Paloma Medina: The Power of Resiliency

On this episode of Humanizing Tech, we’re joined by Paloma Medina for a discussion on how her love of all things systems and her own personal upbringing has shaped her resiliency throughout her career and in Tech. By way of anarchism, her work in healthcare the tech community, Paloma proves the road you choose may not always be a straight path, but the journey will shape you. Tune in to learn about the 6 core needs we all have and go to www.palomamedina.com/biceps.

Transcript

Intro: Welcome to humanizing tech, a PDXWIT podcast. We interview people to dig below the surface of their achievements and challenges showcasing the story behind the story. We believe that focusing on the person and humanizing their lived experiences will help us shape the future of tech.

This episode of Humanizing Tech is brought to you by First Tech Federal Credit Union. First Tech puts people over profit with personalized financial services and convenient banking solutions. To help you thrive. First tech offers individualized tools for your financial wellness, whether you're saving for college, buying a house or looking forward to retirement, when you're ready to save time and money visit firsttechfed.com and see how first tech invests in you. 

Before we get started, I want to acknowledge the land we are on, wherever we're tuning in from. PDXWIT recognizes the ongoing violence,  trauma, and erasure Indigenous Oregonians and Native Americans face. Portland rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Cathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia river. We endeavor to have this acknowledgement be more than just words. The tech industry is building the future of our world and it is up to us to ensure that it is a future for all. To find out more about how we are supporting the future of Native Americans and Indigenous Oregonians, please visit our website. We’ll also add a link in the show notes. 

Anusha Neelam: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Humanizing Tech. This is your co-host Amusha she/her pronouns for me.

Rihana Mungin: And my name is Rihanna. I also use she/her pronouns.

AN: Awesome. Well, without further ado, I'm super, super excited for our conversation today. So our awesome guest today is a TEDx speaker, management trainer, coach, and entrepreneur. She has 10 plus years of experience merging the neuro-psychology of work and life to support leaders and managers in building high performing and life affirming workplaces. Woo! So cool. Welcome Paloma Medina. 

Paloma Medina: Yay, hello! 

RM: Hi! 

PM: So good to be here.

RM: Before you showed up, Paloma. I was just saying that Anusha and I are like new friends. You know, we've been doing this podcast for a little while, but we didn't really know each other. And she came over for dinner last night at my house and I thought would be really funny to ask her first date questions. So I Googled questions to ask on the first date, and the question that I just asked was what is the cutest animal in your opinion, and what is the ugliest animal in your opinion?

PM: Oooh, I'm going to get so much trouble. Oh,  the cutest animal. I mean, red pandas, hands down. What can't they do? That is always adorable.

RM: That is a great answer.

PM: Okay. the ugliest, I feel like I can't get a reaction really. I have an instant gross reaction to pugs. I'm just like, what's wrong with that dog? And I'm like, oh, it's a pug. [laughs] And then once my brain realizes it's a pug and that is how it's bred. Then I  can notice that the uniqueness of each note pug is unique and then I'm like, oh, it's kind of cute. But I'm not going to lie, my first reaction is, what's wrong with that dog? And I'm like, oh, it's a pug. There's some part of my brain that's like, there's something wrong with the dog. So pug owners, I am so sorry.

RM: Don't pugs have, because of their like face shape, like their eyes can just pop out of their head? Because of the way their skull is shaped. 

AN: Really?

PM: Well, that and I think they can die easily ‘cause they don't breathe right. If it gets just a little too hot. 

AN: I did hear about that. Yeah. It's  terrible. It's just the way that we've bred them. And it's one of the things that… 

PM: It's a rough spot, but once I really hone in on what's unique about that pug, then my brain instantly is like, oh, it's kind of cute. 

RM: Yeah. 

PM: Yeah. So weird anyway. Sorry pug owners. 

RM: Great answer. Okay. So we should get to some of the questions.

PM: Maybe some of the tech questions. [laughs]

RM: So not really a question at all, but we're really wanting you to start us off by giving us an overview about yourself and your background. What's the quick overview?

PM: Hmm, what's the quick overview? I am proud of how many industries I've worked in - in a professional setting besides retail and restaurant jobs. I worked in HIV positive healthcare and healthcare that supports people experiencing homelessness and then all the way to tech obviously, and now also supporting creative agencies and a lot of startups. So who I've worked for has really varied, and I really liked that because I've learned so much from how different industries approach human and technical problems, and systems problems. But as far as my actual work it wasn't until about maybe eight, ten years ago that I really realized that my nerdery around psychology and neuroscience was maybe a thing to incorporate into my work. Before that I just really thought I was like a management systems person.

And so, I think the thing that people know me now for is definitely more of the neuroscience and my obsession with the psychology of work. But as well as equity and inclusion as a more recent thing that people know I dig into. But it's really so much of it is just me being into systems. And human systems workflow systems and how to make them really human friendly. So that's the common thread through all of it. Even when I worked in retail, I was always like, this doesn't seem efficient or like this seems like it really frustrates the staff. So why did we do it? How did it start? How do we change it? How do we make sure everyone sticks to the new plan? Always. I couldn't not think about that even when I worked at Starbucks.

