Caregiving in the Age of Coronavirus:

Taking Care of Your Loved Ones—and Yourself

With

Soledad O’Brien

Award-winning journalist, documentarian, entrepreneur and philanthropist

Lee Woodruff

Best-selling co-author, In an Instant, freelance writer and co-founder of the Bob Woodruff Foundation

Renee Peterson Trudeau

Internationally recognized life-balance coach, speaker and award-winning author

Please read important information at the end of the program.

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Hey, everybody! I am Soledad O’Brien. Welcome to our special event.

It’s called “Caregiving in the Age of Coronavirus: Taking Care of Your Loved Ones and Yourself.” 

 

Caregiving obviously comes from a place of love, it’s beautiful, it’s also challenging. It’s unheralded. It’s vital in this society. Taking care of ourselves is all of those things as well. So according to the AARP, 60% of caregivers are women and today obviously that role has become even more complicated, complex and challenging than ever before. 

 

So how are we handling the social, financial pressures of caregiving during a pandemic? How could we manage better? How can women take care of themselves as they are also taking care of their aging parents and school-aged children? Is it really possible to be all things to all people? We kind of know the answer to that is no, and yet here we are every day trying to be all things to all people.

 

So for answers we are going to turn to an amazing pair of guests who will share their personal experiences as well as give us very specific advice on how women can navigate the challenges of caregiving in a very extraordinary time period. Lee Woodruff is co-author of The New York Times best-selling book, In an Instant. She is also the co-founder of the Bob Woodruff

Foundation. It supports injured veterans and their families. You might recall that Lee’s husband, Bob Woodruff, suffered a severe brain injury in 2006 while he was covering the war in Iraq for ABC News. Lee, always nice to see you! 

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  You as well. Thanks Soledad!

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  You bet. Renée Peterson Trudeau is an internationally recognized life balance coach, speaker and award-winning author of The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal and other books as well. She has coached thousands of women and girls too on how to reclaim, rejuvenate and rebalance their lives. Renée, nice to see you!

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Thanks, Soledad! Great to be here! 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Thank you! Okay.  So Lee, I am going to start with you. Caregiving is so stressful and so hard and then you layer a pandemic on top of it, and I think for a lot of people the anxiety level is sort of like right here under our chins. Talk to me a little bit about your own experiences in the past and the things that you have learned that you think could be applicable to people today who are going through similar things when it comes to caregiving.

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  Well, Soledad, there is no question that right now we already have started with, as you say, a stress level that’s up to our chins. So you add those jobs on that so many women especially just take for granted; taking care of mom, who in my case is in an assisted living facility. So I am unable to see her, touch her, hug her. But I am adding the eight-hour round trip drive just so she can see my face through the glass. So, for many of us having that issue. 

 

My own story with my husband, who is very well-recovered and back on the air as a reporter, was one that happened when I was in my mid-40s. So caregiving, a spouse in the unexpected role is another aspect to all of this. And when I talk to the military spouses that I work with or that we work through the Foundation with or those that are part of the AARP CAREGIVER GROUP, their stress level from having loved ones who currently live with post-traumatic stress or some of the injuries from these wars on top of their inability to form community is really what the stressor is.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Yeah, I would imagine that coronavirus complicates something already. Is there any upside; I hate to even frame it this way, but, for example, I have found one little tiny silver lining in a global pandemic is, I am around my family more. I usually travel as a reporter as well all the time, right, so there is a thread of an upside. For these families that talk to you, do they have anything that they would say that the pandemic has actually had a little bit of a positive impact?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  I do think there is a silver lining aspect and part of it is the headspace you put yourself in when you wake up in the morning. Easier said than done--absolutely have to forgive yourself for the bad days or the days when you are just not feeling it. But to try to look at those moments of togetherness as ones that are fleeting. And as we get older, we realize everybody won’t always be around. 

 

But every single day, as someone said to me once, can’t be Doris Day. So if you don’t have that attitude, it’s okay to just say, I am going to have a grumpy day today and tell everybody that, which is what I do. I say I sort of woke up on the wrong side of the bed, guys. I love you, but I am just going to own it today. So I am going to need your help. And just by sort of cinching everybody in and making them a part of understanding where you are coming from, then it takes it away from the personal. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  You tried to tee this up well, Lee, for Renée. I think a lot of the stress comes from these competing responsibilities, right? Like everybody can’t have their day and sometimes, for a caregiver, very often they can’t have their day and they can’t have their time. You talk a lot, Renée, about balance and slowing down and intentionality and sometimes I think all amazing and yet you have this sometimes slog of dealing with the basics of caregiving that seem to be in competition. How do you juggle those?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Yeah, and let me just give a little context, because yeah, I do talk a lot about slowing down and living intentionally, and I am a type A overachiever, oldest of seven children, used to push myself really hard, like to play big, like many of us, and there’s nothing wrong with playing big, but the pace at which I was moving was not sustainable. 

 

So in 2002 I had my son Jonah. Like many of you, I was doing community work and running nonprofits and running my consulting business and traveling and had a baby. And I had no maternal support around me and was really feeling, I had lost my mom, my grandmothers, just had nothing, and felt a calling to gather women and really dive into what does this look like to try to create balance through the art and science of self-care, which I will talk more about. So I started something called a Personal Renewal Group and gathered women to explore how we manage our energy and say no and build a support system and reconnect with who we are. 

 

It was also very revelatory and understanding that as women a lot of us get on this like treadmill of to-do lists, kind of plowing through to-do lists. I had so much stuff tied up around productivity and worthiness that I had to unravel and explore. And I hang out a lot with neuroscientists and psychologists, I am very into mental health, and what we know is that a lot of women are experiencing depression because there’s a disconnect from their inner world. So they have got a robust outer world, but a disconnect about from what’s going on in here. So these groups and this process for me really helped me begin to get on my path in terms of exploring self-care and bringing it in to my daily life. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  So then Lee, let’s start with you. What are some of the things that parents can do to lighten the load as caregivers; maybe we will start with small children first? New York Times had an article talking about education pods, which sounded amazing and extremely expensive. What kind of advice would you give around how to take the burden off yourself, especially when you have got little kids and not college-aged kids like we have?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  Soledad, I can’t imagine right now, my clients, my friends who do have young children, I am not sure how they are doing it, working, trying to be the tutor, because that would have been a big F for me, especially with math. 

 

So I know there are lots of ways to help, but the best advice that I can say is part of what’s so hard about being a caregiver is the lack of control. So there are things that are simply out of your control, and I felt when Bob was injured and I was caring for him, my kids were 14, 12, 5 and 5, and so I was the parent for all of them as he was in a coma and recovering. And the little things that I could control and the way that I could set a schedule and make a list and cross things off the list and the kids knew that at X time this is where they were going to be gave not only me a sense of control over something, because I couldn’t control when he was going to get better or come out of his coma, but it gave the family a sense of structure. 

 

So I think in the absence of that, that’s sort of the big thing, but I think on that list too has to be that me time, because every single woman knows and everybody listening to this knows, we are the last person on our own list and that’s okay some days, but there are days when you just have to say ‘me first.’ And I think that’s the way people are going to get through this fall with homeschooling, because my heart goes out to everyone doing this.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It’s so brutally hard. I have friends who have got 3-year-olds and 6year-olds and that is a lot. So Renée, let’s do a deeper dive into that and let’s focus right at this moment on the younger kids, people who are helping home-school their kids at this moment or are in some kind of hybrid situation. Lee has talked about she is a list person and kind of like get some structure in there and also have me time. Walk me through like what should be on your list? How do you exactly carve out me time? How do you think about that in an environment where you have got a child who needs to get through third grade too?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Yeah, Soledad and Lee, this is so hard, so hard. I have got four sisters that are doing this right know. We have got facilitators and friends and women in our community that are talking about this. It’s just grueling. It’s really hard. So again, just offering some context. I would encourage moms and dads to first come up and take a 30,000 foot view. So what happens, a lot of us are trying to do business as usual and we are trying to keep our same expectations and we have these completely unrealistic expectations. Lowering expectations is the number one thing I hear from moms around the country that’s helping them. 

 

So having a realistic view of what is possible. Doing a lot of pausing, re-setting. Like Lee said, today is not going well, okay? We’re having oatmeal and fruit for dinner. You know? I mean just really, good is good enough.In fact, my sister-in-law, we have a code word when she is having a hard day. She will call me and I’ll say “scrambled eggs.” And that means breakfast for dinner. I also encourage people -- I like to encourage women to live inside-out. So again, balancing our outer world and inner world. So maybe sitting down if you are in a relationship with your partner and thinking about what are the three values this fall that we want to orient around? Maybe it is creativity, maybe it’s physical fitness or well-being, maybe it’s kindness, you know? But what are the three values our family wants to orient around so we can direct our energy and our activities towards that? 

