The Modern LeadHer Way

[076] Challenging Narratives: Empathy as a Catalyst for Global Change

• Emma Clayton • Season 4 • Episode 76

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Trigger Warning:
This episode discusses sensitive topics related to the October 7th 2023 attack on Israel and the ongoing conflict in Palestine, including violence, displacement, oppression and murder. If you find these topics distressing, please prioritise your well-being and use your discretion as to how much to tune into.
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This episode dives deep into the complexities of trauma, compassion, and the realities of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. We highlight the importance of storytelling, acknowledge media biases, and discuss personal accountability in advocating for those affected by human suffering.

• Exploring the intertwining concepts of trauma and resilience
• Discussing media coverage and the importance of diverse perspectives
• Advocating for the necessity of empathy and compassion in conflict zones
• Reflecting on personal experiences that shaped our understanding of the situation
• Encouraging listeners to engage critically with the stories of those affected by conflict

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Emma Clayton:

This is the Modern Lead Her Way, the podcast for corporate career women who want to feel good on their way to the top. I'm Emma Clayton and I'll be sharing with you tangible advice to help you stop sacrificing your soul in the name of success and experience more balance, confidence and fulfilment both in and out of work. Hello, welcome back, and, as promised, I have, over the next two episodes, a very special conversation that I had just before Christmas with three amazing ladies that you're about to meet and be wowed by. That is, shima, juliet and Megan, who are very dear to me, and I am very grateful that they agreed to come on the show. Now.

Emma Clayton:

This episode and the next does need to come with a trigger warning. This episode does discuss very sensitive topics related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, including violence, rape, displacement, war and human suffering as a result. So your discretion is advised and if you find these topics distressing, please check out the show notes, where you'll find a resource pack of a number of resources that you can follow up with, and, of course, you know where I am if you want to cover any of these things off further. So, without further ado, let's get into the first half of this fabulous conversation, which I really do hope you get a lot from. Hello and welcome back to this very special episode of the Modern Leaderway podcast, where I'm joined in conversation with not just one but three beautiful guests.

Emma Clayton:

Hello ladies, hello we are going to get straight into it with some introductions so that we can get into the conversation that we're here to have today, a very important conversation. And actually, before I get into the introductions, I think the reason I've hand selected each of you to be here in this conversation with me today is because you bring your very own different and unique experiences and you also have this one common thing I feel in common, which is your massive heart and your compassion for humanity, and really I am very excited about the beautiful conversation that's going to unfold today. So thank you for being here and with that, why don't we go to Megan? Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself brief introduction, what it is that you do in the world, where you are in the world as well?

Megan Kate Clinton:

Thank you, so lovely to be here with all of you. So I'm Megan Kate Clinton and I am in Cape Town in South Africa, and I have been working as a therapist for nearly two decades now, working in private practice and more recently stepping into training coaches and therapists. So the area that I've really specialized in is understanding trauma understanding where it comes from and how it impacts our lives and how it shows up. So when I bring my trainings, it is to bring an embodied understanding of how we bring someone into wholeness. So we bring someone into wholeness through our somatic experience, through our emotional healing and through our cognitive integration, and when we do that, we nurture our relationship not only with ourselves but with the world around us, and that sparks change in the world. And that's really what I'm holding and what I'm bringing is that healing brings change and it enables change to occur.

Emma Clayton:

Beautiful, and I, for one, can say that I have been on the receiving end of your beautiful work in the world, and I have had such change in my own healing journey, and I've also just been through your trauma-informed training as well, which is just beautiful, because it really is a beautiful complement to the work that I do as well. So thank you for being here and, ashima, let's go to you.

Sheema Khurshed:

Hi, thank you for inviting me.