AN: Very cool. And, and I'm super excited to dissect a little bit more of your professional background. And I know you've got a lot to share with us. On a personal note, I'm kind of curious to know a little bit more - you mentioned to us when we spoke to you earlier that you had immigrated from Mexico when you were eight years old. You're also a woman in tech and, and I'm sure there's a lot more identities that you hold that we might not be aware of, but there's a lot of intersectionality there. So I'm curious, how has your identity shaped your success today?

PM: Ooh, I like the twist at the end there “shaped by success.” Thank you! Because it has. So yeah, I immigrated when I was eight years old and I was essentially bicultural, binational and from Guadalajara, Mexico where my family is, and Southern California. So for most of my life, I was bouncing between two cultures. But really assimilating hard into American culture because I was young and I didn't understand the need to belong. Actually, no, that's not fair. I actually very well understood at eight years old that the way to belong and to be fully seen was to assimilate into American culture. And so the California  - I don't know if this is still what it's like for young kids - but when I was a young kid in Southern California, in Orange County and Riverside County, Mexicans were only troublemakers. That's how you were stereotyped. And I was a hardcore nerd. I really cared about school. I was really into punk rock.  I was straight edge. I was a full human, so I fully assimilated. I just didn't think about it, I tried to just be white.  And I had all white friends. And so it wasn't until probably college, Evergreen State College in Washington, where I started maybe my second year there where I was like, what happened? [laughs]

And I started exploring, at the time I was exploring arts, mixed media. I started exploring assimilation? And I actually moved back to Mexico for a few months as an adult to kind of just be like what's happening. And so  I didn't really self acknowledge those intersections until I was 23 or 24 maybe. Then I never thought about it again. I just was like, cool, I've explored assimilation and what it was to me, did some cool art projects. And then in tech, other people told me who I was. They were like, oh, we finally have a female speaker. And I was like, huh? 

RM: How rude. 

PM: Well and some of it was other women being like finally!

RM: Oh, sure.  

PM: Or people being like, oh, it's really important that we have more women of color. And I was like skrrt?

RM: How did you feel, how did that make you feel in the moment when you heard that stuff?

PM: Just confused. I think assimilation is so deep that doing like a year's worth of art projects isn't per se, going to unpack 14 years of a very deep set cultural assimilation. So I was mostly just confused. I was also confused because I think the thing that mostly - and this is sometimes controversial, I've heard for me to say, but it's accurate for me - I didn't see my ethnicity cause I’m lighter skin toned Mexican. I didn't see my ethnicity as an identity at all. I saw my gender as very much, even since I was little, very much affecting me more. I saw how… I just saw, I just saw it like I was little and I was like, what's up with that? How come I don't get to? Or like, why did I just get that comment? 

And so for me being in tech, I was for someone to say like, oh, finally we have a woman. It wasn't that I was like, whoa, because in social work we were mostly women, which is my previous industry that I worked in. So it was more that it was my first time just being rare around the thing that I knew was always a limitation or could be a limitation - gender. It was just the first time people talked about it. I mean really, really, really, really in social services and in hospital work at the time, we did not talk about identity because we were all a bunch of either white ladies or women of color, like really 80% of our teams. And so we just, I don't know, again, this is, you know, 15, 20 years ago at this point 15 years ago.

So tech is really the first time that I thought I was surrounded by mostly white dudes. There were white dudes, many of whom were very comfortable talking about race and gender because I worked at NCI and that was my first tech job. And so I was like, this is cool. They were calling me on stuff that was proper. Like I sent out some email where they're like, hey… It was like a joke that technically was adjacent to Boy Scouts. It was adjacent, not about the Boy Scouts, but it was adjacent. And one white dude engineer emailed me and was like, hey, just a heads up that Boy Scouts homophobic, you know. And I was like, did I just get called up by a 22 year old white dude? I did. And he's right. It was cool. It was fascinating. 

AN: Interesting. Wow. 

PM: Again, they were mostly white dudes that I was surrounded by, so.

RM: Okay. So let's talk about more of how that identity shaped your success because that shaped it up until that point.

PM: Yes, you're right. I didn't answer that part of the question. I have a theory that growing up female with strong female models in your life, which I did grow up with very, very bad-ass women in my life. That very much told me how to show up as a bad-ass woman. They didn't just happen to be bad-ass -  I have an aunt who's this amazing human rights lawyer in Mexico. And from a very young age, she was like, Hey, so when they do that to you on the street, when someone says X or Y in the street, what do you do? I was 10 years old and she was walking me through how to respond to sexual harassment on the street. It was amazing. So because of that, I just learned early on how to be resilient and the difference between what people try to put on you versus how you get to show up and feel.

And I think that's really magical. To the difference between this person's talking to me X way, this person's treating me this way, however they're seeing me. This person's trying to limit who I can be either intentionally or unintentionally, but I get to decide how I feel about that. And I get to decide that I don't care and I'm like, whatever, I got career goals, step aside. And so I think the way that it shaped me, especially around gender was that it shaped that later when hard things happened, I think a lot of managers and tech folks that I coached, I just realized how they would just fall apart at like every little challenge to their career. My boss would support my professional development. I was like, what? Like, yeah, that sucks. Happy to be here to vent about it. But that's not the full story, right? 

