Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help

leaders activate high performance, no burnout required. Whether through boot camps, keynote talks,

or pulse checks, we help teams achieve meaningful change. If that's what your organization needs,

let's talk. And before we jump into today's episode, just as a

reminder, please leave a review if you can swing it. It really helps new listeners find the show.

Okay, so today, I'm excited to bring you this interview with Lily Zhang. Lili is an author,

speaker, and consultant in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And you might be thinking,

well, there are lots of voices out there on this topic. And you'd be right. But I'm telling you,

Lily brings a fresh take to inclusion and belonging and how we can better create these

experiences for really everyone in the workplace. I spent a few moments during this conversation pretty speechless,

and that is a rare thing for me. Just ask my kids. I learned a ton, and I hope you do too. So let's get into it.

Lily Zhang, consultant, strategist, and author, all of the things around diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is such a

pleasure to have you join me on the Modern Mentor podcast today. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. I am really stoked to have this conversation. I think it's going to be

lots of fun. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time. So Lily, before we dive in and

there's so much ground I want to

cover with you, can you just give us kind of the quick backstory around what brought you to the work

that you do today? Absolutely. So I think like many DEI practitioners and folks who end up in the

DEI space, I was quite passionate about leveraging what I learned

from school and my skills and my passion to building better workplaces for everyone.

I think unlike a lot of DEI practitioners, I got my start right out of college in DEI teaching roles,

basically, as an educator, as someone who delivered this content

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