We have the pleasure of speaking with mentor, entrepreneur, and businesswoman Kethlyn White to expand on our Season 1 self-care discussion. She shares both her personal career and hair journey and talks about the business she runs with her friend, Coil Beauty.

Connect with Kethlyn on LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/in/kethlynawhite/

Check out Coil Beauty! https://coilbeauty.com/

Click here for more Living Corporate! https://linktr.ee/livingcorporate




TRANSCRIPT

Zach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, listen, check it out. Y'all know by this point in Season 2--wow, that is crazy. It's been over a year. It's Season 2, and y'all know from time to time we'll have, you know, B-Sides where we just kind of have a real talk conversation with a special guest, and listen here, today's special guest is pretty special. She's pretty great, is pretty talented, and I'm excited to have her here. Actually, she was one of the first black women that I ever have worked with in consulting. Great background. She and I met in person, and she has a great story. We talked a lot about, like, strategic change management at the time and just kind of navigating these spaces. She has been a great mentor to me. She's one of the main reasons that I was able to be promoted to manager at my last job, which helped me transition to my new job, and yeah, she's great. I don't want to spoil too much. I'm gonna go ahead and introduce her. She is a mentor, a public speaker, a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, a creative, right? Her name is Kethlyn White. That's right, y'all, Kethlyn. So right, so Kethlyn, right, it's, like, a combination of, like--it's black, but, you know, it passes the resume test. Like, you'll still--you will still interview a Kethlyn, right? So it's a really nice combination there. Kethlyn, what's up? How are you doing?




Kethlyn: Hey, Zach. Thanks for having me. I'm glad I--I'm glad I passed your sniff test.




Zach: No, no, no. It's not my sniff test you need to pass. You know what--[both laugh] Kethlyn will make it past the resume test. It's not like a LaQuanda is my point. And Zachary of course is very respectable. Like, Zachary--I mean, how many black Zachs do you even know? You live on the West Coast, but, like, do you know a lot of black Zachs?




Kethlyn: I don't.




Zach: Exactly. So that with being said, today we're talking about black, and we're just talking about self-care and what that really looks like practically. A lot of times, you know, we talk about--we talk about self-care, we talk about--we talk about it from the perspective of natural hair becausae it's an easy entry point into self-care, but I'd like to really, Kethlyn, give you some space to kind of talk about yourself, talk about your journey, talk about some of the things that you've got going on, and then we can go from there. How does that sound?




Kethlyn: That sounds good. So tell me where--tell me where you want to start. You know, self-care, especially in the black community, is a very large topic, and it could cover a wide range of things. I probably would need more than just a podcast episode to really dive in.




Zach: Big facts.




Kethlyn: Where do we want to start?




Zach: You know, that's a really good question. How about we start with your journey in terms of, you know, your transition from, you know, adolescence and high school to college to then--you know, again, I don't want to tell too much, but I know that, you know, you spent some time out of the country and you came back, and you've continued to grow, and your personal image and how you manage your image has continued to grow and shift as you've been in Corporate America. I think that would be a really cool story to tell.