Sheema Khurshed:

I think I'm definitely a layman in comparison to some of the other speakers, but somebody who, I guess, cares very deeply for human rights in general, and I feel like sometimes a lot of the reason why I'm so passionate about you know this, this topic specifically, but then also just in general, is is, I feel like sometimes humanities, I don't know it takes some some strange turns and and I really wonder how we got here and and you know you look back to see potentially where we're going to go forward and think, uh, some of the conversations that we have like this will hopefully sort of inevitably um impact, uh, more people, um and hopefully put us in a better situation for the future.

Sheema Khurshed:

I am currently sitting in singapore. Um, I've been here for a couple of years now for for work, so the work side of things takes over a lot of my life. But in the middle of it all, it's um, it's sort of just connecting with, with these issues and just trying to raise a voice and and trying to sort of implement some change in the world by being the change.

Emma Clayton:

Not trying to change the world, but being the change yeah, and I, for one, am very grateful as well to you. Um, you've been a client of mine for the last three odd years, on and off, and it was really down to you that I had any sort of awareness about what was going on, probably after the events of October 7th, which we'll get to, but before that even you've been sort of sharing educational information about what's going on, um, in palette Palestinians, and so I'm very grateful that you raised that for me, because it meant that I was able to like follow my nose and actually like get a bit more educated about what was going on. So thank you for that. And, juliet, we only just met, in February this year over a beautiful lunch, and we had a conversation around what was going on in Gaza at the time, and it was actually you that sparked the idea to have this kind of more roundtable panel discussion. If you like, so over to you, tell us a bit about you.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

Isn't it wonderful, right, and what an incredible group of women we have. Just like Megan, I have worked in trauma and for me it's been mostly sexual trauma and how people reconnect and how it actually holds them back from intimacy and often the hidden sexual trauma that we hadn't quite remembered. So of course, this is very what's happening in the world at the moment. It's quite prominent, right. And for me what's really important is how rape gets used as a war crime and how it can just have that impact for for generations to come and how it creates that, that schism in intimacy. So I do that.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

I also teach and mentor a lot of coaches and therapists in certain modalities to help their clients with this. And of course I'm Dutch. I have my own podcast called the scrumptious woman, where we talk about all things taboo and intimacy and religion actually not religion but spirituality and all that kind of stuff. And then my children are half Palestinian and half Lebanese. So I've got like a triple one whammy yeah, the Dutch being the colonizer of a lot of places, and then, with my kids and my ex-husband being half Lebanese, half Palestinian, two of my twins, my twin girls, are deeply into art and deeply into being involved in actually recognising that this has to go a little bit further. People can start to stand up for what is happening and just for humanity, that every life is important. So that's where I come into the equation.

Emma Clayton:

I love that. And why don't we start there? Because I know you shared um when we were sort of connecting before this, that you know, when your kids were younger, you you've actually taken them to parts of Palestine and you've been on the ground with them. You've shown them what's going on.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

We used to spend a lot of time in Beirut. I've never actually been to Palestine, but I used to take them to the camps, to the Palestinian camps in Beirut, because my ex-husband's Lebanese Palestinian. Um, his mother passed away and then him, his father was Palestinian, also passed away, um, but it was just really important for me to understand, for them to understand, being half Dutch and half Arab, to actually go back to their roots. It's like we spend summers in France and other places. I'm like, no, let's go to Lebanon where, the first of all, they learn the language and they learn their culture a little bit. And for me it was really important for them to understand how privileged they are because, first of all, they look white for a mixed marriage, but they do look white. My ex-husband looks very white, very Jewish actually. Actually he always gets gets mistaken for that, and so we've flown under the radar a little bit in the UK of the racism and I wrote a post about this not so long ago.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

But it was important for me that they understand what Palestinians go through when they live in Lebanon, where they have no nationality, because they don't have a passport, they can't travel, they can't work in most places because they're not allowed.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

They're not allowed to to own property there. It's, it's you really kind of see, it's like, oh, there's class a for this, and then class b and c, and a little bit like south africa, I'm sure, and during apartheid, where you just kind of saw like, oh, so not everyone is created equal. So, yes, they used to come with all their gifts. We'd go to the camps, they'd have my husband there who would kind of like translate, but it made an impact on them, and this is probably as of the age of the girls must have been six and the boys eight and nine, and ever since that they've just really loved it. They wear their Arabic thogues once in a while, you know, like not always, but you know, though, when they go out, they'll wear something with embroidery that actually shows where they're from and fast forward. This has really become one of my, my daughters, and she's completely moved from doing paintings to really making an impact with her art, and it's all been about Palestine these last two years.

