You are listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brookestio Special Episode.

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching.

And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brookestio.

Well, hello there, my friends. How are you all doing today?

I have a very special guest, and we are going to have a very frank conversation together about what I have seen as some misuses of the model.

And we're just going to talk about it, like stream of consciousness and some ideas and some concepts, and I want to let you know that we're going to do a full training on how to use the model with racism in specifics next week on the regular program.

We're going to do one like that. So so many people have asked for it, and I definitely want to make sure.

But for now, we're going to just do a conversation. I'm going to talk about some stuff that I'm learning, but I'm also going to introduce you to Anita Miller.

The story of how we ended up here is she sent me a Slack message with a curriculum that she had created that she was asking permission to use.

I was like, um, absolutely, this is amazing. Can we go on the podcast and talk all about it? And then we later decide, let's not do that curriculum quite yet, because we're still working on some of it.

So let's have a conversation on the podcast and talk about you. So hi, welcome. I'm so glad you're here.

Hello, I am so excited to be here. So I thought we could start with kind of your story, however you want to tell it a little bit about you, how you found me your experience with the model start there.

So I am originally from I'll call it somewhere in between which is Washington DC. So I go up there and go up in Northern Virginia, where I'll be honest, I really didn't see instances of race growing up, you know, the Washington DC area is really a melting pot.

So you see all type of races and for me growing up race wasn't really discussed. I've been about my senior year of high school, my parents moved to South Carolina.

And you talk about culture shock. It is a much different place, not only in just how people handle things, how people read each other is different in DC, people kind of keep it moving. We don't really make eye contact, we're just all trying to get to the next place.

And the South people wanted to be softer and eye contact. And so that has been a transition for me. I think that that was my first real experience with the noticeable difference in between races.

Because when we moved to South Carolina where we lived was really just there were black people and white people there wasn't at that time. Other cultures, I think, you know, all states have changed from a cultural perspective since that time, but that was my experience. I really didn't have kind of those interactions, at least not directly growing up.

Until I moved to the South. And then in terms of finding you, I was having a moment at work, a moment that I would categorize as a racial one.

And we are just over a couple years and number of things have happened where I was extort tapped on a shoulder, right? Everyone wants to be tapped on a shoulder to apply for a position. And so I applied for this position, I think, right. And the feedback I got was, oh, wow, Anita, interview so well, pretty much, they didn't know I was capable of that.

They were surprised. Sorry to interrupt, but can you tell us what kind of work it was? Yeah, so I work in financial services. So I work in a very white color corporate environment. Okay. And at that time, I mean, this was before diversity and inclusion initiative. So at that time, my floor of let's say 150 to probably 200 people, there were only three African American people.

Can I ask you a question right there? Yes. What do we use the term African American one to use the term black or are they interchangeable?

I think it's personal preference. And no matter who you talk to of what race everybody has their own feeling about it. I grew up pretty conservatively, so I tend to say things conservatively, which is why I diverted back to African America instead of.

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