Best of: How can we navigate imposter syndrome and limiting beliefs at work?

March 21, 2023

In honor of Women's History Month, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, speaks to Dr. Chela White-Ramsey, PhD, Senior Training and Development Manager, Enterprise Client Engagement at Indeed in this best of episode. Drawing on over a decade of experience, Dr. White-Ramsey has spent the bulk of her career training teams, individual contributors and senior leadership teams on topics including career development, crucial conversations, insights discovery and effective presentation and facilitation. A first-generation college graduate, Dr. White-Ramsey earned her Bachelor's degree and Master’s degree from Louisiana State University and the University of West Florida, respectively. From there, she was awarded the prestigious Huel D. Perkins Fellowship and received her PhD in Human Resource Leadership from Louisiana State University. Hyams and Dr. White-Ramsey delve into how employees can navigate burnout, imposter syndrome and limiting beliefs like perfectionism — and what pottery can teach you about your career and life.

- Hello everyone. I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed. And welcome to the next episode of "Here to Help." At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. This is what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps me up at night. What powers that mission is our people. "Here to Help" is a look at how the experience, strength and hope inspires people to want to help others. Today is the final day of February, and all this month, we have been celebrating Black History Month in the US and Canada. Black History Month is an annual celebration to honor the contributions and sacrifices of black Americans who have shaped our nation and history. My guest today is Dr. Chela White-Ramsey, a senior training and development manager here at Indeed. Chela is a first-generation college graduate. She earned her bachelor's degree from Louisiana State University and a master's degree from the University of West Florida. From there, she was awarded the prestigious Huel D. Perkins Fellowship and received her Ph.D. in Human Resource Leadership from Louisiana State University. Chela has been helping people get jobs since even before she joined Indeed, which you'll be hearing more about shortly. She has committed her life to helping people to do the best to work of their lives. Chela, thank you so much for joining me today.

- Thank you Chris, for having me.

- Well, let's start where we always start these conversations. How are you doing today right now?

- Today right now? I'm okay. I am in the process of relocating from Austin back to Louisiana, you mentioned that got my doctorate and my bachelor's there. That is where I'm from, so I'm in the process of moving. So it's an exciting time, but also a transition.

- Fantastic. Well, we're excited that you'll be going back to be close to family, but well, sorry to lose you here in Austin. So let's talk a little bit about your job, you're a a senior training and development manager here in Indeed. Can you explain your role and how you help people get jobs?

- So at Indeed, we have a fantastic group of people. They are called Indeed Recruitment Evangelists, and their job is to scale our brand as a thought leader, and as a partner to our enterprise client. My job is to enable them to do their job through training and development, so I facilitate and lead training. I bring in external trainers to make sure they have what they need. I design and launch different learning and development initiatives, and generally foster a sense of learning among the group. It's wonderful. I love it. And I love the evangelist, it's such a cool job.

- You have a really interesting career journey, which I've now had the pleasure of hearing detailed a couple of times, and you have a PhD in human resources development. Can you talk about your interest in people and where that developed?

- Sure. So I would say that that's probably started just a general interest in people, probably during my undergrad. I made the choice to major in psychology. So I had a choice, I was choosing between psych or marketing because I generally was interested in the way that we think and behave and the way that we make decisions. Now, I made the conscious choice to not do clinical counseling psychology because I know myself, I know that I have a tendency to get very connected emotionally to the work. And I knew that about myself even back then. So instead of doing clinical counseling psychology, I decided to study the psychology of people at work, which is industrial organizational psychology. So that was the choice I made. And it just came from a general curiosity about why we act the way we act and what that's shows up like in the workplace.

- So you grew up in Louisiana. And part of the experience of being in Louisiana is it has been the nexus of significant impact of economic shocks, industry closures, and then of course, Hurricane Katrina, can you talk about some of those experiences and how that shaped you?