Kethlyn: Okay. Well, I mean, from adolescence 'til now would probably be, again, another novel, so we could probably cut it back, but I think it is an interesting point to talk about, you k now, how do you grow with yourself, especially within not just what you're doing individually but how you do and how you grow within your job, your entrepreneurial ventures, et cetera. So, you know, for me, you know, I was blessed to go to Spelman College. Well, [I went to] two HBCUs actually. I started at Hampton and I transferred to Spelman, but one of the wonderful things about going to a historically black college is that you really are left with this sense of beauty in all shapes and sizes with people who look like me, who have my skin color and who therefore have very similar experiences. And we all have different backgrounds. We all are completely different people, but leaving an HBCU, you leave with a sense of pride that no one is allowed to take from you, and it gave me--it boosted my self-confidence that I didn't have going to predominantly white schools as I matriculated, you know, teenage years, right, all the way through high school graduation, and it was extremely impactful for me as I started to navigate the corporate world and entrepreneurship, and one of the biggest legs up I found was that, you know, when it comes to self-care, a lot of that starts at the root with how you manage your time and manage your space, and it's not easy to do, because when you start on your first job, when you start taking on and tackling, you know, your first venture, you find that there are a lot of people who don't look like you when you're a black person, and because of that you end up with a lot of different, sometimes negative, experiences. Sometimes it's hard to feel comfortable, it's hard to not feel so challenged. So having that spirit already from the HBCU provided me with a support system that I couldn't pay for, and so it really did--it really did make a big difference for me as I started to do and started to grow into my roles. I started out in consulting, one because I love technology. My mom, who is a boss in the technology space, she was a CEO of a tech company for about 15 years and now sits on the boards of Verizon, Nordstrom, Roper, you name it, right? And the list will go on and continue. So, you know, she was a huge influence to me, as well as with my dad, around making sure that--you know, they always told me I can do whatever I wanted to do, and I knew I wanted to be in technology 'cause it was the space that it was always going to be there, so I wanted to understand it. [?] an engineer. I didn't really have an interest in being an engineer, but I loved how engineers think, right? So I wanted to be in the space, and I went specifically into technology consulting because I was gonna get my hands dirty. That was awesome, and so I enjoyed Capgemini out the gate, and man, do they let you get your hands dirty, and I'm talking about drinking from the fire hose.




Zach: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.




Kethlyn: Very quickly. And, you know, so you're balancing and managing how to learn how to do that and start your new job and all that good stuff while also managing your space. So I had to set some rules for myself around how I was going to navigate. I had to make sure that I was networking and getting to know people within, you know, my company while also knowing that there might be some boundaries there that I will have to set for myself because I'm not as comfortable in different areas. So it was an interesting journey, but again, you know, my foundation was set, so from there I really was able to, you know, take it a bit further, and, you know, my self-confidence and my comfort level with who I was as a black woman really made a huge difference as I navigated the workforce, and you can probably ask anyone who I joined and started with. They knew who I was. I commanded every room I went in, and it was not necessarily because of my skills, it was moreso because of--obviously that was a part of it, but it was moreso because of the presence I had in the room, and that presence came from me understanding what my self-worth was out the gate. So no one was going to be allowed to determine that for me. I don't care whether I was taking meeting minutes in a meeting or I was facilitating a session, right? No matter what it was, I commanded that space and that presence, and that allowed me to not only grow very quickly, get promoted very quickly and network really well, it also afforded me opportunities to travel and ultimately move to Australia for an awesome four-year opportunity after I got married. So, you know, that's--I think that's at the root of where a lot of my, you know, self-awareness comes from as a black woman is, you know, what my parents and family instilled in me, plus, you know, the foundation that an HBCU provided me.




Zach: So that's really dope, right? And can we--and I want to double down on the part that you said that, like, everyone who--when I was working with you, and I think that, you know, continues forward of course, is that, you know, it's like, "Hey, Kethlyn knows who she is. She knows what she's about, and no one's really gonna shake her from that." Can you talk a little bit about how your appearance and, like, how you managed--how your hair journey, like, came into play with that, like, from--yeah, from graduating Spelman to then, like, I don't know, today.




Kethlyn: Sure. Well, I think it's important to mention that, you know, yes, I am that way now, right? I had to grow into that person. It just so happened that going to an HBCU really helped, you know, catapult me into that. But I still had my awkward--all kinds of awkward phases, especially when it came to my hair, 'cause God bless my mom. She just did not know, right, how to do it, because, you know, unbeknownst to most people, all African-Americans, we all have different types of hair, right? We don't all come out with the same type of hair. We have different curl patterns, different textures, different thickness, right? My mom's hair is extremely bouncy, right? It is very bouncy. She's got these big spirals. So when I came out, you know, she was lo