Emma Clayton:

That's so beautiful, and I guess it had an impact on you too, in terms of, like, what did you see with your own eyes when you were there?

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

You see how many people are stuffed into a little room, having so little and yet wanting to share everything with you. You can invite it in with tea and then everything is like I really had to watch myself if I'd say, oh, I love whatever, if they were wearing some jewelry or I really admired something. They take it off and give it to me. I'm'm like no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I want, but it humbled me. It humbled me that the spirit, the spirit of these people that have been, I mean, beaten and trodden down and at every turn that they try to just keep coming up and showing us their heart, and that really made an impact on me for years.

Sheema Khurshed:

That's something. Resilience. It's just incredible, isn't it? You know reels on social media of these guys how they've dealt with the food situation and just the innovation in terms of you know what they can do. They're baking in the ground with, you know, fire to put some edible food on their plates and carving sticks to make tools, to sort of you know try and sort of make their lives a little bit easier and on some level, you would think, in general, you think people who've endured that much trauma and that much generational trauma and inherited trauma. You know, these kids are growing up in this world not knowing any other world, um, but despite that they've got this incredible.

Sheema Khurshed:

I don't know, I don't really understand it myself. I don't understand the optimism, um, the the spirituality, um, because you see so many of these videos where they're pulling some, one person out. People are, you know, obviously still trapped or passed away, and yet they still come out and they say thank God, and that, to me, is just all of it, all of them. It sort of astounds me and it kind of challenges the idea that if you've been through trauma, you are bitter for it, or that you're holding some sort of, you know, rage or whatever, which I would say would be completely rightly, you know, deserved in this situation in this situation.

Megan Kate Clinton:

I love that when you say you talk about that Shima of like, how does one stand in a place, having experienced such atrocity, and meet it with compassion and kindness and generosity and and a willingness to keep living in comparison to, you know, calling up into a little hole in a bundle and giving up completely? And it reminds me when our president Madiba, when he came out and he walked, having been in prison for 27 years, and he said, if I carried that bitterness with me, we would never move into another era in South Africa, we would be constantly held back. And there obviously is some complexity there. I think often, you know, some people have that capacity to stand up and to move through something and some people don't't. And it's not to make anybody wrong, it's not to say this is the way you'd be positive and that and I know none of us would be saying that here. And I think there's also that other aspect of it that can be when we are in a survival state, we can actually function more easily. And I see that in South Africa as well, although you know we've, you know Africa's gone through the most. You know, as you mentioned, juliet, it has gone through colonization. You mentioned your lineage as well, and Belgium has had a huge impact. It's had a huge impact on, you know, one of the genocides that occurred in Africa where the Tutsi were made out to be like they looked more white, as you say, so it's like it's more OK, and they were made to be the superior race and eventually the Hutu turned on them and, despite Romeo D'Alea coming and saying to the UN and saying to the rest of the world there is going to be a genocide taking place, the world did nothing. Clinton, thatcher, all turned away in that moment and the Hutu went and killed the majority of Tutsi in the country. And it is.

Megan Kate Clinton:

When we're talking about trauma, there is so much complexity, there's so many layers of what we look like. When we're talking about trauma, there is so much complexity, there's so many layers of what we look like, who we are, how we behave, that who gets to actually even make it into the media. There's some real complexity and I think one of the things that really helped South Africa and I know South Africa has gone to other countries in the world I think the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it was structured, was taken to Northern Ireland as well and actually transitioned them through, but it actually got us through something without civil war. I wouldn't say it got us through something completely, because there are all these different layers that we're talking about, and so, while we transitioned to having, you know, a democracy where everybody got to vote, everyone had a level of what appeared to be equality.

