Lori Eberly
About My Guest
Lori Eberly, LCSW is the author of Fuckery and Founder of Radius, a consulting firm that develops self-aware leaders. Her clinical background as a hospice social worker provides a trauma-informed perspective to organizational development, complex systems, and no-nonsense conversations. Addressing workplace conflict and sexual harassment are specialities, along with cultivating psychological safety on teams. She lives in Portland, OR with her family.
Shervin Talieh:
Welcome again to another session of On Misogyny. I'm excited about our conversation today. To begin with, could you please introduce yourself?
Lori Eberly:
Absolutely, Shervin. Thank you for having me on today. I think it's always a privilege when we're asked to introduce ourself and we get to choose which identifiers we're going to lead with. I am a proud business owner. I am a white woman who's been married to her high school sweetheart for almost 26 years. I am a mother of two teenagers, 13 and 16. I am an author of a book that published about four years ago called Fuckery, which is about habits that damage trust in the workplace. I am a social worker. I am a #MeToo survivor. I am an executive coach. I am a 47 year old woman who feels grateful to have lived that many years. I've never really understood women who try to hide their age. I spent too long working as a hospice social worker and in the field of death and dying to not see every additional year as a tremendous gift and I welcome each decade. Those are a few of the identities that I claim. I feel lucky to have a platform to talk about what it means to be a woman and what it's like to experience misogyny here in the States and the different ways that that shows up.
Shervin Talieh:
Fantastic. Just as a final initial identifier, what is your name?
Lori Eberly:
That would be important. My name is Lori Eberly.
Shervin Talieh:
Fantastic, Lori. Where were you born and where did you grow up?
Lori Eberly:
I was born in the Bronx. My parents lived in New York City for about 10 years. And I grew up outside of Richmond, Virginia in a small suburban town called Chester. And spent about five years in the Midwest, going to my undergrad in Ohio, and the moved to Portland in 1996 and very much consider myself an Oregonian at this point in time. As I do my own work in becoming anti-racist, I think it's also really important to talk about our ancestors and where our people come from. I come from a very long line of Swiss-German Mennonites and that very much feels like part of who I am today.
Shervin Talieh:
What is your earliest memory of sexism or misogyny?
Lori Eberly:
As I look back, I didn't know it in the moment, but to get very real very quickly, it's only as an adult that I've recognized that I experienced sex abuse at the hands of an uncle when I was probably three or four years old. As is the nature of trauma, we don't get a timestamp on that. So, to be a child and to have my body not belong to myself, but for the use of someone else who was a trusted family member, that certainly was a very early memory of my body not being my own.
Shervin Talieh:
How has that impacted you?
Lori Eberly:
Well, as any sex abuse survivor knows, there's the obvious ways and then the less obvious ways. I didn't really feel connected to that memory until more recently. Again, as is the nature of trauma and that we don't remember things that don't feel safe to be remembered. But how that has impacted me has been heightened levels of anxiety. What's really fascinating in the research around sex abuse and around rape is that a lot... statistically, women that have experienced very early sexual abuse or sexual trauma are more likely to experience it later in life. My early experiences as a child... Those memories flooded back more recently when I've experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace. And so the way that impacts is that our nervous system learns how to stay safe in the moment. As a child, the ability to run away was not possible. The ability to fight back was not possible. And so a lot of us who have experienced sexual violence have fallen into a freeze response. That response then gets reciprocated later in life when the real or perceived threat of sexual violence shows up.
Lori Eberly:
And so I have moved through my life as a child and as a young woman and as a grown woman often getting stuck in that frozen place when either strange men in bars or men that I've worked with have misused their power and their position. A lot of women go into that freeze response and then there's a lot of shame and guilt that get wrapped up in that. That we didn't fight back or we didn't run away. This is one of the dangers of... one of the multiple dangers of misogyny and the way that women are socialized and the way that we have not learned to establish our own boundaries, to push back, and to say and mean no.
Shervin Talieh:
You were citing some statistics earlier. I believe you said that most women who suffer from sexual abuse as a child are likely to experience it again as an adult. Do you have any numbers... I'm curious... about what percentage of women, just throughout their life, will experience some form of sexual assault or abuse?
Lori Eberly:
I think RAINN... R-A-I-N-N... has some current statistics up on their website. What I've seen more recently is one in three women and one in five men will experience sexual abuse. I think those numbers are pretty staggering for a lot of folks who don't follow that closely. We often tend to focus more on women that have experienced that have experienced sexual violence and I think there's a lot of men and non-binary folks who have also experienced this very toxic form of misogyny and there's even less space for those stories to be told.