Do you want to learn how to advance your career regardless of who your boss is and what they're doing for you? Cause that's what I had to do since I was like 12, right? You're not supporting me. Cool. Who's gonna support me? Who? You, you, you? I'm just going to keep looking. So I felt very thankful. I think a lot of people could say, oh, but it sucks that there was that many limitations based on gender. Yes, of course it does.

AN: No, I was just gonna say it sounds like seeing female role models that taught you how to stand up for yourself, how to be resourceful, those are the things that really helped you learn how to do that for yourself and turned that into help shape your success in a lot of ways. Right?

PM: Right. Even when gender wasn't the limitation…  When gender was the limitation, obviously I had been trained on how to do that. And I trained myself. I grew up on Riot Girl, it was really peaking when I was in high school. I very much was a Riot Girl. I very much read all the scenes. I wrote my own scenes. And I think that like all of those steps meant that I understood gender, but I was trained on how to get around it. But then also later when there's just regular life challenges or career challenges that happen,  most recently say losing my business because of the pandemic. I mean, that just happened to people. It happened to all kinds of people. I was able to have a few months of grieving and then just shake it off and be like, what's next? Because it started from really little.

AN: Wow. 

RM: Okay. So I have a question... you're talking about assimilation. We're all women of color, we're talking right now. And I went through a rural high school, like very white. There was some Hispanic representation, no Black people, very few. And there's a certain amount of assimilation that you have to do. When I think about it now, when I reflect, it's like I did this assimilation to keep myself safe and to keep myself sane. When you reflect on your experience like that, and I know Anusha is very similar, you know, she went to a very white high school as one of the few Asian women there. 

AN: And I was the child of immigrants. So I experienced something similar as far as a new country and having to navigate all of those ins and outs without anyone else around that looked like me either. So yeah.

RM: So did you feel like that assimilation was a requirement or something that kept you safe? 

PM: Nope! That's a really good question. So in Southern California, again, back when I was a kid- I don't know how different that is now - it wasn't required. I remember my first year, I'm in second grade, right? I mean, I'm a kid. And I remember within the first few months writing in my diary and being like, cool. So there's the Mexican kids. And then there's the white kids and then there's the Asian kids. And then like some other brown people, right? The first grade school that I went to didn't have a ton of Black kids in it. I wonder why? Anyway a ton of Asian, Southeast Asian and Latino kids there. And I remember just being like, cool. So it's very clear who is considered smart here and I'm smart. And so I got to just get with those kids and they were the Asian and white kids.

And I remember also my parents… I had a Mexican friend and one Black friend and then Asian and white friends, and my parents speaking of intra racial racism, my parents who are super progressive and liberal and hippies were like, Hey, maybe you don't hang out with those two girls, the Black girl and the Latina girl. And I remember being like why? And they were like, you know, I just don't think it's a good idea… I don't think they're at your level academically. I don't know if that's true or not from grades or whatever, whatever, right? But I remember being like, okay. That's rough, right? Like Mexicans, I mean and not surprising,  this happens a lot in Southern California. There's a lot, a lot of inter racism a lot between people of color. A LOT! 

It goes all over, all kinds of ways. And so I just was like, got it. It wasn't about safety. It didn't feel like that. To me, it felt about prospects. From a very, very young age I was very ambitious. I just liked status. I liked compliments. I liked being told that I was like one of the best. And it wasn't from a competition perspective, it was just from feeling useful to the world. And so I just was like, got it, I see the kids to hang out with where I get to just be treated that way. And so, yeah. What was sad, though it wasn't a choice from a safety perspective per say, what was sad is how many of my diary entries talked, not just about who to hang out with, right? But I talked about praying to God which I  super believed in God then,  praying to God to make me blonde, to lighten my skin, to make me Barbie. I knew that it wasn't just who I hung out with. I knew it was how it looked. Yeah. So, yeah.

AN: And I wrote a little bit about this intersectionality in a piece for PDXWIT, but when I was in high school, I used to try, with the allowance that I had, to exclusively shop at Abercrombie, which makes me cringe now thinking about it. [all laugh] But it was like a similar version of that where it's like, oh, I need to look like this. And if you know anything about Abercrombie and their branding, it's definitely geared toward the white, blonde haired, very preppy, very cool. So yeah, I get that. 

PM: Yeah, yeah. It's funny how very little… what sucks is that it wasn't an actual choice, right? The choice was once I was an adult, but at that point it had been done. I had lost a ton of my language proficiency because I refused to speak Spanish outside of just with my parents. All the things you lose that you really can't gain back.

AN: And is that what you said you meant, you mentioned you went back to Mexico for a few months and was that to try and get in touch with your roots? What was the mission there?

PM: I went to Mexico, I spent three months every year until I was 17 in Mexico. So, I felt proficient in that culture, shall we say, but I think the assimilation work and when I went to understand or explore the assimilation work, I went to live with three months with my mom, my brother and my very large extended family and very tight family that all lived there.  It was really to just sit with this new question. So like I'd always been going to Mexico and hanging out for three months. I was always only one foot there. And this time I was like, who am I, if I'm not constantly still anchored in American culture in American superiority? That idea that America's the best.

