We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful April Diaz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with April below.

Hi April, thanks for joining us today. Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?

We live in a time where you can easily either curate the most monolithic, homogenous, echo chamber imaginable, or you can deliberatively expand the diversity of voices, input, and contribution for your life and leadership. Research shows that “diverse teams outperform smarter, more capable teams.” (Sallie Krawcheck)

The vast majority of my leadership journey I’ve been the minority team player, whether in age, gender, and/or ethnicity. At one point I was the youngest person on the team, the only woman with my level of authority, and the only white person on the team. That trifecta propelled me to figure out how to contribute best to our wildly diverse team, while also work to become more inclusive. I have countless memories of feeling misunderstood, misrepresented, invisible, and insecure because of my ‘other-ness’ on the team.

Creating a more inclusive workspace will never accidentally happen. It takes courageous leadership! It requires deliberate, ongoing attention and action. It calls us to imagine what else is possible when we invite others to the table.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a reluctant entrepreneur and CEO. I never imagined that I’d start a company focused on increasing women’s wholeness and leadership equity. I’ve been in the people development business for 25+ years, but starting Ezer + Co. was a surprise even for me! Ezer + Co. was born with the commitment to help women increase their wholeness in life and leadership. We’re relentless in our work to see more women in positions of leadership and authority.

But we’re also committed to partnership with men. The response to patriarchy is not matriarchy; it’s partnership. Women and men are better together. Inclusive leadership is about sharing power and position. However, you can’t be a powerhouse leader and while also burning out and dying internally. That’s why we’re focused on wholeness. When you expand your inner capacity, you more naturally get the external desired results.

As a company, we’re also committed to inclusive partnership beyond gender. From the beginning, we’ve been building a coaching team that’s at least 50% women of color because we know representation matters for the work we do and the people we work with. We want our team to be as diverse as we can possibly imagine – age, abilities, ethnicity, sexual orientation, backgrounds, faith, etc.

In our company’s early days, one of our Board members (who was a woman of color) said to me, “April, if Ezer + Co. isn’t good for EVERY woman, it’s not good for ANY woman.” Her words became a litmus test of how impactful we could be.

I’m so very proud of what we’re building because more and more women can see themselves in our community of Warrior Women instead of feeling alone and excluded.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

That little global pandemic Covid-19 made the word “pivot” the operative word for nearly 2 years. While I loathe the pain and loss Covid caused for all of us, the pandemic also allowed me to re-imagine what we could be as a coaching company. It gave me the gift of being grounded because I couldn’t hop on a plane and speak in rooms full of people.

Being grounded created the space for us to create our propriety Wholeness Assessment, which is unlike any other assessment in the world today. I was also able to design our 6-month Warrior Woman coaching group program, which is designed for women who are sick and tired of settling, being stuck, and living at less than their best. (There’s even an Executive Warrior Woman coaching group now for female entrepreneurs and women in executive roles.)

Pivoting has often felt like whiplash as a leader and business owner, but it’s helped birth some of our most valuable content and coaching!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Rest is not a reward, it’s a birthright.

The patriarchy and capitalism has baked into our culture that rest is for the weak. That’s a lie! We were made to rest. Rest reminds me that I’m more than what I do, that I’m loved for who I am, that I’m valuable for simply existing. Rest reinforces that the world will keep on spinning even when I take a break. Rest settles me back into my values, dreams, and goals. Some of my best ideas have come on rest days, after a vacation, or during extended time away from screens.

There were multiple points in my 20s and 30s when I was on the verge of burnout. As an aggressive, goal-motivated, high achieving person, I used to believe that rest was only so I could recover and work again. I used to give all my energy to work, but my relationships and my own wholeness paid the price. It was a terrible way to live.

Coaching and therapy have helped me re-train my mind and body to embrace rest as a birthright. I’m more my whole self when I practice rest, not as a means to do more work, but as a way to recover my whole life. That’s the best reward!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ezerandco.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ezerandco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ezerandco/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ezer-and-co/