Megan Kate Clinton:

What we see is, with colonization and with apartheid, it has an impact on the people that live there, and so to break free from that takes far more than a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And for those who don't understand what that is, it's for the people who have experience, who are victims, and the perpetrators to come into conversation with one another and for the victim to say this is what you did to me, this has been the impact, and for that person to really listen to them. And there's, you know, there's, as we know, there's complexity even in that of how, what our capacity is, even as a perpetrator, to really listen, um to how, whether the healing is impactful or not gosh.

Emma Clayton:

Yeah, there's so, so many ways we could sort of come off of there. But I'm thinking just to bring it back to what's going on in gaza for now, and we will come back to the trauma piece for absolutely, because I think that's a that's a big part of our conversation. You mentioned the media as well. Right, like I do not watch any mainstream media, in fact, in my corporate days I felt like I should just to be able to have some conversations around the dinner table and really struggled to ever because I just didn't feel good any time I read the news.

Emma Clayton:

So there was a part of me that knew I couldn't take on what I was reading, but also part of me that was like this is so one sided to like doom and gloom that there must be like more to it. So I feel like I can trust these sources and they might look like people on the ground who are actually experiencing a moment by moment reality right now, who are actually reporting what it means to be on the receiving end of some of the atrocities that are happening. This is like a new era right of reporting and some of the atrocities that are happening. This is like a new era right of reporting and some of the things I've seen, some of the images, some of the footage I can't unsee. I follow many people now on Instagram, for example, that don't show up in my feed because it's not something that Instagram is showing me for whatever reason.

Emma Clayton:

I actually have to go and look for the information that I want because it's not shown to me. So we have all these things that are happening. So we're getting a very biased, one-sided reporting from the Western media. What we see on TV is not necessarily the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then we get this other very real, organic, real-time reporting from on the ground that is actually being shadow banned, it's being, it's being stopped from coming into our feeds.

Emma Clayton:

And whilst it's like, whilst it's horrific to see some of this stuff, it's like I think it's the first time I've actually realized my privilege and my naivety in terms of, like, what actually goes on in the world. So what are some of the things and I'm happy for whoever to jump in in terms of, like, this whole piece around the media and how we also educate ourselves, right, how we ensure that we find those trusted sources so that we can make our own mind up about what's going on. Sheema, I know you have a few things to say about, and actually you've also been like, quite close to reports coming out of Palestine, for example, for many years. Right, you've had a finger on the pulse for decades, not just in the last sort of 12, 13 months.

Sheema Khurshed:

Yeah, so ironically, I studied journalism at university.

Sheema Khurshed:

Yeah, so, ironically, I studied journalism at university and so obviously I've not landed in the career, probably for some good reasons. But you realise, I mean very naively at the beginning. You think that what you're being told is the truth, this, this concept, that, um, if they're showing you the images, if they're showing you the videos, if they're, you know, but they're reporting it in a certain way, that must be the truth, because it's, it's live and it's you know, you see what's happening. And then I think what palestine taught me very early on was that, uh, actually no, because the reality on the ground is is quite different, um, and if you listen to the people that are living it, then their experience is completely different to what you're being um, you know, uh, peddled and and I, and it's quite sad, I think, because you realize, especially actually since since all this started in October last year, that there is almost a blatant suppression of, of an unbiased view, right. So, um, you don't want to get into the right and wrong because, frankly, I believe any loss of life is wrong. So, um, no one at any point in time, I think is is going to say that, uh, anything was um deserved or or, you know, people deserve to lose their lives, or you know that that's never the conversation, um, but instead what you have is this complete sort of uh, I would say it's propaganda, um, dehumanizing a whole country, a whole people.