Shervin Talieh:
You had mentioned also that you are a survivor of a #MeToo... I'm assuming more than one incident. Is there something that you'd like to share there?
Lori Eberly:
Yeah. I would like to share it because I believe that while the #MeToo movement and what happened with Weinstein certainly helped to validate survivors' experiences and remind folks that these things don't happen in a vacuum or that they're rare... There's stories currently in the headlines now. Certainly with Governor Cuomo and the women that have recently come forward with experiences of sexual harassment while working for him. I came forward in 2018 about, yes, multiple experiences while I worked at a semiconductor industry for several years. I was explicitly asked for sex by three executives at that company. One of them was on my very first day of working there. It was not only my first day of working there, it was my first day of working as an executive coach after a 10 year career as a hospice social worker. So, a rather unusual career trajectory.
Lori Eberly:
The larger context of that is I was 37 years old and I had spent, at that point, about 15 years of my career working as a social worker, which means largely working with other women. It is a very female-dominant industry and a lot of that was in healthcare, which is often a lot of women as well, except in the administrative and leadership roles. So, I'd spent my career with nurses and chaplains and home health aids and volunteer coordinators and very spiritual, emotionally-attentive folks. And so to trade that for a career in the tech industry and in the semiconductor in particular, which as you can imagine is a very good ol' boys club and certainly very white male dominant, was a complete change in context for me. And so I was already experiencing a lot of anxiety. I had literally been put on a plane to fly to Europe to coach six VPs. I was flying by the seat of my pants. Just the normal jitters of starting a new job and really wanting to do well. It's the first time I'd ever traveled for business. Really experiencing jet lag in a professional place. This is all the context.
Lori Eberly:
At the end of a very long day on the way up to my room, the COO, who was a very tall man and has a very commanding presence, approached me in the stairwell and said, "Are you coming to the bar for a drink?" And I was like, "No. I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed." Honestly, I didn't even think of it. I felt in my body that he had leaned in too close, but my radar was not really going off at that point in time and I went upstairs. But then it was 10 minutes later that I got a text from an unknown number that said, "Can you come down to the bar? I want to talk about..." Todd, we'll call him, which was my client. I thought who is this? And he identified himself. And so in that five minutes, he had somehow managed to find my personal cellphone number, which he didn't have a right to do, and to offer a bold-faced lie that he wanted to summon me downstairs at 11:00 to talk about a client.
Lori Eberly:
Now, 47 year old Lori would be like, "Yeah, you want to talk about a client? We can make an appointment tomorrow." But that 37 year old Lori, who's brand new to working in corporate, didn't have the capacity to set that boundary. So, then I'm going back downstairs, when I don't want to be there, to supposedly talk about a client with a COO that I'd just met and then, of course, we didn't talk about that client at all. And the whole time, I'm just like, why am I here? What's going on? It wasn't until I retired to bed a second time that the next text came in. "Meet in my room at [inaudible 00:13:21]." And I was just like, oh my god. Is this really how this works? I mean, I felt naïve. I felt overwhelmed. I called a girlfriend back in the States, but because of the time zone, she didn't answer the phone. I just texted back, "No."
Lori Eberly:
And then the next day... This is another way that I think misogyny really socializes us, Lori who is a people pleaser, Lori who wants other to feel comfortable, Lori who is day two on the job and doesn't want to piss off the COO of the company she's been hired for, gives him an out. Again, I would do things differently now. Now, I would screen-shotting that text and marching to HR or to my attorney. At that point in time, because he'd been averting his gaze all morning, I said, "Look, let's forget about yesterday. Let's start over." I didn't want that energy starting a new job and I was trying to reestablish a starting point. He clearly didn't take it as that. He took it as a cat and mouse game and the sexual harassment continued.
Shervin Talieh:
You're touching on a really interesting pattern that other women that I've spoken to have alluded to and have informed me of, which is... and I heard this expression, himpathy, which I read just recently in a book I read about the term as well. Essentially, men create the system and they use it for their own gains and satisfaction. When women are victimized by men in the system, they are either expected to succumb or acquiesce and/or they turn into maybe an unwitting accomplice almost to the continued manifestation of that system. In some cases, we even find women who themselves are enabling misogyny in other forms too.
