 Welcome, everyone. This is an event we've been looking forward to for a long time. I'm Anne-Marie Slaughter. I'm a CEO of New America, and I have the enormous pleasure of hosting the president of New America and the vice president of New America, Tyra Beriani and Cecilia Muñoz. So welcome to cocktails and conversation on the occasion of the publication of More Than Ready, Cecilia's wonderful new book, VU, Be Strong, and Other Stories for Women of Color. I do invite you to grab whatever drink suits you. If it's a cocktail, if you're on the East Coast, maybe not on the West Coast, a mocktail, whatever you would like, but we do hope you'll participate in the conversation. So I'm going to start by just saying what everybody in the audience knows about Cecilia Muñoz, which is she would much rather talk about other people than herself. He would much rather promote and help other people than put herself forward. So given that that's what we know about you and given that's what so many of us love about you, why did you write a book about yourself? Well, so thank you, everybody, for being here. This is amazing, and thanks Anne-Marie and Tyra. I didn't set out to write a book, and certainly not a book about myself when I left the White House. I did what I think, frankly, a lot of certainly women do, which is I found wonderful work at New America that I hoped would be good for the world, and I kind of kept my head down and focused on that work. But a number of people, women in particular, challenged me. Anne-Marie, you were one of them, to think about whether I had something to say that might be of value. And I did what we do. I thought, well, what do I really have to say that would really make any difference to anybody? And I kind of put it out in my mind. But I got pushed, and that forced me to really think about it. Like, well, what do I have to say, and who might I have to say it to? And then I realized, you know, I do a lot of public speaking. I speak on policy issues. I speak to student groups. I speak to groups of interns all the time. And I tell stories from the course of my career all the time, and I tell the same stories because they're the things that resonate. And invariably, someone comes up to me when I'm done. And 100% of the time, that person is a woman. And most of the time, that woman is a woman of color. And she says to me, that thing that you said, I'm so glad you said that because I thought I was the only one. And so I kind of put myself in the presence of those women, and there have been a lot of them over the years, and realized that I do have something to say. And I say it all the time. And the minute I gave myself permission to believe that I had something to contribute that might be of use, I immediately knew what was gonna be in all 10 chapters of the book. And I spoke to seven awesome women, Tyra Mariani, as one of them. Also women of color who had stories to tell. And kind of learned that some of the stuff I have struggled with over 30 years is the same stuff that everybody else struggles with. But we often don't talk about it. We often think it shows signs of weakness rather than strength. And I've learned, I think that's just wrong. And in fact, we are leaders already, women, and certainly women of color. And the world kind of needs us right now. So the book is really an offering of stories from my own experience, stories from the experience of the women who were generous enough to share their stories. But it's also strategies that we use when we doubt ourselves, when we are aware that people around us doubt us when we're afraid. So the idea is to kind of remind all of us we've got what it takes and the world is not only ready for what we bring, but we're kind of ready to bring it. So I'm gonna invite Tyra to join the conversation. But for anyone who doesn't know, who is listening to us, Cecilia is now the vice president for public interest technology and local initiatives here at New America. But she came to us after being the head of the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House, which is the highest domestic policy position there is in the White House and in some ways in all the government. It's not a cabinet position, but you have your finger on the pulse of everything that is happening. And before that, she had spent 20 years working on policy at La Raza and now Ujidos. And she would never want me to say this, but she was one of what we always talk about as a MacArthur Genius Award. So I'm embarrassing her because I'm pretty certain that there are people out there who think nobody with that kind of a glittering resume could ever have doubts, right? That we all look at each other and we think, no, no, you are 100% secure. It is I who are worried, do I belong here? So Tyra, you're nodding. I'm gonna invite you to join the conversation and maybe talk about what it was like to, you know, Cecilia interviewed you, your colleagues, your friends, but you're also women of color who've made their way. So maybe talk about that for a bit. Yeah, it was affirming, I think, as much as anything else because Cecilia would ask me questions. She talks about the things that we do to compensate for the underestimation or knowing that people are doubting us. I'm wondering if we're only there for ethnicity. And I told this story of putting on makeup when I was in my 20s and I went to work at Chicago Public School. Lots of the folks had been there for decades. And I know that I look younger than I actually am. And at the time I really was young. And so I thought I'm gonna wear makeup to make myself look more mature. And Cecilia and I, you know, she said, what about heels? I'm like, yes, heels. So it was extremely affirming. And as I read the book and read that, I loved reading not only Cecilia's story but the other women's story as well. But in sharing that, she and I really connected on a deeper level than we already shared as women of color. And again, the stories were so affirming as part of this process. And there were some of the stories that the other women here are outrageous. Like my eyes literally got big at some of the obstacles and the doubts that they encountered. So, but again, more than anything, it was like, yes, me too. I didn't do that, you know. So I wish I was Cecilia elbowing my way into some of the other things that she's done. They're really smart strategies. So that's actually a story, Cecilia. You might want to tell that you're marvelous about having to elbow your way in on the advice of your own mentors, right? So other people helped you. So you might want to tell that story. Yeah, so this wasn't a figurative elbow. There's a section of the book that's called Sharp Elbows and Other Tools. And the story is from when I first got to Washington, I was all of 26 and got thrown into a circle of the people who were advocates on immigration policy in particular who were pretty much all men. And for them, and most of them were tall men. My immediate boss, who's a wonderful man who's still at Unidos US called Charles Kamasaki, had been one of the guys and he stepped away from his role and kind of pushed me in. And there I was with the guys. And you know, I'm five, two. I was 26 years old. I actually recount that I took up swearing actually on purpose, which is not something I was raised to do. To compensate for my size and my soft-spokenness, I thought like I need to show these people I can be tough. So I deliberately started swearing. That's not a strategy I recommend necessarily, but it's just true. And there was one point where we were working on an immigration bill and we were in the congressional markup which is where a bill gets amended and changed and it ended and the guys stood up and they formed a little huddle. And I wasn't in the huddle. And I was angry about it and I went back and I talked to Charles and I was like, you know, I'm just never gonna fit in with these guys. And he said, look, you're new, you're short, you're a woman. Like you just gotta elbow your way in and literally just use your elbow and say, guys, come on, can you let me in the circle here? Which I did, but I only had to do it once. But that's sort of what it was like. And over and over again, I find that I'm still frequently the only woman in the room, the only Hispanic person in the room, the only person of color in a room. I know, Tyra, that's true for you. It's true of the other woman that I spoke to. And hopefully like an elbow isn't a strategy that you're gonna need to use terribly often, but we do need strategies and I think it helps that we talk about it because it's not easy to be the one person kind of speaking for everybody, which in some ways is an impossibility. I mean, Tyra, you had a story about someone who spoke to you who said that they feel their blackness all the time. Yeah, a high school student actually in Ferguson, Missouri, we went there as part of the administration to talk to the students about what was happening there. And she did describe that and she said, I feel my blackness all the time. And I just, obviously that stuck with me. It's been several years ago and I thought it's true. It is true, both as the joy that comes with that, but then also the challenges of folks underestimating you and doubting you or having preconceptions about you. And so you carry that weight and that weight comes with responsibility and we have to own that. That that is something that is unique to our experience. Just for, I wanna ask you actually to talk a little more about being underestimated, because part of this book is about how we underestimate ourselves, right? How we think we are imposters, how we are constantly worried that everybody else knows what they're doing and we don't. But there's also that feeling of, I want you to talk about when you know that others are underestimating you. But I do have to just point out the intersectionality here because when you talk about, I feel my blackness all the time, most of the time I'm aware I'm