- Sure. I want to start with Hurricane Katrina because I think that that was kind of like the first domino in a series of a lot of choices that ended up shaping and leading me to where I am right now. So I'm from coastal Louisiana. Hurricanes were always a constant threat. It's what I lived with. We learned how to track hurricanes when I was in the second grade, how to track them on a longitude latitude on a map. So this is something that was very much embedded in the way we lived there, and because it's coastal, a lot of the men in that region worked in the offshore oil industry, including my father. So Katrina comes, devastates the region. At the time, my parents are living in coastal, Mississippi, and we lose our home there, just everything, like, it was like completely destroyed. My father was laid off from his job just because of everything that was happening. This was just an extra blow to the situation. And it was taking him much longer to find a job. Then he had anticipated because his work was in the offshore industry. And if we know anything about that industry, we know how fickle it is. It's up and down, very volatile. So after maybe two years of a quite debilitating job search, I decided to try to help him by drafting a resume for him and trying to help him job search using this new landscape. So I went to my university's career center. I let them help me with my resume. I learned how to do a resume. And then I took what I learned and brought that back to him to do his resume and help him with interviewing and job searching at the time we were using the local newspaper, but Indeed was brand brand new. And I learned about how to use that in my career center. So I was showing him that, and eventually we found him a new gig, but then something else happened. He started to send all of the other people who had worked offshore, all these other who had worked in this industry over to me, so that I could do their resumes to help them get jobs. And I got to tell you, it was very... it was fascinating because the work I knew nothing about the work from a technical standpoint, I didn't know what a Deccan was, a pipe fitter, a ship fitter, a journeyman, all these different jobs that I had never heard of, but I started to write resumes for these men who had never had to write a resume before in their life, and I started to, I mean, I charged them because this was my business. So I charged them $5 per resume, and this was a little extra money for me and a little extra help for them. It changed me significantly and I hope made a positive impact on those of the few of them who were able to bounce back and find a new role.

- So you said it changed you. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned from that experience of seeing these men? Many of whom I would imagine because of the industry, they were probably never even had to have a resume before and how you construct that. And then what it was like for them to try to use that, to search for jobs, and how did that shape your view of getting a job?

- I think that, I mean, for starters, a lot of the people in this group... offshore work is really hard work. It is not unskilled labor, it is very challenging work, but I think that my job at the time was to help them find a way to portray that on paper, that they were highly skilled, that they were whole people who could communicate and they were competent and proficient and excelled in their work. And I found that that was kind of challenging to do through a resume. So that was my first learning was that resumes are challenging to try to get the whole picture across, but I did some research and I learned some tricks about how to structure the resume, how to format it, because I know that, bias is a thing, I learned about main bias and all of these different things and an effort to help them. So that was the light bulb for me. And then when it came to just how it impacted me personally, I was coming out of college. I was having trouble finding a job myself. And so I was writing resumes and helping all these people, but also having trouble on my own, trying to find a job. And I found that it was kind of soothing to be able to help someone else, despite the fact that I was also struggling in the same area, it gave me just a little bit of comfort. And that was just major to me in that moment, because, you know, the job search can be debilitating. It can be mentally draining, we all know this. And then finally, when it comes to just barriers to employment, so a lot of the population who I was working with, they did not... well, not a lot of them, I'll say like a percentage of them. They had been, we call it justice impacted today, but back then we called it, they had a record and that to try to convey that they are still whole people and that they can still do the work. The offshore industry at that time was one of the few industries that was fair chance. They were bringing people in, and so when it shut down, it just became even harder, and so it was just a number of barriers that we were trying to navigate. And I realized that we were individuals trying to navigate a system that was just full of barriers and full of bias. And I was trying to do it in the most minuscule way, which was to write them the most beautiful resume that I could to format it in a way that seemed brilliant. And to make them stand out on paper, as much as I could. Learned a lot about systems, learned a lot about systems theory. I didn't even know that's what I was learning at the time, but I learned that if you put a good person against a bad system, the system wins, and that was kind of... it was a little bit sad, but it was all also like quite empowering to know that here's what we can do on an individual level, but it only goes so far.