And so it was really just being there. I had some excuse through school to get credit of what I was studying, but I was really just like, who? Everything from exploring my own racism towards my own crew, exploring Mexicans own weird internal racism, right? Like how dark you are tells people how educated you are. I know that that's not just true for Mexicans, but that's one of the things that happens there. There's a lot of classes intersected with skin tone. And so just sitting with it, just being like, what is up with me and this place and these folks. And I don't know that I came back with ah-has. So I came back, I returned to Evergreen I don't know about now, but then it was very white, very, very white college.

And I was, you know, I was married at that point to a white dude and I was pretty much surrounded by mostly white friends. Mostly I would say like 80%, 90% white friends and I came back and was just so sad. So I think the only aha was that I finally got to a place with Mexico and with Spanish where I could feel the yearning for it and my place in it. But there was no like, okay,  I see how to be in the world and who to be and what to change and how to talk about it. I just was like, I'm so sad to have to come back to a white world. Then like two years later, I forgot about it and was like back in tech or rather moved to tech, it was just a very white world.

RM: Well, it's really interesting because when you talk about your childhood in this way, it's like such a stark reflection of America's values and where America puts its values and you were eight years old and you picked up on it and that is just it's.. It takes a lot. As someone who's been through a lot of therapy, it takes a lot of unpacking to work through that and really understand it. So I appreciate you talking about it, candidly, cause you have to work through it to a certain point to be able to a, just understand it and then feel comfortable talking about it. 

PM: Yeah. And it's a lifelong process, right? 

AN: So then moving back to Portland. Speaking of white. 

PM: Yeah I have a colleague, who's like a fellow coach trainer person who said this, I think his actual quote “I didn't really connect with being Indian until I moved back to Portland.” And I laughed and I said, yes, I don't think I really connected with ethnicity and Spanish. And those two things alone until I moved back to Portland because Portland talks about it constantly. Like, oh my God, they just keep talking about it, especially in the past few years. But even before that, they just won't stop talking about race and ethnicity. And I mean, that's one of the reasons I chose to come back after living in white tech world NYC was, I was like, I'm going to be in tech, which is, you know, still very predominantly white and male. I'd rather be in a place where, when I'm ready and when I'm hungry to explore that assimilation, that unpacking, that internal work. Oh man, I am surrounded by people who are willing to talk about it. So yeah.

RM: Well, I'm interested in your career path. So I think when we talked before, you said you had 43 jobs over the course of your career, a crazy number. And so I'm interested in where did you start? What was your first job? What are some notable ones? You mentioned some earlier you were working in hospital systems, you've worked in tech, you were working with HIV positive individuals. So starting at your first job, where did you start working? What are some really your most interesting, your most proud jobs in the in-between and then like, let's talk a little bit about what you're doing now.

PM: Okay. My first job was 17. I didn't start working that early cause my dad wouldn't let me cause he wanted me to focus on school. My first job was 17 at Crown Books. If anyone remembers Crown Books,  a Southern California discount bookstore in Riverside right in front of Riverside mall. And I loved it. I felt super lucky that my first job was a bookstore. And that it wasn't minimum wage. So my first job was $5 an hour and it wasn't, it was above minimum wage and I felt like a million bucks, felt really proud. I loved that job. I actually really, really was into it, being surrounded by books. And actually it was all ladies that worked there and all ladies who were really into books and they were way, way older than I was. And that was really cool to be around some super smart ladies. 

From there, I just changed jobs about every six months. I went from a coffee shop to another coffee shop, to another coffee shop, to a new age bookstore to like working for some really mentally unstable dudes in Hollywood, telemarketer. I mean, really I just was like, bam, bam, what's next? What's next? But I think the one that stands out to me was when I worked at Starbucks. I worked at many multiple Starbucks by the way, those all count as one job. Cause it was like Starbucks. You know, that's one company that I worked for and I was like a barista and that counts as one job, even though I was at three different stores across like a year and a half. Anyway, at one of them, we lost our manager, our store's local manager.

I forgot what happened. And so we didn't have a manager for like two months. And for some reason they couldn't place a manager. I dunno, they were having a hard time and it was a group of seven or eight, lady identifying people and all kinds of folks, all over the place with age and ethnicity, all kinds of people. But we're all of a sudden we didn't have a boss and we instantly self-organized. And in those two months, our numbers improved both like sales increased or customer surveys were better and we decreased expenses. We were just like ta-da! And they put a new manager in, they told us they were going to bring a manager in and we emailed them and were like, Hey, we've been doing amazing without one, can you hold off?

Because we're loving our jobs right now. We just became this beautifully well-oiled machine. And they were like, Nope. They put in the total jerk. I quit immediately. Maybe he fired me. I don't remember. It was like that quick of a, like I'm out and he's like, you're out. And I'm like, wait, no, I quit. And he's like, you're fired. I was like, okay, bye. And I think back on that, because then later when I was thinking about, fast-forward worked as an office assistant, secretary, I worked at an architecture firm as their archives coordinator had zero experience doing that. Don't know why they hired me. I was just all kinds of jobs supporting myself through college. When I graduated, that's when I moved to Portland and I had a ton of experience creating community artwork projects to explore issues.