a woman. Not always, and as I've gotten higher up, I mean, if I walk into a new America meeting, I don't feel like, oh my gosh, I'm a woman in a man's world. But I've certainly felt it often, but I've never had, but I'm also the majority. And so I've never had that double sense of, I am a woman, I'm a woman of color and people don't see me at all or they're making all sorts of assumptions. So I just, I think that's part, there's part of what you're talking about, Cecilia, that's true for all women and then there's definitely part that is particularly relevant for women of color. But Tyra, you might want to talk about what you do when you feel like people are underestimating you, when you can feel that sort of, I think it's George W. Bush that called it the bigotry of low expectations. And I wear a shirt. I know I love it and people can't see it. It's as underrepresented, underestimated. But I do, right? I think there is something in the explicit of saying, I know what you're potentially thinking. You can't assume that for everyone, but I mentioned, for example, even wearing the shirt and in an all-stack meeting, it was an all-stack meeting where we were talking about our diversity and I wanted to just to make that point without saying it and wearing it. And I could tell that, I saw, I remember, seeing some of the women of color in the room and their faces lit up, I could tell when they had read my shirt. It was my way of saying, this is what I think people think about me and this is what I know that people think about us and whatever the other and the only in the room is, whether it's African-Americans or Latinx or women of color more broadly or women in the case not at New America because we're 70% of the workforce there, but in general, to say, this is this lived experience and I see you and I wanna create space for you to show up in the workplace to be who you are. And I do that in part through my clothing. I've mentioned that I wear African clothing, sometimes I wear monthcloth skirts and printed fabrics of color that you just don't see a lot in fainting. I don't want to do that because it's expression but I wanna create space. I grew up, my early years were in a corporate environment and I didn't, there weren't women, I don't have a luxury now but there weren't women with platinum hair. There weren't women who were wearing printed fabrics but I want people to show up the way that they want to express themselves, obviously professional and all that but there's plenty of room that we don't exercise as part of it. But the other thing that I do in terms of the underestimation is the preparedness. Because even though I know that I'm, and Cecilia and I remember sharing about this as well, that you know that you're competent and your skill but you wanna make sure that you take out any margin of error of having a bad day by being prepared. So we tend to over prepare, you know what I mean to sort of say, I'm gonna show you. And I have been invited to spaces and places and conversations knowing that it probably is because I can check the diversity box for the person and I show up saying you may have invited me for this reason but I'm going to show you how much more I can contribute to the conversation as part of it. So in some ways I'm looking to overperform if you will just to prove that what I know was an underestimation to have been a false attribution. So Cecilia, why didn't you call your book more than ready? It's a wonderful title and I had help from my editor in picking it out. Because it really, it refers to that but it refers to multiple things. I mean, I think the world is kind of more than ready for what we bring and we're more than ready to bring it. But also it refers to exactly what Tyra said, all seven of the women that I spoke to landed on the same strategy which is that when we are concerned about, when we are not quite sure that we've got what it takes then what we do is we overprepare and when we sense that other people may doubt that we have what it takes, what we do is we overprepare. Like we do the work, we show up knowing our stuff and that is we kind of lean back into that and that gives us the strength to compensate for whatever doubts we have or whatever doubts we think other people have. And one of the stories I tell in the book it has to do with a time when one of the chiefs of staff that I served under told a couple of folks who were writing books that when I was promoted to domestic policy director that that, he described it as a last straw leading to his departure from the White House. And the, I don't think he said it in so many words but the impression that the two people who wrote books that he said that to, the impression that they got was that maybe I was less qualified, maybe I was an affirmative action hunter. And because I saw those books that cost me probably about two years of self confidence in the time that I was at the White House. Not because I thought that I couldn't do the job because I was in the job, I was doing the job and the president of the United States had asked me to do the job and I was in that job for five years. But because I did think, well, if that's what that one person obviously very prominent person felt, how do I know that that's not what everybody in the room is thinking when I'm sitting here? And how do I know if I'm having a bad day or I, you know, boned up on this set of stuff but the thing that blew up that day was this set of stuff that I wasn't quite ready for. You know, I don't want that, their impression of that to be, yeah well, you know, we need to surround this person with other people who could carry the water because we're not sure that she can. And the thing about a place like the White House is that when folks sense that you're not quite on your game they don't tell you, like you don't get feedback unless you ask for it and maybe even not then. They just kind of organize meetings without you. So your radar is constantly going for, like people, is there a meeting happening that I'm not in and what does it mean? Like you can really do a number on yourself. And I learned in this, I learned from talking to other people and it's not just me that this happens to that the way you compensate for that is you make good and sure you're doing a really good job. You make good and sure you do your homework. You know, you make good and sure you're prepared. And then when you invariably have to answer a question that you don't know the answer to because sometimes it happens, you own it up and you go find out. And I think that's very much part of the strategy that we adopt. We, Cathy Kochen, who I think is, I can see on the chat, I think she was participating. She's one of the women that I spoke to. She called it being ultra prepared. Deisha Dyer, who I also see who's one of the women that I spoke to, who I also see on the chat, same thing. She was somebody who was thought of, she was the social secretary to the president of the First Lady, which is an incredible high pressure job. She was viewed as an unconventional choice for that job because the people who get picked for that jobs are, you know, kind of have like the Emily Post pedigree. And what she had was smarts and skill and creativity. She's amazing. But, you know, the press was watching her because she's somebody who didn't fit their image of who's supposed to operate in that job. And that happens to people of color happens to women all the time. And the way we deal with it as we show up, you know, with some extra. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think every woman has probably had that experience of worrying or feeling like they are being either invisible or underestimated or just, you know, not heard so often. And a fair number of us have probably also felt like there are men around us who think we're an affirmative action hire, you know, that we're there because we're a woman. And Tyra, when you said, you know, all of us have had the experience of knowing that we're on a panel or in a, you know, on a commission or on a board of our gender more and more than our qualifications. But I do think the, again, when I look at women of color, this has become almost reflexive as somebody who hires people. I immediately assume they've got something extra because how else would they have made it this far? All right, to me, it's flipping the script. It's looking at people and thinking, I know what was, you know, how the cards were stacked against you. So if you even got to the point that you could be considered to be promoted, that's because you had the grit and the determination and the preparation and the sheer smarts to make it. So I really, I often wish I could give people different lenses to understand what it takes to battle not only your own self-doubt, but also that pressure on you at coming at you from society all the time. You know, Justice Sotomayor talks about this in her. She wrote a wonderful book called My Beloved World and she talks about how she knows she got to Princeton through affirmative action. But she describes that as, okay, so that got me to the starting line of a race I didn't even know I was running. So you get to the starting line, but then you know what? You have to run the race, right? You have to show up. You have to be prepared. You have to do it well. You know, nobody's gonna let you take shortcuts. And that's what we have to do. And often it is against the headwinds of people's low expectations of us. And people don't feel like, Tyra, please. Sorry, to that point, I love that metaphor because I, in our conversation, I described that, you know, I had this incident where my confidence was knocked and it was knocked for years. And successes that I had after that, I thought were more about luck than it was about my preparedness or my competency and skill that I brought. Like it's these three things, but luck any moment now, my luck is going to run out. And then I came to realize it's not, that I had the wrong