Tell it Proud

This episode is a replay of a live performance from Change My Mind: a live storytelling experience in NYC. This story is about my beliefs about neighbors changing over my life, from growing up as an outsider in Utah to surviving a building fire because of neighbors in NYC. This story highlights the beautiful and complicated role neighbors can play in all of our lives.  

This episode highlights The Heart of a Woman which is an autobiographical and courageous act of self-trust as a memoir of Maya Angelou's life from 1957 to 1962. She writes about the turns and lessons of her dynamic life during a dangerous and divided time in the U.S, and it's filled with famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X. The Heart of a Woman sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent pr...

This episode is a replay of a live performance from Change My Mind: a live storytelling experience in NYC from Hope Alcocer, who is a two-time author, speaker, certified mental health coach, and award-winning marketing strategist with 15 years of experience helping Fortune 500s, startups, and purpose-driven brands tell stories that move people. A Midwest girl turned New Yorker, she bought a one-wa...

We ingest thousands of messages every single day, from 30 second social media hot takes and news headlines, to billboards and printed advertisements we may glance at while hustling about our neighborhoods, to our favorite TV shows and movies we cozy up to on the couch in the evenings. All of these messages impact how we feel, think, and behave in both positive and negative ways, including our beli...

The Black Masking Indian Tradition during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, developed through early encounters between the region's Indigenous and Black communities.  This tradition has continued within the Black communities of New Orleans, with many participants being mixed race descendants of Black and Indigenous ancestry who self-identify as Black Indians. In this episode we highlight Flagboy Giz is a...

The Message is an incredibly timely and powerful book by Ta-Nehisi Coates that highlights the moral depth of what it means to be a writer, and what responsibilities we have when we put ideas into the world we hope others adopt and understand. As someone passionate about how much storytelling shapes every aspect of being human, this book deepened my understanding of the calling of writing. Written...

You can be in a room full of people, and feel lonely as hell. One reason for this is a lack of attunement. Attunement is how we connect deeply with another person and allow them to 'feel felt.' It's genuine curiosity about someone else's dreams, ideas, desires, feelings, goals, and wants. Many people have limited capacity for genuine attunement in their relationships, but it's one of the most mean...

Belonging is a fundamental need, often found in dense community ties and emotionally close relationships. Yet many of these same spaces we hope to find belonging from, often demand conformity and betraying our own needs and values, for full acceptance. In this episode I share a bit about how true belonging is being fully witnessed, recognized, and accepted for who you are and what you have to shar...

What is trust? The simplest definition I drummed up after noodling, researching, and mind hashing this eons old question, is something or someone safely fulfilling its responsibilities and commitments with consistency, honesty, and integrity. We are constantly tasked with extending trust because we have to trust in hundreds of things in our daily lives just to function. This episode describes how...

Today's episode is an essay I wrote titled "we need to rebrand racism" because we have plenty of racism but supposedly no racists. The term racist was coined in 1935 and I've come up with three new terms we should use: shadow shame, melanin averse, pigment piqued, to beat racists at their own coopting word game. This episode looks into the history of language and it's power when we take it back.  

Today's episode is an essay I wrote titled the practice of ubuntu for bridging divides. Originating in the Bantu and Xhosa people of Southern Africa and popularized by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, it's a philosophical concept and set of practices about interconnectedness of human existence, and emphasizes that one's humanity is inextricably tied to the recognition of others' humanity. This phi...

This episode is a replay of a live performance from Change My Mind: a live storytelling experience in NYC. This story covers my own journey of moving across country on a 3 day train from from NJ back to my hometown in Utah with my mother and siblings, how intergenerational trauma lives in our DNA, the history of nuclear families and chosen families, and the importance of building community and rel...

Catastrophic weather events are an increasing norm due to climate change, sped up by the destructive consumption and production practices within businesses and societal norms. In times of grieving and loss, it's understandable to feel overwhelmed and a growing hopelessness about what can be done, but a powerful counterpractice is to look to untold history for cultural insights and solutions for th...