Lori Eberly:
Yes. I actually haven't heard this term, himpathy, but it certainly makes sense. I've seen both of those reactions. The acquiescing as well as the accomplicing. And I'm sure there's others, right? Because there's always more than two choices. I certainly was an acquiescer for a while. Because if we haven't been socialized to set boundaries, to stand up for ourselves, to speak truth to power... I mean, some of it's about how we've been socialized, but a lot of it is just the reality of... I'm the primary breadwinner in my family. I carry health insurance for myself and my children. I was starting a new career. Certainly on the day one of a new career, you don't want to get HR and legal involved in what you're dealing with. There's just constantly these series of choices of... I mean, I didn't acquiesce in that I said no and I tried to reestablish.
Lori Eberly:
So, there's subtle acquiescing and sort of like once or that... Like, in this situation with Martin... I mean, narcissists and sociopaths and just dangerous misogynists, they love the thrill of wearing you down. Maybe you can set a boundary in the beginning, but they will slowly begin to manipulate your mind so that it becomes harder and harder to resist. That's that cat and mouse game that I mentioned. So, there's a lot of reasons that people don't stand up to it. Again, as a white married educated woman with heaps of privilege, it still took years for me to speak out against the sexual harassment and eventual sexual assault that I experienced there and I've got as much stacked in my favor as possible. To imagine that I was a Black or Brown woman. To imagine that I was wasn't married for 25 years or didn't have a master's degree. There's a lot that I bring that adds to my credibility. When I did come forward, I was believed. I have no doubt that that's largely in part to my white privilege.
Lori Eberly:
Now, to circle back to the accomplices, I will say as a survivor, I have mad respect and compassion for all the women who, for a million reasons, do not publicly share what happened to them. Total respect and compassion for that. What I've learned, though, is that there are certainly women as well as men who are rewarded by keeping the secrets of predators. Who are given real power in being that secret keeper. Who are promoted and given positions in very male-dominant areas because they keep those secrets. There are woman who I've interviewed who are incredibly judgmental and scornful and attacking and cruel of women who have #MeToo experiences. Because those women have more of a fight response and they are so judgmental of women who had a flee or a freeze response. When I look back on my experience of what happened to me at Lam Research, I've worked through the trauma of the sexual assault. I've worked through the trauma of institutions that uphold sexism and racism. The part that is the most bitter pill for me to swallow is all the women who actively participated in those very misogynistic structures.
Shervin Talieh:
I think listening to you, it's clear that my lens was a little... not only was it limited, but it wasn't... there was no grace in it. I think what I'm hearing from you, Lori, is that... and I like the way you framed it about the freezing essentially. As I'm hearing you... please correct me if I'm wrong... there is the... There are women who are being victimized and some are choosing to speak out even though it could come at a tremendous cost to them. Others, for very understandable reasons, maybe don't have that privilege. Maybe it's a job that they can't afford to lose or whatever the case may be. And maybe there is this third category that I'm thinking about... and maybe it's unfair for me to see if they even fit into this bucket. I've heard from other guests that, in fact, misogyny, while it is a system that benefits men, there are... I mean, I think we saw with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the results afterwards and some of the voting patterns as an example. We do find... and maybe this is detached from the sexual abuse topic, but we do find that there are women who want to uphold the system of misogyny and that is new information for me.
Lori Eberly:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Again, there's... Our brains really want clear heroes and clear villains. We want to be able to look at someone and say this is a good one and this is a bad one. There's just very little in life that is that simple. And misogyny hurts all of us. I mean, yes, women and other marginalized folks bear the brunt of that, but misogyny hurts men too. White supremacy hurts white people too. All toxic systems hurt human beings because they are, by nature, anti-relational. I mean, specific to sex abuse, I want to say that while I was interviewing other folks to see what their experience has been at the company that I was working with, there were also men who experienced sexual harassment in that company. Because a toxic culture is not wise enough to figure out where to be toxic and not to be toxic. It is just toxic.
Lori Eberly:
In the same way that white woman are very much colluding in white supremacy because our proximity to white men is an incredible privilege. I get power. I get wealth. I get influence and all sorts of perks by being white even though white supremacy hurts all of us. Misogyny, sure, hurts women and other marginalized folks, but it's built on abuse of power. It's built on upholding the rights of certain people in certain moments. But it's kill or be killed. The same people that would not share stories with me because they were worried about how they would be connected to the predators and because they were active accomplices, they stayed quiet until things went public and then, all of a sudden, they were the first person to call me and say, "Oh my gosh, you're so brave and did you know?"