mix. That A, it's not about luck, it's about opportunity. You do need to have opportunity. You need to be able to get to the starting line. But it's as much about I'm here because of my competence because I have prepared as part of that. But when you get those knocks in your career, it can be tempting or those doubts and not wanting to prove anyone right about those doubts, you can just sort of get the narrative wrong in your head that doesn't allow you to show up as fully and with as much power as you bring to the table. And to say, do you feel like you are also carrying other expectations on your shoulders? The expect, in other words, that you are, you were the very high position in the White House as a Latina, do you feel like you're also carrying the kind of hopes and expectations and reputation of other people on your shoulders, all the Latinas who will come after you, all the people of color period? I mean, is that a burden that you feel? Yeah, I mean, several of the people I spoke to described it as it's like weight that you carry. And the way I experienced it is I really, if I'm the first Hispanic person in this role, in this job, I better not screw it up because then it's gonna be that much harder for whoever comes after me. And I was the senior most Latinx person in the White House. And that's also my expertise. Like I know the community really well. I was at the National Council of La Raza now, Unidos US for 20 years. Like that's a thing I know a lot about. So I was carrying the community's water along with lots of other people on the team. I described them in the book called Team Latino, which was an amazing group of people. There were a lot of us, but we had to kind of carry the water and there is this tension that I feel all the time, which is, and I never understood whether I got the balance right or not, where sometimes your job is to push that there are folks who don't necessarily know what you know. And in order to do the job well, your piece of knowledge has to be part of the equation and you have to push in and insert it. But sometimes your job is to actually hold back a little bit because your job isn't to be an advocate 100% of the time. Your job is to make sure that the whole team serves the whole country well. And if you are only understood as well, she's a Latina in the room and she's gonna lift up her stuff. And like, we have to let her have her five minutes of talking and then we're gonna go on and do our thing. You're not being effective that way either. So you both have to represent, you have to calibrate it right so that people can hear you. You have to figure out which of the times when they just, there's a thing they just don't know and it's gonna be uncomfortable for them to know it, but I gotta say it. And which of the times when you're pushing too hard. And so it's like a constant calibration, but there is this sense that if you screw it up, it's gonna make it, it's gonna be harder for the next person who comes after you. But the other thing we tried to be, tried to do, and this was really an example that was set by the president himself, but also by people like Valerie Jarrett, who was really amazing about this, is to try to create safe space for people, to ask for feedback, to, you know, to up their game and to kind of do that calibration. So I would, and this is one of the strategies, it's one of the things I outlined in the book, is to find, and I just, I had a conversation just this weekend with another Latina who was looking for advice, and this was the advice I gave her, was to find people who see you at it and who are safe enough that you can go in and close the door and say, how did that go? Or that didn't go well, help me see where I got off course. Valerie was that, was one of those safe places, for me there aren't a lot of safe places in a job like that, but she provided one of them and you could go in her office and close the door and say, you know, how do I, I'm not being understood in this point I'm trying to make, or, you know, I can't tell how others are receiving me. And, you know, she was both committed to her colleagues, but also committed to making sure we were doing the job well and you get feedback even if it was hard to hear. So that's one of the strategies I recommend, is be relentless in asking for feedback, but find people who you can trust to give it honestly and who won't hold it against you that you're asking. Right, some people see that as a sign of weakness, I actually think it's a sign of strength, you're saying, look, I'm trying to up my game, would give me information that I need to do it. But it's not always safe to do, so it's important to figure out who your team is. And it was important to me, so Valerie was my boss the first three years, but I didn't just ask for feedback from the people that I reported to, I also asked for feedback from the people who reported to me, and that was really, really important in making sure that I did a good job. Tyra, you were nodding, so Tyra was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Department of Education. So Arnie Duncan was the Secretary of Education and Jim Shelton was the Deputy Secretary and you were Jim's Chief of Staff, but you were pretty high up there. Are there people you asked for feedback from? It's Jim and I shared that for sure, and Chief of Staff, Emma Padera, we also did that, but yeah, and the three of us do that, right? That's what makes this a little special for good and for bad, you know, that I will give you feedback. And Cecilia and I will talk and go, how did that go? And the three of us do that together, that is the beauty of working at New America is the opportunity to work with the two of you because it never, ever stops and there's the saying, hire you go, the less you hear, the less you hear what's going on within that organization. So it is critical at all stages of one's career, but it's even more critical within a senior leadership role. And so yeah, Jim's still asking for feedback today because he knows I'm gonna give it to him straight and then he can count on it. And you have to look for those people because people will tell you what they think you want to hear, but it doesn't make you better to hear what they think you want to hear. And in fact, I'm skeptical of the person who's unable to come up with anything, like really, you can't come up with anything. That's perfect, really? Exactly. It's not possible we're human, we're valuable as part of that. So it is, there was a point that I was kind of a feedback junkie because I was always looking for the feedback and I had to just rest both with my own sense of self and how I was doing, but to find that close network of people that will be honest agents, again, to help you calibrate. And knowing sometimes you have to push, you want to push and you're gonna leave people uncomfortable and then maybe it goes too far or maybe you didn't go far enough, but you need not only your own calibration, which ultimately I think rests with peace within self of whether or not you did that within using others around you to that end. And that's interesting. Kyra's taught me more about feedback. You know, we worked together in many different ways, but you've taught me more about asking for feedback and giving it. You nominally report to me, but I've learned far more about how to actually improve myself from the way you provide feedback. So you were gonna jump in and then I have another question for you. So I think the thing that we forget or that we fail to take into account enough or at least that I have failed to take into account enough is that if a woman of color is in the room, by almost by definition, there's sort of more perspectives there than the way decisions are traditionally made, certainly on policy issues, certainly in corporate boardrooms and many, many settings that determine the course of our lives in the United States, those decisions are made frequently by men and frequently by men who are not people of color. And so just by virtue of being in the room, we are bringing something which is too infrequently there. And there's reams of evidence now that if you have a diverse group of people from a variety of backgrounds making a decision that diverse group tends to make better decisions, they tend to make decisions that are more effective. And this is true in every sector. So the thing I advise people, especially people early in their careers to just know when they walk into the room and they're feeling all of those headwinds that we feel is that the people you're in the room with need you and they need what you bring. They may or may not know that they do, but they do. And it's important that you know that they do because that's one of the places that you will get the confidence to say the hard things that sometimes you need to say, or to just hold your own in a setting where you may feel like you're on your own or you may feel people underestimating you. And there's now reams of evidence to support it, but the key is to have that kind of at your core as you walk in. Absolutely. So there's a comment in the chat that tees up the next question I was gonna ask you and I, many of you are commenting and asking questions we're gonna turn to you quite soon. But Gini Gervasi says, one of the things that I think is special about Cecilia is that she comes from a place of kindness and truthfulness and generosity. And she talks about those tools being superpowers, but I wanted to ask you, there's a chapter in the book called kindness. And I'm not sure that's what many people would expect. It's certainly, I read lots of corporate leadership books or non-profit leadership books and kindness is not exactly the first thing they recommend. So talk about why kindness is in the book. I thought about this long and hard. I mean, it's something, and thank you Gini for that lovely comment. Gini herself is an outlier, she's an episcopal priest. So I think she probably knows a thing or