That was a main thing that I did at Evergreen. But for some reason I got a job at outside-in clinic in Portland, Oregon. And I think I got a job in the job center. It was like a temporary job. And one day they were short-staffed up in the clinic upstairs and they're like, Hey, you speak Spanish. Right? And I was like I speak pocho Spanish. If those of you who know pocho Spanish, which is super, super messed up, English, Spanish. And I was like alright, and they were like, cool, can you fill in for the interpreter that called in sick, the medical interpreter? I was like, what? I do not think I'm qualified for that. They're like, cool, come on up. And that day I was in like four or five different medical visits, with patients and doctors. And I was hooked. 

I was like, whoa, this is fascinating. This is fascinating. And I think one of the things… the reason I mentioned this Starbucks job and that those two months rather at the Starbucks job where we were essentially self-organized, leaderless, if you will. And what I think I loved about outside it, as soon after I got hired full-time at the clinic as an interpreter. And then later I did all kinds of other things. Soon after we got this new manager, Angie, and though she was a boss very much, she was like the official clinic manager. There was so much about that job that was self-organized that we just had to just make decisions without always a clear leader. We had to troubleshoot some really, really hard, both emotionally hard, right? Like patients overdosing in our bathroom pretty regularly.

Patients dying. Yeah, just really hard stuff. Angie just created this work culture where we didn't need her to make hard decisions for us. We very much just were constantly learning together and figuring things out together. So later when I switched over to tech I mean between that and Outside In was me getting obsessed with performance systems, something called continuous quality improvement, which is really where you look at a healthcare system and you see, what is it about the system that is hurting patients? And what's preventable? And essentially continuous quality improvement believes that almost everything is preventable. And so that just led me down the path where I realized I want to be really bad-ass at this job. I really want to be someone who changes healthcare, but I don't know how to do that from where I am in this job at Outside In besides continuing to work at Outside In.

And that's when I sought out my master's. I got a master's in public administration at a place that had a specialization in healthcare administration. And I was super pumped. I was like, okay, systems thinking, learning, here I go. And this was at NYU. I did not learn any of that. That is not what they taught me. I was really frustrated. It was super boring. How to be a bureaucrat, I'm sorry, NYU. Maybe I took their own classes. I don't know. It just felt like they were teaching me how to be a bureaucrat. So they, to their credit, let me do a customized specialization. And so that's when I started learning about design thinking, which blew my mind. I started learning about Lean and Six Sigma and these other more like tech approaches to systems.

And I got an internship coaching clinic teams in New York who are having performance issues. And if I do say so myself, I kind of nailed it. Like I was like, oooh, this is some kind of Venn diagram of like my obsession with systems and I care about humans. I'm really interested in how these two things intersect. And so I just thought that that was what I was going to do. I was going to be a performance coach in healthcare. But for some reason I found this Etsy job posting that was a learning and development director I think was the job. And I was like, what is that learning and development? That's not something that at the time in healthcare was a thing. And I read the job description. I was like, that's what I do. That's what I do. I just do it in healthcare. And I asked a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend what do these folks get paid? And it was like 40 K more than any possible job I could get as a bad-ass if I was, you know, if I was considered a bad-ass performance improvement person in healthcare.

RM: $40,000 more?

PM: Oh yeah. Yeah. Community health care is rough for wages. It is dismal, dismal, dismal. Oh, it's really bad. Maybe if you go up and work for a huge hospital system, but I didn't want that cause you can't change a huge hospital system very easily. They don't want to change. Community clinics want to change and they're super quickly evolving, but then you get paid nothing. So I was like, okay, I have a lot of graduate degree debt. I graduated with $125,000 of debt between my undergrad. Cause I said, you know, I paid for the whole thing. So I was like, I need to take care of this situation. So, Etsy, please hire me Etsy. Oh my God.

RM: Yeah. Let me take that money and pay this down. Let me be able to live. And eat. 

PM: Right. Right. Also I love Etsy, by the way. Somewhere in one of those 43 jobs one of them was that I started my own handmade bag business of making vegan belts and bags. So I loved Etsy. I loved what they did for makers. And so I just was like, so smitten. So smitten, not just with the 40 K plus more... I was smitten. And the company at the time was like 400 or 500 people, Brooklyn based. So it really was a pivotal, pivotal job. It connected with… back at the Starbucks job. One of the things that the engineers really fascinated with at Etsy at the time was leaderless decision-making. And I was like, I am your lady. I am obsessed with this.

I also forgot to mention this, but I kind of grew up going to anarchist camps when I was in high school. Cause I was into anarchy, like actual, organized anarchy people who actually think about how to make that a sustainable system. And they were like, what? Who are you? Because at the beginning they were like, you're not an engineer. You don't get us - get out of here. They were very mean to me, I should say that. There were engineers that were very, very mean to me. Very unprofessional, very mean, very passive aggressive. Not all of them, any of them. Luckily there was enough of them that kept me kind of intrigued. And I think it's because it wasn't just because I was lady or cause I was brown. I think it was half because I wasn't an engineer. I mean, nowhere close, nowhere close to an engineer. They were like, you do not get us.