- Pretty early on, you had already dedicated yourself to helping other people in their journey to find employment. And then in the meantime, you're getting ready to graduate in 2008, which was an interesting time to be going out into the job market. Can you talk a little bit about that time and what was going on for you and how that impacted you?

- Sure. So the 2008 recession, I'm coming out of college, quite proud of myself for having finished. You mentioned earlier, I am a first generation college graduate, so I was ready. I had been taught like many of us, "You go to school, you get your education. You'll find a good job and life will be less hard." And I came out of school and I started to put myself out there and I realized that my career prospects were nil. I couldn't find anything, I had gone on... I mean, it's hard to remember the exact number, but it was like a dozen interviews in the course of just like maybe four or five months, so many interviews. And I got really good at interviewing. I got really good at job searching, but nothing, no one was biting, people did not want to hire me. I didn't have the experience, and it was a recession. So economically the country was strapped. It was a hard time. At the time I made the choice to ride it out in grad school. So I decided to go ahead and go get my masters, take on a little bit more debt and try to improve my chances of getting a job, but not everybody had that option. And we were seeing it all around us people losing jobs, of course, but also losing things like homes, people were losing their house. I started to see it and I made the choice in that moment that even if I get a job, even if I get a full-time job, I'm going to own some sort of skill so that I can utilize that to make money if I needed to. I made the choice to not solely rely on a full-time job for my income, because people were losing them left and right. And I do believe that with our generation, this concept of the side hustle, I think it's a direct result of that 2008 recession, because I think a lot of people were seeing that, a lot of people were seeing, their families destabilized by the economy and realizing that we have to learn a skill or a trade that someone would give us money for in addition to our full-time work. And so I think that directly impacted me today. And then, the resume writing stayed on as my side hustle, just moving forward. I kept that with me and I kept that in my back pocket because I think it created a fear, a scarcity mindset going through that and trying to find a job and not being able to, and seeing so many people lose theirs, but grad school was the answer for me. And it ended up working out in my favor. I'm very fortunate because of that.

- So I'd love to actually talk a little bit about some of the academic perspective on this. So the primary theme of this podcast of these conversations that we have is really around what inspires people to want to help others, but in our case, I mean, that's just because of what we do as a business, but can you talk a little bit about from your studies, what it is that you've seen that makes people want to do, what it is that they do?

- I can talk about it in two ways. So the first way to just get this out there, we try trade a certain amount of labor for a certain amount of money, and it's very transactional and we do it because we have to, right? So there's a part of us that we work because we have to, then there's also a part of us, "We work because it gives us a sense of purpose." And I think that that becomes more and more important. The more you're able to do work that's in line with your values. So if you're able to do work, that's in line with what you feel is important, that allows you to demonstrate your strengths, then it becomes more than just a transactional situation. It becomes transformational, and it becomes an outlet for you to work in your purpose. And then something that some of us have been missing, especially since 2020, and the pandemic is work as a social outlet or as a place for us to build connections and relationships with people. When we have this at work, when we have this option, it makes work more rewarding and enriching, and it's another reason why we do it. And when you take that away altogether, it can make work quite stressful over the long haul. And if you take away the ability to work in line with your values and have that values alignment, you could also make work quite stressful. And what happens with that prolonged stress is that we eventually get to a place of burnout if we continue to go without meeting those needs. So there's work as transactional for financial gain. I think there's work as a sense of purpose and values alignment, and work as a social connection, a place for us to connect with other people and build relationships. And I think if we take away any of those for a long period of time work starts to get much more challenging, and we start to experience lots of stress.

- So one of the things, you had this experience early on looking at the impact of the 2008 economic crisis. And then obviously the last couple of years with the pandemic. And one of the things that upheavals like that do is they certainly change our perspective or our relationship. But the other thing they happens is they can expose underlying symptoms that are already there that might not be as visible or obvious to everyone. But some of these inequities were just laid bare by the pandemic. Can you talk a bit about how you've seen a relationship with work change as a result of crises like this?

