so I go inside and um as I walk into the kitchen I can't describe it as anything other than a scene out to Texas chains Massacre there was blood everywhere as the police arrived they were like put that down that touch that um I was taken to one side they decided that I potentially was a perpetrator and I'd attacked [Music] Sophie hello and welcome to the truth lies and workplace culture podcast brought to you by by the HubSpot podcast Network the audio destination for business professionals my n
ame is Leanne I'm a business psychologist my name is Al I'm a business owner we are here to help you simplify the science people and create amazing workplace cultures welcome back welcome back lots of uh lots of love recently on LinkedIn for for our pod there's a dog sneeze in the background for you it's not it's not a sound effect it's a real dog uh so welcome back if you are new here as we always say then it's all about creating amazing workplaces and amazing places to work uh Leanne's the exp
ert I'm not so I'll be asking the questions that you probably have in your head as and when we talk yes if you are joining us for the first time in 2024 welcome it's February Harrah and February is a very important month for a number of reasons yes February is lgbtq plus history month and we'd be interested to hear what your organization is doing for it in case you haven't heard anything about it don't worry our guests are going to explain it all in a second we thought the best way we can contri
bute as allies to bring you some pretty special guests in February so we're kicking things off with the extraordinary Danielle and Sophie from the belonging base consultancy yes Danielle and Sophie wood from University sweethearts navigating the complexities of gender transition Danielle and sorie have weathered many of Life storms together their Journey encompasses challenges with Mental Health employment Transitions and the intricacies of navigating diverse relationships in 2020 three they co-
founded belonging base they were driven by a genuine commitment to lgbtq plus issues and mental health and Danny and Sophie use their experience of leading diversity and inclusion teams to help Business Leaders build inclusive cultures that enhance The Human Experience they are committed to positive change and today we'll be learning more about their own lived experiences of belonging and how it shapes the work they do today with clients this is an incred inredible story and it's one that covers
a lot of themes that some listeners may find challenging including experiences with adverse mental health and suicide please do check the show notes if you're struggling at the moment you'll find some useful resources and support that you can access straight away let's start our Episode by meeting our incredible guests let's meet Danielle and Sophie wood my name is Danielle Wood and this is my partner Sophie wood we are a married couple and we've been together um 31 years um and together we for
med our own business last year called belonging base We're British citizens but we're living um a lovely life on the Sunshine Coast in Spain having been married as husband and wife 21 years ago um Sophie transitioned um as transend transgender in um 2011 and that has filled the story of where we are today okay as promised before here is a short overview from Sophie of what lgbtq plus month is and why you should care well it started out um and Danny back me up on this I think it was two teachers
wasn't it who who really wanted to increase the awareness of um children's education around um lgbtq communities and and issues typical history syllabus would not include any reference to people from you know LGBT groups to so that was the kind of impetus behind it starting I can't remember the teachers names um but fair play to them and it was kind of grown into this this kind of part of the calendar month where we can actually tell people's stories and also when you're telling somebody's story
or if you're giving somebody a voice to tell their own story for example then that's when human connections um are possible so at this point we usually set the scene and tell you what to expect from the episode but these women have an incredible story which they're going to share straight away so let's start with Sophie but if I look at my personal Journey just to put it all into context when I was in my mid 30s I had from an outlookers perspective got of dream life so I had a great job working
from nuk policing beautiful wife Danielle great relationship with my parents great friends uh extended family networks had everything going for me but at that time I was experiencing sustained periods of depression and I was to the extent that I was actually self farming um which is kind of quite strange because there's no tangible reason why that should be so I had to go on that journey to try and solve that problem so that entailed two years basically of CBT speaking to a psychologist and it
was working through those two years of of conversations um they actually had an epiphany moment which was oh my God I I am I am Sophie I am I am female so all of these kind of feelings with which had been with me since a small child but I've been supremely and expertly locked down into kind of parts of myself which um I didn't want to kind of get in touch with suddenly came to the four so I made this huge decision Really Brave decision um knowing that I could lose everything if I if I came out t