 

And then I could go on and on but I’ll offer one more thing, it’s for moms really creating a scaffolding for the fall. So pausing, I recommend doing just taking an afternoon or if you can, a day for yourself if that’s possible. Stepping back and really entering this intentionally, thinking about what do I need from a self-care standpoint, physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally to create the architecture or the scaffolding to set me up for success so I can really be resourced and be present for my family?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  It’s one of the things that worked for us when all my kids moved back home when the quarantine happened is, I realized I was doing everything. I’m sure there is no one out there that can relate to this, and I realized like, wait, I had an empty nest. Like what -- you all came back and now my grocery bill has quadrupled and I’m still doing everything. So very early on, I had what I call a mini-freak out and I said, guys, I was your mother for 29 years. I still am your mother, but I’m not your maid. So we’re making a matrix/metrics -- and we’re signing you all up for dog-walking. Someone gets to go to the grocery store, someone else were doing cooking, dishes. Everybody was part of it, and that’s that moment you asked earlier what are we going to look back and see and to Renée’s 30,000-foot view, which I love. Those sweet moments that feel like they’re sticky at the time are going to be the things that we remember from this time in a good way. Everybody wanted to help, they were all in on that. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  I remember when I was mopping the floor and my 15-year-old son said something like -- leaned over and said, can you get me the cereal? And I’m like, I might -- it might end badly for this child. But really, and I realized like oh, I have created this. You can sit down and wait, or better, you can mop the floor and get your own cereal. Right? Like we can solve this, and I think sometimes it’s about like realizing that you do have to empower your older children, even though they are easier than the little ones in a lot of ways. You do have to empower them like this is a shared responsibility for everybody in this family.

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  As mothers, we get into that mama bear. Like, let me accommodate, let me make everything safe, let me make everyone comfortable. So just having awareness of that and being gentle with yourself. And I would say, moms, one of the most powerful things you can do is starting your day intentionally. It is pausing, and in the morning, even taking--so we know when we study the brain--taking as little as five minutes in the morning to think about what am I grateful for? How do I want to be today? On some people, it may be meditation or prayer. Some people, it may be mindful stretching, some people, it may be journaling, have some great little journaling exercises, but starting your day with intention: How do I want to be today rather than let – just falling into the day. It can be really helpful.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Lee, when Bob was injured, I know that there had to be fear around finances, and resources, because the future is so unknown. What were the resources that you realized you could turn to for advice, for guidance, for help, for just information?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  It’s a really pertinent question because I have a piece of advice I’ll share at the end of this, but I was terrified, as you know, because you were not just a colleague, journalist colleague, you’re also a friend when Bob was injured, and a good friend at that time. Bob had just gotten to the anchor chair at ABC and so our finances had just changed, literally was there eight weeks before he was injured covering the war in Iraq. So it was not like we had all of this nest egg for four children to go to college or any of that. And my first thought was, oh my gosh, we’re going to have to have a plan B. Sell the house, I’ll go back to work full-time instead of freelancing, we’re going to need health insurance. And the scary thing for me and the piece of advice I have for every single person out there listening is to put together what I call the “red file.” 

 

And the red file is who is your lawyer, where is your will, who is in charge of your finances, what life insurance do you have? All of those things were scattered around folders and files all around our house. Bob was really the person who dealt with most of it. I wasn’t sitting around with no idea what was going on, but I was so happy to have him deal with that stuff. And it took my girlfriends and sisters weeks to construct what our financial picture looked like. And there is just no excuse for that. You need to have one place that you go. And then to the longer point of view, it was getting some good financial advice and advisors, and I can’t think of a better reason to be here and be on this panel than to talk about having really solid financial advisors who can help you figure out what you need to set aside, how to live within a budget. All of those things are so important, and do not save that for a rainy day.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: And Renee, clearly, that’s not just great advice for, oh my goodness, there’s been a catastrophic injury to somebody in the family. I mean, I think that’s great advice if you’ve got small children or you’ve got older parents as well. What kind of resources do you advise the people who are reading you and following you to start looking into if they just need some kind of guidance?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Yeah, absolutely, and I echo what Lee says. John and I just did that. We’re about to do bicoastal living, two locations and we just went through that process. It was painful, it took forever, but I’m so glad we have it in place. So I really echo that as well. 

 

So I guess my top recommendation would be to really look at building a robust support network. And so you can draw a circle, on a piece of paper, put yourself in the middle, you can do spokes going out from there. So professionally, and personally, what kind of support do you need to feel really nurtured and strong, and resourced in your life? We talked about definitely, yeah, an amazing financial planner, a CPA, it could be a parenting coach. If you have the resources, it could be someone to help you with meals, or household things. Emotional well-being. It could be a therapist, a minister. What kind of support do you need? 

 

Some of this involves lining people up or hiring people and some of this involves just reaching out and being vulnerable and being real with friends or people you know and saying, I need help. Can we walk every Friday morning and share resources around parenting our 17-year-olds? I’m having a hard time. So getting comfortable with asking for and receiving help and building a support system can be life-changing.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It’s been so weird to realize how little we touch other people now, right? I mean, if you’re doing it right, you’re not hugging anybody who is not in your immediate family, and you know, obviously, for people who you’re close to, who you want to hug, you’re just afraid of who wants to be the asymptomatic carrier of something that ends up harming someone that you love. What’s the advice you guys would give to people who are trying to figure out? I mean, I find this the weirdest thing about the time that we’re in. How do you have a closeness with people who in the morning you would hug or shake their hand or pat on the back? It’s just strange now.

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  I think you get real touchy with your pod squad. I think there are a lot more hugs and I think my kids -- the grown kids needed more hugs during this time. I think that I grab the dog whenever I can and tried to just get a few pets from the dog. Dogs will give you unconditional love, but it is extremely hard because we are physical animals. And I think that’s the difficulty with communicating in this format. And I -- and I’m hearing this from neurologists and others as well. I’m sure Renée has more to add. We’re meant to connect to people in-person to get that energy from them, to see a 360 real body and maybe touch it and have contact. That’s all part of our own sort of sense of well-being and self-care. So this is a really hard time right now. So with those people that I am around, I do find myself hugging a little more and I find my kids sort of needing it, sidling up to me, asking for it kind of.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Interesting. Yeah, I went in the other day accidentally. I met somebody and I went in to shake his hand. We’re both in masks and we were far apart and he recoiled. And of course I was like, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry -- I don’t shake people’s hands, but it was a very weird feeling.

 

What are the other ways, Renée, that you can maintain a closeness maybe with your grandparents, the kids and the grandparents or even people who are better than acquaintances but not living in your household, keep them close without touching them or putting them at any risk?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU: Yes, such a huge topic, we can talk about this all day, and

I’ll just add a little context. I just did a media interview last night and we were talking about in the pandemic, what are the key things that really make a difference? And I was sharing, you know, again, I’m all about neuroscience, spending time in nature, you know, daily movement, you know, that move a muscle, change a thought. You might have heard that, being mindful of media intake, and then the fourth one was connection. Connection is our medicine.

 

So like Lee was saying and like you were saying, Soledad, it is so critical right now for us to have this connection. It’s like oxygen. So every morning in our house, we will ask we’ll just do a quick circle up. My 18-year-old doesn’t want much to do with me. He’s ready to leave the nest. But I will ask, what is one thing you’re looking forward to today?

 

So, again, this is kind of based on resiliency research, reorienting our minds. What is one thing you’re looking forward to today? You can do a Zoom call. You could reach out to your grandmother or grandfather in that caregiving role. Well, ask them what is one thing you’re looking forward to? It can be tonight is fried chicken night, where they live. It can -- whatever, it can be something really small but realizing that connection is integral to our well-being. It’s not fluffy. It’s really like oxygen.

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  So some of the things that I did for my mom, my dad passed away from Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, so she’s truly alone and for a long time not allowed to leave the room. So I would send her a poem every day. I dug up old photographs. Remember, when we got photographs developed? And sent her those and we also sent her a rotating picture frame. We three daughters of hers, loaded 5,000 digital pictures on it so that she could every day since she wasn’t allowed to talk so small. And -- but that also did something for me to Renée’s point, like I felt like I was keeping that connection with my mom and doing something that would keep her motivated and happy and just the act of giving, as we all know and being able to do that felt fantastic.

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  I found that the family chat, like we set up a little family texting chat, you know, really, it’s a -- it’s a place to keep stupid jokes, and pictures of our puppy. And it was actually great to have everybody weigh in on something that was a unifying thing--even though we weren’t all together, it felt like we’re experiencing something together, even though physically we’re not particularly together.

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  We also made a family garden and it was -- it started with just pots on the deck in the early spring where we grew herbs and lettuce and kale and just the act of doing that and then eating our own food kind of inspired everybody and then we made a bigger pot when summer happened.

