, all of these things, that it changes over time as well. Like there were things that I didn’t even know that I cared about until I had children, that I didn’t even know I cared about until I heard that my daughter has a gift of dyslexia.

You know what I mean? And so if we don’t look at that emotional intelligence, like you said, that skill is actually a super important skill when you think about it, because that’s what helps navigate you in your life. And if you tap that skill and you’re always curious and trying to solve those problems, when you see a problem instead of just going [00:25:00] at it like the normal way, if you were curious enough to say like, “Oh, let’s step back, let’s look at this a different way.”

I don’t know all the answers, right? Like all of those things, if you put them together, that’s really the magic.

Gayatri: I love that. I agree. Yep.

Kelly: So let’s get into, like, I feel like always the meat of the discussion being what is like the new and latest in terms of skills innovations in your world. There’s just so much happening right now.

Gayatri: There’s so much happening. I was thinking about, about this idea. I mean, I think about this every day, because I lead a portfolio at Walmart where we are constantly trying to understand how to facilitate and create economic mobility for American workers who don’t have college degrees.

So that’s the problem that I’m trying to solve on a daily basis. And I think that there are, I’ll [00:26:00] share two things that are really top of mind to me right now and they’re there in what I would call completely opposite, of how you could do what I’m articulating. So I’m just really nerdy for a second.

 This actually is in your world Kelly, with your day job with the MSI, is this idea that we could build dynamic skills ontologies, and please listeners bear with me what a word, but like dynamic skills ontologies that actually map in a dynamic way, the things that a human being is capable of doing. And the reason that that is so important is if you do this work and you’re familiar with the Bureau of labor statistics and the O-NET database, this is all a static map of how people move through the labor market.

So this job code has these associated skills with it. And we decide that today, we put it into the system, [00:27:00] and it doesn’t change. It doesn’t evolve. Except that we all know that it does. Being a librarian today is a very different job than it was actually like even two, probably a year or two ago, but even more so than it was a decade ago.

And so this idea that we could build with the technical capacity and capabilities that we now have a way to dynamically allow a job or a collection of skills that create work, shift over time and that we could share those across industries across employers is, I think it unlocks so much for the future of work and for the movement of human capital.

So super nerdy, very technical. On the other side of the spectrum, I don’t think we as sort of economic and workforce development professionals, talk enough about social capital. Which is literally the opposite side of the tangible hard skills that a person is tagged with. [00:28:00] Social capital is just the idea that what you know is important, who you know continues to play a role in how you move through the workforce.

If I go back in time and I look at my own career and I think about when opportunities opened or when I was able to get into a new role, often was about the skills that I had, the skills and competencies that I had, but also it was about who could open a door. You know, even if just a little bit and you never know who it’s going to be.

So social capital is not about knowing fancy people. Social capital is about having relational value in the relationships that you have and it’s also about knowing people in different sort of pockets of the world and of work. We think today and we sort of take either a racial equity lens or a financial inclusion lens, and you put that over the idea of social capital, it’s not hard to recognize [00:29:00] that the child of a CEO has a very different network that he or she has access to, their social capital is so different from the capital that someone who maybe has lived and worked in the same five city block radius of a Baltimore, Detroit. And it’s not better or worse, but it’s very different.

And when it comes to accessing pathways to economic opportunity, one will open more doors than the other. So I spend a lot of time thinking about like the innovate, the technical innovation and how that can just drive new and incredible opportunity for how we map movement across the market, but I don’t think that we can ever do that without a real consciousness to it not ever replacing the importance of humanity and human relationships in how people find and access work. So that was quite long-winded, sorry.

Kelly: No, it’s not. I mean, it’s obviously for [00:30:00] me also super interesting. But I think it’s a good point to mention because a lot of times people hear us talk about technology is about data when it comes to innovation around these things, but there truly is a human component component to this.

And even when we talk about the data and technologies, I will just mention that the whole concept around that, is to take what we were just talking about, that magic of all of those things and make that communicate it, like you able to communicate that so that it is actually important, but I realize it sounds super boring and nerdy.

On the other hand we do this human  interaction piece. I’m so thrilled that you mentioned this, it just doesn’t come up that often. But I have to agree that this is an important thing.

I think we just forget, you know, we forget. If you just pause and you go through any day, go through a day and think about the role that human capital played in that day, or excuse me, that social capital played in that day.

It’s actually mind blowing. Who did you talk to? Did you get connected with [00:31:00] them? Why did you get connected with them? Who opened all of the right and it’s, the quick answer is, “Oh, well my, my network,” and then you have to pause and go like, does everyone’s network look the same or do people’s networks look different?

And so I push myself to think about how can I use my social capital to open more doors for others, especially people who just, they may not have their hand on the same door that I do. I can just poke that door a tiny bit open, but that’s all I need. Sometimes it’s just that one introduction or that one email or that one phone call  and it can be game-changing for someone for you to access opportunities.