o to friends and family um and and and initially that's exactly what happened it was worst case scenario that my family rejected me I still haven't SP spoken to my kind of parents and brother since moment lost pretty much the entirety of our friends Group by by two people um ended up losing the place where we lived initially kind of lost the marriage relationship with Danielle um and also contact with her side of the family as well but I kind of thrown all my eggs into to one basket big time uh
with that decision to actually do something make my life better and just after that happened um I got a letter from the kind of local hospital the PCT who did the funding um at that time telling me that they weren't going to fund me to actually engage the NHS in terms of supporting my transition um and that kind of because I just lost every making this huge decision had a dramatic effect on my mental health and that led to um a kind of serious self harm suicide event um which for the poor Daniel
le who is dealing with my the shock of my transition actually turned into an attempted murder suspect now that's how Sophie describes it what about Danielle what does she remember about that evening imagine this issue else um we were both working for the police at the time and on this particular day um I was hosting an awards ceremony um at Police Headquarters with the deputy chief Constable had a lovely evening um packed up wrapped up got started going home Drew up on Drive in the car and front
door's wide open it's late at night it's dark um and I'm thinking what Earth our front door doing open I didn't say I was on my way um and so I called I called Sophie's name and she said leave the door open leave the door open and sounded quite panicked so I go inside and um as I walk into the kitchen I can't describe it as anything other than a scene now to Texas chain massacre there was blood everywhere and Sophie's lying on the floor or kind of semiconscious and I'm kind of in shock I don't
really know what's going on and all of a sudden the first responder arrives and kind of like appears in the kitchen and I'm I'm I'm just I don't know what happened because you know when you watch crime drumers on TV and they say don't touch the knife well I touched the knife and I not only touched the knife I picked it up and my little kind of thing about cleaning I actually went to the sink and washed it up um and put it on the side and uh as the police arrived they were like put that down to t
ouch that um I was taken to one side they decided that I potentially was a perpetrator and I'd attacked Sophie and they decided that it was um I would need to be detained so I wasn't allowed near Sophie I had a police escort they took my hous keys off me I had tape around the house I wasn't allowed back in until scenes of crime had been in um and do you know what the fortunate part for me was that that evening I had been with the deputy chief conable of that police force which meant that when it
came to Alibi time they were able to check me out pretty quick so I you know I was back in the house the next morning but it was it was a really traumatic night really traumatic night it was and we we could look back in it with few I think um because of that that scenario because we are a big fan of of crime dramas but the Ser the serious not of that was um I ended up recovering from that and I was then spent a week in a mental health unit which was a really fascinating um experience very very
scary not enjoyable at all and whilst all this was happening um we're still both working at Police Headquarters they one of our colleagues at work got no idea that all of this stuff is happening so I literally came out of pencil health institution back into into into work and and carried on with with my training role um and everyone just thought I'd had you know short absence for for some reason the reason that I've started off talking about mental health is a mention there that pre-transition I
had this this kind of serious low mental health with periods of mental health in in dispersed over over a series of years but post transition I have what I can describe as a kind of inner light inside of me um which is is is actually quite beautiful I think which means that I have a kind of resilience within me that I can actually deal with most things that life throws at me and being by a Transformer life is thrown quite a lot in in my direction it is quite the story what we love about these w
omen is how honest and open they are this really is the first step in driving positive change because people's lived experiences breed understanding and empathy and compassion and for those with a similar lived experience reassurance they're not alone so fast forward a few months and Sophie has made the brave decision to tell the world that she is transgender so what was this like for Danielle when Sophie first told me that she was transgender it was I think in the April of that year and then th
e incident in the kitchen was kind of later on that summer and it was it kind of rocked our world and as she said she was actually had it got so bad that we ended up in having to um section her for a while she came out of there and everybody in our lives had an opinion on what was going on at the time people were telling me what I should do what I shouldn't do every time we left the sh people stared at us people made comments they went around the supermarket aisles twice look at us and I just I
just was finding the whole thing overwhelming and as part of that I tried really really hard to kind of like carry on as you know life as normal and after a while it just got it just got too much my mental health was suffering I had some time off work I had counseling I think the counselor that I had helped me get to where I am today without them I don't know where I would have been and when I say that that's because at the time there was not a lot in mainstream media about um being transgender