two about being a woman in an occupation typically held by men. Kindness is in the book because it is too frequently mistaken for weakness. And I think that's a mistake, right? I talked about how at the beginning of my career I took up swearing in order to show that I could be tough. And we understand leadership and toughness through a very kind of male lens. Not that men can't be kind, but kindness is not necessarily a virtue we associate with leadership. But it is a way I try to show up in the world. And I learned that it's a skill set and it's a skill set that we undervalue and it's a skill set that is tremendously important. So as a domestic policy director, part of my job was to drive, help drive the decision making that arrived at the president's desk. I was rarely, I was never the smartest person in the room. I was rarely the person with the most expertise on whatever the issue was that we were discussing. But the skill set that I had that made me good at that job is that I could read a room. I could understand what if you had, as you might imagine, sometimes the secretary of labor and the secretary of commerce disagree with each other on a policy issue, shocking. My job in that moment was to make sure that each of them got heard. And that they felt that if they were in a disagreement on an issue and ultimately the president was gonna have to decide, they felt that their perspective got heard. It got a fair airing in that he got the information that he needed to have in order to make a tough decision. My policy brilliance is not, is maybe important. But in that moment, what the president needs for me is to make sure that the two people who were disagreeing can live with whatever decision he makes because they understand that he had all of the information and he just chose. And sometimes you win those decisions or your perspective prevails and sometimes your perspective doesn't prevail. But if you think you've been treated fairly and you think the information was present and he just chose a different direction, then you can say, all right, now I'm gonna go support that decision. I'm gonna go make sure that we implement it well because this was a fair process. All of that is a skill set that requires empathy and it requires kindness. It requires the ability to understand what somebody needs in the moment in order to get a decision made. And we don't, we think too frequently, especially in rough and tumble settings, that the person who's showing up with kindness is not showing up with strength, not showing up with toughness, maybe not even showing up with smarts and when we think that we're wrong. And I have been very inspired by the work of Jennifer Pulmieri, my former colleague who wrote a wonderful book called Theorem Madam President. And she's an advocate for like crying is also okay on the job because it's an expression of emotion. Swearing is an expression of emotion. People do that all the time. So is crying and enough already with assuming we have to behave the way many have behaved for since the dawn of time in order to be leaders. Like that's gotten us fairly far, but there are limits. And it's time to reshape what we think leadership looks like and that includes kindness. I couldn't agree with you more. And of course, we also know that men are socialized not to show their emotions. So they're given a very narrow range within which they're allowed to express their emotions. Swearing is okay. Crying is certainly not okay. Even kind of showing visible emotion and empathy is often not okay. So I agree there, but I think it's particularly important in Washington where very quickly you feel that unless you're cynical and hard boiled and kind of think the worst of people, you're naive and idealist and just kind of not tough enough for the game. Whereas in fact, if we're working on behalf of the American people and we are supposed to actually take these values seriously, it doesn't mean we're for passies. We can be plenty tough, but kindness, empathy, emotion, kind of connection to people to me is so important. And a part of what I always find difficult about Washington and certainly parts of the government is that you really are read out if you're not presenting this hard boiled, cynical, kind of old school journalist. They're just out for their own perspective. So I found that part of your book to be extremely important. Thank you. So I just... My old friend and former colleague, Chris Lew is asking a question. Hi, Chris. Whether I think men will benefit from reading this book. Well, that was one of my questions. So Chris, thank you. He loves the question. I hope the answer to that is yes. I mean, the person, the people in my head as I was writing it were women and in particular women of color, but I think we're important. And I think it's important for humans, other people who are not women of color to understand some of what we wrestle with. And to also have an opportunity to rethink what leadership looks like. So I hope it's useful to men. And I hope people enjoy the book, but most of all, what I hope is that people find it useful, that's why I wrote it. I will second that it is definitely useful to men. The men can be kind, the feedback point. We talk about family, all of those things are relevant to us as human beings. So it definitely, I think there's, there are some things that are certainly unique, but I think there are some universal principles in there as well. Now, I often think of how many books I have written by male leaders about leadership. And I've learned from them that they don't always apply in many ways. I think leaders come in many different strikes, but I've certainly read and learned from them. So I can't imagine why men would not equally learn both the experience of maybe the women of color around them, but also just with themselves, just thinking about, you know, how to ask for feedback, how to show emotional, all of that I think is very valuable. So I think we are about ready to turn to questions. I see one question that actually, let's just say Orttira might answer, but it said, did any women you interview have strategies for how to respond to white fragility? So for anybody listening, sort of the idea that it is often that when you are raising critiques from the position of a woman of color or a person of color, often white people get very, very defensive. And so you end up having to protect against that. And so that was a question that says, there's a lot of defensiveness that I'm unsure how to navigate. So we didn't address it as a specific topic, and maybe we should have, because it's a thing. But I didn't ask that question in so many terms. I will say that everybody that I spoke to feels like they're kind of juggling multiple things. But this came up in my conversations with them about kindness, it came up in my conversations with them about kind of sort of feeling like you're representing everybody when you're in the room. And that you have kind of multiple identities. One of which includes the person who's listening, who's trying to listen and trying to understand. And there is this sense that we are expected to sort of represent as well as to understand like if we're gonna be effective. And this is an argument that I have with my, I have two wonderful adult daughters as a conversation that we're having a lot is that they are kind of less willing to modulate how they present something so that they can be heard. And for them, it's much more about expression and about being true and about being authentic. And I modulate all the time. So I think that's part of the tension. And at least for me, and I can only speak for myself on this, my goal in almost all of those conversations is to bring people along with me. So that's why I modulate. But I understand and respect that that's not always everybody's goal. That was, I remember us having that conversation of thinking about impact and the need to modulate in order to have impact and versus like, I'm just gonna say it and you gotta deal with it. And there's people, you know, they choose to navigate within one end of the spectrum or something where in between, and I'm sure it varies from conversation to conversation as part of that. But there's definitely a piece of, I just need to say it and you have to hear it. And it's on you to own that and deal with it. And I think it also depends on what we're talking about and who's in the room to what degree do you modulate versus like just putting the ball, you know, on the other side of the court and having them respond. So Cecilia, there's a question from Sally Osberg, one of our wonderful board members. And so it says, I love this question. It says, everything you say speaks of tremendous dignity on your part. Did you ever lose it? There's space for women to demonstrate anger, frustration and hurt and Sally led the Skoll Foundation for a long time. And certainly was on the front lines of plenty of underestimation. Let's put it that way, but did you ever lose it? Oh yeah. I mean, thanks for the question. I don't think I ever lost it in a, now I'm gonna yell at people way. That's kind of, when I lose it, it tends to manifest itself in tears. I had one, I think memorable occasion that the summer of 2014 was the summer, what I think of as the summer of unaccompanied kids. It was the crisis of large numbers of children coming from Central America. Alone. And I was, you know, a lot of us, there was a team of us in the thick of, you know, making sure that we were properly caring for those kids, which it both seems like a long time ago and my goodness, so much has happened in that realm that I can hardly talk about. But for a very concentrated period, we were so focused on getting those kids into proper shelter care. And every day I was kind of examining my conscience to make sure that we had done everything we could and that we were doing the best possible job under the circumstances. And at the same time, the President was being, getting a