How Growing Up in Foster Care Shaped Chéla Gage’s Leadership

The Anxious Achiever

Morra Aarons-Mele

Careers, Management, Mental Health, Business, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 600 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How does growing up in foster care shape you as a leader? Chéla Gage is the former Vice President Global Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer, workforce mental health advocate, inclusion expert, and host of the 1 Million Fosters podcast. Gage joins Morra to share how her childhood in foster care shaped her strengths as a leader, her reflections on anxiety and hypervigilance as an asset, and how she’s transforming trauma into purpose. Chéla’s journey from foster homes and group homes to senior leadership roles at Nissan, Raytheon, and Starbucks is a testament to the power of claiming your story. She shares how her upbringing honed her ability to read a room, anticipate challenges, and build belonging, skills that have made her invaluable in corporate spaces. Learn more about Chéla Gage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelagage/ Key Themes: ✅ Hypervigilance as Leadership Strength: Growing up navigating new homes and caregivers taught Chéla to read the room quickly, identify influencers, and trust her intuition—skills she now uses to drive business impact. ✅ Reframing Trauma into Purpose: Chéla discusses how she once felt shame about her foster care past but now sees it as her superpower, providing her with empathy and perspective leaders need. ✅ Parenting as Reparenting: Motherhood allowed Chéla to give the love she didn’t receive as a child back to herself. ✅ The Role of Anxiety: Anxiety kept Chéla alert and prepared, but she learned to manage in therapy, to reduce constant threat scanning and burnout while embracing her “hypervigilance” as a leadership tool. ✅ Creating Belonging in Corporate Spaces: Through her career in recruiting and DEIB leadership, Chéla discovered the importance of recognizing and honoring people’s whole stories, not just their resumes, to create true inclusion. Timestamps: 07:09 Hypervigilance as a Superpower 12:59 Transforming Pain into Purpose 18:40 The Role of Anxiety: A Double-Edged Sword 24:14 Inclusion and Belonging 29:51 The Impact of Personal Stories 34:50 Empowering the Foster Community

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listeners, I'm so excited to bring you my conversation with Chela Gage.
0:11.8	She was most recently the global, I'm going to read her title, Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer at Starbucks and a little company you may
0:23.5	have heard of. And she's been the North America head of talent for Nissan and had senior,
0:30.7	senior people roles in many companies. Chila is also a foster care kid.
0:38.3	She grew up in foster care and she is embarking on a new project to tell that story.
0:45.3	I first heard her speak at the One Mind at Work Global Forum and she shared how her experience growing up in foster care created her to be the
0:59.4	leader she is. She mentioned her hypervigilance, her always scanning the environment for threats
1:06.2	as something actually that had really helped her in large corporate roles. In this episode,
1:11.7	she shares that how, starting at age seven, she would enter a large group home and have to suss out
1:17.6	who the influential adults were that she needed to know so that she could get adequate food
1:23.9	and clothing and care and how that carried forward in her career. It's a transcendent
1:30.0	conversation and I hope you'll like it. Okay. Well, Cheila, it's great to have you. And I've seen
1:39.9	you talk twice at the annual One Mind at Work Global Forum. You're a huge force in the workplace
1:49.7	mental health field. And I was so intrigued by your story, by your new podcast. And, you know, obviously on this show, we talk about mental health, but also we talk a lot
2:06.4	about how our childhoods influenced who we are now.
2:11.6	But you said something that was really interesting in one of your interviews.
2:16.5	You said that you felt like your story began
2:19.5	before you were born. Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah. So the more I become aware of who I am
2:31.7	as and all of my identities as a mom, a wife, a sister, cousin, friend, all of that.
2:41.0	I'm aware of how much grace is needed and how much forgiveness is needed in my identities.
2:52.8	Like as a mother, I am flawed, you know?
2:57.8	I want to spend 100% of my time with my kids, but I have to work.
	...

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