Creating Opportunites to get in the Vibration you Desire in the World
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

In this interview, I sat down with Julia Bernadsky to discuss the war in Ukraine and the impact of the heart-based leadership of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine.

Julia is an entrepreneur originally from Kyiv and shares her insights on energy and peace, as well as how leading from the heart has turned the tides of war in favor of freedom. She also talks about how caring for people and humanity is more powerful than money and power.

Join us as we discuss the current state of Ukraine and beyond! You can purchase a jewelry piece crafted by Julia with 100% of the proceeds to support Ukraine.

https://untamedhearts.com/collections/necklaces/products/support-ukraine-necklace-bracelet

Creating Opportunites to get in the Vibration you Desire in the World
By Darla LeDoux, Founder of Sourced™ and Author of the books Shift The Field and Retreat and Grow Rich

Hello, and welcome to today’s conversation in the Certified Source Leader series on my YouTube channel, Shift the Field TV. I’m here with the fabulous Paula Forbes. 

Hi, Paula.  I’m so excited to do this together. 

Paula describes herself as a Conversation Catalyst who guides leaders committed to making meaningful change. Her leadership workshops, institutes, and retreats provide a transformative experience for leaders allowing them to lead their organization successfully and in alignment with their mission and vision. 

As a coach and facilitator, Paula’s job is to hold space for diverse points of view and create a setting where participants can have powerful discussions without polarizing their relationships. She uses various methods in her workshops to design safe spaces where participants can feel comfortable having tough conversations and ultimately learn how to move forward collaboratively. 

This only skims the surface of who she is. Paula is an attorney who has primarily worked in the education space over the last 20 years. She goes into schools and helps to facilitate change when an incident has happened around race or any prejudice, particularly race. 

Paula has shifted her work into leadership work for people running diverse organizations and multicultural schools and communities. 

Darla: Transformation and law is a unique combination. What does it mean to lead Sourced in your work as an attorney? 

Paula: It has evolved around my own reckoning and transformation. I help people to see who they are, go through their own self-discovery around their Source Energy and who their inner knowing is, and to be comfortable, confident, and committed to their inner knowing. 

I work with leaders all the time, and they tell me what they want, but they don’t understand their purpose. They truly don’t understand what that means. When you ask about leading Sourced, I love to get people to that place where we talk about our Sourced Energy, where they are with their discomfort, and understand the exploration of what that discomfort is. Then we move to the desired place, and in the process, we build a commitment to have no more fear about going to that place of commitment and desire.

Darla: I love to imagine a world where people have the source t-shirt or the bumper sticker. That’s a clue to say, Hey, I’ve done my inner work. I know who I am. You can trust my knowing for myself. I know you know what’s right for me. My question – what happens if everyone live Sourced?

Paula: People are willing to lean into the resistance of the work they’re facing, and when they do that, they find their voice. They are fearless in their work. I don’t mean fearless in the sense that I’m creating warriors in the work that I do with civil rights and working in this system of equity. People always make the assumption that if you’re going to do this work, you’re going to be a protester or an organizer, or you’re going to beat against a system and beat it down and break it down and do it in a way that we visualize a sense of conflict.

I see this inner knowing of who you are as a more peaceful human. It’s this place that you get; that’s not the conflict, but the being at peace with understanding our why and our purpose and being willing to step into that in a way that creates space for other people to be able to step into it as well. 

It’s almost the opposite of the assumptions that we make about people that want to deconstruct systems like racism. When we think about how we can work together better, we always think that we must go through this huge violent conflict because that’s how we’ve always looked at it in our history. But our history teaches us so much more than the conflict; our history teaches us a pathway to peace.

Darla: You used the word reckoning and that it helps us to face our resistance. Can you share a little bit of your backstory of being raised in the Midwest by a civil rights activist and coming up in this world? What was that reckoning and how did you experience resistance?

Paula: I’ve had my own racial reckonings at different stages in my life. That’s what I love to be able to bring people through this process. My father raised me. We came to the United States when I was a baby. He was a civil rights leader. We landed in Madison, Wisconsin. He was also one of the founding members of the Urban League in Madison, which was a pretty significant thing in the 1960s. 

No one would rent or sell us a home when we moved there, so the mayor of Madison rented us our first home, which was on the industrial side of town. My family was the first to live in an integrated neighborhood on the west side of town. 

That meant that I was then a little black girl, the youngest of five, that was going to integrate into my elementary school. It was Randall Elementary in Madison, Wisconsin, and my family was one of the first black families to live on the west side of town. My experience then gave me an understanding of race and what race meant being the first and the impact of being the first and the impact of living in a neighborhood that didn’t look like me. 