RM: Yeah. There's a total elitism in that industry. 

PM: Fascinating! 

RM: Yeah. Yeah. Well reflecting on it is fascinating, but at the time it was like, I'm going to slap one of these dudes upside the head.

PM: Yeah. I mean, again, I have worked in a lot of industries like architecture, healthcare, social services, youth services, family services, right? I've never, I'd never seen that before. You can't possibly get us because you're not an engineer. You can't possibly understand us culturally. And I was like, no, I've seen, this was before slack. This was back in IRC days. Those people remember IRC. I'd be like, I've seen your IRC threads. I totally get you. You're ridiculous. And you're very easy to understand and you're very human. You're very human. Yeah, you're just like the rest of us, just with some sweet salaries. Very, very good salaries.

AN: I'm curious. You highlighted a couple of components of your career where you really enjoyed working in more, what you call leaderless positions as a management and leadership trainer. 

PM: Right? [All laugh] 

AN: You know where I'm going with this. How do you train leaders where that part of what you enjoyed kind of translates into how you're training these new leaders? If that makes sense. Yeah.

PM: Yes. Yes. I think it's because of that experience. So one of the things I learned from all the many anarchist communities that I felt a part of when I was young, up into my early twenties, was how much they still were rife with all the same pitfalls that say the tech world is right? Which is super elitist and super classist stuff. Which is why I say that like once I got to engineers, I was like, no, you really are like everyone else. Every human is unique and every culture is obviously defined by lots of really unique things. But at the core there's some real commonalities and I think social stratification, so the fancy word to mean, we still try to put each other and like rank each other in some way. You know, ethnocentricism, in-group, out-group bias.

They're just present everywhere, no matter what industry. And they define a lot of what different people's experiences are of work. And so what I learned about the anarchist approach is that either way humans - past a certain number which is about 12, in my opinion, 12 people - pass a certain number. Humans naturally move into leader hierarchies because shit just gets complicated. Systems get complicated and decision makes decision-making needs to be made in a way. However, what I loved about learning more about shared decision-making models and leaderless systems is at which level you can actually create a lot of autonomy in shared decision-making. So it's not, which one do we use? It's at which level of work can you create a shared decision-making model and at which level, in which situations, depending on urgency and importance, do I personally very much believe that it's really just the most efficient and effective to choose a good leader and make them make the decision and trust them with the decision so that the group can move forward?

And that's where I get really fascinated. So I train managers and leaders on the difference between coaching, which is where you are supporting insight and decision-making in the person or in the team versus mentoring, where you're giving them advice about how they should act but in the end they still get to make the final decision on their behavior, but you're giving them a lot of guidance, versus directing, where you being more of a traditional leader where you're just like, yes, that no to that. And, what I find really fascinating is that I, myself really appreciated having a manager that knew when to switch into directing mode and be like, cool. So Paloma, that thing you did can never happen again. That was not okay. I did that once, by the way, just something that was not okay. And she was like, that wasn't cool. That's a no, that's a hard no on that. And then she switched coaching and she said, so how are we going to handle this? Let's switch into brainstorming mode. How do you want to handle this? Brainstorm rules. We're just gonna throw out some options. And then later we'll decide what's the right one.

What I needed was somebody to be like, no, and now how do you want to handle this? And so I think that's what's beautiful about rather than like either or humans crave autonomy, but not too much of it because they also really value predictability and certainty. And so the fun and the magic is in toggling between one of these three modes to get to know how might you fulfill the need so you move the team forward. But you can't stay in one of the modes. You can't stay in coaching. You really can't. I don't think, and you cannot obviously stay in directing.

AN: So you kind of have to toggle between the two. 

PM: The three actually mentoring, which is the middle ground between the two.. Where you give a lot of direction, but you're still like, but still your call, how you want to handle it. I can't be there to enforce this.

AN: Yeah. Cause I was going to say in that coffee shop example, it sounds like based on this theory, when you explained it, I was like, so no one wanted to jump to trying to like be the leader or the manager? But it sounds like based on that theory, it's, it's what seven people. So it didn't have that dynamic.

PM: It was not, it wasn't that complicated. By being seven people might've been eight, but I don't think so. I mean that included, you know, shift managers and just like frontline crew. Maybe there was 10, I dunno, point is there's only four shift managers. There's four of us. And between the four of us, we could just be like, cool, what needs to happen? And with those numbers, you deeply get to know each person and that means you can deeply trust them and you can deeply understand weaknesses and strengths. And so it's really easy to kind of be fluid with each other, right? If there's trust there. Once you get past 10, 12 people, it's really hard to really deeply understand strengths and weaknesses and be able to build that frequency of rapport. So you can be like, Hey, I think you're doing that thing again. Can I help? That's harder to do. And sometimes it's nice to just be able to have the boss, the manager say like you to, what is happening? No,  you're taking too long to address this conflict between the two of you, let's address this, let's move forward. Right. yeah, just again, 12 is a rough number, but it clearly has felt.

AN: Helpful. 