Lori Eberly:
I appreciate you saying that you feel like I add some grace in it. I try to. That's a product of therapy. That's a product of my own spiritual practice. That's a belief that hate poisons me. I do believe in the power of forgiveness. I also believe in the power of accountability and that we really have to look at all the accomplices, all the cowards, that allow any kind of predator or misogynistic systems to stay in place. None of this is in a vacuum. It is deeply, deeply systemic.
Lori Eberly:
I frequently wondered about the math. I can't write algorithms, but I'd love if somebody listening could. For every misogynist in a workplace or freaking on the schoolyard or wherever... For every one that really has some power and is actively abusing their power, how many willing accomplices who know and say nothing are required to keep that person in power? If three woman, say, step forward and say, "John harassed me," for every three... I believe there's some kind of math that says for every three that come forward, there's 10 in the shadows. And of those 10 in the shadows, we can predict that five of them have told at least one person and the odds are that five of them have never breathed it to anybody.
Lori Eberly:
Because this is what I began to see when I tapped into the whisper networks at Lam was I found my #MeToo sisters. I found other women who had experienced sexual harassment or assault by the same people I had. And then I also was able to have conversations with people that never experienced it firsthand but witnessed it. I talked with people who had chosen to leave. I talked with people who had chosen to stay. I talked with people who had told a friend or their partner or a therapist and I also talked with #MeToo sisters who had never told anyone before they told me. What I've learned is there is an incredible weight to carrying the secrets and shame of perpetrators.
Lori Eberly:
Again, this is a deep poison that comes from a misogynistic culture that... Even if we're not talking about sexual harassment or assault. Like, my daughter. I have a 16 year old daughter. It hardly ever snows in Portland. It snowed a couple weeks ago and she's out shoveling the sidewalk because I asked her to. She was catcalled by a car driving by while she's shoveling her driveway. I am glad that she and I have the relationship that she can come in and say, "Oh my god, Mom. I just got catcalled." Because that at least gives her that opportunity to purge that someone felt it was their right to whoop out the door at her because seeing a young woman shoveling snow gave them pleasure.
Lori Eberly:
How many women deal with that sort of bullshit on a regular basis and don't even give it words to their friend or their partner or their journal? We just carry that and it happens over and over and over again. Maybe our girlfriends recognize it. There's this place of understanding it. But why I agreed to do this call with you, Shervin, is that I think there's lots of well-meaning men out there who really, because it's not your experience, cannot imagine what it's like to go through your life being catcalled or having your breasts stared at or feeling minimized or dismissed because of your gender.
Shervin Talieh:
That is precisely why I started this journey was because it was... I'm 52 and, a little over a year ago, someone close to me said that I was not as woke as I thought I was. And she gave me some pretty specific examples. It led to more questions and that's one of the reasons why I'm listening to you and just trying to understand how dehumanizing it must feel to be assaulted, frankly, by a stranger. I've heard other women describe this idea that... and you were talking about it earlier. That, really, it's a persistent attack on your safety. I was hoping that you could kind of connect the dots for me a little bit from... You went on to... Your undergrad, I believe, was in Ohio and then you found yourself in healthcare and social work. And then I really want to understand what Fuckery is all about and the work that you do in your book and the work that you do today.
Shervin Talieh:
There's a specific question I also have about the idea that we're socialized into thinking that women are supposed to take care of us. It seems like if we're going to solve this problem, at some level, that actually has to be changed too. The expectation of what is a quote, unquote a man's role in the world versus a woman's role. Isn't it interesting that even in industries like education or healthcare, where women are by and large 90 plus percent of the workforce, the power and leadership is still centralized with some men.
Lori Eberly:
Specifically to this notion that women take care and we are caregivers, we're seeing that in this year of COVID. Again, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the number of women who have left the workforce. Whether that's to take care of our children who are schooling at home or to take care of our elders. Women are leaving the workforce in droves. That will have long-term implications on our careers, on our salaries, on our promotions. I have a friend who works in academia who talked about how she's seeing other professors who are women having to not do the research and not take on... There's so much, of course, importance to being published and get tenure, et cetera, in academia. How in the world can you do that if you're at home taking care of your children and you're the one being responsible for their education? And she's like, "We're going to see less women be published this year and in the next couple of years." Again, in an industry where there's so many white male tenured professors, that it's just one example of how women are called to care for our communities at the expense of their mental health, of their careers, of their happiness, of their wellbeing.