there was hardly any resources on the internet and I was really really struggling to find help and the doctors decided because they didn't have anyone who dealt with this kind of situation they sent me off to see three therapists to pick one to see whether you know how I could work with them and the the one that I went to see that I I kind of like felt in Affinity with and we started to work together was one that said look I I can't say that I've had the this experience before but what I'm looki
ng at is I'm looking at you and I'm listening to you and what I'm he hearing is that you're going through a type of bereavement you're going through a loss of your husband the life that you have now the way that you're perceived in society and also the loss of a life that you thought you had the future you thought you had which really resonated with me because it was it was a total uturn in terms of our life the kind of the question which probably changed everything was she said to me what's you
r greatest fear and I said it was losing my best friend and of course she looked at me and said well why do you need to do that and I hadn't even thought I thought it was a kind of all in or all out and um so she's so from that we worked with that and um it we decided that maybe do we just be friends or do we carry on in our relationship and as part of that um she encouraged me to think about other avenues and exploring other things and I thought with all the white noise with all of the staring
with all of the chatter I thought do you know what I'm going to just make a break and I'm going to I'm going to go off and do something completely different six months and then that will clear my mind give me some space and enable me to work out what what I want to do next so I ended up packing up my entire life into the back of a fat 500 which you can imagine was tough and driving down to the south of Spain and finding a job in jalter which is a English speaking British overseas territory and t
hat six months was was pivotable to the rest of our lives and in fact strange enough Sophie actually drove down with me to actually deliver me to Spain and then she soed a couple of weeks and I put her on a plane back to the UK two weeks later and the moment she left I felt like I'd lost my my arm on my leg it was like I knew in that moment that I felt like I'd made a mistake that being a part wasn't what I wanted but in actual fact it was probably what I needed to solidify that thought because
that time period made me realized that your connection with a human being is much more than being husband and wife and being seen as acceptable in society that heterosexual couple which blends in yes things were going to be more tough yes people were going to look at Sophia's transgender and actually she's now thrown me into a world where the rest of the world sees me as in a lesbian couple if we stay together so that was really hard for me as well and it still to this day remains uncomfortable
in certain situations particularly in work situations where you know you're meeting new people and you're not sure whether you trust that somebody's going to be supportive or not which is fundamentally one of the reasons that when we decided to pull our resources and experiences um to to form base it was about helping people to not have to go through those really really uncomfortable experiences in their personal life and at work because when you're feeling that you're hiding that you're being c
autious about who you trust all the time it just puts you on edge and you don't really you don't you don't really progress talking of the workplace we wanted to know how Sophie's colleagues reacted so my experience in the workplace is has been largely positive because of the people who are working with me and the way that they actually kind of treat me now because they're dealing with me day in day out they just see me as the same as them a human being doing a job so any kind of uh turns disappe
ar it's usually within about two hours of meeting me and then it's just a normal human relationship we make human connections with each other just like people do in teams all over the world um but what I found in all organizations is what I call these con concentric circles of hate so the inner core of people who deal with me and know me get on absolutely fine there's no issues at all um and then when you go wider into the company where people don't see me or inter me on a daily basis their kind
of behavior um towards me and the language that they use that's reported back to me on occasion is is you know gets worse and worse and then when you go into the wider company in quite a few organizations then they just have this experience of taking on information from from mainstream media now the media does seem to like this subject there are so many articles online and many of them dismiss transgenderism easy for me to say as a mental health condition I must admit until I met Sophie I wasn'
t entirely sure how it all worked myself so I asked Sophie to school me it's it's not a mental health condition it's it's it's quite difficult to explain to people because it's it's just kind of an innate an innate um feeling in my case I'm binding transwoman so my my gender identity is congruent with who I am on the inside everything is is is lined up and people try and kind of turn into an educational exercise and going into other like definitions and things like that people always say gender
