Executive coach and Lead For Liberation founder Shayna Renee Hammond has spent two decades coaching Black leaders through burnout, and she says the work starts with energy, not strategy.
In this episode of Ronderings, Ron sits down with Shayna, founder of Lead For Liberation and Indigo Unbound, for a conversation about what it costs to lead inside systems that were never built for you.
Her first day of school was in Pinckney, Michigan, a rural town known for the Ku Klux Klan. She was five, the only Black child, and no one on the bus would let her sit down. She got an assigned seat behind the driver and rode alone for the rest of the year. The emotion she remembers is not shame. It is curiosity. What she took from it was a sentence she still uses: it ain't me.
Fifth grade in Washington DC brought her first Black teacher, who pulled her aside and told her she was a leader. She went from the bottom reading group to the top of her class, and became a principal at 25, leading the highest performing middle school in Baltimore at the time.
Ron and Shayna get into the raw deal school leaders are handed. LeBron has a trainer and a physical therapist behind him. Principals are told to put up all star numbers and hand themselves an ice pack. Shayna calls the thing underneath it a sick collective consciousness, built on scarcity and false urgency, and she is not waiting for the system to fix itself.
Tune in to hear what spirit told her when she felt stuck at 45, and why she calls the CrossFit Open a diagnostic.
Chapters:
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00:11 Welcome to Ronderings, and meeting Shayna Renee Hammond
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03:28 Kindergarten in Pinckney, and the bus where no one let her sit
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07:35 The fifth grade teacher who told her she was a leader
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14:20 It ain't me, and presence alone is revolutionary
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16:29 The talk she gave that found her fifth grade teacher again
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20:25 The Teach for America application she filed at
2:53 in the morning
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22:00 Dr. Alonso opened an org chart and let her choose
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26:46 Recruited back by KIPP at eight months pregnant
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31:11 Leaving to be a present mom, and the first contract
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36:20 IndigoWomen becomes Indigo Unbound, and a room of 100 Black men
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40:06 LeBron has a whole team, school leaders get an ice pack
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43:17 The CrossFit Open and what spirit said about being stuck
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48:51 The Ronderings question: invest in your energy
Links:
Reach out to Shayna Renee Hammond through Lead For Liberation for executive coaching and organizational culture work, or through Indigo Unbound, the space she built for Black leaders and entrepreneurs to do the inner work that sustains the outer impact.
Episode 107
