101. From Implicit to Explicit: Aligning Your Values With Action
Summary
So often, people think of values work as a one-and-done activity. Not so! As we transition through our many iterations, the values we hold dear transform, becoming more developed and recognizable. However, the full scope of our personal growth is often lost on us in a forest of nuance. In this solo conversation, Erica plots her own evolutionary process - from cosmetology school to DEI professional - highlighting moments that reinforced her commitment to the work.
In this discussion:
Musings on conversational camaraderie and solo topics
Our values in our backstories and everyday experiences
The beauty industry as a microcosm of systemic racism
Living our beliefs in the name of good trouble
Keep The Dialogue Going
Our next From Implicit to Explicit masterclass is filling up fast. The journey begins Thursday, April 22nd.
Head over to Pause On The Play to sign up.
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Acknowledging and trusting our evolutionary journey is a vital piece of this work. Our values define us and it’s these beliefs that we send out into the world through our words and our actions. Making that connection is one of the principle reasons why Erica and India lead From Implicit to Explicit.
“It 's such a powerful process,” explains Erica. “To watch people think that, ‘Oh, I'm not sure what my values are,’ or ‘I think I already know it; I've done it,’ and they get to the end and, every single time, they're like, ‘I had no idea! I didn't know I had all this in there!” They didn’t equate their actions, the choices they made on a daily basis - how they spent their money, the places they chose not to frequent, the voices they decided to listen to - with the values that mattered most to them; they took those things for granted as they navigated their lives.
“Being able to accompany people through such a powerful process is an honor, and it's a gift and every single person that we have done Implicit to Explicit with, I thank you because it is a gift to witness that expansion,” Erica says. “I mean, I seriously can't even put words to it. It's amazing.”
We would absolutely be honored for you to participate in and experience, firsthand, the process, allowing Erica and India to accompany you as you wrap your brain around the values that matter most to you and ways in which you chose to project them out into the world. It’s truly a transformative experience.
“I'm humbled to be able to watch this shit happen. I fucking love it. I seriously do,” Erica says. “However, it won't be complete if we don't have you in the [virtual] room.”
Article
Welcome to the 101st episode! If you’ve followed Pause On The Play for a while, thank you! We appreciate you. If you’re new here, welcome; it’s so good to have you on board for the next 101.
This past month has truly featured Erica in her zone of genius, engaging in conversations with others - conversations that have enlightened, entertained, and informed. The discussions featuring acclaimed romance author Tasha L. Harrison and best-selling poet Jon Goode hit all the notes. The re-release of Erica and India breaking down India’s 2019 experience at AfroPunk offers an intimate and still-raw glimpse at the real-life experience of a Black woman out in the everyday world.
For this conversation, she goes solo. “Sometimes when it's just me, it's a little awkward,” she admits, “because I like being in conversation and, so, there are times when talking into the ether, it just feels fucking weird.” Make no mistake, however: Erica on her own provides an opportunity to connect different pieces of her backstory with her present - and future - iteration.
Backstory-Forward
“If you didn't already know, I have been in the beauty industry in one way, shape, or form since I have been 18,” she begins, setting the stage of her origins story. “I started cosmetology school right after high school, and I have kind of had my hand, so to speak, in hair before that. It was something that I've always wanted to do.” Her mother prompted her to take an international baccalaureate program instead. “[It] was a gifted and talented program that I had zero interest in. I wanted to do cosmetology then, but when I graduated high school, I still did that anyway,” she concedes. “I remember at that point, I really only kind of thought of it like, ‘Oh, I just want to do hair,’ not really knowing where it was going to go.”
Once Erica started cosmetology school, she stepped back from the program, taking on an apprenticeship instead to advance her knowledge and career. With her hours met and license attainted, she assumed a succession of increasingly challenging roles. “I have been an assistant manager; I have been a manager in different types of salons; I have been a cosmetology instructor at a Paul Mitchell school. I have had apprentices under me; I have spoken to classes. I mean, I've done so much and, I'm very fortunate to have touched so many different titles or jobs and occupations within the industry.”
Her long list of accomplishments doesn’t end there. Erica has served as a makeup artist and spent a great deal of time working on weddings. “It was a big chunk of what Silver Immersion (Erica’s hair and makeup company) has done over the, oh my gosh, over ten years! And, it was actually why I started Silver Immersion,” she says.
Despite the success, Erica looks back and notes that she suffered from beauty burnout, from the sheer volume of work, yes, and from the racism entrenched within the industry. “I've been in that industry for over 20 years, and some of the things that I saw and experienced...I think they probably did pile up in some ways,” she admits, “but it definitely prompted me to take all of the things that I've experienced, that I've learned, that I've watched others go through, and I brought that into my diversity, equity, and inclusion work.”