 

And not everyone can do that if you’re living in a city, but everyone can grow your own herbs in a pot. There was something, as Renée said about getting outside, putting your hands in dirt, gardening, using your hands. That connection.

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  I love that. There was a study at UCLA on women and friendship and about how we’re wired and what we go into this mode called tend and befriend. That’s how we heal. That’s how we kind of come into wholeness on our own. So I made it a priority during the pandemic and I still do. I have girlfriends, thank goodness, that will drive to my South Austin neighborhood and walk with me every day. So either in the morning or at night, different friends that will come, and it’s fine to move our bodies, and we get a lot of benefit from that. But we solely do this or I do this primarily for that emotional connection, emotional selfcare. So when you want to ditch your walk with your girlfriend, please keep it at the top of your to-do-list, because it has an enormous impact on your well-being.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  You mentioned self-care and you’ve talked a lot about extreme selfcare. So I think driving yourself to a friend’s house to walk with them is a good example of extreme self-care. Renée, tick off for me some other examples of extreme self-care. And then also, how do you wedge it in there? Like, there is a lot of things I would love to do. I just cannot find the time sometimes.

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  For women that are thinking, I don’t have time, my plate is so full, and I know many are probably in the sandwich generation. Right? So they’re caring for parents and caring for their kids.

 

If you can reorient to the idea that self-care is not about adding something to your to-do-list, it’s about cultivating a new way of being with yourself. When we practice self-care physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, taking the walks and journaling, taking time for that phone call with a friend, taking time in nature. Some people it’s meditation and prayer, other people it’s service. In our family, we’re doing this Drive a Senior, a national program, because we really want to help others.

 

But doing those things really resources you and helps you cultivate a stronger state of being. Two things that are up for me right now around self-care that I’m really looking at are around managing my energy, so not my time--a lot of us get very confused about time and energy. I underestimated grossly the amount of energy it was going to take to prepare to send my son off to college this Friday. I underestimated what it was going to take for me emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, on top of everything else that’s going on. So I wish that I would have been more intentional around that.

 

The other thing that’s come up for me a lot is on Sunday night we had a going away dinner for my son and it was a beautiful dinner. But at the very end, I kind of got into an uncomfortable discussion or argument with a family member, came home, woke up the next morning just feeling the heaviness of that and I didn’t feel like walking, I didn’t feel like meditating, I didn’t feel like journaling, but I checked in and I knew that if I made myself do this and really call and harness on that discipline, that it would put me in a state of being that was not only felt better for myself and help my day flow, but would enormously impact everyone around me. So this idea that self-care really helps us rock our game, you know, it’s not fluffy, it’s not a manicure or pedicure. It really helps us rock our game.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  And I love that you describe it as it’s not more to do on your list. It’s actually a viewpoint around your list. I think that’s important. You, Lee, have wrote an entire book called ‘Perfectly Imperfect’, which is kind of the viewpoint, I think, for a lot of people who go into caregiving. Why that title? I mean, obviously, you are sending a message with this strategy around what life had suddenly handed you.

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  So there’s this mythical bar for us that we’re supposed to be able to do it all. So that’s an automatic set up for fail because you’re never going to get through it all. So the notion of being perfectly imperfect and embracing that to me was just giving ourselves permission to have those bad days. And when I think about self-care, and it was impossible in those days when Bob was living in the hospital and I had the young kids and still was trying to work in some form. My self-care might have been as small an item literally as going upstairs and cutting and filing my nails for the day. Like that was self-care. That was ten minutes to do something that have been bugging me or that walk-and-talk. 

 

So I would get outside, and that to me is so important. For me, it’s going out in nature. But I call somebody and say, will you walk with me? So, it’s Renée’s South Austin neighborhood but without the proximity. So I’d pick a girlfriend I hadn’t talked to in a while and we go for a walk and I’d have my cellphone and just talk to her, and those are -- there’s this whole concept of respite care which just sounds so enormous and it sounds like you failed as a caregiver because now we need to send you off to the spa or go take a break. And I think that’s another reason for women to judge themselves and feel like they’ve fallen short. So if you can embrace that we’re all perfectly imperfect and accept that, you’re in a much better head space to deal will all the many things you have to care for.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  How do you guys think about financial balance? Because I have to imagine when you’re a caregiver, and certainly this happened with my elderly parents. Suddenly, you start putting all your resources over there and you start skimping on the things over here. Is there a financial balance? Is it just you got to get through it? How does it work for you guys? Renée, why don’t you start?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Sure. So again, I keep coming back to that pausing and taking the 30,000-foot view, which I do a lot. Every 90 days, I take a planning retreat where I kind of come up and look at my life and see what’s calling for my energy and my talents and my time and I think this ties into financial planning, absolutely. So doing this for yourself whether it’s half-day or one-day planning retreat or visioning, sharing this with your financial planner, but I really define balance in a larger context is having enough time, energy and resources for that which matters most. At that moment, at that life stage, at that particular moment and then orienting your energy and your resources towards that thing whatever it may be. Maybe it is working with a kid who is having a hard time. Maybe it is caring for a parent who has Alzheimers. Maybe it is -- but there is widespread employment right now. Maybe it’s a career transition, but looking at balance from that bigger standpoint and then financial balance being a piece of that and reaching out for help, getting that support from -- we talked about the financial planners, the CPAs, et cetera.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  How about for you, Lee, especially considering that your caregiving role came overnight? From one minute, you were not a caregiver and then suddenly you were a caregiver dealing with four children, small children and a health catastrophe? How do you think about financial balance? How should people be thinking about how to potentially deal with something that’s coming down the pipe but they can’t even imagine at this moment?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  My -- so my take on that was so different, Renée from yours, doing that sort of looking at things in chunks. All I wanted to know was that we would be okay at the very end. So here I was, we had -- we didn’t have a nest egg, a nice nest egg that would take care of me for the rest of my life. So it was so critical in that moment in time to sit down with what I needed for my own sense of self and calm was to sit down with our financial advisor and say give me the worst case scenario financial planning. I want to know how much do we have to put away each year, how much do we need life insurance? I don’t ever want this to happen again. If it does, God forbid, I want to be so prepared and I got so much of my ability to sleep at night knowing, okay I’ve got this. I know what our plan is. I know that I -- I needed to know that I could take care of them all. I needed to know that absent Bob that my kids wouldn’t suffer financially. They were never going to be flying around in their own private jets. That’s for sure, but I wanted them to be able to go to college and I wanted them to be able to handle any health emergencies that might happen. 

 

And when the financial advisor was able to walk me through that and help me have my hands on the lever of how much risk I wanted in terms of stocks and bonds and anything else in a portfolio, I could roll over and go to bed at night. I needed that long-term view that if anything bad ever happened that we could be safe.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  A final question for both of you is around what advice you would give someone for dealing with what I’ve -- it’s just a crazy time. Like if a girlfriend called you up and said I’m just struggling and it’s not one thing. It’s kind of everything, right? The job market is uncertain. I have a job at this moment but tomorrow, I might not. And my kid has gone off to school but tomorrow could be coming back. And this one here, their school was open but tomorrow, that could change. And I’m feeling stressed and anxious. I can’t tell you exactly about why but everything is stressing me out. What would be the advice that you would give that person? Lee, why don’t you startus off?

 

LEE WOODRUFF:  I love this question, because I have gotten this question. I have also been the person who’s called somebody and said, “What! Help me! I have two things that I’d say to people. One is walk outside right now, look at the sky, just look up. Look at how beautiful and big this world is. Look at the fact that you’ve just got through the last hour. Did you get through the last hour? Pat yourself on the back. You went from nine to ten o’clock and you’re still standing and you’re still here. 

 

And the best piece of advice I ever got was from a psychiatrist who --  I crashed later so I was up, up, up, up with the adrenaline taking care of everyone after Bob’s injury and then once he sort of got to safety and was doing rehab and doing better, I crashed. I went on antidepressants. I just was able to finally – I had gotten this woman to shore and now the lifeguard collapsed and that’s pretty textbook, as I’m sure Renée can tell us. And so I began to talk to somebody about grief and complicated grief and that loss that is different than death. You have lost certain things in someone but they’re still there. 

 

And how it’s a really wonderful process and a painful process, and at the end of the day I said to him, how do I stop waking up at 3:30 in the morning anxious and just ready to jump out of my skin? And he said, tell you -- ask yourselves these questions and it’s really based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I know that not everybody can answer these in this way, but I was lucky enough to be able to do that. Are you loved? Yes. Do you have people that you love? Absolutely. Do you have a roof over your head? Yes, I do. Do you have enough to eat? Yes, I do. Have you always been able to figure out how to get those things? Yes, I have. Well then, roll over and go back to sleep, because things always look better in the morning, and I can’t tell you how many times I have ticked through that mental list in the middle of the night, and I know that we’re entering an anxious time where not everybody is going to have a place to live or maybe enough food to eat, so I say that with mitigating factors, but I feel like we are -- people are resilient. The human spirit is resilient, and if you form that community that we’ve all talked about, you have that one person that those ten people that you can unburden it with. Just hold on for a minute and it will get better. When it’s bad, it always somehow gets a little better.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  And very rarely does being stressed and not sleeping -- it doesn’t really help. It almost never helps the situation the more you’re freaking out no matter what the circumstances are.