Lori Eberly:
And so, yes, we do have to talk about this. I think it's how do we... Yesterday, was International Women's Day. How do we uphold and acknowledge and thank women for being such amazing caregivers? And how do we also teach other folks to be a part of this critical important work of caring for others? Of caring for children? Again, not to get too stuck on the gender binary. I mean, I certainly work with women in my coaching consulting business who are not natural caregivers. Let me tell you. Talk about judgment. If you are not a warm and fuzzy woman who has a natural inclination to care for others or be in deep relationship, we have words for you. Bitch being the first one that comes to mind. That also doesn't mean that there aren't who don't identify as male who aren't deeply caregiving. Whether that's in the way that they lead, in the way they show up for their families, for their parents, et cetera.
Lori Eberly:
I believe that to be human means that we have this capacity to care and to bring in and to encircle those. We are hardwired to belong and to be in relationship. We can say men suck because they're not caregivers. I don't find that to be that useful. I think men are also socialized to not be in that role and they're not allowed to be in that role. Because they are expected to provide. They are expected to go out and earn the money and leave that caregiving work to the women. Those gendered roles... Again, it's not that they just don't work for the women. They don't work for the men either if any of us are boxed into what we need to do or not do.
Lori Eberly:
Yeah, I think it's very important that we're talking about the role of caregiving and who's allowed to give care and who's allowed to receive care and what care looks like. Again, not to get too far off topic, but living in a pandemic where quarantine life and working from home and healthcare and financial insecurity and the terrible racial and social injustice we're experiencing in the US and, of course, around the world. We need to be cared for. I am deeply concerned about the mental health of folks. We are a long ways away from whatever a new normal looks like.
Lori Eberly:
In fact, I talked with a client this week who's feeling particularly dismayed because we're watching people get vaccinated around us and yet we still know we're like six months out from being able to gather with friends and family the way that we used to. People are depressed and people are struggling. We do not live in a society... Misogyny does not allow us to live in a society where we are vulnerable and we talk about feeling afraid, where we talk about how lonely and isolating it is. Misogyny requires that men act like they have their shit together all the time and that women are needy and ask the men to care for us. And the whole system is fucked. It's not working for us. For anybody.
Shervin Talieh:
I love that. Can you tell me about your book?
Lori Eberly:
Yeah, absolutely. So, my undergrad in Ohio was in social work. I'm one of those weird people who knew from a very early age what I wanted to be, which was a social worker. And then I got my graduate degree here. Did healthcare social work for a long time. Left that job because I had a terrible boss, which is why most people leave their jobs. And then moved into executive coaching and leadership development because of someone I met on a nonprofit board. And so the book came to be after working for five or six years as an executive coach, where a lot of what I do is doing 360 interviews. If I'm working with you, Shervin, and you're my client and let's say you're a senior director who is being promoted into a VP role and they say, "Yeah, Shervin's really brilliant and he really understands the business and he's really smart and tech-savvy. He needs a little help knowing how to run a remote team. Maybe he's kind of got this bulldozer mentality and he needs to learn to be a better listener," which is not the case for you at all. Enter Lori to come in and teach some of those leadership skills.
Lori Eberly:
And so when I do a 360, that basically means I'm going to ask your direct reports and your teammates that work alongside of you and your superiors. I'm going to interview about nine of them and I'm going to say, "What does Shervin do really well? What are the strengths that he brings to this job and to this organization? What are the top one or two things that are continually getting in his way that he needs to focus on to be a better leader and to be more successful?" And then the third question is, "And how will you know that he's taken this 360 to heart? What will he be doing differently in a week or a month or three months from now?" What I learned from doing dozens of these interviews is that, when I ask the question, "How does Shervin get in his own way?," those where almost entirely behaviors or patterns that have the folks that you work with losing trust in you.