lot of pressure from folks in the advocacy community, which the immigration advocacy community, which is the world that I come from, on a variety of things, including immigration enforcement. And there was one meeting in the Roosevelt room where both of those things kind of came to a head and I was sitting next to him. And these, you know, people that I love who are like my family are pushing hard on him and pushing hard on me, which is their job in which I totally respect, but it was fairly heated. And so I mostly kept it together, but a tear managed it like to roll down my cheek, which everybody evidently noticed. I thought it was very subtle, it was not. So my losing attended to manifest itself that way. And I tried not to do it in front of other people. John Poe Mary would tell me it's totally fine to do. I didn't know that at the time, I hadn't observed that at the time. But I did, I think I probably, usually on my way home from work, I cried every day that summer. That is helpful. So Cecilia, Ben de Guzman asks a question that directly builds on that where he says, I mean, you came out of the human rights community 20 years of fighting on behalf of immigrants as a human rights advocate. And you found yourself in the middle of really tough, tough, tough decisions. And you were criticized by people from your community. How did you, I mean, crying on your way home is definitely one way that we all let go in different ways, but how did you manage that? I mean, on the one hand, you were representing communities of color. On the other hand, you were representing an administration you were a part of. And how did you navigate that and how did you learn to live with the criticism? I think. Yeah, so I knew it was gonna come. And thanks for the question, Ben. He's who's a wonderful advocate who I greatly admire. I knew when I took the job that I would get ripped his shreds in some corners of my own community. And I knew that that was true because I would be part of governing and part of governing includes immigration enforcement. And so I understood that when I took the job. And so I felt, I felt emotionally ready for it when it happened. It was, it got fairly personal. And I don't think I was quite ready for how personal it got. But I understood it. And look, the job of an advocate is to push the people who are governing. So like, I know that as well as anybody because I did it for so long. The way I grappled with that, you know, when you walk into the building on the first day, you hope and believe that you're gonna be able to do the very best you can every day. You understand that the tools are not gonna be perfect. They're not gonna be able to do a perfect job. And the law, especially in the case of immigration, the law is badly broken. So the tools kind of are kind of terrible. But you're gonna use the tools in the most constructive possible way. And you're gonna try to be governed by law and by values. And that's, I decided on that first day that I was gonna try to be able to look myself in the mirror every day and believing that I was doing the very best I could with the tools that I had. And it helped a lot that I worked for a president who's judgment I really believed in. Right? I felt that he wasn't gonna ask me to do anything I didn't believe in and I was right about that. So I think there's lots of criticisms to level that are really fair. I think there are fair amount that feel kind of unfair. But that comes with the territory of trying to lead and of governing. And so I mostly, because I kind of went in, understanding that it was gonna happen, I mostly didn't bother me much. But I did learn what I think of as the difference between criticism that is about trying to help you to do a better job or that lifting up something that you gotta fix because it's broken. And criticism that's about being just being righteous. And I have more respect for the former than for the latter, frankly. Yeah, well, when people ask me about being a leader, one of the things I always say is if you wanna be liked all the time, this is not for you. There's just no way to lead effectively. Meaning you actually make decisions and move things forward and be liked all the time. You hope you can do it in a way that minimizes the dislike or the anger or whatever, but the criticism will come. So Cecilia, we have a question from Maline Gayle, whom you know well, who's a new America's board chair. And it may be early for this question, but it says, what is the most unexpected response you have gotten to your book? And from whom, although not my name. Well, the book was only just coming out today. So I haven't had much response yet. But I will say, in the course of writing it, I asked my daughters for their input. And I'm in this wonderful position. My daughter's names are Tina and Mira. They're 27 and 24. And one of the things I wrote about was balancing life and work. And I got a chance to ask them, how did it go from your perspective? And they actually controlled my ask. And at least the response, the most interesting response that I got in the course of writing the book really came from them because they didn't understand the question. Like they, I agonize so much about how hard I was working and whether or not I was being the kind of mom that I wanted to be. And they just, they experienced it very differently. So when I asked them the question and they wrote me back, I was quite startled that like all the agonizing, just for all the agonizing, they were just, for them, it was fine. So that surprised me. And I try to raise it a lot because I have, you know, Henry and Tyra and I have a lot of colleagues who are raising kids and right now they're home and they're trying to home school and they're trying to work and that's a lot. And so I try to be assertive in saying, you know, you may be experiencing this as doing everything halfway. Your kids are experiencing you as a dedicated parent and that it feels different from their end than it does from your end. And don't forget, it's like, you know, it's more okay than you think. You know, as a cat, as you need to, and I have to just without saying what, you put their responses in the book and it is really beautiful. So for no other reason to see their responses to your question was just the delight. Well, one of those daughters happens to have weighed in on the chat. So Gina was continuing your conversation with her and about why your daughters are less willing to modulate as you put it. And she says, maybe the issue is their generation that they've had it with having to wait for the rest of the world to get it. And before I talk about Tina's response there, one of your daughters, I wanna just say, Diane Zarsuelo wrote in saying, I am so tired of asking for permission to be my badass self. I feel like I have to manage everyone else's feelings about what I wanna say, how I say it, and whether I get to have the authority to say it or do what I feel is right for our, my community. So she's asking like, how do you create space for powerful, hungry, passionate, strong and talented women of color? How do you allow them to be themselves? And Tina says that, you know, it's really, that that's a big part of it, that you don't want to wait for the rest of the world to get it. Tina also says, I just feel so lucky to have a mom who's willing to talk about these kind of tactics and hear where we're coming from when we disagree. So all of that is really lovely. So I think we're experiencing a really important generational shift. I can definitely feel that I'm on the, like the aged side of this generational shift. And part of this is because younger women are less willing to put up with stuff that the rest of us have put up with for a while. And I love that, honestly, and honor and respect it. I continue to believe that it is important to find ways to bring people along with you. But it also, you know, I say that as a, that's the result of many years of bending myself like a pretzel to be heard and understood. And I have some respect for people who are kind of not willing to do all that bending. And hopefully there is a place in between those things that allows us to be authentically who we are and to insist that people be at least part of the way for Pete's sake. And frankly, they're more of us now, you know? In the time that I was working at NCLR, Latinos became the largest minority in the country. And I feel really fortunate that in the sort of trajectory of my own career, we went from being completely invisible, except like in the Southwest in Florida and New York and Chicago, to being the largest minority in the country. And we may be a lot of things, but invisible isn't one of them anymore. And with that comes the rest of the country kind of having to deal with us. We're here, you know? And obviously the dynamics are very different in the African-American community because of the history. But I do think we are arriving at a place where younger people are insisting on being seen in a different way. And thank God. Well, I think you talk, and Amory and I had this conversation too, where I was sharing, I was in a cohort where an older woman said that her daughter sort of said, it's because of you that we're in this position. And I think she was talking about the Me Too context, but, and the conversation I was having with Amory was also, there is also something about setting the stage. And you make this point in the book of movements just taking a really long time that there were things that happened in the 1700s and the 1800s and that then led to, you know, women's rights that led to the Civil Rights Act. It wasn't a five-year, a 10-year thing. It was a multi-generational thing. So I think we have to also acknowledge how the context is different. And I personally find it refreshing that I can have pushback in conversations about diversity that aren't only with people of color or aren't only with black people. It is refreshing that I can just speak about