I will just throw back to listeners here today too, that is some amazing advice. I realized we can’t always help all the people we would love to help, I’m sure we all get a ton of requests. But if you get a request from someone like I did this summer, who their internship got canceled and they [00:32:00] were stressing, but they really want to work in economics. Like whatever the little thing is, just a little attention, a little share on social media, a little introduction to one person. It might not all work out, but like, that concept of paying it forward, even if we can’t do the big enormous things all the time, just those little bits those add up when we all do them together.

So anyway, I’ll throw that back to everybody too, pay it forward in this way. It would be great. So my last question for you Gayatri,  I’m curious because there is, this time is changing immensely for us this year. There’s been a lot of events that have happened that I think we all feel, we’ve all felt this before, but this is just like a new kind of pressure that has been added to it.

And I feel this wonderful feeling of, there is something that’s been brewing for awhile, that this being the catalyst of something that is truly going to change the world. If you could make a [00:33:00] wild and crazy guess on what is feeling that feeling for you, that is like world changing, people changing, whatever you want to call it, throw it out there.

Gayatri: I mean, it’s pretty simple. It’s shared  humanity. So our globe is facing this shared adversity. So actually not planned, but the conversation we were having at the top of the hour of when you are faced with challenge, you grow, like that’s just, it’s just a formula. It’s just how it works.

Right? So our nation and more so, our entire globe, is faced with the challenge and the adversity of COVID and of this health crisis. And then, especially in the United States or more acutely in the United States, you layer in this reckoning with racial inequality and these are major adversities to be faced.

And what’s really interesting to me is, I just feel like they’re being faced collectively, not independently. [00:34:00] Right? So they they’ve always been faced independently. But there’s this collectivism to how they’re being faced now. My hope and some of my personal experiences thus far in the last few months, like I’ve been more open with my own humanity.

I learned fairly recently from a lovely therapist here in Arkansas that I have anxiety. I had this therapy session with her and I’m going on and on. And she’s like, “Oh sweetheart.” She goes, “Oh, sweetheart.” In true Southern way, “do you know you have anxiety?” And I said, no, no, no. I just, I worry.

And she’s like, “Okay, like, there’s worry. And then there’s like this other level of being in the world.” She’s like you have anxiety and she goes, and that’s okay. It’s okay to have anxiety, but I think it’s important for you to know that. And so what I’ve done with that is taken that and just shared it.

Like I’m a successful working professional mother. I also have anxiety, not a big deal. In fact, probably some because of the other. And there’s a beautiful piece that a [00:35:00] mentor of mine, Lenny Mendoza, who was the former Economic Chair in California, he sort of abruptly resigned a few months ago.

And he just put out a thought piece this week, actually talking about his own struggles with anxiety and depression and talking about advocacy around mental health. And when I read it, what I thought to myself was, I wonder if that story breaks without COVID as the backdrop for how we interact as humans.

Right? Like I wonder if some of these stories about the reveal impossibility of rearing tiny humans and maintaining day jobs on computers from home. I wonder if they break in the Journal and the Post and the Times like they have in the last couple of weeks, if it were not for that.

And so it’s like our shared humanity. This is a moment of reckoning. I can’t imagine that does anything but positive [00:36:00] things for what we can build together.

Kelly: It’s like everyone is now on the same playing field, the same level. They’re like, we get it.

Gayatri: Well, the vulnerability is shared, right? I’m very clear that like we’re not all exposed to and vulnerable in our physical health within the same way right now. We’re really not. But there is this shared fear. There’s a shared anxiety. There’s this shared extra threat. I’m genuinely a hopeful person most of the time, but I actually find myself being more hopeful in what feels like a darker time now, because you see all these glimpses of the beauty of our shared humanity.

It keeps me moving forward.

Kelly: So that feels like the perfect last words for our podcast today. So I will wrap us up. You guys, thank you, first of all, Gayatri for joining us today. This has been fantastic. I am so excited that you were here and for anyone that’s [00:37:00] interested in following Gayatri, she’s available on LinkedIn and Twitter at Gayatri Agnew.

I’m going to post this for you all with the spelling of everything. If anyone is interested in joining the Mother’s Monday Movement or learning more information about that, which I truly hope that you are. I think this is not only for mothers. This is truly for parents. I just want to say that even though I know we’re mothers and we share our experiences and all that good stuff, all about parents and that is available at mothersmonday.com.

And for anyone that’s interested in really just helping and promoting people that are running for office right now, let me know and I will connect you to the right people. I am available on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook at Kelly R. Bailey.

Thank you all for listening in today to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I would love any feedback or suggestions, some ratings, all that good stuff. And you can listen to us anywhere podcasts are available. Hope you all have a wonderful day. [00:38:00]