- Yeah, so it depends. There's a couple of different things and I'm trying decide which way I want to go with this, but I saw a quote probably like midway through 2020, and it said something like, "We're all experiencing the same storm, but we're not all in the same boat." Like some of us are in a canoe, some of us are on a yacht. Some of us are in a , and I think that that's true. And I think that when COVID first came on board and this idea of essential workers having to go in and go to work, and we're calling these people essential. But when it comes to our social reward and who was being rewarded, the essential workers were not, they were being put under the most stressful work conditions. They were exposing themselves to possibly getting sick. Many people died and they weren't compensated in a way that suggested that these people are essential. And what I'm saying is I'm talking about people who worked in grocery stores, people who were frontline workers, meanwhile, people at a higher socioeconomic status who maybe worked in corporate or in tech, many of us, we worked from home. We had companies that said, "Hey, we're going to make sure that you're protected. You're going to work from home." And I think that's just that in and of itself that showed something, something was wrong. And I think that that definitely impacted later what became known as this idea of the great resignation or people leaving work, because it started to show that, at the end of the day, you have to take care of yourself by any means necessary, whatever that looks like, nobody's going to tell you to stop. Nobody's going to tell you, "Maybe it's time to take a break." You have to know that for yourself. And so, as people started to change their relationship with work, we started to see people leaving the workforce and opting out in droves. And we also started to see this concept of rest and play as being revolutionary, right? It's almost like pushing back against a system that's designed to create burnout by resting and playing and changing your relationship with work so that it's no longer your soul identity, but so that now it is a place for you to do some purpose driven work. It's a place for you to get paid, but it does not have to become you. We can create a better boundary there. And I think that's what people started to do.

- Yeah. I know that this is an area that you've been really focused on of resiliency and how to avoid burnout. And this is something, again, kind of like I was saying before has always been an issue. But in the last couple of years, one of the things that's happened with the pandemic is it's just been so clear, the extraordinary pressure that everyone is under, both at work and in the rest of their life. So it's not even like you come to a stressful job and then you go home and then everything is relaxed because people have been worried about their economic security, their health and safety, their families, and their communities. And so what are some of the things that, you think we can be doing to help avoid burnout?

- I want to start by saying that burnout is a systemic problem. So there are things we can do as individuals in the meantime to cope and navigate and live within that system. But ultimately the way things are set up, it's kind of hard to avoid it. So that's the first thing, but I will say on a macro level, just thinking about some of the things that Indeed is doing, like our flexible work arrangements, the option to take a little time off, or even to drop down your workload. I think that those things can helpful. One of the things that I shared with you, Chris, a while back was this feeling of, a couple years ago, how I was feeling just chronic burnout, just debilitating. And I made the choice to go down using our flexible work arrangement that 80% schedule, because at the time I felt like my burnout was due to just, I needed more rest, right. I'm just tired, I just need more rest. And this is why I'm experiencing burnout. But I think looking back on it, I can see that while rest was a small factor, I was experiencing burnout because I wasn't getting the social connection and reward that I mentioned earlier that comes with work, I was lonely, I was isolated. I felt by myself and it really, it started to take its toll on me. And so I did a little bit of research about why we are experiencing burnout. So this goes back to my, I'm a doer, I went back to what I knew and because I was struggling in the summer of 2020, I did a very small qualitative research. And it sounds crazy 'cause it's like, "Why are you doing more work if you're burnt out?" But I was so tired of feeling that way. And I wanted to know how other black women who were similar to me were experiencing this? Were they experiencing this burnout? What was driving it? So I did a survey, I asked 200 black women, like, "Are you experiencing burnout? What do you think the cause is?" And I read all the responses and people were saying what I was saying, "I don't feel connected. I feel lonely. I feel isolated. This work is not important to me. I'm doing work that is not in line with my values, essentially. I don't feel a sense of control. I feel like life is happening to me and I can't control anything or I'm tired. I'm overworked, the work, it's very routine, or it's too much, it's too complex." So I started to realize there were all these drivers of burnout and depending on your driver individually, you can do something to help alleviate it. So when I realized what my driver was, this feeling of loneliness and I'm sure many of the people on my team can attest to this because I started reaching out to them, putting all these coffee chats on their calendars. Many of them like, I'm just like, "Can I get 30 minutes with you? I just want to see how you're doing. I just want to talk, I just want to connect with you." And this was before the dreaded Zoom fatigue set in. So I probably wouldn't do that today, but at the time I just felt disconnected. And so I started to try to connect myself as much as possible. And that was when I started realizing that community, an antidote to burnout could be quite powerful, getting people together to validate one another's experiences, getting people together to talk about it, and just be there for one another. It can be a, again, just a bomb for what can be just a really painful or isolating situation. So I started to lean heavily on community. I started to create those communities and eventually things got much better, and I still, I mean, I still marvel at how it was able to get better because I was quite pessimistic and cynical. I didn't even believe that burnout recovery as possible. And I'm going to be honest with you. I still go back and forth about whether or not everyone can recover, but I will say that it helps to build that community of people and to have those conversations with others about what you're experiencing.