it in a way that I didn't think I could 20 or 30 years ago as part of that. And it is because there is this groundswell, there's an intolerance, there's like a movement of people standing behind you that this is part of the conversation and that intolerance or an impatient is the right thing to have as part of this. So I think for me, it's like this building. I think you talk, I love the metaphor of talking about the ripples and how the ripples themselves leave, eventually lead to what become waves. And I think we also have to acknowledge that part of it as well, but it is that juggling that we've been talking about that someone in the chat mentioned, the pretzels, those things, they are absolutely exhausting. And even for myself being an African-American woman in the majority white institution, I am exhausted. Navigating and Emery feels this as well. We have that partnership in that way of responding to the diversity and trying to manage it all in a way that allows you to be effective. And for me, recognizing I am in a position of power yet I know the weight that I carry that comes from and the pushback depending on what I decide to do, you carry that and you, yeah, most days you're tired. And that's the challenge of leadership. And I'll say as I listen to this, I think the one thing that I hear it as a parent where you wanna teach your kids what the real world is like, and at the same point in time, you hope that they change it, right? You don't want that to be the world that they encounter, but you also know that you've encountered it. And I often think when I wrote my article in 2012 about it went work and family and how tough it was, many, many women have written to me to say, you know, I read your article when I was in college and I thought you were full of it. And now nine years later or six years later or whatever, I've suddenly had my first child and oh my God, were you right? So they're telling me the world still hasn't changed as much as I wanna change it. They thought that it was gonna be different but change is slow. And yet I can also look at that and say, yeah, but the world you're entering is light years better than the world that I entered or particularly the women 10 years ahead of me. So Cecilia, there's a question on a slightly different front that I think is also gonna be interesting to lots of people from Jessica Davidson. She says, I'm a young woman who started at the Obama White House at the very end and then moved to an anti-sexual violence advocacy. The tools to be a frontline public advocate of a movement and the tools to fit into the old Washington style that we know about are often not complimentary. I wanna go back and forth between government domestic policy roles and fierce frontline advocacy in the future and wondered about one harming my ability to be taken seriously in the other. So what advice do you have for someone like me who wants to follow you where you've been an advocate and a policy maker and now probably a bit of both? So what a great question. I mean, I think they are, I wasn't sure the skill set would transfer the advocacy skill set would transfer into a governing skill set when I walked into the White House on the first day. I had doubts about it. And I discovered that actually they are compatible skill sets that, in this case, I was serving a president who knew exactly who I was. So he knew what he was getting. And so I had, I drew some confidence from that. But the skill sets are more related than I thought they were gonna be. Now, it does require that thing that we talked about before. If you're moving from being an advocate to governing and back again, there are some people who will not have it, who will impose a purity test or a righteousness test or will not accept whatever kind of, however imperfectly you use the tools when you're in a governing role that will involve choices that you just don't have to make when you're in an advocacy role. And I think you have to be willing to endure that. But I love the idea of going back and forth. Frankly, I resisted it. I resisted going into government. And I'm now so glad that I did, I learned so much. And so much that now informs my approach as an advocate because I never stopped being an advocate. Well, wow, it helps to know where the levers are. And it helps to know how the process works. And it helps to know who is the person you need to be poking to try to get them to do the thing you want them to do. And unfortunately, a lot of advocacy is disconnected from strategy about how to move the policy that's actually gonna affect people's lives. And so an advocate who understands how that works on the inside is very valuable to the right kind of advocacy campaign and institution. And from the governing perspective, I mean, obviously you have to pick your boss well, right, work in an administration that wants people who know what you know as an advocate. And I had that lunch. I wouldn't have done it if it weren't for the fact that this was a president who had been an organizer and who respected organizing and advocacy. But I think of the challenge for someone early in their career and people who have heard me, who have heard me speak to people early in their career will smile because I say this every single time, it's a continuum. And if like government is on this end of the continuum and organizing is on this end of the continuum and there's lots of things in between, your job is to find where you belong. We need good people at every point on that continuum. And where I thought I belonged on the continuum when I got my first job turned out to be wrong and I learned that I was better at something else. But your job is to figure out where your voice is strongest, where you feel like you are a fit, where you are engaged in work that makes your heart sing when you wake up in the morning. And that's the work that you will be affected in doing. I think that's a marvelous part of the book where you describe sort of your sense that you should be on the front lines and Tyra and I were talking about this today at this moment of crisis. Many of us feel like we're just not doing enough. We're sitting in our houses and we're on Zoom calls and we're writing emails. And you write very powerfully about realizing, wait a minute, this is not for me. This is not where I can contribute the most. And that's very important for all of us. We have to accept the gifts we have and how we can contribute, even though we might wish or think that others are contributing more. So there's a question from our own MFA Agau who was of us and is asking, she says, I'm curious if you have any words about moments of crisis, whether workplace systems are likely to revert to the existing or hidden networks that exclude us whether we find it harder to trust ourselves in a crisis and what advice you have for us. Oh, wow, MFA, what a wonderful question. You know, obviously we're living through a crisis now and you can definitely feel, we're all kind of thinking through like, what do we know about anything remotely resembling situations like this? Who were the leaders then? Well, those leaders were meant for almost by definition if you're looking back in history. And so, and what were the systems? Like what are the ways that people made decisions that kept people safe? You revert to those things because those are the paths that have been worn. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those systems were the right ones that they're appropriate for our current time. And what we have learned about previous crises is what has come down to us from people who were focusing on a certain kind of leadership and not other kinds of leadership. If you dig into it, during the Second World War, women were as important to the war as men. Of course we were. We've learned much less about that. And so we don't, when we think about who was making the decisions and how did the big stuff happen, there's a lot written and a lot that we've learned about that layer of leadership and much less about what was happening in the realm that women were engaged in. And so I feel excited that we're living in a time where we are kind of reworking those paradigms and beginning to understand leadership in a different way, beginning to recognize people who made enormous contributions historically but who weren't recognized. Because that teaches us a lot about what we need to know right now in this minute, in this crisis, how to knit a community together, how to make sure that we are watching out for each other, how to make sure that people who were vulnerable get protected, and frankly how to make sure that we, when we're in this crisis and when we're on the other side of it, that we become a society that we should be. We're, this crisis is exposing a lot of the ways in which we've failed each other as a society. Going back to the old way of making decisions and the folks who used to make the decisions is definitely not gonna be the way to make the world what we need it to be. So I think it's a thing to understand but also a thing to resist, if that makes sense. So Cecilia, there's a related question from Kathy Bryan which I find very interesting given the way we're all working today. She says, do you think that, and to tie her to you too, do you think the dynamics of the room or the table will change in the online remote environment that so many of us are working in these days? Any advice for elbowing your way in here? And I think that is interesting because suddenly, I mean, in some ways everybody can be seen equally because we're all little boxes on a screen but in other ways it may be even harder to kind of assert yourself, be interested in what both of you think. Tyra, do you have a view? Yeah, well, I will say it's an interesting question. I'm still pondering it but what I have noticed at least in our context is when you, I think the chat box has opened up, has created more space like whether we're having an all staff or directors, we're