 

Renée, I’m going to give you the final word, if I may. What advice would you give? How would you advise someone who calls you up and says, I’m stressed?

 

RENÉE PETERSON TRUDEAU:  Yeah, and let me just echo, Lee, I love what you said so much on so many levels and there is a lot of science and actually when people are battling depression to walk outside and look up, and we actually know that it has a cognitive and neurobiological effect of looking up when we feel down. So thank you, that was such a beautiful reminder! 

 

So I would offer up, if I was speaking to you as a girlfriend, the reminder that self-care is not about self-indulgence, it’s about self-preservation. And if you were to do nothing else during this time, as you move through your day and when you feel that impulse that you should be more, you should be doing more, to pause, put a hand on your heart, and there is a lot of science behind this; and simply ask, what do I need, what do I need? And this can feel super weird, but I do this throughout the day, throughout the day, just pausing, checking in, what do I need, and the more you do it, the more comfortable you become. So being open to this idea of as you move through your day doing these check-ins and asking what do I need and knowing that as I resource myself and I focus on self-care, everyone around me is going to benefit. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Those are great thoughts to close on. A big thank you to our panelists and of course thank you to you as well for watching. I hope you have gotten as much from this program as I have from Lee and from Renée. 

 

We hope that you have enjoyed this conversation and that you have taken away some really specific and useful insights and inspiration as you navigate the road ahead. So stay safe and again, thanks for watching!

 

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Finding Purpose and Staying Connected

In a Disconnected World  

 

With

 

Soledad O’Brien

Award-winning journalist, documentarian, entrepreneur and philanthropist

 

Shiza Shahid

Co-founder, Our Place, founder, NOW Ventures and co-founder of the Malala Fund

 

And Lisa Nichols

CEO and founder, Motivating the Masses

 

Please read important information at the end of the program.               

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Hi everybody, and welcome to our special event, Finding Purpose and Staying Connected in a Disconnected World. I’m Soledad O’Brien. As you know, women are striving to stay connected with family and friends and co-workers at a time when staying in touch means FaceTime and Webex and Skype and Zoom. In this socially distant reality, you can’t shake hands with a co-worker. You can’t hug an old friend. And even though we’ve adapted to life in a disconnected world, we have to ask ourselves, will we ever be as connected to others as we were before? At a time when many women feel like they’re operating on overload, is there a way to find purpose and even joy? 

 

For answers, we’re joined by two fantastic guests who are going to share their personal experiences and also lots of very specific advice on how women can stay connected while also continuing their own journey to finding meaning and purpose in our lives. We’re going to be diving deep into how we can find personal purpose and power and become game changers in whatever form that might take for each of us. 

 

So let’s begin by introducing Shiza Shahid. She’s a co-founder of Our Place, NOW Ventures and co-founder and founding CEO of the Malala Fund. Hi Shiza!

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  So great to see you, Soledad.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Lisa Nichols is a best-selling author, entrepreneur, humanitarian and also a motivational speaker. Lisa, hi!

 

LISA NICHOLS:  It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Soledad.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It is my pleasure to talk to both of you. So let’s begin by jumping into the past of your lives. Shiza, I know you were 14-years-old, 14, when you started volunteering in a women’s prison in Pakistan. Sixteen years old, you were volunteering at an earthquake relief camp. You were the only woman there. And I know for you Lisa, you navigated some childhood experiences that led you to kind of where you are today. So I’d love for you guys to kind of take us back to your back story and how that led to resilience. 

 

Why don’t you start for us, Shiza?

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  Absolutely. I think a lot of my formative experiences, a lot of -- all of our formative experiences start in our childhood and that’s certainly how it was for me. I was raised in Pakistan, in the capital city Islamabad. I was fortunate to be born into a modest, but very loving and progressive family that wanted me to have all the opportunity in the world. But I was also growing up in a country that’s ranked the second worst place to be born a woman. And in a country that at the time that I was growing up was experiencing a lot of challenges with poverty and terrorism and violence. And I just wanted to make sense of what was happening to my society, so I ended up spending a lot of my early years volunteering in women’s prisons and refugee camps and natural disaster relief. 

 

And through my interactions with communities and specifically women who were dealing with some of the most challenging situations in the world, I really understood what it meant to drive grassroots change, but also what happens when you financially empower a woman. 

 

I was really sort of guided by this learning in all of the work that I did after that. I was fortunate to get to come to the United States to study here. I co-founded an organization called the Malala Fund with a young girl named Malala Yousafzai who was shot by the Taliban for wanting to go to school.  And Malala really is sort of I think a symbol of resilience and forgiveness. She taught me how to forgive and how to move forward from that moment to really bring positive change for other girls around the world who are fighting for their right to education. 

 

And since then, I’ve been focused on what I call mission-driven business: the intersection of business and impact. And, of course, I started that business in a pandemic, at a time when we cannot gather. So I’ve been learning a lot about how to pivot, how to adapt.  But I also believe strongly that it’s in times of hardship that we become stronger. I am a strong believer in resilience and that in this moment, we have to find how to adapt, how to support each other and how to make something good come out of even the worst things.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Lisa, how about for you?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  Oh wow! First of all, Shiza, that’s so inspiring to hear. I’m honored to be in this space with you and to just hold the space for all that you’re creating. So I just want to acknowledge you for that. For me, I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I lived between the Harlem Crip 30’s and the Rollin 60’s. Those are not cheerleading squads. So I grew up between two gangs and I had on average three fights a week to get home from school because I didn’t have a choice. I needed to get home and there was all of this violence and all of this just negative energy around me. 

 

Though when I stepped into my house, I had an amazing household, amazing mom, an amazing - to Shiza’s point, I had a great family. The environment was just toxic, the environment was,  felt like it was just full of lack. And everything around me represented scarcity. Everything around me represented there’s not enough. I remember when my middle school teacher asked me “What did I want to be when I grow up?” I was 15 at the time and I looked at her and I said, “I just want to be alive.” And if I get to 21, ask me that question again because I would have achieved my first goal. 

 

And I just had this energy when my son was born, when he was eight-months-old, I went to the ATM to get money out to buy him Pampers and I didn’t have enough in to get $20 out. I had

$11.42 in the bank. And I remember, Soledad, having to wrap my son in a towel for two days.

And on the second day, I looked down at my son, Jelani, and I said, “Son, don’t worry, mommy will never be this broke or broken again.” And so I began to teach myself.

 

And I volunteered at women’s battered shelters, helping them through their mind, to possibly get out of situations, and then I went to alcohol and drug recovery places. And then my lifestyle just kind of kept blossoming from that. I never stepped into personal development saying, “I want to be a motivational speaker.” I stepped into it saying, “I need to save my own life and I need to save the life of my child,” and hopefully, if this works, I can possibly inspire a few people to do the same.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  You both described survival mode and of course I think in a lot of ways, you’re describing very dire and difficult circumstances. But I think there are a lot women today, myself included, where sometimes we just like shift into the gear of survival mode.  

 

There are so many unknowns. Will you have a job? What will your finances be? Will your kids go to school? Will they be moving back home? Just what’s going to be six months out, one year out, three years out? So many variables. Should we not be in survival mode? Maybe I’ll have you start Lisa and then I’ll go to Shiza next. Is there something that can bring us joy and purpose that’s higher than survival mode?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  Absolutely. I think that survival mode will allow you to do just that, survive. And some techniques or some mindset that you can pick up to support you being more than just surviving it, just hanging on by your fingernails, hanging on by your eyelashes, is to begin with the end in mind. You don’t just want to get through this, but who do you want to be on the other side of this? 

 

The way you navigate through this and build your own personal momentum up is that you give yourself micro wins to hit and then you go hit those micro wins, because there’s so much that’s in your circle of concern, but then there’s so much that’s in your circle of influence.  And what takes our joy away is that we live 80 percent of our time in our circle of concern and only 20 percent of our time in our circle of influence. When you began to navigate and move to your circle influence primarily, those things you can’t influence, you still can’t influence them, they are your concern, but your energy is on what you can influence versus the things that you can’t touch. That makes a huge difference. So No. 1, set micro wins, milestones; and number two, begin to look at what you can influence in your circle of influence and spend more time on that while monitoring everything else.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  That’s so smart because often I just slam my head into the wall and become more and more frustrated especially in an environment where everything is very stressful. Shiza, when you were in prisons volunteering, when you were doing earthquake relief and volunteering, what did you learn about resilience? Was there joy in there? Was there purpose in there? Or was it -- again let’s just get through to the other side.