identities in the brain but it's more than that I think it's in the is it is in the brain but it's also in your heart and in your soul and it's absolutely definitive um and it's also something that should be really private to me ideally in life it really shouldn't impact anybody else's life um and in the main it it doesn't at all some people who dismiss the transgender experience use the argument that it shouldn't exist in the first place despite the complexities and social constructs surroundin
g the idea of gender some people believe that if you are born with male genitalia you're a man and if you are born with female genitalia you're a woman their argument is that nobody can be transgender Sophie explains this way of thinking isn't quite right so basically it's a it's a belief that sex is immutable so it's kind of you are born male or female that's determined by genitalia and there is nothing else in science that exists outside of that therefore a trans identity is completely invalid
that's that's kind of simple way describing that belief system the science doesn't back that up um one of the frustrating things for me I came out as I said in 2011 is these kind of debates all across Europe and in many other countries around the world these debates were settled in uh you know from the 1930s 1940s 1950s and it's it should be a a complete nonissue so but those kind of Matt cro isues if she she kind of think about the the kind of press coverage around trans issues which remember
between 0.1 0.56 I don't ex% population it's absolutely Ely and it really shouldn't be public interest at all but it is used as a as a kind of way of distracting people from what's actually really going on you may have seen the other argument from certain people who we won't name on YouTube that this is just an excuse for men to get access to female only areas so is there any truth to this well who better to ask than someone who had complete access to the national sex offenders database here's S
ophie again um so the main kind of myth chance people at the moment is that we are a threat to women and girls in private spaces so the theory is that somebody who is not trans who's a predatory male will actually go through and engage with um a kind of gender trans I in order to facilitate their mod of suppandi their MO committing a sexual offense um against a woman or a girl now when you actually consider that c light of day it's as a proposition it just dissipates on contact with a really it'
s it's actually quite a ridiculous notion when I worked in the Police Service I trained and had access to all of the national kind of crime systems so I had access to National crime data and my fingertips I I trained the national sex fenders data base I had access to all of that data and at that point there are zero crimes recorded in the UK following that motor Randi there was only one crime I found searching the police national computer which was somebody taking on the guys of female to make t
heir escape so it's some guys did over a post office and they dressed in burkers to actually kind of disperse themselves into a crowd so that was the only time in the whole criminal justice history of the UK um as of 2015 which you know hopefully is quite informative to people who like things like f um that it is completely nonissue and if you look at the the kind of countries who practice you know self ID you know places like Malta Ireland the name twoo they also have zero instances of people b
eing threatened at all so it's complete fallacy but this informs what is supposedly this Grand debate cultur debate in mainstream media which you'll never see a transperson partaking in it's an absurd notion that trans people are predators yet it's one I hear spouted online a lot this narrative is not only Incorrect and grossly unfair it's dangerous this misinformation spreads fear which spreads aggression which spreads violence transgender individuals and communities experience shocking amounts
of violence and discrimination in fact transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crime including rape sexual assault and aggravated assault this narrative is dangerous this narrative needs to stop yeah clearly there were a lot of changes for both Danielle and Sophie when Sophie transitioned but there was something that became glaringly obvious to Sophie when she presented her new self when I presented a Sophie and I I didn't look very good in terms of what peop
le term passing the time because I didn't do any kind of you know any preparations or what not then I wasn't perceived as fale I was perceived as other okay but the thing that hit me right in the face was I lost all of the male privilege that ID had up to that moment in my life the ability to walk into a shop there you know to go into a bar sit down read a book just like a conversation with somebody completely disappeared overnight now I didn't know that I had male privilege until I didn't have
it and that's the challenge and that's why that kind of mindset is wrong but it's a real Tusk not to crack the greatest trick privilege ever pulled is convincing people it didn't exist now Sophie did concede in the full interview that she's paraphrased Kaiser so from The Usual Suspects movie there but still what a line as we've alluded to before Danielle and Sophie have set up a consultancy to help organizations be more inclusive it's Sophie to explain their reasoning and she starts by telling a