- So from a community perspective, one of the things that you did was what we were talking about last week, The Sister Circle, can you talk a little bit about what that was and what it meant for you and the other women involved?

- Yeah. So when I did that qualitative, it was a survey and a couple of interviews, some interviews with folks, I asked about a few things. So I was experiencing burnout. So I asked about that, I was experiencing imposter syndrome, which now I wonder, or lately, I wonder if that might have been a side effect of the burnout, because once upon a time, I used to feel quite competent and skilled in my work. And I swear burnout just obliterated my confidence. And so I was experiencing that and I wanted to see if other people were experiencing that. And there were a couple of other mindsets that I was hoping to shift, including perfectionism and people pleasing because these two things I found were really, really kind of holding me back in my career, in my desire for advancement. So I did, I created something called The Sister Circle for high-achieving black women. So I invited a few people who took the survey. I asked 'em if they would want to be invited to something where we'd get together and talk about it. So I invited them about eight people and over the course of six weeks for that very first one, we talked about these different topics. Each week, we focused on something different. We talked about burnout. We talked about people pleasing and the mindset, and maybe where that comes from, particularly as black women, where that comes from in our community. We talked about perfectionism and this idea of you have to be twice as good to get half as much and how that drives perfectionism and whether or not that serves us. We gave each other room to question those stories that in our community, they're handed down like inheritance, this idea of being twice as good to get half as much, we gave ourselves permission to question that talked about, like I mentioned burnout, and we talked about that imposter syndrome that comes along after you might have experienced something, or maybe after you're awarded a certain recognition or whatever the case may be. So we talked about all those things, we talked about hat's called the behavior chain, which is not something I created, but I use that as a model for the conversations and the way it works is we see and hears something. So we experience something. We tell ourselves a story about what we just saw and heard; based on that story, we feel some kind of way. And then based on that feeling, we act, and we use that to dissect our feelings of perfectionism, of people pleasing, of even procrastination. That was another one that we talked about because all of that manifests based on the stories that we tell ourselves and the way we feel and how it drives our behavior. And you might not be able to change the way you feel, because by the time you start to feel something, you feel it, it's just is there, right? And then you act, but you can change your story. And so, based on what we saw in her, what was the story that we were telling ourselves and was there a room to change it? So that one story I just used as an example, like you have to be twice as good to get half as much, if you are a woman, a person of color, in the LGBT community, can I change that story? Is it true? Right? Like where did that come from? What if we changed that? And we said that I'm here because I'm qualified to be here. How does that change the way we feel? And then how does that change the way we act? So each week in The Sister Circle, we did that. We challenged our stories and assumptions. We validated one another and it was so, so good. And the people who walked away from that first group, they were like, "You got to do this again. You got to do this more. We need more of this." So I started running it and I did another one with a whole new group of eight black women. And they came from everywhere and we got together, and we had our coffee one hour a week for six weeks. And we did that, and it's just that space, that community for alleviating some of those challenges that I personally was feeling. So selfishly, it was what my graduate professor would've called vanity research because I was feeling it. But I also think I would like to believe that it also helped other people as well.