Beauty Not Always A Beautiful Space
One such revelation is the fact that the beauty industry remains one of, if not the most, segregated industries for both stylists and clients. “I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that segregation is fully gone, but seeing how salons and cosmetology schools and beauty products, as a whole, are very much Black/ethnic hair and then everything else, you can't get any more meta when it comes to segregation and working in salons,” Erica says. “I clearly would see people going to people that look like them more often than not and, in a lot of ways, I kind of defied that logic because the clientele that I had, as well as the clientele that I currently still have...my clientele has always been, not going to say always [but] most of my career has been very, very diverse.”
Even starting in a more predominant Black hair space, Erica explains, she quickly became aware that the industry did not intermingle in the same way that she wanted to in her career. “I saw this in, again, people going to people that looked like them partially because of this segregation that would happen with schooling because you weren't often taught to do hair that wasn't what was on your head,” she explains. “I went to a predominantly Black school, and we were taught to do hair that looked like ours. Flash-forward to when I became an instructor, [students] were taught how to do I'm going to say, “white” hair, but I'm saying quote-unquote because white hair is not necessarily straight; Black hair is not necessarily not straight. And that does not even include the fact that there are people that fall outside of those two parameters that aren't often included in the dialogue nearly enough.”
The focus on fine, straight hair came at the exclusion of wavy, curly, and textured hair types. And, when the powers that be decided to recognize hair types outside the prevailing “norm”? Umm… Let’s step back for a moment to explain what a cosmetology mannequin actually looks like. “It looks like something made out of...kind of like horror stories because it's, like, the head that rolls around in the trunk that somebody is trying to scare you with around Halloween,” Erica laughs. “It's just...it's just the head, but yeah, it's a little discombobulating to see it if you're not familiar with it. They have straight hair and not at all something that mimics any texture that isn't, again, just straight. It's very homogenous and not in a positive way.”
Good Trouble
In a sad attempt to mimic ethnic hair, students received mannequins with the same fine “white” hair as their other stock - only permed on tiny rods. “It was a terrible representation and fully inaccurate,” says Erica, “and it did not in any way, shape, or form begin to address the differences in products that are used, the differences in techniques, any of those things. None of that came up!” Frustrated by the narrowmindedness that the teaching mannequins represented, She purposefully sent clients to students who did not look like them. “I specifically did it because I did not want them to rest in the space of, ‘Oh, I know how to do what's on my head, and I'm going to just stick with that.’ I purposefully said, ‘You know what? Nope. Okay. You have naturally coily kinky hair; you're going to get the straight blonde-haired, fine-haired to come in to figure out what to do with that.’”
Erica did the reverse as well, coaxing stylists with finer hair types to care for wavy, textured hair or to work with relaxers to gain that knowledge. “It doesn't serve you to stay in the comfort zone of what you're already familiar with and, in doing that, there were definitely times where my students were like, ‘Oh shit! She made me nervous,’” Erica laughs. “but I watched them flourish because of it. I watched them learn what they otherwise may not have learned because I didn't see as many of the other instructors around me challenging them in the same type of way to be better stylists in the industry.”
Regardless of the clients she assigned to her students, Erica’s goal remained the same. “I have no desire to send someone out into the beauty industry as an instructor or as someone that is apprenticing under me that can't step into the capacity of being better than me; you're supposed to be,” she says. “If not, I haven’t done my job. If I haven't equipped you to be better than me, I have failed.”
She saw that inclusion wasn't happening in the beauty space, that it needed to happen. “The reality is, I didn't know back then, that it was an act of trying to create inclusion or, you know, “good trouble” as John Lewis would call it in a sense, because I'm like, yeah, I'm going to completely disrupt the way this is done, but I'm going to do it for the benefit of everyone that is here.”
Still, Erica says, as intentional as her actions were, she didn’t immediately recognize the constant nature of her core values, that they would eventually transform into the advocacy she does now. “It's in line with actions that I have taken of saying, ‘yeah, I can do it that way, but I'm not going to; I'm going to do it this way, and here's why, and I don't care about your formula. Fuck that; I'm not doing that!’”
Looking back, of course, she recognizes the consistency of her trajectory. “It's like, wow! I didn't realize how much my actions were aligned with what mattered to me until I did and, you know, being able to just pay attention to the connecting threads that have always been there. You know, watching how, over the years, I would repeatedly have conversations with clients about stepping into ownership and...hmm, what's the word I want to use? I want to say, comfortability is probably not even a word, but I like comfortability - that place of really just accepting and honoring their natural hair,” she says, “and when I say “natural hair” in this moment, I am referencing hair that is like my natural hair. For those of you that have been around me or, possibly, seen any images of me, you know, my tiny curls, my coils, my kinks, my hair, that defies gravity.”
