 Hi everyone, I'm Scott Shageoka. I'm GoDaddy's entrepreneur in residence, and I am here in San Francisco on the shelter-in-place orders here in California. And for the next 20 minutes or so, we're going to be doing a roundtable with an incredibly smart group of people. We're going to talk about how do we cope emotionally, personally, and professionally during this time. I do want to say, though, that these are really tough times right now. And if you are looking for help, please ask for it. There are mental health organizations out there in our communities that are here to serve you. And in this moment in time, we need to make sure that we're taking care of ourselves. Thank you so much for joining, and thank you so much for your time to talk about how we can cope through this COVID-19 crisis that we're all living through as entrepreneurs. So I wanted to just first ask, you know, who are you? Where are you from? And what do you do? I'm Elizabeth Cardiello. I am based in New York City, and I am the founder of Cafe Unimatic and the host of Brave Conversations Over Coffee. I'm Ashley Ray. I'm the founder of Mala Collective, and I'm from Vancouver, Canada. My name is Thea Monye. I'm from Los Angeles, and I'm the founder of Mali IO and a podcaster with Dun Black Mamas Podcast and Shaping the Shift Podcast. I'm also a practicing therapist, so I work with college campuses. As you all know, this conversation is about how do we cope and no better way than through three people who are embodying that and living that in their day to day. And so we'll start with you, Ashley. Could you talk a little bit about meditation, what it is, and how it's important for you or helpful for you to cope through this time? When I'm teaching meditation, I talk a lot about it's just creating space for yourself to reconnect to your breath. And when we're doing that, we're reducing anxiety, we're creating space for calm, ease, lowering blood pressure, all of the things that we should be doing right now. For myself, I meditate each morning, and I have a gratitude practice, and I've noticed having a few minutes, even five to eight minutes, setting a timer on your phone, just to take a minute to breathe, and then writing out what you're grateful for can really shift how you spend the rest of your day and puts you in a really positive mindset, especially when there's so much happening that can be really negative. It's a really beautiful way to shift perspective right now. Elizabeth, I'll go to you next. I think something that is important to you is this idea of really being heard and the power of listening. Listening is actually a generous act, and whether if you feel heard, it changes the way you think about yourself, and then it changes the way that you act. And it changes, I mean, when people, we know that lack of trust kills productivity. So if we're able to better trust others or better trust ourselves and actually listen better, sort of everything opens up and gets better. And right now, I think what's interesting is that we're being given this opportunity to slow down. And actually, what I'm seeing is that businesses, teams, since they're virtual, they're starting to actually ask, how are you? And they're listening for the answer, which is really beautiful. And then, Thea, what about for you? I really loved this phrase of healing through joy. And so could you talk a little bit about what does that mean to use joy as a practice to cope? The communities that I work with, the communities that are used to a narrative around strength and resilience and struggle, like their oppression has been, has been rolled into a narrative that says, but it made you stronger and it made you resilient. And, you know, I come from an immigrant father. And so I think like those narratives are ways we have taken lemons and made lemonade out of it. However, they don't tell the full story of what we deserve to experience, which is also joy and pleasure. So for me, it's like getting people to not view those things as a luxury, but as a right. There's ways to look at this and there's ways to experience this that don't have to be super painful. And that don't require you give way more than you have to at this moment, but that you can actually take the escalator instead of the stairs sometimes, and that's okay too, is like a fun new thought to introduce to populations of people who are extremely hardworking, but don't always get the credit for it. I am so inspired by you three. You are all so incredible and just really just living both deepening into your professional life, but also deeply attuned to what's needed in our personal lives as humans and how do we relate to ourselves and to others? And it's just so beautiful to bear witness to. And I was wondering, you know, having that perspective and having that way of moving through the world, what are some things you might share to other small business owners or entrepreneurs who maybe are really struggling through this moment and are scared and are in the midst of this uncertainty just like you three are. That's what my podcast Shaping the Shift is about. It's about changing uncertainty for dreamers and creatives. So changing uncertainty are things that are always a part of our life, but when they come up, we're like, oh, where'd you come from? You're