We were lucky to catch up with Eliza Ramos recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Eliza thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?
I have always been curious about what healing means to those I come into relationship with. I’m aware that for me, my definition of healing is constantly changing. And when looking back at these past two years, and the hardships we have all been through, healing has meant coming back to myself, to the things that matter to me, to the way that I most authentically want to be in the world. When the pandemic hit and it brought up a lot of my old fears that I thought I had “dealt with”, but that there was still something to learn from. I by no means think healing is linear, and I think there is a level of growth that happens every time we cycle back to something in a different way.
When I’m coaching people, I talk about that moment or experience when our stuff shows up again or in a new way or something gets hooked and those things that maybe we judge ourselves and say ‘But I’ve healed that, and it’s suddenly there again.’ For me, the practice of meeting the moment with mindfulness has really come into play – acceptance that this is the moment that I’m in, even if it means anger or pain or grief or loss. I often find that the most suffering I’ve experienced is when I’m pushing against what is happening, or when I’m telling myself “this shouldn’t be happening, this is all my fault, why can’t things be different”, etc. The second I could actually meet the reality of what was happening… then I could enter creativity in terms of what I could do about what I was facing.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m Eliza Ramos. I currently live on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland CA. I come from a multi-cultural multi-lingual family. I’m the second of four siblings. I consider myself a creative, an artist, an explorer, an adventurer. And there are many other things I can say, but I’ll start with that. Vocationally, I’m the CEO of an organization called Circles International. Our aim is to support social justice leaders to cultivate wellbeing and prevent burnout… because burnout is really rampant in the social justice field. If you look at social justice and organizing compared to other vocations or work that people might enter, the level of turnover and mental health burnout is really high. I honestly came to this work because of my own burnout.
I started in social work – I was very motivated to create change… especially for youth that were in tough situations because of systemic inequities. That led me to a career in public health. I was fortunate to work with the United Nations and with governments and multilateral organizations around the world – in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. Living in various cultures was always a humbling reminder of how much more I have to learn, and to keep myself open to what I don’t know or may not be seeing. Alongside this work, I think I didn’t realize how much the accumulation of the mental and emotional strain was just building up under the surface in ways that I just didn’t realize when I was working so hard. I was so focused on the outcomes of my programs and making an impact on my community and I was ignoring all of the internal signs of burnout that were happening. That all caught up to me and I… I started feeling physical effects of that, mental effects, emotional effects. As a leader, I was far less impactful than I could’ve been, and I think there was a lot of harm that I was doing that I didn’t see.
I became really interested in this question of “what does it look like to actually lead from a place of being well and thriving as opposed to just being part of the cycles of harm that I was trying to undo.” Through my own healing and transformation, and then eventually when I started working with other leaders through Circles International, I am constantly unlearning and re-learning around this question.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I think the interconnection of the inner work and our inner lives and how that enters our outer work in the world, and especially in leadership roles… it became clear to me that it is just so integral. And a question that I wanted to explore. And honestly, more of what I wanted to see in the world. I wanted to see organizations that were putting their people first and making sure that their people were well before trying to create scale and create impact. I’d been doing a lot of work with folks who work in healthcare/health equity and diversity, inclusion, and equity. Both of these worlds have which have gained a lot more focus in the last year due to the pandemic, and that uncovered a lot of existing wounds and issues in our existing systems.
One of the things mentors kept telling me is that none of these wounds are new, people are just looking at them a little bit differently. I think that’s true particularly around moral injury and moral betrayal… It’s made me realize that it’s just a part of the territory. If I want to create change in any way, there’s no way that I won’t face moral betrayal because the current systems and structures that we operate in are built to be inequitable and often to oppress and create harm. I think so much of the struggle that happens is that we’re not training our leaders to expect that, and then when it happens, the stress response comes. And then suddenly self-doubt or panic might set in… I may think I don’t know how to lead in this situation. What we need to be doing is training our leaders that this is going to be a part of the territory, period. So how are you going to take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of your team, and how are you going to navigate with wisdom and creativity as opposed to reactivity and stress? It’s a totally different way of leadership than we are taught. It’s a piece of leadership that I wish existed for so many folks that I see lead but don’t have the grounding to be able to manage the amount of stress and difficult decisions and moral betrayal they have to experience.. Not just in big moments like shifting to meet the world in a the pandemic, but in the little moments, every day, in every conversation or relationship.
Our approach at Circles International is that we work at the intersections of holistic leadership development, wellbeing, and diversity equity and inclusion. We believe that each client is the expert at what they do. Our expertise lies in creating facilitated spaces and processes that allow the client to reach their desired outcomes, and our primary focus is People. The Who always matters more than the What. We take the time to get to know our partners and their goals, and ensure our offerings are fully customized to meet their unique needs. I love supporting leaders and organizations to trust themselves and their wisdom, and just help unlock it so they can create cultures of thriving in the longrun. The impact we aim to create in the world is only as sustainable as our people.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
There’s a culture in organizing and justice work that says, “well, if you’re not angry enough, then do you care enough?” And that was honestly a really hard one for me to undo in myself. It was a story I told myself over and over that made me feel guilty or like I was never doing enough. “If I don’t work hard enough, do I care enough? If I’m not yelling enough or putting my voice out there enough to create change, do I care enough about these movements?” That can be a really treacherous territory I think. Because then we’re linking our anger, our resentment, our pain, to outcomes. But what would it look like to link our love, our joy, to those outcomes instead? If my goal was “am I joyful enough that I care enough”, then I’m excited to go to work. Then I have so much more energy to give. Then I’m leading from a much more sustainable place.
It’s easy to talk about but hard to practice in real life. For example, based on my values I will not accept discrimination in my workplace, period. But when I’m coming from a place of ridgidity, anger, resistance… that comes from the exact same place that discrimination comes from… so HOW I approach that resistance is just as important as that resistance itself. So I can resist discrimination from a place of calm, and a place of knowing my worth – as well as the worth of the person in front of me that might be unknowingly causing harm, or, I can resist from a place of anger and stress and reactivity. The HOW is just as important as the what. We’ve seen the nonprofit paradox operate over and over again in the most difficult of ways — we’ve seen how immigration rights organizations can treat their staff that are mostly immigrants. We’ve seen how youth education organizations can talk down to youth. We’ve seen how health organizations forget their own health. Or healing organizations cause harm. We’ve seen that over and over again, because we’re missing the how and focusing so much on the what that we’re almost ignorant to our own role in these cycles. So this question comes up a lot when I’m coaching executives and leaders as well… We’re not trying to get rid of anything. That fire within you to want to create change is actually really valuable. The question is, how are you going to respond to it and what are you going to model in order to create the change that you want to see?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://circlesinternational.org
- Instagram: @circlesinternational
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/circlesinternational/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizaramos/
Image Credits
J. Torres Photography
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