Sheema Khurshed:

And it's very sad to realize that when you pull out and you look at more than one source, and you pull out and you look at, you know who's really controlling everything. And it's the conglomerates and it's the media moguls and unfortunately, they're all connected. So you can have five different media sources. You can have three news channels, two newspapers, you know online, everywhere, if you go far enough, you realize that they're all coming from one owner and unfortunately I think that's the situation that a lot of the global media is in at the moment is that it is, it is controlled and it is censored, trolled, and it is censored, and it is censored to push a story, a narrative that serves a certain purpose, whether that's commercial or political or financial or whatever it is. And I think, once you connect, that it's very hard to trust your news sources.

Sheema Khurshed:

So I think you're right, I think we're in an age now where we have access to people and we have access to people's stories and you've got like 27 year olds, who have now lived this for their whole life actually, who are now, you know, one of the journalists on the ground the Palestinian Bissan, I think her name is. She's now gone on to be named as one of the Financial Times' most influential women, and that fills me with so much hope that somewhere there's going to be a crack and somewhere this, you know, will move towards the truth, the balanced truth. You know we'll move towards the truth, the balanced truth. You know the black and white, but told across the spectrum, instead of what I feel is happening at the moment and I think I also agree that it's changing, it's I feel like I feel like actually people have done that. I feel like actually people have done that right.

Sheema Khurshed:

I feel like social media, the incredible protests, all the people that are now invested in this who, like you, up until a short while ago had very little information or awareness, and I feel like I really, really hope that we eventually push and enact the change that will get us a fairer system. That's the ultimate game, I think, from everyone is that that's the only reason these guys are doing it. Otherwise, you know, they've got enough on their plates running for cover and trying not to have buildings drop on them and trying to, you know, make sure their family members are still alive, and stuff. So they've got better things to be doing, but they're also doing it because they're hopeful that what they do and the stories they tell and the legacy they leave whenever they leave it, will end up making some big changes in the world bringing awareness and really getting people to realize that, oh, what I have been told I'm 56, what I have been told for the last 56 years about the state of Israel, and everything is actually through one lens.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

And I remember when I was 15, I came across the first Palestinians and really good friends, twin friends of mine. I used to go to their house and the father was the ambassador of Kuwait, so I met Arafat there. I met Edward Said, who's so well-spoken and actually just, I just kept saying we just need to educate the world that they can see what is happening, that there's just not one lens to look through. And I remember Hanan Ashrawi. So I met loads of these people before I actually even became involved with my ex-husband, so it's like she even became involved with my, my ex-husband.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

So it's like, oh, so all this stuff that I've learned through, you know, and of course, of Anne Frank, and then the whole holocaust that we, we were taught in Holland and in Europe, so much like, oh, my god, we can't say anything against the Jews, and it's not like we were, but it's how that got tweaked, that any time that you made a remark or you questioned anything that the Israeli government was doing. It was like oh, you're anti-Semitic. So I've been on the brunt of that for quite some time now and really recognizing that it doesn't have to be one or the other.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

We can be completely pro-Jewish, pro-any human life, and still call out what we feel is injustice injustice anywhere in the world and one of the the things that for me in my personal life is one of my ex-husband's aunts lived in Haifa, which is not in the West Bank, which is not an occupied Palestine, which is, you know. She was married to an Israeli and yet her treatment in Israel, as a Palestinian woman who was born there, you know, before it was proclaimed as the state of Israel was very different. She didn't get access to the same hospitals. She died in an ambulance because she was kept waiting because she was Palestinian. Things like that where you think, oh okay, so I'm starting to see this. I'm starting to become aware of another picture. I'm starting to become aware of another picture.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

Now, here in the UK, the BBC has come forward saying that since October 7th, we just had to keep bringing it back to. Well, what happened on the 7th? Doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself? Does anyone else in the world have? Does any other country state that we have the right to defend ourselves? We can go into the whole politics of that, but I don't think we even want to, but it's just like that's what it had to be kept coming back to. And if you just look at the last 70 odd years where we have been fed one narrative and now it's like, oh, with social media opening up, or it's like we start becoming aware of other things.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