story about when she was working for the Police Service in the UK it's East medland Regional group of forces I was there speaking about my journey and I like a bit of audience participation so I threw it out and said why are you here today and a police officer at the front said I'm here as a punishment and there was a group of police officers like 10 of them who had done something bad in their in their duties out in the community and there a punishment that been sent on this diversity course an
d I found that quite amusing at the time but it really started my brain working overtime I suddenly realized that they were the people that I needed to speak to they are the hearts and Minds that I need to change if I want to make you know my diversity inclusion work actually affected when we're talking about transgender issues now we're having the same conversations I was having back then over 10 years later and I've noticed that in the corporate dni world nothing's really moved forward and bec
ause of that experience that's informed my belief that in order for dni to be effective you need to talk to the 95% of people who don't give a about dni rather than the continual 5% who really get it um and if I was going to characterize corporate dni at the moment it's this giant Echo chamber are people who really passionate about diversity inclusion speaking to people who are interested in diversity inclusion and therefore really get it and so I think that's one of the main reasons why things
just haven't moved forward as much as they should do this is such a revelation to me because Sophie's absolutely right there is zero point in talking about this to people who are already converted that whole preaching to the choir thing it's the non-believers who need to hear this which is why I genuinely hope that this is an uncomfortable but necessary listen for some people but when it comes to seeking change in the workforce Millennials and gen Zed are as usual spearheading the campaign one o
f the things um that we've been coming across time and time again through research and actually speaking to members of um generation Zed genz is that their their views and their values are very different and what in what they want an employer in a workplace this started with the Millennials and now that gen Z and by I think it's 203 about 30 odd per of the workplace will be from that generation and they're looking at their workplaces and going to interviews and asking these two-way questions it'
s no longer an interview where the business just asks you about your skills and experience and what you can bring to the table but they see it as a two-way conversation and they're finding out whether the employer is a good fit for them and if they don't have inclusion at this the front and center of what they do and if their cor you know corporate social responsibility Etc their ethical values are not aligned they're unlikely to want to pursue a career with that organization and so I think busi
nesses really do need to think about this because as we move through the next couple of decades the people that don't put so much importance on it will be falling out of the workplace and if business owners don't start to look at making sure that their culture is inclusive they just won't attract and retain the best talents so I always say it's a little bit like you know are they heading towards Extinction um are they dinosaurs Danielle and Sophie have had extensive experience working with organ
izations to improve inclusion and belonging so who do they think is doing a particularly good job here's Sophie I think a good example from the UK that I'm aware of where their kind of external values are you know really lived vicariously through their their kind of value sets within within their teams and they've got a really great inclusive culture it's actually ansus so I've got some former colleagues who who who work at ansus in in the UK and they are I think really really switched on in ter
ms of everything that we're talking about one of the things that they're doing really well is they they've introduced a kind of which would traditionally be termed a kind of learning experience platform where um people can access you know personal growth um learning but they they they're using it as an effective learning tool for people that can be accessed remotely right all of their the retail networks um but they're also using that platform to kind of effectively communicate their their cultu
re and their values to shine light on areas of the business and people in the business who you know wouldn't normally get a looking and they created um some really great levels of of human connection what's interesting is that both Danielle and Sophie totally accept that the traditional way of incorporating di into business is not working as well as it should be but with their new consultancy belonging base are they doing things a little differently what we're trying to do at belonging base is t
o say we're not going to focus on what I call the kind of painting by numbers you know diversity inclusion models we want to actually really get into the cultures in organizations we want to be getting into to the team level speaking with people helping them to deal with each other in the best way that they possibly can so we want to focus on the things that we have in common with people rather than the differences that set us apart now one thing that we know we all have is mental health um and
that is a really good way of helping to change the conversations that people have in their teams and in their workplaces when I trained up as a mental health first aid instructor um we actually discussed things like practicing the skill of listening non judgmentally to other people we do a big piece around What's called the frame of reference which is a model to help you realize that when you're dealing with somebody they bring their whole life experience their identity their sexual or orientati
