Zach takes care of a little house cleaning and touches on a few important topics, such as our blog, 5-star reviews, listener letters, and our monthly newsletter. Back to regularly-scheduled programming next week!




Connect with us! https://linktr.ee/livingcorporate




TRANSCRIPT

Zach: What's up, y'all? Zach here with Living Corporate. Now, we have some news, okay? We all know from time to time we'll shout-out JJ. You know, we'll ask him to drop a Flex bomb or the Jamaican air horns or some applause. So listen, he's actually married to the woman who y'all hear on the outro. Her name is Kiara. Mind-blown. Crazy, right? I know, I know, I know. Anyway, look, my wife Candace and I are godparents to their eldest child, and we're all pretty close. Like, we've known each other for many years. So they're actually bringing in their second child very soon. In fact, they may even be here by the time you're listening to this podcast episode. So look, I feel like that gives us a healthy moment to pause and shout-out Kiara and JJ on their expanding family, and it gives me a reasonable excuse to give y'all some other updates, right? All right, so boom. First thing is our blog. Y'all, look, we have content coming out nearly every week now, so make sure you check us out on the website, living-corporate.com, and actually share it on your platforms, especially, like, LinkedIn, Facebook. You know, it's a--remember, like, we're Real Talk in a Corporate World, right? So the more that we can share this type of content in professional spaces--quote unquote professional spaces--the better. So I definitely want to shout-out our regular writers and our guest writers. Y'all need to please keep it up, and y'all--that y'all was to the writers. Now, this y'all is to y'all. Check us out, right? Check us out, give us a read, and just share it around. Okay, so second thing is our 5-star reviews. So we talked about this in our Season 2 Kickoff, but we have some giveaways planned for those who show us love on the iTunes, okay? So do this for us. After you give us a 5-star review, screenshot it and email us with your address. You will then get into a drawing where you can win a mug from us. This is a good mug too. Like, this is not, like, a little, you know what I'm saying--this is not your grandma's mug, okay? It might be your grandma's mug if your grandma's mug would be big, right, with a huge cup. This is a big mug, right? It's a good mug. Like, you could almost actually eat, like, a little small thing of cereal out this mug. Like, it's a good mug, so check it out. But for you to get the mug, again, for free, we're just asking that you give us a 5-star review, and we'll definitely shout y'all out on the show, just like we did so many episodes ago. Third thing is listener letters. Now, look, y'all, we're not just trying to talk AT y'all, and I know that's kind of weird since we're a podcast, but we're not, right? Like, we actually want to dialogue with you, and so make sure you keep sending in listener letters. Ade and I have had fun thus far in what we've gone through, but we could always use more. So continue to send them in, and encourage your friends and your people to do the same. Fourth thing is our newsletter. So every month we drop a newsletter on what we got going on. Our latest episodes, our blogging content, giveaways, partnerships, all of that, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter through our website. We have--I'm not gonna say the exact number. We've got a few thousand, you know, folks on the newsletter list right now, but our goal is to get to 25,000 by the end of this year, and we're coming up on the halfway mark of the year. We've got a little ways to go, but we want--we want y'all to be on this newsletter, so make sure y'all actually subscribe to the newsletter. Okay, cool. So then last thing, shout-out to y'all. There are so many spaces that I'm seeing in, like, these formal corporate contexts that--they try to talk about culture or D&I, but there's just such a thick veneer of, like, respectability and, frankly, an aversion to discussing race and gender in an intersectional way that--long story less long, rant less long--I just am continuing to understand and value what it is Living Corporate is trying to do here. And this is not me tooting my own horn or trying to pat my own back, but really thanking y'all for supporting this journey that we've been going on, right? It's been a little bit over a year. And our goal was just to create courageous, transparent content that talks about and aims to center identities that are not often centered, right? I mean, kind of what I'm speaking to is I've noticed that, even when we talk about race and we talk about gender within the corporate context, it still centers whiteness, right? Like, it rarely actually centers the perspectives and experiences of the people that are actually being marginalized. It somehow makes racism or discrimination or bias either something that is innocent or unintentional, but it doesn't really, like, seek to empathize, again, or center how those experiences make the non-white party feel. And I believe that Living Corporate is an exercise in empathy, right? Like, we're aiming to really drive and put you, our listeners--especially if you're not a person of color--in those shoes of the people who are experiencing these things and having real, honest, transparent conversations about these topics. And, you know, this platform was kind of birthed out of a certain level of frustration. That frustration has not necessarily gone away. It won't go away, but the frustration is not our fuel for Living Corporate. The love that we've gotten and the support that we've gotten from y'all has been our fuel, so again, shout-out to y'all. Shout-out to Kiara and JJ. Congratulations on y'all's little one. Hope to see them soon. And yeah, we'll catch you all next week. Back to regularly-scheduled programming. This has been Zach. Peace.