That was when I was a young girl, and how I looked at the world was very different. When I say that I’ve gone through many racial reckonings, I’ve been able to reflect on that and say, “that’s what I knew.” 

I knew there was resistance to me being in that neighborhood, but I had incredible allies that made it possible for me to stay. I didn’t get run out of that neighborhood because I had allies that created a container where I could live and grow. I did have some traumatic experiences growing up, some of which have stayed with me my entire life, and I am in the process of healing what that meant and how that is carried with me throughout my whole life. 

My racial reckonings started as a young girl, then in my younger years, and then in my young adult years, going to college, understanding and learning my history. When I was older, I intentionally focused and learned about who I was, what my history is, and what Black history is, and then in law school to understand it from a constitutional level, to study race in America and what that meant from its origins. 

It didn’t impact me until recently, which is amazing to be in my late 50s and have this racial reckoning at the time of the pandemic. The precipice of race in America in my life was the murder of George Floyd.

Darla: I want to underline that this happened in your community. 

Paula:  Yes, right here in my community. I live in a suburb; this happened right in the city, but not far enough away from me, where it didn’t feel the tremble that I didn’t see what was going on in my community. One of the charter schools I helped create was smack dab in the middle of the chaos. The school districts for which I work were right there. 

George Floyd was not the first to be murdered in the United States because of race and who he was as a black man and the police brutality and racism in America. He wasn’t the first one. We know that. But because we could, for the first time, experience it in real-time, through social media, to watch and witness this murder globally, he represented that whole piece about what we are seeing, what that means, and what the impact is. 

I think that is why all of us have those visuals forever cemented in our hearts and our minds because we were able to see them.

Darla: You’re the founder of the Finding Human Institute. You take groups of humans through this experience to look at their racial reckoning or their own race story. People of Color and white people who go through this experience ask questions like, ‘What is my own story with conversations about race? What is my resistance to conversations about race?’ 

What do you want people to know who have felt that ripple of the George Floyd murder about the state of the world today? I’ve seen more people being activated than ever; what do you want them to know about this idea of resistance when it comes to this conversation around race?

Paula: Finding Human is about the self-discovery of how we see the world in relation to race in our history about race. When I say the resistance, it’s almost the resistance to try and unpack how we see the world based on our race story, what we were told, what people taught us, how we think about race, and what we don’t know about how we are in the world is in relationship to race. 

I take people through the process of unpacking that story. That’s the internal resistance to a person. If I open up Pandora’s box, what will it reveal? Now I have to wrestle with what this means and how I impact the world. It started because I teach education and the law. 

Most of the teachers in our system are white, and we have a predominant population of children of color in our educational public educational systems. We wonder why those students of color are not succeeding at the same rate as kids that are not of color as white children. I don’t mean to compare black children and children of color to white children; I need to compare them to what success looks like in education. Why aren’t they getting there?

It’s hard because everybody wants to blame the child. I’m not blaming teachers, but I want teachers to understand that they have something in how they show up that creates a barrier to teaching children of color. I want to help them create a container of safety so that their students of color can show up authentically. 

That started me on my journey of peeling back those onions back and saying when you’re in a classroom, you are impacting that classroom in this way. Some of that is because of your history about who you are, and what you were told about the issues of race. We need to unpack that.

Darla: When I was in corporate, I was trained as a coach to facilitate these conversations about diversity, and we had to look at our story. Yeah. I thought, “I don’t have a race story.” I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I don’t have a race story. There were people of color in my community, and I couldn’t see how I had a race story. I was near a Native American reservation, too, so I have learned that we can’t grow up in this world and not have a race story. We can’t, and to think that we don’t, is that the issue??

Paula: That’s the resistance. That is to say; slavery is over. I’m not racist. That’s something that happened in my history; my parents did that. So I don’t need to look at that. To fail to look at that, then, is a failure of us to be able to look at the systemic issues in our systems, our cultures and our policies and practices, and our laws. That is why we have such a disproportionate equity and equality system in our society because we fail to look at our history. 

That’s your history; you can’t deny your history; you have to examine it. How does that allow you to lean in to say, Okay, now I know how I can make room for others to show up? 

Darla: Using the example of the teachers and creating a container of safety so that the students can show up authentically: if I am a teacher and I have resistance to an authentic expression that’s not the same as mine, then I’m not going to create safety around that unless I’ve done my work on that resistance. We know the power of that space, where you can show up authentically, and I’m hearing that you’re spreading that by having people have this conversation.

Paula: You’re right; it started in education. I didn’t know what I was doing until I went through the Sourced experience myself, became a Sourced leader, and was able to identify my own discomfort and how I could get to this desire of being able to create space for anybody to have a transformational experience when it comes to their resistance around the issues of race. 

