Sharing Where You Are

A new year is often a time of reflecting on the past and planning for the future, but it’s important to remember that where we are right now matters.

And as content creators, it matters that you share what’s going on with you and not forget yourself in the process of interviewing others or providing value through teaching. Your experiences are not only potentially beneficial for others to hear, but sharing honestly helps normalize discussing some topics and the experiences we have around them.

Erica and India get together to share where they are right now and why it’s important for content creators to let their audiences get to know them.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• Why content creators should share their personal experiences

• Erica and India’s experiences becoming homeowners

• How Erica put her values into action through her recent move

• A different take on boundaries and how that’s helping Erica navigate online dating

Your Experiences Matter

India Jackson (she/her) says that as podcast hosts and content creators, particularly for interview-based shows like Pause on the Play®, it can be easy for the hosts to get left behind. But she says it’s important for content creators to share and let their audiences get to know them.

Erica Courdae (she/her) agrees and says that there is a narrative that content creators are only valuable for what they give to others and not simply as themselves.

“I don’t think it’s good to leave yourself behind because that is what makes you, you. That is the thing that can’t be bottled, can’t be replicated, can’t be done by anyone else.”

She says there’s value in simply sharing yourself and your experiences, without necessarily teaching anything.

India jokes that if people shared more freely about topics like aging, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find a rogue hair on her face–that she nicknamed Larry–now that she's in her thirties. “I could have been mentally prepared for that.”

Erica says that she’s been trying to do more sharing of her experiences because she recognizes that sharing could be beneficial to someone else, but also that it simply normalizes it.

Becoming a Homeowner

India segues into asking Erica if there are things that she has “unveiled, uncovered, learned about yourself, about the way that you live, lead, or earn that you didn't know and you wish somebody had like just shared like, yo, be prepared for this, this might happen?”

Erica says that one of the biggest learning experiences she’s had recently was going through the process of buying a house. The financial process of buying a home on her own was both practically and emotionally challenging, dealing with banks and realtors, and also money stories and feelings of not enough-ness.

“I really wish that the same way you get a realtor and loan officer and all these things, can they come with a therapist? Because it’s a lot.”

And it was compounded by interacting with an industry that “doesn’t regularly center or support Black people being homeowners,” as with the history of redlining. (If you’re not familiar with redlining, she recommends watching the movie The Banker.) She says there was so much about the process that she wasn’t aware of, and that there wasn’t anyone who represented her whom she felt like she could ask those questions and get honest answers.

India says that her experience of buying a home just before Erica did was similar in not knowing what she didn’t know and feeling unprepared for the process.

Erica says that the first piece of advice she would give to someone exploring buying a home for the first time is to get all of their business, tax, and bank paperwork in order. “The home buying process requires an ungodly amount of documents…Make sure everything is in order, which will save you a lot of headache.”

She also says to be prepared for how much longer things can take than you thought they would, so build in plenty of padding for yourself to save heartache and hassle.

India mentions that she had key dates like closing moved several times in her process and that she’s noted the same experiences in Black friends who’ve bought homes, but not her non-Black friends. Erica agrees that that seemed to be pretty consistent in her experience as well.

“That secondary piece was very challenging to feel like I had service providers…that I had to keep changing dates on. And I wanted to give concrete dates, but I couldn’t give what I had never been given. You’re just waiting and flying by the seat of your pants and hoping for the best.”

Voting with Your Dollars

While often on the podcast, Erica and India are discussing how they and their guests earn, lead, and work; she wants to know what might have changed for Erica with the process of moving into her new house versus prior moves and how that relates to how she leads and lives outside of work.

Erica says that when she used to move from apartment to apartment, she could generally count on the new place being mostly clean and often relied on friends for help getting her things in and out of a U-Haul.

“I am not asking my friends with whole families and jobs and bad backs to help move stuff anymore. Those days are gone.”