- That's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. One of the things, when we were talking last week, that that came up, that we had a connection was around ceramics and pottery. And I know that that's something that is important to you. Can you share a little bit about the role that plays in your life?

- The caveat is I am not a great ceramicist, so I'm going to share that now, but yeah, so I started last year, early last year, I started learning how to throw pots on the potters wheel, because it's just an opportunity that came up. I always fascinated with watching other people do it. And so I took a class and I loved it. I thought it was so calming and meditative the idea of sitting at the potters wheel and you get a block of clay and starts from nothing. And being able to create something from that. There's just so much power in creating. And I firmly believe that we're on this earth to make in whatever way that that might be. So it was powerful to be able to do that. But then I got really comforted by the impermanence of clay because it's changing and you can mold it and shape it. But that also means that there's some impermanence there, every stage of the process from centering your clay to pulling it up into a vessel, to taking it off the wheel and trimming it to firing it. every step of that process is fragile. Something could happen, it could all fall apart, right? If you center the clay or if you don't do it the right way, when you try to bring it up, it's going to fall apart, right? If you take it off the wheel, even if you don't do that the right way, it can fall apart, it can blow up explode in the kiln. There's so much that can happen. And I took comfort in that as a self-proclaimed control, I don't even like the word control freak, 'cause I don't like that. I feel like that's a little dehumanizing. But I have a thing about control. I like to be in control, and when it comes to pottery, you have to let that go. You have to be willing to let things fall apart. You have to be willing to let it take shape. And there's sometimes when it turns into just something beautiful. And then there's sometimes where it turns into something beautiful and it falls apart. And then there's some times where it just doesn't. But in any case, what you envision usually is never the way it ends up, it usually ends up way, way better, or it doesn't end up at all, which I think is meditative. Can I show you, I have a-

- Oh, yeah, please.

- So this is my favorite, it's really hard to see, but this is my favorite piece that I've made. But then I put it in the kiln and you see the kiln gods took their due 'cause you see it's broken. So said all that to say, it's still comforting. It's still my favorite piece because I think it's beautiful. I think the colors came out, but I did not plan for it to come out this way and it rarely ever does. And I think that's a metaphor for life, right?

- Absolutely. Yeah, and we spoke about it, so I have not done ceramics in over 30 years, I had the amazing opportunity my senior year of college to take a year long class with an extraordinary teacher who passed away a few years back, Japanese, Hawaiian woman named Toshiko Takaezu. And she taught this introductory course where I was, which was pretty extraordinary. And it was for me coming on the heels of, I had a really difficult time my first few years of college and had worked basically over the summer to get my life together. And so part of it was, I was looking actually to just give myself a little bit of a break. So I decided to sign up for something that I thought was going to be easy in this class. And it turned out that it was actually extraordinarily challenging and it was sort of where so much of my healing kind of came from, from that experience and everything that you described, and in particular, we talked about this before the experience of centering itself, which is this extremely meditative, very difficult for me at first process of just trying to get this crazy lump of clay to actually just get on the right spot. But there's something incredibly amazing once you figure it out, you literally get a center of gravity from it. And that concept of centering, I mean, they call it centering the clay, but it's a very centering and meditative kind of experience. And what you described also about essentially letting go of the results, and I think for anyone that has any kind of streak of perfectionism, it's actually really helpful to do things where you have no control, because I know that that my tendency sometimes is as someone who really wants to do things as well as they can be done. The degenerate form of that is to just limit all of the things in your life that you can't properly predict how they're going to work out and people's lives can get very small that way. And so for me, it's actually been really helpful throughout my life to do things that I have very little... I bake bread, that's one of the things that I do. And I'm one of those people doing...

