This Is My Syncopated Life

In this opening episode of Season 4, we explore revelation, healing, and the beautiful complexity of becoming. “Our Lives Live in the Zigzag” invites listeners to rethink the idea that life must unfold in a straight line. For Black women especially, our power often lives in the unexpected turns, the detours, the pauses, the losses, and the moments that force us to see ourselves more clearly. This...

What happens when you stop asking whether you belong and start asking who created the measuring stick? In this birthday episode of This Is My Syncopated Life, Dr. Charles takes listeners through stories about performance evaluations, perspective shifts, Black Feminist Thought, invisible standards, good china, identity, visibility, and why some people insist on measuring giraffes using turtle ruler...

This episode is different. For the first time, I open the door and invite you into one of the most important stories I will ever tell: becoming Ericka’s mother. Before the medals. Before elite competition. Before coaching. Before the world championships. There was a little girl. And there was a mother trying to figure it out in real time. In this deeply personal episode, I share stories of Brookly...

How many opportunities have you eliminated before gathering enough information? In this episode of This Is My Syncopated Life , Coach Patrice explores the psychology of experimentation, adaptation, and what happens when people count themselves out before testing what is actually possible. Using a surprisingly powerful lesson from a routine eye exam, this conversation explores why clarity rarely ap...

Why syncopation? In this episode of This Is My Syncopated Life , Coach Patrice finally answers the question behind the title and explains how a word passed down through humor, memory, motherhood, and observation slowly evolved into an entire framework for understanding Black women’s lives. From childhood stories and lessons inherited from her mother to conversations about adaptation, interrupted r...

Season 3 begins with a different rhythm. In this episode of This Is My Syncopated Life , Coach Patrice introduces Fatima — not simply as an AI assistant, but as a thinking tool, interrogation framework, and reflective partner used to challenge assumptions, trace patterns, sharpen ideas, and explore the deeper conditions surrounding human behavior. This conversation moves beyond surface-level discu...

In this powerful episode of This Is My Syncopated Life , Coach Patrice reframes Black womanhood through the lens of justice, hypervisibility, performance psychology, and Black Feminist Thought. Blending courtroom drama, psychological insight, and cultural truth-telling, this episode explores the exhausting reality of constantly being interpreted before being understood. From emotional labor and pr...

The Origin Before the PhD, before the analysis, before the voice sharpened into steel—there was a 17-year-old Black girl from Brooklyn trying to navigate systems that never taught her how to survive them. In this episode of This Is My Syncopated Life , Coach Patrice reflects on academic dismissal, identity, institutional failure, and the psychology of becoming. Not through polished redemption narr...

Some people recognize power in Black women before we fully recognize it in ourselves. They know who can speak clearly under pressure. They know who can challenge systems. They know who can walk into confusion and create language around what everybody else is too afraid to name.

This is not another “heal, girlboss, and manifest” podcast. It is structural. Embodied. Intellectual. Lived. That is the difference. This episode is not about fragility. Black women have survived conditions that would have collapsed entire systems. This conversation is about cost.

This is my Manifesto of the Syncopated Life . In Black Feminist Thought, we understand that "syncopation" isn't just a musical term—it is the art of surviving and thriving in the off-beat, navigating the spaces between the notes that a dominant culture refuses to play. This script is designed by a Doctor of Philosophy in General Psychology, specializing in Performance Psychology. It...

This is not just a story. This is a pattern. In this episode, I share a personal experience involving my brother, Lorenzo—and what happened when the women in his life chose to direct their anger toward me instead of holding him accountable. What unfolds is something deeper than conflict. It’s about misdirected anger, emotional displacement, and the uncomfortable reality that it is often easier to...

Let me reintroduce myself. This isn’t commentary—this is analysis. In this episode, I break down a pattern that keeps showing up: a man’s behavior is treated as private, but a woman’s response is treated as the problem. And when that woman is Black? The expectation is clear—stay quiet, protect his image, and carry the weight without disruption. We’re not doing that. This conversation uses a real-w...

You ever hit “remind me later” on something you knew you needed to handle… and then it shows up at the worst possible time? Yeah. That’s not just your laptop—that’s your life. In this episode, I take a simple IT moment—ignored updates—and break it all the way down. Because what you avoid doesn’t disappear, it waits. And it’s real patient too… until the exact moment you need everything to work. We’...

In this episode, I continue the conversation—moving beyond workplace frustration into something deeper. What happens when you grow, expand, and come out of a space transformed… but the environments around you stay the same? I talk about what it means to become your work, to carry the stories of other Black women, and to recognize the responsibility that comes with that kind of awareness. There’s a...

In this episode, I’m breaking down a moment at work that wasn’t new—but it was revealing. What started as a simple ticket turned into something deeper: being corrected when I was already right, being overlooked while still being relied on, and watching how certain behaviors get normalized in professional spaces. This isn’t about one interaction. It’s about a pattern—how competence gets questioned,...

This episode calls out patterns in real time - especially the ones people ignore. If you've ever felt something was off but couldn't prove it, this is where it gets named.

This is a space for real conversations - unfiltered, thought-provoking, and very syncopated. Some days we'll laugh, some days we'll go deep, but it's always going to be honest. Please be patient, I am stepping out in faith and trusting the process.