not supposed to be here. Like, it's not a part of our everyday existence. And so I start off by reminding my fellow entrepreneurs and creatives that this is something you deal with literally every day. The order didn't come in on time. This person didn't do what they said they were going to do. These things are part of our everyday life and we navigate them and adapt to them in these little small ways. But those small ways add up to a skill set that we can use right now. Maybe you want it to grow and expand kind of like what you were sharing earlier about with the coffee business. And then it morphed into like conversations over coffee, right? Like allowing it to expand into maybe a greater purpose or into something bigger than you ever imagined. But first, you have to believe that that change could also be for the better. I think what's interesting about right now, what's happening right now is we're all on this roller coaster and we've all lost something. And even if that's normalcy or sunlight, we're all kind of losing something right now, which isn't meant to be negative. It's just meant to be recognized as we're all in a version of the grief cycle. What we need to do when we're in the grief cycle is feel the stuff that's coming up. That's the only thing we can do. The only way out is through. What we do when someone shares something hard with us is that we want to fix it. And we mean well, but the problem is when we want to immediately fix it, what we're saying to them is you shouldn't be having this feeling. I need you to stop. And I know how better to fix it than you. And what we're doing is robbing that person of their path to resilience. And I think what small businesses can do right now is really just start every conversation, start every team meeting with a check-in of how are you. If you can make your employees feel like family right now and actually listen to them, I'm pretty sure that they will take the actions, be more motivated, be more productive, and they'll just feel more fueled as opposed to even if we need to have layoffs, it's I think listening is key to actually holding each other's hands through this. What about for you, Ashley? One, go easy on yourself. I think a lot of people are really hammering home. This is a time for productivity and collective anxiety. It's okay. It's okay if you need to chill out and take some time. Next, I would say just being aware of our thoughts. So for me, my graduate practice is really important that each morning, even if I don't want to and even if I feel like it's gonna be a bad day and I'm stressed out, I still write what I'm grateful for and throughout the day, my language, my verbiage of my team with my friends, my family is one of gratitude. And I think the third thing is as a team and as a leader, this is a beautiful opportunity to lean into your values. So I know for us as a team, we've really reflected on as Mala Collective, how do we show up for the world and we get to show up right now for people in a really special way. So we've really realized our values and I would say we've all reconnected to the purpose for our business and it's given us a new level of energy. Like how has this experience been for you all going through this COVID-19 crisis? Some of the more stressful things like going to the grocery store is like really intense. But talking to clients and hearing like what you were sharing about Elizabeth with the grief, the collective grief and that we're all experiencing in different ways and that sometimes if you wake up sad, it's not just your sadness, you're caring. We're actually all caring each other's emotions at this time. So I think what happens is typically a lot of things are very internal. We've become a very introspective society and with a lot of mental health terms out there. So it's like, what could I be doing differently? And I'm like, this is the time where a lot of it is external. A lot of it is like in the air and in the world. And so I think I give myself a lot of permission to not decide how I want to feel that day. I just can feel how I feel, not try to control it. So we started hosting a bunch of public brave conversations that are free that anyone can come to and we do one for young women and it's mostly college students. But it's become all generations of women. What's been interesting is really watching myself realize how much I want to help, but also in my own framework, the first thing is be present. It's not to fix, not to do anything, just sit with it. And because everyone's in this crazy roller coaster of emotions, it's grown me already because it's just, it feels like it's been like drinking from a fire hose of, you know, in the normal world, people have emotions, but now they're just, they're exponent, they have exponentially more. Personally, during COVID, a big practice has been to treat myself the way I treat people I love. So often, if someone calls me crying, like, you're doing great, you're beautiful, you're amazing, and sometimes not that kind to myself, as I am to people that I love. So that's been a big practice, self-love, self-compassion ease. I think you all are very incredible at being present and in the moment. And I want to also understand what your hopes and dreams are for when we move through this and out of this