on their beliefs their socioeconomic background their work experience that point and all of those factors in their individual frame of reference make them who they are at that moment in time and that frame of reference is going to be entirely individual to them and completely different from yours and just by appreciating that you have an immediate change of mindset in how you deal with people in terms of what kind of I hope the change that I see in cultures is that people will no long to be talk
ing about the business case A diversity inclusion what one of the things I would say if I was kind of if I want to see a new startup coming into into the marketplace and they set aside money they think yeah let's do some DNA I work then I would urge them not to spend that money on a Dei specialist I would get them to spend that money training their leaders to be the best people they possibly can and facilitating these kind of team workshops where where people can can really make those connection
s now we've talked about belonging on the Pod many many times before but here we have two women who both have experienced a huge change and as they mentioned before the change was not accepted by everyone so I asked Danielle what belonging really means to her and how we can build a culture of belonging and inclusion in a workpl the feeling that we H we had when we first went through the transition was that we didn't feel like we belonged anymore we felt like we were kind of like Outsiders and th
e people that have made our experience is great moving forward it wasn't necessarily a particular company it was particular people and managers and teams that made us feel welcome and helped support us in developing our careers so for me it's not about par because there have lots of companies that went Awards you know don't get me wrong but if you spoke to every single person in that business do they all feel like they belong one of the things that I I came across through one of your old podcast
s actually was the quote by John amichi the uh cultures defined by The Worst Behavior tolerated which I absolutely agree with because that's that that kind of backs up what I've just been talking about which is that depending on where you are if you let banter happen if you let discrimination happen in your area everyone thinks that's okay the reason we picked belonging base one of the reasons was we started with that feeling of belonging I think for us it was really personal so there's a quote
I think I think as breny brown talks about belonging and the difference being the opposite to belonging is fitting in and we spent a lot of time just trying to fit in and stay under the radar and it really does affect your performance and your mental health so what we would like to do if it's even if it's just one company at a time one team at a time we want to be the people that you go to if you really want to have that feeling that that create that culture where people feel they truly belong t
o be their best selves it's it's all about that belonging feeling for us we felt it we didn't feel it and then we feel it again so and it does make such a big big difference to what you're capable of at work what's so interesting about the story is that Danielle is really open about her own experiences and challenges with being self partner there are a lot of stories out there from the perspective of the person transitioning what about those who are most close to them here's Danielle again I thi
nk when you're a partner of somebody that's going through a transition it's for me anyway it was a journey I didn't think I would be on one that I didn't want to be on and one that I had a very adverse reaction to initially so much so so that I threw myself into work and had a burnout I basically crashed and burned and then spent a whole week in bed and then seven weeks off work so and I I thought my whole world had fallen in I and I had some very dark thoughts and I look at my life today and we
're living we're living our Dream really now you know behind me we go confidently we we are living our Dream we're living in the south of Spain living our best life now and had I let that get the better of me at the time we may not be sitting here today I went through a whole period of denial for quite some time and I couldn't get myself out of that area and I think with the help of a professional I actually got to the other side and if you don't feel comfortable speak professional reach out to
people like us that have been through the experience because we're always happy to talk to people who um are are in that dark place and can't see the way out because it's it does it does knock you for six when something like this happens and your life kind of gets totally turned upside down so my advice would be talking to people and getting professional help yeah find somebody you can trust um make sure that you speak words out loud that's really important for your internal processing but first
and foremost focus on the future however kind of dark you're feeling if you focus on the future even if it's one day in the future one week in the future one month in the future you'll just automatically start looking forward to something um and that's the Essence of Hope is that looking forward to Something in the future and that's the that's the key to still being around kind of the age of 52 um as any alternative dream life in Spain with you know beautiful property lovely kind of cultural su