Lori Eberly:
So, Fuckery as defined by John Sabol and I, who's my co-author, are habits that damage trust. It's not just the Machiavellian thing. It's not just sexual harassment. It's not only bullying. It's not throwing people under the bus. It's not intimidating or dominating. Although all those things are fuckery. It is also the more subtle forms. For example, mine is analysis paralysis. I'm a big over-thinker, which is fine if I'm working on my own, but if I'm working with a team and Lori can't make a decision, people are going to lose trust and faith in me. I had people pleasing as a primary form of fuckery for many years. If I'm always trying to please others, other folks might like that in the moment, but it means that I'm probably over-committing. It means that I'm probably... because I'm struggling to say no and set boundaries... that deadlines are going to get missed. As a leader, that's going to have an impact on me. I get paid to help companies sort through and face their conflict, but in my personal relationships, I can avoid conflict. And avoiding conflict is as much fuckery as creating conflict. Because it's going to get in the way of us being able to work together as a team.
Lori Eberly:
The premise of the book is really understanding what fuckery is. How we look in the mirror. Because it's way easier to point out Shervin's fuckery and John's fuckery and everybody else's and not look at mine. Recognizing what it is, why it disrupts business, how to get a handle on it. And then once I have clear understanding on that, then how do I, as a leader, improve my ability to hold teams accountable and also build community. As a leader, how do I build momentum so that I can achieve my mission and how do I also build belonging so that people want to work here and truly value trust and relationship?
Shervin Talieh:
I will be using the term fuckery regularly. It was so... It's almost as though... When you described what it means, it's almost as though, yeah, obviously that's what it means. Like, I've known this all my life, right? I don't know what... It's almost like a deja vu with a new term. So, let's connect the dots a little bit between things that we do that erode trust and sexism professionally. Because obviously... I mean, as both someone who has maybe not been an ally or maybe even, frankly, created an environment that allowed for bad things to happen, I'd like to know from you what are some things that, in general, men in power can do in the workplace to create less fuckery, if you will, and a better environment for the women working there?
Lori Eberly:
Beautiful question. Well, I think you are modeling absolutely the first thing, which is you recognize that you don't know some things and that, if you want to learn more about misogyny, you should probably listen to women. And so you bring your curiosity, you bring questions, you bring your listening skills, and you bring humility. Those are good leadership skills for all of us to practice. In the same way that I and many others are trying to better understand racism and how I can be a better anti-racist, I think it's really... It has to start with I'm listening and I'm learning. But listening and learning ceases to be enough if we are not also acting. It can't only be a cerebral experience. If you interview 50 folks and you are really deeply moved by all that we say, but it doesn't cause you to do anything different, then I would say it's not all that useful.
Lori Eberly:
Does it allow you to notice... Huh, I'm working on a project and it looks like we required the woman in the room to be the one to order lunch. Or I notice that every time I go to this meeting, it's a woman who's always taking notes. I notice that, in the break room, it's always the women loading the dishes or unloading the dishwasher. I wonder why that is. I wonder can you use your position to... if you are the person in power or if you have access to the people in power... to say, "Hey, I notice that we put something on LinkedIn that said we celebrate women. Are we revealing the salaries of the people in this company and can you tell me the percentage that women make on the dollar to the men?" Are you looking at maternity care policies? Are we doing sexual harassment training that is just check the box and yet there is nothing about how do we turn bystanders into upstanders? Are you watching women be interrupted and saying nothing because you don't know how to change it?
Lori Eberly:
It's not about waiting until we have all the answers or can get it right. It is how do we interrupt injustice in the moment? That can just be saying in the middle of an all hands meeting, "I just need to say that this feels really insensitive. I'm wondering how the women in the room feel right now. This feels like mansplaining." That's fuckery as well too. "Lori just made this suggestion and nobody said anything, but then Jack made the same suggestion and we all said, 'Jack, that's brilliant.' No shade to you, Jack, but let's acknowledge Lori. It was her idea." It takes risk. We have to be willing to take risk and that's scary. Courageous people do things even when they are scary. That's what living in our integrity means. We recognize that to live in our integrity, to break and dismantle harmful systems, we have to be willing to stand up against the status quo. Unless and until we do that, it's just an academic experience.
Shervin Talieh:
Lori, that is such a powerful and inspirational call to action for me and for anyone else listening. I want to thank you for... right off the bat for speaking your truth and being vulnerable and open. Really, you've shared a lot with me today that... Yeah. It's stuff that I needed to hear and thank you. Thank you for being generous and for sharing your wisdom with me. I'm really grateful.
Lori Eberly:
Thank you, Shervin. I feel the sincerity and really value the space and the platform that you've created for women to share our stories. It is by doing this. It is by listening to others and increasing our own understanding and then taking that understanding to drive action. This is how we change the world.
Shervin Talieh:
Thank you so much.
Lori Eberly:
Absolutely.