Today's episode is about You Got to Move , an underknown and incredible documentary following the transformation of six ordinary people into activists through their attendance at Highlander Folk School, an activist training ground that was founded in the 1930s, trained 100K everyday people, and still exists today. The people featured in the documentary are both Black and White individuals who live...

Trust is the foundation of healthy relationships and a functioning society. Without trust, we cannot function or meet our basic needs. When we have high levels of trust in our relationships we work together better, and feel a deeper sense of wellbeing and safety. While pundits and politicians on the far-right complain about the woke DEI mind-virus , those of us who live in reality understand our s...

Today's episode is an essay I wrote about what social justice can learn from sports. I'm highly critical of corporate sports. The industry is rife with misogyny, racism, and classism, encoding values into millions of viewers that keep them dissociated and passive, particularly for male-identifying folks. I've had debates with sports-loving friends on how I find it to be a red flag when someone's c...

Welcome to Tell it Proud, stories of courage too good to erase or ignore. I'm your host Christina Blacken. I'm a public speaker, performer, writer, and founder of The New Quo which helps every day people practice authentic leadership through daily acts of courage that improves trust and wellbeing in how we live and work together. Today's episode is an essay I wrote titled "why imperfection is your...

Today's episode is an essay I wrote for The New Quo Learning Community of a review of an incredible book by Cole Arthur Riley called This Here Fles. It's a poetic masterpiece of personal storytelling focused on discovering and practicing the wisdom and lessons within our familial stories, generational wounds, and personal experiences, so we can liberate ourselves from beliefs and practices that ha...

This episode of Tell it Proud is an instagram live interview of TaShun Bowden-Lewis, who made a historic first in her career as the first Black Chief Public Defender for the state of Connecticut. We discuss her earliest memory of courage as an "only" growing up in an all white school, her lessons from defending the most vulnerable, and what she calls the pivot under pressure when facing adversity....

Welcome to Tell it Proud, stories of courage too good to erase or ignore. I'm your host Christina Blacken. I'm a public speaker, performer, writer, and founder of The New Quo which helps every day people practice authentic leadership through daily acts of courage that improves trust and wellbeing in how we live and work together.   If you felt a stomach dropping, heart skipping clutch of fear at a...

Welcome to Tell it Proud, stories of courage too good to erase or ignore. I'm your host Christina Blacken. I'm a public speaker, performer, writer, and founder of The New Quo which helps every day people practice authentic leadership through daily acts of courage that improves trust and wellbeing in how we live and work together. Today's episode is an essay I wrote for The New Quo Learning Communi...

The Underground Railroad was a secret network of routes, safe houses, and abolitionists who helped enslaved people escape from slavery to freedom in the northern states, Canada, and Mexico from approximately the late 18th century until the Civil War, with one of its most famous stewards being Harriet Tubman, who was an abolitionist, social activist, and a formally enslaved person. It's no surprise...

Welcome to Tell it Proud, stories of courage too good to erase or ignore. I'm your host Christina Blacken. I'm a public speaker, performer, writer, and founder of The New Quo which helps every day people practice authentic leadership through daily acts of courage that improves trust and wellbeing in how we live and work together. Today's episode is an essay I wrote for The New Quo Learning Communi...

Welcome to Tell it Proud, stories of courage too good to erase or ignore. I'm your host Christina Blacken. I'm a public speaker, performer, writer, and founder of The New Quo which helps every day people practice authentic leadership through daily acts of courage that improves trust and wellbeing in how we live and work together. Today's episode is an essay I wrote for The New Quo Learning Communi...

Today's episode is a throwback to one of my favorite episodes I produced on a previous podcast of mine called Sway Them in Color. In this solo episode, I unpack the concept of what I call an oppression pass, which is the belief that because you are liberal, marginalized yourself, like black people/have one black friend/are married to a black person/have black children you don't participate in or p...