having people chime in and participate in ways that have not happened before. It doesn't feel as risky as speaking up and everybody turns their attention, right? And so it just feels riskier and Emery and I were commenting like when we do all staff we're like, there's way more participation in the virtual setting than there ever was when we're holding it in person. So in some ways I think it is creating space by leveraging some of those tools but like anything I think it also has to be intentional on the part of the person that is leading the conversation as well as I think part of what your book affirms is stuck in there because you are more than ready and you're more powerful than you think. So there's a two-way part to it of it's a virtual elbow I think in some instances that we'll need to see but I also think the online community has created more some of the benefit of the anonymity or seeing everyone at once create space for others to participate as well but what do you think, Cecilia? I think that's exactly right. I mean, we're just learning to live in this new world but I'm quite fascinated. I haven't been able to read all the chats as I go through because I'm also trying to concentrate on the conversation but there's like a whole nother conversation happening on the chat I've noticed. Right. Which is great. You're right, Tyra, that the participation in this kind of new world that we're living in is shifting in ways that I think are really interesting and that are lifting up maybe a broader diversity of voices than we would typically hear which is so interesting and kind of exciting. But the piece that's missing to me that I was reflecting on in the last few days is people that I used to see in the kitchen I don't get to see anymore because I don't naturally interact with them otherwise and so I've been thinking about how do I make time to connect in the way that you would at the water cooler as we used to say back and I don't really have it anymore but that's something I've been thinking about are people that I get to connect with and learn from and learn about their experience on any given day, we're missing that part of it and I think we need to think about how to build that in. I think that's a really interesting point because you don't bump into people virtually. No way, whereas indeed one of the great things about being in the office if you make yourself available is exactly the water cooler and the coffee machine that's kind of unexpected encounters so that's an interesting point. There are a couple more questions to say or more specifically on your book and I will say yes, the chat is as if people were in fifth grade but they can pass notes to everybody as opposed to just their desk mate, it reminds me of people passing notes in grade school but Tamara Richards says Cecilia, how do you address men who talk to you in an angry or dismissive way? Do you adopt a friendly strategy or do you come at them in a similar way? So a very specific question. So I can think of some examples of time when this has happened I tend to get really calm and really focused and really kind of thorough in my responses, right? So I lean right in particular again, I'm small as stature, right? So a man getting testy often also involves like size and so my defense is to frankly be smarter and somebody who's being testy is frequently, oh sorry, that's my landline ringing, is frequently not being smart and so I tend to calm down, get very focused and make sure that I have solid reasoning and then I kind of lean into the stuff that I know and to express it well. Rather than trying to kind of play on the same playing field. Tyra, do you have any, nope. So I'll just say, my husband's 6'6", I've got a son who's 6'5", and another who's 6'3", I'm really used to this. And my strategy is I ask questions, right? I used to push back and I'm not just the men in my family but I used to push back and I would very quickly be overpowered, assertion is not something you're gonna win in that situation. But I just ask questions because I have found over time that often, first place, it puts it back on the other person and often they'll deflate. So for what it's worth, that is a proven marital strategy anyway. So we have a question here from Rip Rapson, you know and well, Cecilia, the president, the Kresge Foundation that says Cecilia had, well actually I think this is just a comment but I'm gonna read it. Cecilia has reminded a board on which we both serve that the imperative is to build a machinery of change that may require a long time to build but that is capable of activating when the time is right. She embodies the kind of fierce and intelligent patience that does indeed change the world. That's wonderful. I'm moving to say thank you Rip. Offering that and then there's another question for both of you from A.B. Robinson that says, thank you Cecilia and Tyra. What is your best advice for a white woman to not only be an ally to people of color but an accomplice in making change? I think that's an important question for many of us. Well it's a great question. I think it involves some listening. I think it involves, in some ways the best situations like that that I've been in are when people ask, what do you need? What can I do? How can I support you? Let me, so I'll give an example as you heard Emery say at the very beginning. I'm like promoting a book that I've written is I find an excruciating experience. I'm proud of the book but it feels too much like self promotion to be in my comfort zone. And one of our very wonderful colleagues, Tara McGinnis, knows me well and knows me well enough to know that that's uncomfortable. So she has basically marched into my office to say, I know this is uncomfortable for you and here's things that I think I can do that you're not gonna like to do but that can actually move this forward. Now that's not necessarily related to race but it's a strategy. And it helps for me to be able to ask which I am actually done in this case but it also helps to anticipate like, here's what I see that I think you might need but let me check and let me show up in a way that is kind of of service to what you need to move something forward. Tara what would you say? I do think the listening is part of it and the trust to be open to hearing what we're experiencing or what we're seeing or what we think is inequitable. I've certainly, Emery and I have had conversations over the years and I think we've worked together close enough, she can see, she'll call it out before I even have to call it out but I think there's the other piece of the acting. The listening and trust are not enough but the acting is part of it which is when you're, if you are more aware when you are in circles that we are not, of course that you speak out and you say something that you not only observe this thing but you say something about this thing or you do something about this thing so that it doesn't take us being present in order for the change to happen. So that's the other piece I would add to the equation. A great example is recently an invitation to a dinner of scholars of experts of policy experts who focused on poverty and this was a group of maybe 40 people and I detected I was one of maybe two people color in the room and so one way to be an ally is to not expect me to be the one to have to raise it. Like in that situation we're talking about poverty, we are talking about communities of color except that it's a bunch of really wonderful experts who have dedicated their lives to this but they're all white, they're almost all white. One way to be an ally is to be the person who lifts that up and not expect the one person of color or one of two people of color to be the ones to say, you know, maybe this room isn't diverse enough to be really authentically talking about this subject that we're talking about. That reminds me we were at New America we were having a conversation around diversity of our events and diversity on our panels making for richer conversation, better outcomes that you were speaking to earlier. And there was a person, a man in particular who started making a comment about not really wanting it and seeing it as a photo and he didn't want it to be a dog and pony show and I was getting hot. I couldn't believe what I was hearing first of all but I was also just getting hot and it was this beautiful moment because the women could relate to Ann Marie's earlier point of having some experience with that and they all just jumped in and it was beautiful for me to feel like I don't need to jump into this that other people are allies and they could relate it was their lived experience as well so they weren't doing it on my behalf but it was nice that I didn't have to be one of the few people in the color of the room who was maybe more offended by the comment that was made that was part of it. So that just not speaking and saying, can you see? But it goes a long way to be able sometimes to even share glances of you caught that comment that was pain, right? That was really inappropriate but that you don't just sit on it and it's great to relate but we also need to do something about it and so we've got to put all those pieces together. Yeah, I will just say that as somebody who spends a lot of time, you know if a woman makes a comment and it's ignored and then a man makes the same comment I'm often the person who will very deliberately say, yes as Cecilia said, you know, yes as Tyra said to remind everybody, wait a minute the person who really made that comment first was a woman when a man does that, I could just hug him. You know, when he goes to the trouble of pointing out that actually to lift up a woman's voice sort of make sure she's heard so those things can make a huge difference across many different situations. And there's a related question, Cecilia and actually to all of us but it says, Cecilia, it's from Sharon Burke and it says, I'm interested in whether the three of you and the