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  I think it is important to acknowledge that the effects of this moment are very unequal and there are a lot of people particularly people of color, people in the service industry, immigrants who are disproportionately affected and in survival mode. There are others amongst us who are perhaps able to do our businesses or perhaps even able to do our businesses better at this time. And sort of where we are in that spectrum sort of allows us to understand, what’s our role? And are we just trying to make it through? Or do we have the capacity to give and support in this moment where we are really all connected and we do need to be helping each other more than ever. 

 

For me, I started a business about a year ago called Our Place, a mission-driven business and we create kitchenware and cookware products and our whole mission is around bringing people together around a dinner table. So all of our storytelling as about people from different cultures and faiths and ethnicities and beliefs and traditions coming together around a dinner table. 

 

And so in April, when we all first locked down, I was really uncertain because April is this month where you had Passover, you had Easter and you had Ramadan. So collectively three of the most significant home-cooking traditions where communities gather and they celebrate and they eat together and that was sort of a cornerstone of our brand and storytelling.  So we decided to just ask our community and ask them how they were dealing with the uncertainty in this moment and finding joy. 

 

We ended up connecting with Liz. Liz is an entrepreneur and she was hosting Passover Seder during the quarantine and she talked about how typically she would have 27 members of her family come over, they would all eat together and it was a really important tradition for her, but this time she was hosting a Zoom Seder with 60 members of her family from all over the country. And she talked about the loss of not having her regular Passover Seder with the 27 family members she loves dearly. But she also talked about how this was the first time she was having Passover with some of these relatives from across the country and how she was really excited about that and reconnecting with people and finding a sense of joy and hope in that. 

 

And we connected with Anna who is a chef and a cookbook author and Anna was celebrating Easter. She talked about how her mother couldn’t come over and her kids were really asking for this one dish that her mother would always bring. And so she called up her mother and asked her for all the recipes and written them down. And she said that she was grateful that she’d done that because in the past she’d always taken the fact that her mother would always be there for granted, but now she had these really precious memories written down and that she was finding joy in that. 

 

And I think what I learned from those conversations is exactly what you both have sort of pointed to is, is there is joy everywhere.  There is joy even in times of hardship, and sometimes in times of hardship, it is when we notice it the most and cherish it the most.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  That’s so interesting that obviously in a pandemic, there’s clearly been a ton of loss, but I think we could all come up with the little silver linings—not traveling as much. I have dinner with my kids practically every night for the last six months, which we normally wouldn’t do. They’re not even little silver linings actually, they’re big silver linings. They’ve been wonderful blessings in a really difficult circumstance and I think everybody kind of has their own list of those things.  

 

What advice have you been giving people about how to stay connected when you’re not going to hug them, you’re not going to see them, you’re not going to run by their house, you’re not going to drop by to pick up something. What tips do you have that we can really feel connected? Why don’t you start for me, Lisa?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  OK, thank you. So first of all, to recognize that social distancing does not mean socially disconnected, like those two don’t mean the same. That social distancing does not mean not to check on each other. Remember, this is the first time in our lifetime that someone is afraid of both being the victim of an illness or a virus and being the perpetrator. 

 

When I was traveling home to California, I had the fear of catching it and then I had the fear of giving it to my 91-year-old grandmother. We’ve never been there before. This is an anomaly that we haven’t ever seen in our lifetime, at least, in many of our lifetimes. So understanding what it is that we’re climbing over or navigating through, it’s not an emotional disconnection, and a lot of times what starts physical begins to threaten an emotional connection or a mental connection or a spiritual connection and that’s our job to defend that. 

 

A couple of techniques to do and many people may already been doing this but these are the things that I have done. I carve out, I carve out 30 minutes every Sunday, sometimes I go up to 45, and I make two-minute love videos. And so I just get on and I make two-minute love videos and they’re to cousins and old friends and people that I could easily forget about because I assume they know I love them. And right now, let’s not assume anything, let me remind you. So two-minute love videos. 

 

I also have once a month that I get on Zoom with my cousins on a Friday night or a Saturday night and we recipe swap, and we all agreed to start cooking around six-ish, so that an hour later, we’re coming out of our dish. We’re not prepping the dish together. We’re talking about the dish and we’re eating it and either really disgusted at we created because many of us are experimenting or really excited and we have that moment of share. What’s crazy is about seven of us get on; wthin the next three weeks, we’ve all made each other’s dishes because it looks so good. We post the ingredients in the chat and then we go out and we make it because food is a love language. To me, food is a love language. 

 

The other thing is that we have a movie night where you’re not watching the movie together but we’re all watching the same movie at the same time and then we just chat about it. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  I love the way you’re leveraging technology for very human emotions, right, pulling people together with the technology but not replacing the love or the thoughtfulness with technology. And I love these two-minute love notes for my sons. I cannot call them, they’re teenage boys. I cannot call them love notes. I’m going to send them family update notes. I love that idea because they’re not at home. 

 

So Shiza, what do you recommend? If someone were to call you and say, “I feel so disconnected from my friends, how do I stay close because I can’t go visit them?”

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  Yeah, I love those tips as well. Thank you, Lisa. I have found the more I plan and the more deliberate I am about it, the more likely I am. Literally planning, seeing a friend over Zoom a month out or if we’re trying to do a group chat, limiting the number of people, things that feel like I would never do them in normal times, but they make all the difference right now. I think those things really help. 

 

And then I want to mention cooking again because I do think cooking, making something with your hands right now is incredibly comforting. For me, it’s cooking the recipes that I grew up with that my mother used to make for me that the moment I make them, I just feel like I’m transported back. And she lives 7,000 miles away in Pakistan and I don’t know when I’ll see her but there’s something just very visceral about eating food that she used to make for me with those same flavors that makes me feel like I’m right back there with her. And I think those practices even on your own can just give you a moment of connection.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  I love that advice. I’m a terrible cook but I’m an excellent assistant to my daughter who’s a fantastic cook and I do all the dishes. So I think we’ve worked out a thing that works. 

 

Lisa, I want to ask you career advice, because again, I think as we’re all trying to get through this pandemic, the reality is if you’re trying to grow your career, while you might be also navigating dealing with your kids or starting to homeschool them again or taking care of other people. How do you have face time with your boss when you’re not in the office? 

 

How do you think about well, here’s where I want to be in six months or a year, here’s how I want to get this next opportunity or here’s how I can be helpful in a work situation?  Normally that kind of thing would be popping into someone’s office saying, “Hey, I’m here, and here’s the work I’m doing.” What advice do you give for women who are trying to grow their career at a very difficult time?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  Well, you can still do that. You just pop in their office differently. So now popping in the office is popping into my space. What are all the ways that you can pop into someone’s space? A lot of times when people are looking to advance their career, they believe it’s about being seen, but truly, it’s about being result driven. 

 

What problem can you help to solve? What problem can you help to solve? And how can you help us get to that end solution?  Look at -- I tell my team all the time you are all the CEO of your division. What’s the problem in that division that you are the solution to?  And so looking at it that way on a very basic level is doing business from home or virtually, if you’re doing business virtually, or if you’re on a skeleton crew at work does not mean leisure. So are your machine -- is your technology and your machine and your environment up to par? Your sound, your lighting, your work environment, your appearance? 

 

I took a guest bedroom and broke the bed down this weekend and said, there’s no guests! There’s just work at home. So, this room is no longer a guest bedroom. This room is now my office and my studio because that’s the pivot. And so pivot with purpose. Don’t just pivot and don’t drag yourself into the change, my business sisters. Don’t drag yourself into the change. The change is here and those who will rise on the other side powerfully are those who pivot with purpose and with resiliency and with passion.  

 

The last thing I’m going to say is follow up. In this pandemic, everyone’s leaned back a little bit. I’m going to invite you sister, lean forward. And the place you lean forward in, to me first, is in your follow up. Turn around requests, turnaround proposals, turnaround opportunities like you’ve never done before. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: You know, I live in New York City and generally speaking, I wear sweats all the time like everybody else. And the other day, I was walking around the city and I saw at least eight women in the greatest summer dresses. They were beautiful and it literally inspired me. I was like, you know what? I am done with sweats. I am done looking like I’m running to the corner to get a quart of milk in my flip-flops and my hair in a scrunchie. 

 

Just seeing how they were dressed for work when clearly, here in New York City, they’re not going into an office but that they were, as we talked about, that environment for work, it really, it literally lightened my day and really inspired me to kind of do better. So I think all of that is fantastic advice. 