rroundings through beautiful dogs living their best lives which could have ended so easily transgender and gender identity is a complex topic and one that is not spoken about enough certainly in terms of the actual facts if this is all new to you if you want some help understanding what it is to be transgender and how to better support people in your workplace sery has some excellent book recommendations so the first one hardly recommend this is It's called trans Britain Journey from the Shadows
by the wonderful Christine Burns and if you really want to kind of find out what really trans Community is all about what we've achieved over the last few decades that's a read for you if you want to kind of look at in more detail the kind of culture wars that going on at the moment this book is an absolute showstopper the trailer gender issue by Chan Fay absolutely extraordinary author and really kind of picks all that in a very articulate and entertaining way and of course if you want to chat
with these amazing people then here's how to get in touch best way to access uses through our LinkedIn profiles follow belonging base on on LinkedIn um you can go on our our website as well and just click on the contact us button and we'll be happy to take things forward with you during lgbtq plus History Month Danielle and Sophie are offering sessions for anyone who's interested kind of like a lunch and learn so we delve into you know what is lgbtq History Month some of the key changes that ha
ve happened in terms of History over the last 50 plus years through our lifetime which is actually really recent history in terms of um equality right and then we look at things like the language the confusion around language how people are worried that they're going to trick themselves up and and re reinforcing you know it's not a problem don't worry and also we look at um a little bit of our personal Journey about the belonging the not belonging and the belonging again and how important that i
s in the workplace and talk to businesses about allyship um as well we're kind of intimating that with our own kind of timeline as of our little life on Earth so far and hopefully being quite entertaining at the same time we could do another three or four episod with Danielle and Sophie alone let alone expand the conversation around the transgender experience it's it's a big complex topic that is misunderstood but one that is really important we engage with we do better to understand and we don'
t shy away from we don't fear yeah and as Danielle said the younger Generations are looking at you and they are judging you on whether you're actually taking on board all this stuff whether you're actually doing something about it now the kind of the thing which really surprised me was the whole idea about the sort of white male privilege and of course Sophie's got this unique perspective in that she's you know she's been both on both sides of that of that fence and I suppose I joke about it on
quite quite often saying you know I'm sort of a Gen X white straight all this kind of thing I'm kind of quite lucky to take advantage of that privilege really and also the opportunity as well I think that you have to to support um the people around you to be an ally to women to trans people to members of the lgbtq plus Community um we're not hating on you know I think a lot of the media hates on on the white straight mail it's not that it's more a case of male privilege is real white privilege i
s real if we can use this privilege to support people around us and and improve the whole Human Experience for everyone then that is really something that we should be doing especially as Business Leaders as people in these positions of authority we should be taking accountability for The Human Experience I loved what Sophie said you know it's it's we're all humans you're only a human being too and that is making it hugely simplified and we're not taking away from the complexities of the experie
nce and stories different different communities have but when it boils down to it if we actually just consider The Human Experience within our organizations it's a pretty good first step yeah and as Danielle said it's okay to get it wrong it's if you if you want to get it right that makes the big difference I think so next week we have the Incredible Dr CLA Hughes from mind if you're not from the UK you don't know what mind is it's a huge mental health charity um it's a really big deal and then
we have the amazing author and podcast of Bruce daisley and then rounding off our lgbtq plus month we have the father of workplace culture himself John and Mei yes it's going to be an incredible episode an incredible lineup I'm so excited and what a way to continue our February content with the incredible Danielle and Sophie and bring you our very small contribution towards lgbtq plus History Month definitely go and follow them on social medias on LinkedIn to see everything they're up to Daniell
e and Sophie thank you so much for your contributions to this episode it has been an incredible one and one that I think will always remain very special thank you okay we'll see you next week bye [Music] bye-bye all is grumpy grumpy grumpy out grumpy [Music] [Laughter] out listening listening listening listening 17 2017 mean at this point if you're watching this on a blooper and you actually watch the bloopers and you know what I mean when I say 2017 I want to take you for a drink get in touch w
e'll fly you out to muster Carana okay
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