Hiring movers was a huge change, and she also hired a crew to come into the house, which had been sitting vacant, and clean prior to moving in. She specifically hired service providers of color for those services. She also packed a lot of her house early, which proved to be a good and bad idea when her closing was moved and she was living in a 75% packed house. For packing, she got as many used, free boxes and packing supplies as possible, and made sure to pass them on to others through OfferUp or local Buy Nothing groups.

“Any opportunities that I had, I wanted to make sure that my values were brought into the decisions that I was making.”

India says those are great examples of voting with your dollars. Erica adds that by working with smaller, local providers, when her closing was pushed out again and again, they were willing to work with her rather than charging her a cancellation fee and dropping her from their schedule.

Living in the limbo of closing dates and a home that was mostly packed, Erica had to give herself grace to be “cloudy and unfocused, because that was real.”

She had to acknowledge that in a stressful situation, she wouldn’t be able to perform at the same level. She had parenting challenges in that her childrens’ birthdays fell in that period, and simply the uncertainty of when they were actually moving, but being transparent with them about it helped to be understanding and stay excited, rather than everyone getting frustrated.

She strategically left some things unpacked that she knew would be supportive to her, like seasonings so she wasn’t stuck with bland food, and pieces that support her spiritual practices like some of her crystals and tarot cards.

“I just made sure that no matter what I had packed away, that I still gave myself access to things that felt like they were my things.”

Boundaries and Online Dating

Erica is also digging into the concept of boundaries this year. She’s shifting away from a prescriptive version of boundaries that feels restrictive, “like something that you deployed in order to correct bad behavior,” and toward a practice of boundaries that embraces “what matters to you and what you want more of.”

She’s interested in boundaries that help her take the actions she wants to take, rather than creating boundaries around what she doesn’t want. She’s asking questions about if actions are in service to what she wants in her life.

“I really feel like boundaries are really my opportunity to consciously claim what I want and how to hold the space to actually get that, and to know what happens if something is not of service to that…I want it to be an opportunity to figure out how things can improve, how they can grow, how they can evolve, and how it is that more opportunities can be present.”

That conception of boundaries has come up as Erica explores online dating again. She’s had success with it in the past, and knows others who have too.

“It really is putting me in a position to be honest with myself about what it is that I do or do not want…It’s also requiring me to be very honest with myself about what I can provide and how that works with what someone else wants.”

India asks Erica if anything has changed for her approaching online dating with her understanding of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Erica says that some people are much more transparent about their values and beliefs in their profiles now. She says she’s noticed a lot of profiles that specifically mention political figures and who should swipe right or left. She also recalls one profile that listed an “argumentative woman” as a non-negotiable.

But after years of being a DEI consultant and coach, Erica says that as she’s been getting to know people, she’s noticed that “there’s a different type of space of discussing what their experienced may have been, what it is that they are noticing or feeling or finding to be true for them in their lives.”

Coming back to profiles, she says that it’s interesting to notice how much more access people have to put things like Black Lives Matter or LGBTQIA+ Ally or Trans Ally in their profiles, or being up front about being polyamorous or in open relationships. “There is a lot more transparency around lifestyles than what there was before. And I actually find that very hopeful for people to be able to be more of who they are.”

India asks if it’s possible that Erica’s DEI title might make people more open to sharing with her. Erica says she’s wondered if that might be the case in some of her interactions and India says she’s experienced that in a limited way with people in her life with people going between either afraid of her judgment or more willing to speak to her because she won’t judge them.

Erica says, “I think in some ways people are a lot more transparent, but I also think there’s the reality that just because that’s what’s on their profile, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s who that human is and that’s how they’re gonna be once you’re in conversation with them.”

She says online dating is “a very interesting social experiment, I will say.”

Ready to dive deeper?

If you’ve enjoyed the conversations on this podcast, you may want the chance to ask Erica or India your questions, and you have the opportunity to do that in The Pause on the Play® Community. 

You’ll also get to meet and be in community with a global group of values-driven individuals and join conversations and get feedback on situations in your work like hiring or marketing and in your life, like voting with your dollars or the messy middle of moving or online dating.

Learn more at https://pauseontheplay.com/community