The film israelism was a massive eye-opener for me as well, why people think a certain way, and especially jewish people in States. What has been taught to them? And then when they come, go to Israel and they're actually like, oh, there were people living here. Oh, this is apartheid, where it creates that change of like. Let's just look at more and become aware of it. And it doesn't mean that you have to go and immediately become pro this or anti that, but just become aware of it. And it doesn't mean that you have to go and immediately become pro this or anti that, but just become aware of it and notice within yourself. Where does that feel uncomfortable? We're just taking a stand, feeling comfortable, even taking a stand for humanity, for everyone has the right to live.

Megan Kate Clinton:

I think a lot of the time with the media. I think it follows a lot of society. You know when society looks away, you know we can. We can get into the politics, and there's obviously politics there as well, and there's obviously. You know we can get into the politics and there's obviously politics there as well, and there's obviously. You know there are genders to portray the media and to portray. You know. You can look across Western media and you get the same story, no matter where you look, no matter which newspaper, whether it's in America, australia, the UK, south Africa kind of thing, it's very you know the news rolls out in a very specific way and I think what you do when you see that is it's the same looking away that society does.

Megan Kate Clinton:

When something's too much, it's because we have structures in place and the media is one of those structures which is a traumatized structure.

Megan Kate Clinton:

It's being put in place by traumatized people and it has a traumatized view then of the world which is to go.

Megan Kate Clinton:

This can happen, and that doesn't get spoken about, and then sort of fairness, equality, all of those things that would be naturally entrenched in a society that had integrated history, that had healed its past, would be able to communicate like that, and then we would see a media starting to communicate like that.

Megan Kate Clinton:

So I think so often we can get into like the content of what's happening around the world and go, but why is this happening and what's going on there? Whereas when we actually step back and start looking at the process of what's going on and we understand what drives processes like that, it makes it easier to find ourselves in kind of commonality, to find ourselves in a basket where we all go. We want this in the world. And if we want this in the world, which is equality and connectedness and care for those in the world, what does that then mean? That then means kind of collective healing. It means systemic trauma release so that we can have what we desire in the world, and then that changes these traumatized structures because the people that put them in place have healed, and then the structures look profoundly different, they look interconnected.

Emma Clayton:

Do we see this happening in our lifetime, this healing on this scale?

Megan Kate Clinton:

I think at the moment we face a polycrisis in the world and I think the genocide we see here I never in my life expected to see a drone go out with a child crying as the sound, so that when people are drawn out and the hair just goes up on the back of my neck so that individuals reaching out to save a child then get shot down or sandbags, you know, labeled as flour to people who are starving, being delivered and somebody who reaches out, I can feel the emotions starting to come up in my own body.

Megan Kate Clinton:

I never in my life imagined I would see such horror unfolding and I think in some ways I can understand why people turn away. You know, normally we would have, we would have known what is awful in our little community and we would have processed that. Now, with social media, we have all of this around the world, with Sudan, with Somalia, with you know what's happening in Gaza, all coming in and flooding our system and it makes sense in some way that we turn away because it's horrific. There's only so much I can tolerate of watching children being dug out of rubble and, you know, bodies of children laying in mass graves. It's, you know, we've all seen the pictures. It is unimaginable, it is absolutely unimaginable.

Sheema Khurshed:

I completely agree, megan. Megan, what else can you do? Right, like you're faced with this day in all you have to do is open any social media, especially if you're following. You know those, those accounts. What do you do? You can either confront it, acknowledge it which I think on some level is probably harder than because your view of the world really changes, and I think some people find it much easier to compartmentalize. That this is happening in a remote place, somewhere super far away, will never impact me. That's not the world that I live in. That's, you know, my reality. My reality is everything is good, everything is safe.