 

How do you guys think about or maybe even do yourselves, finding personal time or putting yourselves first? I feel like I have a list of 76 things I have to get done today and then myself is like number 77 or 78 possibly after walking the dog, that sort of thing. I know I’m not going to get to it and I’m always amazed at women who have a lot of self-care, because I really would love to be that person. And I never ever, ever get to be that person and I think it’s important to be that person, but I never get to be that person. 

 

What’s the advice that’s realistic that you can fit -- I mean both of you guys have very busy days, how do you fit that self-care in? Why don’t you start us off, Shiza?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  Yeah, I was going to say Shiza, why don’t you go first? Because hopefully you’re better at it than I used to be when I was your age.

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  You know, I’m not and I’m OK with that, because I made a choice to build something at this moment. I have -- I’m building something that is incredibly hard at a difficult time and I feel like -- I know that I have a lot of people relying on me and I love my work. It absolutely brings me to life. 

 

And so I know that this is busy time, I know that this is not a time when I can take a long vacation or the other day, I thought I want to learn to play piano. I never got to learn how to play an instrument. And then I thought about whether my brain would possibly be able to handle working on anything. And I was like, no, I just, I can’t. I’m just not going to learn the piano right now. I’m not going to -- there will be a moment where I can learn the piano. This is not it. 

 

So I think there are ebbs and flows in life and there are times when you choose to do something hard and you need to give it your all and there are times where you have a little bit of rest from that and you can learn a new skill and travel and that is also growth. That is also so important. But I’m not sure you can do it all at the same time. I think as long as you’re making the choice deliberately and you have those ebbs and flows, I think it’s all good.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  I love that. I think you’re exactly right. Sometimes getting a massage, as crazy as it sounds, is not relaxing if you have a long list of other things that need your attention. So I don’t disagree with that at all. Lisa, you had said you didn’t used to be good at that. Do you have a different philosophy now around taking care of yourself?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  I don’t know if it’s a different philosophy or a different practice. I’m at a different place than Shiza. I see my little sister in her like -- the Lisa, the little Lisa in her and you’re so beautiful, your soul is so beautiful, Shiza, you’re just -- I'm looking forward to getting to know you better and what you’re up to. I’m probably just a little bit older, just a little bit. 

 

So I just believe that we have different purpose seasons and they require differently of us, and your line is always going to have 77 people in it. That’s what movers and shakers do. We always have 77 people or 170 people in our line. Your job is to simply know when you have to be at the front of your line. You won’t always be at the front of your line, but you have to sign up for being at the front of your line. 

 

And then Shiza to what you said, time management, you said time management. So, I’m going to invite you to write this down, sis. There are the things that I’m doing now, they have a date on the calendar. There are the things that I’m not doing now, they have a date on the calendar that’s way out there. And then there’s the things that I’m never doing now, they’re just on the wish list. So everything I want to do including things like play a piano, they’re all on my list. Doing now, got a date. Not doing now in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. Never doing now, learning fluent Spanish. I want to know it more than anything, but I don’t have a date for it. I don’t want to put a date on it. A date stresses me out, but it’s out.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Final question for both of you. My husband and I started a very small foundation. We send girls to and through school and sometimes I have to tell these young women who often come from difficult circumstances that the challenges that they faced have actually made them in some ways tougher than their counterparts.  That actually there has been something out of that difficult thing that you can take to the bank. Like you had been here before and some of your classmates have not. You have survived this. This thing here will not chuck you. You can make it. You’ve been tested already. 

 

It’s sometimes a very hard sell for them because I think they look at struggle as struggle. Are we going to be more resilient coming out the other side of a very difficult time? Let’s say it’s mid2021. Is that -- is what I’m telling them a true thing or am I just spinning a wish for them? That we’re going to come out the other end and there’s going to be some valuable lesson that actually will make us stronger as we head into 2022. Who wants to start?

 

LISA NICHOLS:  If I can jump in, I think 2021 is too soon. I think that the message now is sign up for the marathon because this is not a sprint. So preparing them for the long journey. And if we’re wrong and it’s over soon, that’s great news. But prepare me for a marathon, not a sprint, so that I’m ready for that. 

 

Speak to -- replace the question marks. The best thing we could do is replace question marks with either a period or an exclamation point. Will I survive this? Can I survive this? That’s a question. You are built to survive this. That’s a period or an exclamation point. Because when the question marks are replaced with periods and exclamation points, the moving ground becomes solid. And the best gift we can give to each other is to make our foundation solid right now. 

 

And sometimes you have to answer with something that you can’t quite touch it. Like I say, here’s what I know. No matter how bad this pandemic is, no matter how crazy the social injustice gets, my human spirit is unavailable to be taken. My faith, my faith is not on the option block right now. 

 

So to sit inside that certainty with them, I think the thing, Soledad, that I would write down to give people is certainty. Certainty. It might be 2021. It might be 2022. It might be 2023. None of us knows, but here’s what I do know, is that who you are is built for such a time as this. That’s what I do know. Period. That’s where the period comes.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Love it. And Shiza, I’ll give you the final word on this.

 

SHIZA SHAHID:  Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. I think it is in times of hardship that growth happens, but growth and resilience is not a given. It is I believe the most significant determinant of success, of happiness, not intelligence, but resilience and how we adapt and how we react and how we grow. I think when I hear about the girls that you’re sponsoring, I think of my own experience. I was fortunate to come to the United States on a full scholarship to Stanford University. I had no idea really what that even really meant, and I was surrounded by classmates who had been to elite boarding schools like Andover and were off to the Olympics next year, and spoke four languages and played five instruments. And I definitely felt that sense of inferiority, of envy that I hadn’t had those same opportunities. 

 

And it took me a while to realize that everything that I had gone through was a whole education and set of experiences that I possessed and understanding that I possessed and cross-cultural ability that I possessed. And I think what I would offer to those girls is to stop discounting the experiences, the hardships, the perspective that they have gained.  And I understand why they do it because the education system doesn’t value it and society doesn’t value it and nobody is really asking you about it in a job interview. But once I learned the value of those experiences is when I was really able to sort of unlock my path. So I want to offer that to those girls that you support and thank you for doing that. 

 

As for 2022, I wish I had a crystal ball, but I do think the human spirit is resilient and I do think the moral arc of the universe bends upwards, as Dr. King so eloquently said. So I think we’re in a difficult moment right now, but I think it’s galvanizing us to see the things that are broken and to really re-commit to a better future.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  I love that you said, “Don’t discount your experience even if everyone around you does,” because ultimately whether we’re talking about young scholars trying to get through college or working women trying to figure out how to navigate the job or moms who are losing their mind because they’re juggling so many things, I think that’s exactly right. I think that out of that can come resiliency, even if people don’t necessarily give you credit for it.

 

A big thank you to all of you who are watching and of course to our guests, Shiza and to Lisa. I think it’s inspired all of us to take action in our own lives and I hope that you’ve all been energized by hearing their stories.  

 

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this conversation and that you can take away from it some really specific and useful and tactical information on how to navigate the road ahead. So stay safe everybody and thanks for watching. 

 

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Soledad O’Brien, Shiza Shahid & Lisa Nichols are not affiliated with Bank of America Corporation. 

 

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A Century of Progress:

The Road to Gender Equity

 

With

 

Soledad O’Brien

Award-winning journalist, documentarian, Entrepreneur and philanthropist

 

Savita Subramanian

Head of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Research And head of U.S. Equity and Quantitative Strategy, BofA Global Research

 

And Jackie VanderBrug

Head of Sustainable and Impact Investment Strategy Chief Investment Office,  Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank

 

Please read important information at the end of the program.

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Hi, everybody, and welcome to our special event. It’s called A Century of Progress: The Road to Gender Equity. My name is Soledad O’Brien and this year, 2020, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19P^th_P Amendment, which, following decades of struggle and dedication, granted some women the right to vote. It would take decades more, of course, for women of color to overcome discriminatory barriers and achieve full voting rights. 

 

So women have come a long way over the past century but there’s still so much work to be done, both in the area of gender and racial equality.  Achieving equality lifts everybody up, the entire global economy in fact, and believe it or not, how you invest can make a difference. There’s something called gender lens investing, which I had never heard about before now, and we’re going to be talking about that a little bit later on this program. 

 

So joining me for this conversation are two leaders from Bank of America whose work has done much to illuminate this conversation about women and gender equality. Savita Subramanian is Head of Environmental, Social and Governance Research and U.S. Equity and Quantitative Strategy for BofA Global Research. Savita, hi.

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Hi, Soledad.  

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Great to see you. Jackie VanderBrug is Head of Sustainable and Impact Investment Strategy for the Chief Investment Office, Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank.  Jackie, it’s so nice to see you. 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Hi, Soledad. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Hi there, so let’s get right into it.  This global health crisis is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before. Talk to me about the particular toll that it’s taking on women who have historically always lagged behind men, Jackie, when it comes to equality financially and equality really on every other front as well.  