women you talk to Cecilia in your book felt sometimes the burden of expectations specifically that they would play a certain part in work life because they are women of color maybe as the social blue, the cheerleader, the nurturer, the confessor do you feel and in particular as women of color that you're supposed to play a certain role? I'd be interested, Tyra, what you think about this too? It's a great question. I don't think it's necessarily a certain role unless it's your job is to be the person of color in the room, like we did talk about that, right? Then there's a section of the book which is when you feel like you're only there for a little bit of color, right? Where there's a, I've been, had somebody say to me can you come to this meeting tomorrow because we're having this meeting on this thing and we realized that we didn't invite any women or any people of color and you're both, like would you come? Which is not, I guess an honest description of why they were inviting me, but it doesn't actually speak to the whether or not they expected me to actually have wisdom in that meeting, right? So there is that role that all of us have been and it happens all the time. But I'm not sure that there's a kind, aside from that, that there's a specific role that we all feel like we need to play. It's more that you feel like you're, that there's a certain kind of spotlight always on and it never goes off and you're just aware of it all the time. That's how I experience it. I think that's right. I certainly, I don't feel the need to live up to your goal at all. I'm liberated in that way. But it is this, the one thing you don't wanna take away is that you from this conversation of the book and I don't think that happens is that you only need one, you only need one Latinx, you only need one African-American, you only need one woman, right? Because we are as diverse as whatever is the most diverse thing that there is. And if you think about your own family and how within your own family you are different from the rest of them than such is the case within any given culture as part of that. So you're right, you have this weight or you can feel the spotlight that you are somehow the spokesperson. For all African-Americans, all African-American women, all Latino, whatever, right, as part of that. And you know it's just not true. And so even when we're doing something, I try to get those diverse perspectives because I know that my lived experience is not another person, woman of color's lived experience and we should bring all of that into the conversation and I don't think there is enough reality. Even though we've said it for decades now, the reality that we're spokespeople. So we're coming to the end. I'm gonna ask one more very specific question and then we're gonna turn to maybe some closing thoughts. But very relatedly, Jessica Ian and says, what do you do when you're asked to be on a panel to speak on diversity? And I've had this problem too where suddenly I'm supposed to be the expert on diversity. I'm a national security expert. What do I know about women in foreign policy? Or, but what do you, this has happened to all of us. What do you do? How do you handle it? How do you handle it gracefully that basically says, I'm sorry, you know, I'm a tires and education expert. Cecilia is an immigration expert among many other things. What do you do there? Well, one possible strategy is to ask, so why is it that you think that this is my area of expertise, right? To put it back, right to go back to your strategy and Maria of asking a question to turn it back on the person who's asking, who's making it very obvious that they have at least figured out they need a panel on diversity. So points for that, or they've at least figured out that they need some diversity on their panel and points for that. But that doesn't, I mean, I think it is okay to reject the notion that because we are the one person of color on the panel, that our expertise is actually diversity has that same thing. So I think it's okay to ask, and I have now made a regular habit of asking, if somebody's asking me to be on a panel of just asking, like, am I the only person of color on this panel? Like, who else is on this panel? And it causes some, frequently causes discomfort, which that's fine with me. But I think it's useful to turn the question back on the person who's asking, like, why should the burden be on you to explain, you know, the fact that I haven't? Anya, in my name, doesn't mean I'm an expert in diversity. Great. All right, so, so first of all, I just have to say, Cecilia, I don't know if you saw, but your cousin Jorge wrote in, and I'm not gonna ask it as a question, but I'm gonna make it a comment because he says, tell us about your inner sources of strength when faced with personal attacks. And you have talked about that, but I take that really as a comment on your sources of strength. And all of us have actually witnessed that. And I'm just grateful that he is part of this conversation. But I'm gonna ask you all to reflect in sort of some closing remarks. Otto McDonald writes in and says, also a new American, I'm curious about your thoughts on the nature of power. Frederick Douglass has said that power concedes nothing without demand. If we simplify the current situation to white men have the power and how much tug is needed on our part collectively as women of color, how do you think about that? So we have a quote from Frederick Douglass. We have a reference to our current situation and maybe an invitation just to give us some final thoughts. Tyra, do you wanna go first? I won't go first on the final thoughts, but I'll comment on Autumn's point, which I think it's very true. If we look at history, the change that we saw in history didn't come from power being given. It came from power being demanded. And part of my fear in this moment we're living in, this moment being over the last few years is the things that we've allowed to go unchecked or we have only spoken about it in our echo chambers that we've not moved to real action to demand a shift. And there are understandable schools of thought around the focus on election, but there's a whole lot that's happened in between here and there that we have let happen and we have not demanded that power shift or that things change as part of that. So I absolutely agree. And when I think about even some of the changes that I have made as a leader, it's come from the demand. Some of it are just things that I saw and observed and I thought were the right things to do, but sometimes they came in response and I rely on that voice. That feedback that says we need to do something differently as part of that. And you could argue that that's giving, but there's a demand that sits there that I have to respond to as a leader. I think I agree with all of that. And I love that our current Speaker of the House has been very clear about it, that you can't expect people to give up power. You have to take it, but then you also have to use it. You have to know what you want it for and you have to be prepared to use it. And to connect that to the question that Jorge asked about kind of sources of strength, one of the pieces of advice I cite in the book is this notion of getting your love at home. Meaning if you kind of, you know who you are and you know where you belong and you have people in your life that you get sustenance from, then you can go out there and piss people off and demand power and act as an advocate and care much less about whether or not those people like you. I'm not sure Nancy Pelosi worries very much about whether Mitch McConnell likes her, right? She's an example of somebody who's clearly, she's getting her love at home. She has that stuff at her core that allows her to do uncomfortable things and not really care that they make people uncomfortable. And that's advice that I've taken to heart when things get hard and things get hard for any person in life. This isn't just true of women, it isn't just true of people of color. But this notion that your job when you go out into the world is not about being liked, it's about making a difference. And if you know that where you're getting your love from is secure, then it's easier to go out and do it and people can say things about you that seem uncomfortable and you don't have to care because you're getting your love at home. So that's a beautiful note on which to end. And I will say that I remember early on when I first started to lead, my brother who was an investment banking would say to me, it's not personal. And I do think many women in particular are more inclined to take criticism personally where we're socialized to be hypersensitive. And his point was, yeah, people are gonna say nasty things, but it's not personal. It's more like a football game or where you're just in the scrum, don't assume that it's aimed at you. And that was helpful to me. And I also, I think it obviously does help if you're anchored as securely as possible. But I wanna close by suggesting to everybody again, I'm not suggesting, go buy this book. It's a great book. It was my honor to read it in draft. It was, you know, Cecilia being Cecilia kept saying, oh, you know, you're making time, I can't believe it. I'm like, no, this is a great read. I am learning things. It is funny. It is tender. It is fierce in places. It's a book that is a wonderful read. And I really do wanna end by saying I think it's a book for our time. I think we are in a crisis that demands many different kinds of leadership. We're in a crisis that demands care and kindness and connection and solidarity. We're in a crisis that requires that we draw on the talents of everyone. And that means all Americans. That means people of color. That means women. That means women of color. And we are grateful for this book. So I thank all of you for being part of this cocktails and conversation. Go get the book, tweet about it. And we look forward to seeing you again.