Sheema Khurshed:

You know, I was reading a social media post this morning, actually from a Palestinian account who was making a comment about some interaction she'd had with somebody else who seemed almost completely oblivious to what was going on.

Sheema Khurshed:

And it turned out in the course of that conversation that this person had intentionally unfollowed all the accounts and in fact had I don't know whatever it is to mute them or whatever, so that she wouldn't see it. So that was an actual active sort of thing to say I can't handle this, or rather that it's. In this case it seemed like it was a bit more callous and it was probably more about I want to live in my world, I don't want to entertain the idea that, oh, it's too much to handle, and so I kind of, on some level I think, I empathise with that person as well, because it is a lot. It is a lot and if you carry the weight of it then it definitely will become very heavy and some people obviously can deal with it and some people can't. And I think the key there is that you're not actually asking, or at least actually not even from us asking. They are not asking you to change your life, you know.

Sheema Khurshed:

They're just all they're saying is listen, understand, educate yourself, break the chain. And I think that message, I think sometimes, sometimes it's hard to get through that no one's saying to you that suddenly you have to abandon everything and change your life because of these atrocities. And I think, equally, you realize that it's not just Palestine, right, there is a lot of stuff happening in many parts of the world, things that have been happening for a long time. Sudan is a perfect example. You know, we've got historic sort of ongoing atrocities over there. There's parts of the world that have never really come out of, like army control and horrible, horrible things.

Sheema Khurshed:

I think Palestine was almost probably the litmus test a little bit to sort of go hold the mirror up to the world and say you know, you need to acknowledge that the world is not working in the way that you think it's working and that it is probably a far more unfair place than you thought. And I feel like once, if and once people get to that realisation, then that's then a little path to sort of maybe change it for the future. But I completely, completely empathise that it's overwhelming to try and deal with in. You know the instance.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

Completely. And I remember speaking at the Royal College of Art last year with some of my daughter's friends and university students that were like it's so much I am getting depressed. Mute some accounts or you can just take social media off your account or really limit it. There are so many ways of doing it. And how often are you actually checking in with your body? How often are you checking in that you're, you're breathing or that you're holding yourself tight and and then giving them the tools to get back to themselves? Now I've noticed also in the coaching industry. A lot of us are coaches or mentors and it's been difficult to take a stand and being called out for my stand. And then yesterday in my mastermind I had written a piece on what will you tell your grandchildren if they ask you what you did during the genocide, and I've tried to explain it from my side and you know, just to say do what you can, but silence is deafening.

Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg:

And one of my mastermind ladies, who's an old client of mine, and she said I was so touched by it and I wanted to share it. And then I didn't share it because I have a lot of Jewish friends and I don't know how that would be taken in the community that I'm in here. She said I'm so sorry because it was written so beautifully and I wanted to share it and I said I don't want you to share anything that's not on your heart, but this was written exactly to bring awareness and to just notice like, oh where may we have been silent? Because we're afraid. We have that fear and that is what drives the silence. So it's done the job that it needed to do. I'm very, I'm pleased that it touched you and if it just touched one life, that's enough.

Emma Clayton:

That will bring a ripple and we're going to leave that here for the first half of this conversation. I really do hope you found it both eye-opening and enlightening, as well as informative and interesting. So you are very welcome back next week for the second half. I do hope you'll be back to join us. If you can't wait and you would love to just dive into the whole conversation now, then head over to my YouTube channel. So that's the Modern Leader Way podcast with Emma Clayton, and you can watch the entire video from start to finish. Let me know what your thoughts are so far. Ladies. Feel free to share them on social media with me and in the meantime, do take very good care of yourselves, and we will be back next week, don't forget. There's that resources guide in the show notes. And yeah, until then, take care, thank you.

People on this episode

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Emma Clayton

Host
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Juliette Karaman-van Schaardenburg

Guest
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Megan Kate Clinton

Guest
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Sheema Khurshed

Guest