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Yeah, Soledad, it’s such an important place to start because as you said, gender equality is good for the economy and it’s good for society.

Unfortunately, our current situation and the pandemic has illustrated the inverse, which is that when we have economic and social hard times, they are disproportionately borne by women and girls, and I’ll give you three examples. The first is jobs, the second is unpaid care and the third is entrepreneurship. 

 

So if we look at jobs, what we know is that women’s jobs were 1.8 times more vulnerable in the economic hardship that the pandemic brought forward.  (Source: “COVID and Gender Equality: Regressive Impact,” McKinsey & Company, 2020). And while we have seen some return to work, the one demographic that has not shifted in terms of unemployment is young black women.  So we very quickly get to it’s not just women but it’s disproportionately women of color.  

 

Part of that, about a quarter of those job losses are disproportionately because of women’s employment in certain sectors that were more affected by the global shutdown. The other is more systemic issues that are related to the roles of gender in society and one of those is unpaid care.  So globally women do 75% of unpaid care. You can think of cooking, cleaning, child care, elder care; and in the U.S. that's about two hours more on average a day.  (Source: “COVID and Gender Equality: Regressive Impact,” McKinsey & Company, 2020). 

 

And then if we look at entrepreneurship, women make fantastic entrepreneurs.  That whole movement has been growing, but women historically, whether they are microentrepreneurs or high-growth entrepreneurs, have less access to capital. What we really have seen is less access to capital in this downturn and so that is disproportionately affecting women’s businesses. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  So as sometimes capital access tightens, of course it impacts women who are already behind even more. 

 

Savita, we know that this is the biggest public health crisis of the last one hundred years. Give us a sense of the scope of how – I’m not even sure if the word unusual – unprecedented this is from a fiscal perspective. 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Absolutely unprecedented.  By the numbers, this is the worst recession in the post-war era, and we saw the quickest decline in equities, in the equity market that we’ve ever seen.  We saw the quickest entry into a bear market that we’ve ever seen, and fortunately a pretty strong and quick recovery.  But this has really been, I think the nature of this crisis is so different and the nature of the economies are so intertwined today that shutting down every major global region of the world has had sort of an indelible and unprecedented impact on economies. 

 

In particular in the U.S., I think where we saw the hardest hit was within the services sector and as Jackie pointed out, this is one of the sectors that is probably more skewed towards employing women than men, so that was sort of an unfortunate outcome of this type of pandemic is that it hit the services industry harder than any other industry because we’re just, we’re literally not leaving our homes.  We’re ordering stuff off the internet but we’re not leaving and going to restaurants and hotels and traveling, etcetera.  So unprecedented is absolutely the word for it. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  So we’ve laid out some very tough truths, I guess I would put it, tough facts about where we are at this moment. And we know just historically, women are confronted with inequities and have been for a long time, whether it’s unequal representation at the higher levels in the C-suite, the wage gap, accumulative lifetime earnings. We know women fall behind on that front as well. 

 

When you are thinking, Jackie, about strategies to better confront these kinds of challenges, what comes to mind? How do you deal with these what seem like big systemic problems? 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  It is important when we’re thinking systemically, Soledad, to think long-term.  Unfortunately, women have about two-thirds on average of what men have in their 401k balances.  So it’s important to start saving early and it’s important to look at your contribution level because women usually contribute slightly less than men.  (Source: “Gender Lens in Defined Contribution Plans,” Bank of America, 2020).

 

The other thing to look at is your goals and your allocation. Women have historically allocated less to equities and that does have a long-term effect in terms of where they land when it comes to retirement. Women are historically considered to be savers and budgeters and men are more the investors.  And so that shift of having, taking on that identity of an investor early and being willing to overcome what has been considered a confidence gap.

 

There is some great news on the horizon. If we look at women under 45, 75% of them say they’ve managed their own finances.  They’re twice as likely as previous women to say they’re the primary investment decision-maker, so I think we are shifting that identity.  (Source: “Seeing the Unseen: The role gender plays in wealth management,” Merrill, 2020).

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It’s so interesting, right, you’re talking about framing and narratives and how we think of ourselves as running our finances, and there was a great detail that a hundred years ago, one of the arguments against women voting was that women wouldn't be able to both vote and keep up with their domestic duties and wifely duties, which I mean I find hilarious. 

 

So Savita, talk to me about how women are doing today in terms of impact and influence, like I assume we can confidently say we’re managing to vote, keep up with our wifely duties and do even more than that. Where do we, in all seriousness, where do we land in this, our impact today for women? 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Well, one hopes, yeah, I think we’ve come a long way, baby. So you know it’s interesting because if you look at any of the statistics, they are very encouraging.  So if you look at the gender pay gap, it’s closed demonstrably. Unfortunately, the gap still exists but it’s closed pretty aggressively. If you look at education rates for women versus men, we’re now at a point where I think back in the mid-90s, women crossed above men in terms of the percentage of individuals in that prime age period with bachelor’s degrees.S

 

Women are controlling investment decisions increasingly, so as Jackie points out, I think we’re on the road to recovery there. Women generate wealth 1.5 times as quickly as men. (Source:  Boston Consulting Group, 2020). So you know, there are a lot of really impressive statistics out there that suggest that we’re on the road to recovery, although we’re not quite there yet. 

 

I mean if you look at some statistics like women on boards of publicly-traded corporations or women in management positions, etcetera, or female CEOs, very, very, very low still, but obviously we’re making great strides and in particular over the last we’ll call it five years. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It’s interesting you measure public corporations, because of course there are several European countries that have passed actual laws that require public companies to have a minimum number of women on their boards. They’ve done a similar thing in California back in 2018, I guess they’d call it a mandate. 

 

Do you think, Jackie, we need more of these kinds of policy initiatives to actually move the needle? Will we get to a day where it’s just happening without a policy pushing this number? 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  I tend to be a fan of letting the market take care of things instead of mandates, but for this one I think you do have to back out and say why would there be a mandate? Why do we want women on a board anyway? And the answer is because it drives better decision-making. Diverse groups make better decisions, and it drives innovation and it contributes to the bottom line.

 

But the other answer is also that the board sets the tone for the company, and it is important from an inclusion and inclusive capitalism standpoint to have diverse boards.  So then you’re asking the question, “How do we get there faster?”  And I land in the camp that the mandates actually help, right, because we have a systemic challenge.  And even though in 2019, 50% of the U.S. new directors were women, we’re not going to get there fast enough if we don't push forward quicker.  (Source: “29_T2019 Spencer Stuart U.S. Board Index29_T,” Spencer Stuart, 2019).

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Savita, I’m interested in understanding, you know, when we talk about equal rights for women, I think often we’re talking about almost like a social justice perspective on that kind of conversation, but it sounds like the two of you argue that there is a real impact on the global economy when you’re talking about equal rights for women. Can you connect like where do those things intersect?  

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s really interesting to think about why we want more women on boards. Is it just for the sake of this notion of fairness and equality? Well, maybe, but it also turns out that companies with a higher percentage of women on the board of directors for publicly-traded U.S. companies have historically shown a higher return on equity, lower earnings volatility, better financial performance than companies with much more homogenous boards. (Source: “Womentum!,” BofA Global Research, March 3, 2020).

 

I think another reason that this is important is if you look at companies that are selling to a broad array of customers, but you have the decisions being made by one group of people that all think exactly the same way, you won’t get that connectivity with your consumers. So I think it’s just that link is very clear to draw out, it’s not just sort of a feel-good metric.  

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: In the big picture, not necessarily financially, but in the big picture of sort of the global economy, why does women’s gender equality matter? How does it move the needle maybe, you know, outside of just, hey, if we have more women on boards that will be better for the businesses? 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  If you look to what we’re -- where we’re headed as a globe, you need to look to the sustainable development goals. So in 2015, over 190 countries got together and ratified what is best known, Soledad, as like a strategic plan for the planet, right?  (Source: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Sept. 2015).

 

This was a bottoms-up, what is it that is going to allow all of us to prosper.  So there are 17 of these goals, it’s hard to remember, they’re all color-coded. Goal number 5 is gender equality. (Source: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Sept. 2015). And what we know is that goal number 5 is an accelerant for all the other goals. In fact, we’re not going to achieve what is anticipated or desired by 2030 without achieving gender equality, right. 

 

Gender equality enables us to address climate change in a more holistic way. Gender equality enables us to address hunger, to address education, to address all of these other things that society wants. The investments that we can make in terms of gender equality enable us to create a world that works for all of us. It also creates a sustainable economy moving forward. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Savita, are you finding that the conversations you’re having with people, they’re now caring about the gender issue? I mean I think it’s fair to say ten years ago as a reporter, we almost would never cover it. Just in terms of what was making news, it didn't matter at all. Has that changed dramatically? 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Oh, absolutely, it’s on investors’ radars in a very real way, and I think part of that is because of the proliferation of data and disclosure. Companies are talking more about, you know, this gender pay gap and how they’re resolving it.  Companies are disclosing the statistics in terms of gender stats in different roles and management roles, so there’s a lot more information that we have. And I think that investors are also sort of becoming more and more aware of the costs that a lack of gender equality is having on society. 