“...it was almost coaching - but coaching people through owning their natural hair texture in an...in an environment, often a professional environment that did not honor it, that did not want to see it, did not respect it, did not think it professional nor becoming,” Erica pauses to reflect on the immensity of these intimate moments before continuing, “having to really guide people through what does it look like to choose to step into their natural hair? And its ownership out loud anyway, or to choose not to in that moment, but be clear as to why and what the goal was of doing that - and in some cases, it was to do almost an intrepreneurial job within a place that did not really support those that looked the way that they did. And yet, they said, ‘okay, I understand. I see you. I got you. And I'm going to stay here. I'm not going to go. And I'm going to do what I can to begin to shift things in this space. And I'm going to leave myself in a position of seeming to assimilate, and I know better on the inside.’ - I had no idea that you know, having conversations like that were coaching, years ago.”
“I didn't know that talking people through what it looked like to love how they looked, as they actually were,” Erica says, reminding readers that there’s nothing wrong with choosing to straighten your hair or wearing makeup, “or any other things that we can do because we are chameleons and we choose to, but there is a big difference between shifting your appearance by choice and shifting it because you feel as though this is what you need to do to be respected and to be included and to actually be acknowledged. That's a completely different place. For a lot of us, we don't always know the difference until we get out of it.”
She says that awareness is akin to the red pill/blue pill choice, referencing The Matrix, one of her favorite analogies here on POTP. “Once you see it, you can't unsee it, but you have to first see it.” Erica weaves together seemingly unrelated acts of rebellion into a more significant expression of her real progress: showing a white mother with a Black or Brown child, for example, how to care for her child’s hair, or teaching a Black woman how to care for her hair in its natural state - and find love, respect, and reverence in doing so… “to not allow the inherent segregation in this industry that I so deeply love despite its flaws, almost because of its flaws, because I know the impact that the beauty industry can have,” she says.
“I had no idea that the love that I have for the beauty industry would absolutely set the tone for me choosing to use my voice and my platform and my knowledge and my tenacity to bring diversity, equity, and inclusion to the world via my particular way of doing things, and to know that I can make an impact in this way.”
Core Values As Tinder
As Erica explains, the threads have always been there, just waiting to be woven into place at different points. “I can expand on them, and I could shore up my platform because that's exactly what I did: I took the things that were already there, the values that already existed, the things that were the backbone of the entire way that I existed, I took that, and I created an entire way of being for myself in ways that I never expected.”
Had she not done so thoroughly and authentically, likely, she wouldn’t be sharing this story now. “I also wouldn't have had the impact that I've already had, nor the promise of the impact that I have yet to make because make no mistake, I am not done. I have a lot of work to do by choice. And, the values that I have become more and more intimately acquainted with, that have accompanied me throughout my life, they will continue to accompany me on my journey. They will shift and evolve in the same way that we shift and evolve as we grow and move through life.”
And yet, no matter the iterations, those foundational beliefs will remain familiar. “For those values give me a reason to show up here and record here on my hundred and first episode - thank you for a hundred. I appreciate every one of you that have taken the time to listen to me - they've gotten me here, and they will continue to move with me,” she says. “Every little piece that has been tinder for the fire that burns within me, that makes me get up day after day and be determined to contribute to the betterment of the world that I leave to my children; this is what fuels me.”
So often, people think of values work as a one-and-done activity. The work wasn’t like that for Erica. “What happened for me was, I've, you know, gotten acquainted with my values, and I look back, and I can see where they've been and how they've evolved. I can see where they're continuing to evolve, but I can also see the nuances in it.” Taking those subtleties into consideration is a vital piece of the process. “You can see how a shade of blue can become teal. It can become cerulean. It takes on these iterations and yet, still a shade of blue; the heart of it hasn't changed, but those nuances can have a completely different heartbeat.”
There’s so much value in acknowledging our evolution, in celebrating its full spectrum like that palette of blues. There's so much joy in connecting to that journey, becoming aware of those changes or tweaks in tone, and recognizing the many ways these values impact our choices and affect our lives. Those are the beliefs we ultimately project into the world around us, like a projector putting a movie onto a screen.
“As always, you know I love being here, having these real conversations with you, being able to share part of my story and part of what has fed into my own values, evolution, and uncovering how it’s fed me being here, speaking to you today, as Erica Courdae through Pause On The Play. And, so, for you being here, and supporting me as we together cross lines, recreate boundaries in order to support and not separate, so that we can continue creating the change that we want to see. For all of those things, I appreciate you. I thank you. And, I cannot wait to see you the next time.”
Quoted
Erica Courdae
“It doesn't serve you to stay in the comfort zone of what you're already familiar with.”
“If I haven't equipped you to be better than me, I have failed.”
“I didn't realize how much my actions were aligned with what mattered to me - until I did.”
“Every little piece that has been tinder for the fire that burns within me, that makes me get up day after day and be determined to contribute to the betterment of the world that I leave to my children; this is what fuels me.”