PM: Yeah. It felt helpful.

RM: I have a specific question about the leadership coaching side of things. So for me personally, I struggled with imposter syndrome. And when I receive criticism, it's not the end of the world, but it kind of is. How would you coach both sides of things? Because I'm sure that it's important for managers to understand that some folks on their team might have imposter syndrome because they are maybe a person of color or a woman or LGBTQ+ where there's some reason why that feeling would be a lot stronger than if they were part of the dominant culture. So how would you, you know, coach the leaders and then how would you coach the folks who are experiencing that in that position?

PM: Yeah. I think one of the nice things about the coaching versus mentoring versus directive model is that coaching is a great option when you have a really different experience, background, privilege, context than your report. Cause you know, a white dude, handsome, 6’1” in his thirties telling me just get in there and get more confident, Medina. We know that by the way, that's mentoring right? Where you're like, here's how I would do it. Here's how I would handle this person pushing around in that meeting. And so I think luckily a lot of the managers that I support, they're like, I get that. I don't get to just be like, here's how to do it, but then what do I do? And I'm like, cool switch into coaching, right?

And so you can lay down with the directive. You can be like, Hey, I want you and the team needs you to be more firm about team boundaries. When you represent us at that meeting, that's what the team needs in a person filling your role. It's standing up managing expectations on the teams behalf in that meeting. We've discussed how that's really hard for you, right? That's hard. If I know that my approach isn't going to work with this person for this person, or I can just presume that because we have such different experiences, backgrounds, identities, how we are seen in the world. Switching to coaching, when coaching, a question you can ask is who is someone that you just like deeply admire that would have handled that situation and manage those expectations in that meeting beautifully.

Like you would have, you really love how they handle that situation? Most people can think of someone. They get to choose their model. And you're like, cool. How close on a scale of one to five, five being you're almost allied with who they are, and one is like, you are nothing like who they are, you don't even know how to become that person. Where do you feel you are right now? And say the person's like, I feel like I'm a two. I don't know how to show up like that confident friend that I have. You're like, cool. Let's brainstorm, brainstorm rules. Let's throw out all the things that could help. The little tweaks, tone, body, language, scripts, backup support from people around you, all the ideas of how to move you from a two to three. I don't expect you to be a five tomorrow or next month, but the team will need you at some point to be like a four.

Again, I switched back into directive.Here's what the team needs from you. And then back into coaching. But let's focus on just getting you to a three-level and let's focus on what are all the ways to get you there. And people will have ideas. If they're stuck, you can be like, well, here's some things that work for me now I'm in mentoring mode, giving you advice. And then back to coaching mode. Once I say, you know, here's two things that worked for me, my body language. And this sounds weird, but I walk in and I check how my shoulders are - even if it's a virtual meeting - I checked my spine and I check just how bad-ass I'm feeling.

That shifted for me. This is true, by the way, that shifted being able to fill my body up differently, shifted how my voice came out. And that shifted a little bit of my confidence. And then I was able to actually feel not so weird with scripts, these kind of back pocket scripts, like I have an alternative idea for that versus like, what if, you know, [struggling] like, I have an alternative idea for that. But let me pause. That's what's worked for me. What do you think? How would that work for you? Because then the person gets to be like, [laughs] Nope, I've tried that. And it did not go well for me or they used to say, Hmm, yeah. I don't even know how I hold myself from those meetings. And then you're exploring. So that's a long answer… 

AN: No, that's great. I feel like we just went through a simulation. [all laugh] 

RM: Is this part of your course? This is how you teach leaders and coach leaders?

PM: Yes. Because what I've learned is that you can keep talking about some general frameworks or you can just role play in front of them how it might go down. And then they're like, oh, I know how to do that. I can do that. And you're like, I know you can, you just had to see it. Humans are lovely mimickers. We mimic each other really well. We're very, very well designed to mimic each other. And so why not try different modeling to see which one the person wants to mimic versus just being like, let me talk about this pyramid model for the next 20 minutes. Nothing fo you to mimic. Nothing to mimic there. I mean, again, I love my pyramid models, but there's a limit. I know that didn't answer the second part of that question, but I do think leaders and managers can do so much more, so much more to support people, whether they are their race, their gender, their ethnicity, their age, you know, their ability status or not.

AN: Yeah, absolutely. And something we didn't touch on so far, Paloma, you have a passion around the connection between neuroscience and equity and inclusion. When did that begin for you and how have you continued to implement that? With that lens for your work and what you do today as a coach and a trainer for leadership and a management teams?

PM: Yeah. I mean, it began back when I worked at Outside In, because I was around a lot of therapists because we had a lot of therapists. And I was kind of intrigued about their work. And I was intrigued about how much of their work had to be about diagnosing people. And I don't know why I got, I was like, that's weird to get like diagnosing is weird, right? It just becomes a stagnant label on a person. And it's, it's just kind of how that feels. It's one of the ways that that field functions, not the only way, definitely how healthcare and insurance functions, it's your diagnosis. And so that led me to this weirdly to this a book called The Happiness Advantage that someone recommended to me as a, like, they're like, yeah, there's psychology, which has studies, identifies what's wrong with people and then diagnoses them with what's wrong.