COVID-19 era. What are your hopes and your dreams for small businesses, for other micro or solo entrepreneurs like yourselves, you know, after we get through this? What do you hope, you know, you walk away with or others walk away with? I've been thinking a lot about how we use this current moment of intense emotion to create what we want to see on the other side of this. I'm in LA. And so one of the things I witnessed was, you know, like literally in a day, the homeless problem was solved. It was like we had one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. And like overnight, you weren't seeing homeless people on the street. They were being put into hotels and empty buildings. And it was like, oh, so we just, you just could have figured out a plan for that, right, this whole time. Or like, you know, you saw people coming together and making sure that elderly people had special times to go do their grocery shopping so they'd be safe and they'd be okay or that people were delivering food to elderly people. And it's like, oh, goodness, it's a miracle, right? Like, these are things that we could have been doing, but it took this to make us do. And so a lot of what I'm thinking about is how do we as business owners, entrepreneurs, dreamers, creatives, look at that and say, how do we make that not just a solution to COVID? How do we make that a solution to the problem that was there before COVID and actually keep that as a part of what we do after? We're seeing that, you know, we can actually shift some of these mindsets or behaviors that we have and how do we continue to do that beyond this moment in time, I think is really smart and so needed. That takes this time of crisis for us to really reflect on our values, why we're here as a business, how do we serve people, how do we show up? And I would say, you know, even as a leader for myself, goals that I've had for the business, thinking those projects will take six years, three years, two years, we've been able to pull off in like two weeks. So really, like cutting things down to small chunks, we're so capable, we're so capable as leaders, we're so capable as individuals and humans, and I'm just so in awe of resilience. So I'm just really hopeful that we've all tapped into a part of ourselves, we've always had it that we continue to know that that exists after. If we're creatives, it's kind of our job to see what to envision a more beautiful future and then figure out and reverse engineer how to get there. And sure, some people won't do that, some people will say, you're silly, but like, everyone silly until we can actually make it happen, right? Like, it's impossible until it's possible. Our mindsets and our attitude is a part, is an aspect of how we're going to move through this. And acknowledging that we are not these independent, but in fact, we're interdependent, we rely on other people, they rely on us. And so how do we lean into those relationships? After hearing all of these wonderful, beautiful words from each other, you know, what are you hoping you and others take away in terms of the coping skills or strategies that people hold as they move through this COVID-19 crisis? For me, comparison can really send me down a rabbit hole. And there's this beautiful phrase, comparison is the thief of joy. Like just sitting with yourself and being okay with, with just breathing. I have to remind people constantly, we're living through a pandemic. This happens every 100 years. The idea that you think this should be normal is insane, right? It's not, it's not what you're being called to do. You are going to have to pull from a party yourself that you haven't tapped into maybe ever. But what you come out of this as will be that more significant and expensive because of it. If we define ourselves by a business or by, you know, being, being something and doing something in the world, well, right now a lot of people were being called to do nothing. We're being called to sit in the unknown. I think our greatest public service right now, you know, outside of staying home, obviously, is to learn to open up and really sit and listen to other people's experiences. The only reality is that we're all experiencing this time very differently. And I think it's, it could be if we allow it to be a really beautiful learning experience. Because I mean, the entire world is experiencing it together. And that's, don't think ever happened. This conversation has been so beautiful. So thank you. And I hope you all have a continued joyous, wonderful day. Keep doing what you're doing. And, you know, thank you so much for I learned, you know, sharing, I learned so much through this conversation. And I had fun. And that's what it should feel like every day, every moment. So yeah, thanks so much, you three. Yeah. So I hope you really found a lot of value from that roundtable. I think it's so important that we find ways to cope emotionally and personally and professionally during this time. And again, if you really need the help, please ask for it. There are so many mental health organizations in our communities that are ready to serve you and help you take care of yourself. And if you need any other resources, you can go to OpenWeStand.org. And until next time, stay safe and well. And thanks so much for joining me.