- Are you good at baking bread?

- Well, I've been doing it for over 30 years. And then at the start of the pandemic, I started, I'd always been afraid of sourdough and like a million other people, started baking sourdough bread. And it's amazing because you do so much and there's so many steps and then you put the thing in the oven and it either rises beautifully and has this incredible ear, or it just falls flat, and it's a total catastrophe. And it's amazing to sort of leave that control aside, and like you said, the extraordinary thing is not that well yet may blow up and be terrible, but that it also, for me, the really powerful lesson is that the things that I'm not in control of turn out to be the most beautiful and surprising and extraordinary and letting things happen. So anyway, for anyone that hasn't had the chance to try it, if you can have access to a ceramics class, there's something really magical that happens there.

- There's power in it, I love it.

- So one of the things that you have clearly, and we've been talking about this, you've dedicated your life to helping other people achieve their career aspirations. And I think you maybe have answered this, but maybe just to sort of tie it all together here as we're wrapping up, why does that mean so much to you to help other people with their career aspirations?

- I wish that I could say that it was holy noble. I just want to help people. And I do want to help people, but it does something for me. I think that it offers me a reward, it offer me a sense of purpose. It's immediate. When I was in academia, the thing that I struggled with the most was how long everything took. Like everything took forever, do the research, and then you get published by the time you get published, the research is outdated. It's just, the impact was so far down the line. And I feel like when I am facilitating a training or having a one-on-one conversation with someone about their work or writing a resume or helping someone learn something, I can see the aha moment. I can literally see it in people's face. I've facilitated so many... particularly in person, it's a little bit easier, but I've facilitated so many learning experiences and I can see when people get it. And that does something to me, that's like a little ding every time. And so working in a field where I'm able to constantly do that and know that I'm making a difference and know I can see my impact, that's for me, that's the field for me. That's why helping people with their career aspirations and their professional development aspirations became just quite rewarding. I love that, and I wish anybody who wanted it, anybody who wanted a career like that, where they could see that ding, I wish that for all of us. And then the other part of that is specifically when it comes to communities that have been historically excluded, economic empowerment is a game changer. It is so important that equity and trying to foster that and close those gaps, closing the wealth gap, closing the employment gap for people who have been historically excluded or marginalized. That's important to me. And it's one of the reasons why I work hard on myself to get into positions where I can help people, where I can make decisions that would help close some of those gaps and bring some economic empowerment to other groups. I career coach with people, back in the day, when I did a lot of one-on-one career coaching, I worked with people who would not normally have access to something like a career coach. So I'm working, I'm talking to people about their values and stuff at work, and they're like, "Look, I just need a job, I'm not trying..." but the reason for that is to offer some sort of exposure because I have this beautiful tie to these two worlds and I can kind of be a bridge there.

- Well, we always close with the same question and I would love to hear your thoughts on looking back over the last two years since the start of the pandemic. And we really are right at the two year mark now for Indeed, it was March 3rd, 2020 when we made the decision to send all of our employees to go work from home. And what in that experience with all of the challenges that we've seen has given you some bit of optimism for the future?

- I think that my hope lies in people taking their power back this way that people are finding a new relationship with the concept of work. My hope is seeing people who set boundaries and who rest and who find ways to make their lives enjoyable, because we learned that the things that we thought mattered the most, they don't matter. And so like my hope is seeing other people find that for themselves. I hope that we can sustain that over time, just as things continue to evolve, 'cause I won't even say go back to normal, but as things evolve, I hope we can sustain this rest and play as a revolutionary act. I really want us to keep that.

- Well, Chela thank you so much for joining me. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed this conversation and had the opportunity to actually spend quite a bit of time with you and talk with you. But it's really amazing just to be able to hear this all in one place and to get to share this with other folks, you are an inspiration and yeah, thank you for joining me and thank you for everything that you do to help people get jobs, both in your job and on your personal passion time and you've dedicated so much of your life to this. So thank you so much for all of that.

- Thank you, Chris.

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