This is one thing that I want people to truly understand. It starts with race because our country was built on a system of race and a racial construct that people were different. For example, I had a medical condition that required a transfusion, and no one asked me what race I would prefer when it came to the transfusion. It was the same; it was blood, I needed blood, and it wasn’t based on racial differentiation at all. It ran through my veins, and so I sat there, and I thought to myself, we are not different. When it comes to how we breathe and live in this world, it is only when we externally judge each other based on what we see based on historical issues that we have to reconcile. 

When we do that, we open space for everyone. It starts with race, but it doesn’t end there. That’s what’s been the reckoning for me to create space, not just to understand why we talk about race, but there’s so much resistance out there on how we judge people every day for who they are as humans. The Finding Human Institute is about finding humans, not just discovering issues around race.

Darla: What would you want to share with people about where to start around understanding race and this conversation about race? What do you want people to know?

Paula: That it’s okay to start where you are. What I love about having these conversations is starting with people you trust and love. Start around a dinner table around with friends, pull a couple of people together, and say, I want to have a conversation about what I know and what I don’t know about myself and my history and how I see the world. Then expand that and create those spaces. 

If you build the right container, to have that conversation, you need to have that conversation. It starts first with your own individual self-discovery and your own kind of experience of what did I know about race. What was I told? What’s different now? What am I learning about that? 

That’s okay, and not to fear. The fact is that we sometimes think, if I don’t talk about it, then I won’t get canceled, then people won’t judge us. You have to step into it. You have to walk into it. 

Darla: I would rather trust your container than bring a conversation to my family’s dinner table. Before, I’ve had my own, you know, reckoning, if that makes sense, because it’s like blind leading the blind or being in this conversation over time has helped me strengthen my muscle to where nobody in my immediate circle would have any doubt where I would stand about something.

Paula: Yeah, and I mean, I guess I need to admit some people would never dare go to their dinner table and have that conversation. They know exactly the resistance that they would meet, so that’s why I love creating that container for people to walk into a space that I hold or host, or the people I’ve trained hold our host, and being able to speak their truth and know that that is okay. 

I’m not saying that they get to walk in and start insulting people because we form those agreements that respect me form those agreements with how we’re going to impact and show up in that space. I want people to know they can self-examine and listen. When they listen to each other, they can start to heal.

Darla: I know that the core of your belief in your work is listening creates healing. 

Paula: I learned from listening to others and not coming up with it myself, thinking I know everything, or only really being guided by my own beliefs. You can learn so much more when we listen to each other’s experiences and what they’re going through. It does help you heal. 

Darla: I feel drawn to share something. In this work through Finding Human, I’ve been in another container around race for white people specifically. The repeated exposure to the conversation, I thought I knew some things because I had been trained before. And then I thought, well, haven’t we solved this by now? I was like, gosh, how are we in the same place? 

After immersing myself in the conversation with my closest black friend of 15 years, we have entirely different conversations with me about her life than she would have had before the last few years. The depth of our relationship and the transparency and authenticity and conversations about race and how race is impacting her is entirely different. 

You and I have talked about this feeling out of who’s safe, yet to actually share what the truth is. I think as a white person and as a leader of a community, you can think you’re safe. Or you can think, like, I don’t judge, you know, I’m not in judgment. That’s one level of healing. But then the familiarity and exposure to the conversation to where you’re not tensing up physically at the thought you might say something wrong, or you’re right because that energetic resistance is just as present as if you said something ridiculous. So I would love to speak about that a little bit. How do I become an ally if I don’t know much about Black culture? 

Paula: We always think that we have to know something or go out and, and learn and read all the books and know everything to have the conversation that you’d have to be fluent at it first, and then you can go out and speak to it. That’s not true. You have to build that muscle. You always want to be culturally competent if you can. But being an ally isn’t about knowing everything about Black culture. I don’t know everything about Black culture. I still am learning about who I am, but black culture is diverse. It’s just as global as everyone else that lives in walks on this earth. We are all so different. 

True allyship is about a person you can trust, who you can go to, who you can have a conversation with, who will hold that space for you to have that conversation, and who will love you through that conversation. When you’re not there, they will stand up for you as a human being and will also recognize when someone is trying to diminish your light.

They will say wait a minute, what are you saying here? Challenge it in a way that allows someone else to think about their impact, not cancel them, not shame them, but challenge them to think about their impact and what they’re resistant to.

It’s building that muscle; it’s about creating the container; it’s about having the heart to hold somebody in a place where they feel safe enough to talk.