And then there's positive psychology, which is not interested in diagnoses at all. Positive psychology has gotten a bad rap in the past five years. Totally sure why but positive psychology is understanding using what we know about psychology, including a lot of neuropsychology and neuroscience about how people can just be better, whatever better means for them. And so I read this book, Happiness Advantage, and I was like, what? This is fascinating. And we're using none of this psychology and neuroscience from how we support our patients and clients. Not that I know of, I'm not privy to the therapy conversations. But I know that in our one-on-one conversations and like social service calls, we were not using this actually doing the opposite at the time. I was also very, very clinically depressed myself for the first time in my life.

And hiding it pretty effectively from work. I had a very specific manifestation where I just cried all night and every morning. But at work  I just felt I could do it. It really helped that I had a really intense job, very distracting. And so that book also struck me personally, and I think positive psychology and how much it uses neuroscience and neuropsychology just really finally helped me to demystify some of the basics of why brains do what they do. And so later when I was in grad school I was coaching these clinic teams and seeing the limit of things even like Lean or Six Sigma and these other performance improvement approaches the limit to them because they weren't acknowledging the emotional lives of these people at work. Not at least not how they were modeled then and they weren't acknowledging and giving them tools to deal with the daily, emotional regulation and emotional burnout of their jobs.

These were really hard jobs, you know? And so I started sneaking into my coaching sessions with the teams. Do you know this weird thing called the amygdala? It does this weird thing when you get really upset and if it gets really threatened, does this other thing. And the teams were like, what is that why I just went berserk on everyone? And was it my full self? And I was like, probably. Did you get tunnel vision? Did this happen? And so then later I just kind of kept figuring out how to sneak it in. By the time I made it into tech and I started with a few engineers, they loved it. That was how, besides the cat gifs, that is how I gained their trust… was by nerding out, really hard in my workshops for them. And then I didn't know, my other colleagues were even smarter. They were so super smart. A company called LifeLabs that just like these people knew the stuff three times the level that I did and started working with them. And it's just, it's been nonstop since then.

AN: Wow. That's amazing. And I feel like too so it sounds like diving into doing some of this work and I mean, you've gone through your own mental health issues and it sounds like looking to incorporate that into how we view our employees, that's been a huge driver in how you've tackled the work that you're doing.

PM: Yeah. I think what's been really nice is that sharing something like how the limbic brain versus the prefrontal cortex shows up in a hard meeting where someone threatens your sense of belonging or certainty or status, which also very much the brain is hardwired for equality, fairness, right? Any one of those threats, just even like a two minute spiel to a manager saying like, oh, I wonder if for that employee a sense of belonging or status or certainty was threatened. And so I wonder if their limbic brain did this and then their prefrontal cortex did that. How does that resonate for you and what might've been going on for them? And then they're like, okay. I think neuroscience reminds us how very much we share. Daily, emotional lives are really similar. Some of us might be threatened and not supported differently, but everyone can, every manager that I've ever worked with, every manager I've ever, ever supported can very much relate to the feeling of how much it hurts, hurts and distracts you from your work when you feel insulted at work. 

And now they know it's because the limbic brain was doing this and the PFC was doing that. And now when their employee says the thing that that person said really hurt me and I'm having a hard time focusing. They're like, yes, I know why now I know why versus being like, you need to get over it, you need to move on with that.

AN: Yeah. Kind of like it's forgotten until, you know, you kind of re the way that you said it makes a lot of sense. I mean,

PM: Yeah. I could talk all day about the limbic brain and the PFC. [laughs] But yeah, I think demystifying the brain is never a bad idea. It's clearly the thing that's making a lot happen.

AN: Paloma, do you have any advice for, or call to action for our listeners?

PM: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things I have learned and thus made like a PDF for is for managers or employees who want to self-advocate or managers who want to be better managers to check out, they can Google Palmoa Medina biceps, like biceps, like your arm muscles, or you can go to Palomamedina.com/biceps. And I made this PDF because essentially walks you through these six psychological coordinates. And I think my call to action is, just check it out because it's not my work. I'm just synthesizing it based on lots of other, really brilliant people and what it taught me and what it teaches a lot of the managers that I support is like all of a sudden you have new ways of understanding and talking to your reports and seeing their full selves now that you know all the things that matter to humans. And if you're an employee, it might finally validate and give you words why something matters to you and how you might self-advocate for it. So that's my call to action. I think it's a helpful tool. I met people to check it out and see how it might serve that.

AN: Awesome. Yeah. We will link that in the show notes for our listeners to check out. But thank you again, Paloma. I know I got lost in this conversation and forgot that we were even recording halfway through. So I appreciate you being here and taking the time. And it's also a great way to wrap up season four of Humanizing Tech. This is our last episode for this season. But don't worry. We're going to take a short hiatus and we will be picking up with another season soon. Huge shout out to our incredible podcast team. Your dedication to all that you do is what makes it possible for us to tell these stories. And I know we've got some new folks joining the podcast team next season as well. So I'm looking forward to everything that we're going to do with the next season. So with that, thank you to our listeners for tuning in, and we will catch you on the next season.

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