 

You know, if you look at areas of the world, in most areas women have equal access to education as men. But in certain areas, like if you look at Sub-Saharan Africa, women have far less access to education than men, and if you look at the role that women play in society, they spend -- there is some staggering statistic of you know 40,000 hours a year just moving water around. I mean this is not a good use of time and I think that what that's pointing out is that if we just invest in gender equality, it can have real economic ramifications. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Jackie, let’s talk about gender lens investing, as I promised everybody. I have to say, I had never heard of that and then I certainly didn't realize that it actually had been coined like ten years ago by the Criterion Institute. Why don't you start with just what is gender lens investing? 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Yeah, so the first thing to realize is that it is gender lens investing and the lens is really important because it’s a lens, not a limitation.  If you are able to see gender data patterns, you can see opportunities and you can avoid risk. So really what a gender lens investor means, I am taking gender data and integrating it into my investment process. 

 

Take a look at the research that Savita and her team have done, you know, numbers after numbers in terms of why gender should matter to an investor, why you would want to understand it and it’s not small. This is not something that is just about investing in micro-entrepreneurs. It’s something that exists across asset classes. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  While you’re talking, Savita is nodding her head very emphatically, so Savita, let’s talk about the data and how sort of the gender lens fits into the overarching conversation about sustainability. 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Absolutely, so you know we’ve done a lot of work kind of parsing the numbers on, you know, sustainable investing sounds really great but does it actually work.  And what we’re finding is that sustainable investing and using environmental and social and governance types of attributes, or these so-called nonfinancial attributes are actually critical.  And I think that investors have been thinking about all of these things since the advent of investing, but I think what’s happening now is we’re more formally incorporating environmental and social and governance types of considerations into our investment process. 

 

So one of the reasons I think this is happening is that today, if you look at the average U.S. publicly-traded company, 80% of its assets are what’s called intangible.  So these are assets that are based on brand and reputation and intellectual property and nonfinancial measures. (Source: Source: BofA Global Research, Standard & Poor as of 12/31/2019). So when we’re sitting here thinking about which companies to buy, we really have to shift our focus, or our lens, from thinking about price-to-earnings ratios and leverage ratios to thinking about things like does this company have a safe, stable, diverse workforce? Does this company produce products that are safe for consumers? Does this company have a management team that's aligned with consumers, suppliers, shareholders and buyers? And I think that those are some of the considerations that we’re starting to see investors more formally incorporate into their processes. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Interesting, so Savita, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, we’ve seen the economy is, I’ll use the word volatile but I think that's not strong enough. Would, are those companies that have prioritized sustainable growth and are really thinking about enhanced opportunities for people of color, are those companies literally better positioned to deal with the crisis that we’re in right now than others, is that what you’re saying?  

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  Well, it just so happens that during this bear market that we just all lived through and during this social pandemic and this unprecedented global shutdown, companies with strong social characteristics, one of which is gender diversity, actually outperformed their peers.  (Source: “ESG Matters: Bull Market Phenomenon? Quite the Contrary,” BofA Global Research, March 25, 2020).

 

In fact, what was interesting to note is that companies with good policies around leave and strong and loyal employee bases that were likely to stick with the company during a tough time, those were the companies that actually outperformed the S&P 500 on a sector-adjusted and size-adjusted basis. (Source: “ESG Matters: Bull Market Phenomenon? Quite the Contrary,” BofA Global Research, March 25, 2020).

 

So for me as a quant, it’s particularly gratifying to see that if you had bought these companies at the onset of COVID-19 that had, let’s call it, more attractive social scores, you would have actually demonstrably outperformed the market by, you know, 5 percentage points in the U.S., 10 percentage points in Europe. I mean it was really an interesting period to look at what happens when you are in a troubled environment. (Source: “ESG Matters: Bull Market Phenomenon? Quite the Contrary,” BofA Global Research, March 25, 2020).

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  It’s so interesting because when I deal with my investment manager, you know, I don't think I’ve ever dug down really deep in kind of how I wanted to feel about the things we’re invested in, right. I wanted to make X number of dollars or I wanted to be able to pay for my kids’ college down the road.  But you’re really talking about kind of what changes you want to make in the world that you want to be a part of, you actually can do that in your investing.  

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Just important to say, you can do that and you don't have to give up what you said before, which is you don't have to give up putting your kids through college and all of your other financial goals. It’s the magic of “and.”

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Right, they’re not mutually exclusive because by the way if they were, probably you wouldn't get a lot of people investing in them. The fact that you can invest in doing the things that emotionally, morally, value-wise you care about and also make money to me is the win-win. 

 

The inclusion of women at sort of these higher levels, is there data that shows us that that actually impacts earnings and stock market and, you know, like real data as opposed to it makes us all feel good to know that there are women at high levels as part of these conversations? Jackie, I’m curious if you have that data. 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Overall, we have seen that companies that are gender diverse are more likely to outperform their peers. McKinsey’s research here says companies that are gender diverse are 21% more likely to have stronger financial performance than their peers. (Source: “Delivering through Diversity,” McKinsey & Company, 2018). Interestingly, that number has increased, Soledad, over time, so it’s more important now than it was five years ago for that gender diversity and racial diversity is even more important. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Why is that changing, Savita? I’m so curious about that being more important now than it even was five years ago. 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  It’s always been an important driver of returns. So, you know we’ve actually found in our work that gender diversity at management levels, at the board level and at an overall company level, if you just took the market and you broke it into two groups: companies with above median number of women in management positions and below median, and you just tracked these two groups over time, we found that very consistently, historically, you know over about I think it was about a 15-year period that we looked at, the group with a more diverse management team or a more diverse board systematically saw a higher return on equity than the group with the less diverse management team or board.  (Source: “ESG from A to Z: A Global Primer,” BofA Global Research, November 25, 2019).    

 

I think that from a performance perspective, we’re starting to see that performance spread increase as investors kind of get wise to this thesis and start investing in the companies that are actually kind of looking better on all of these statistics that we’re talking about here. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  So Jackie, are there trade-offs? When you’re discussing with clients about gender lens investing, are you saying, you know, “But here’s some stuff to think about on the other side?” 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG:  Yeah, so just to underline maybe what we’ve said, we are, we are saying unequivocally, you do not have to give up risk-adjusted returns to invest sustainably or to invest with a gender lens. I do think that you need to look carefully in terms of that investment process, right, so one of the myths is that this is something you do overnight. Most of our clients that start to move towards a more sustainable portfolio, they do it over a number of years, and obviously there’s tax considerations, there’s timing considerations, there’s looking overall at your allocation, all of that is important and that's something that your financial advisor helps you with. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  So before I let you guys go, I’m curious if you are feeling optimistic, pessimistic, somewhere in between? I mean I think we’re not fully going to be able to bring the economy back until we get a grip on what’s happening with this global pandemic and any version that doesn't include that is just not going to really work.   Why don't you start us off, Jackie, and then Savita, will you jump in as well? 

 

JACKIE VANDERBRUG: Yeah, Soledad, I feel like this is a really emotional time and it is interesting just the research there, the pandemic, women have felt more stressed during this pandemic than men have from an emotional standpoint, it’s just back to that other burdens that we carry.  (Source: “COVID-19 and a Crisis of Care in the United States,” MenCare, June 2020).

 

We need to understand that when we increase equality for women, it’s not like we reduce the opportunities for men, right? That this is not a win-lose situation and that's where I think we can come together, when I talk to men and they say, “absolutely,” right?  Gender equality helps all of us economically and socially, so to me that's the, that’s the optimism here. I am optimistic, although there are days, believe me. On average, I am optimistic. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Hmm, how about for you, Savita? 

 

SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN:  When you look at the numbers, I still feel kind of depressed that we’re still at a point where women are paid less than men, even though their education level is higher and women are working more at home and getting paid less, so there’s a lot of numbers you can look at that make you feel kind of like “What progress?” 

 

But here’s where I feel really optimistic: corporate America has basically undergone kind of a sea change in terms of their ethos where instead of just maximizing shareholder returns, I think we’re in this culture where corporates want to maximize stakeholder returns, so that means treating their customers, their consumers, their employees fairly and ethically and a big part of that is diversity and fairness.  

 

And then I also think what’s nice to see is that even during this bear market where investors basically sold out of almost every asset class, we continued to see inflows, surprisingly, into sustainable investment vehicles. (Source: “ESG Matters: Bull Market Phenomenon? Quite the Contrary,” BofA Global Research, March 25, 2020).  So I think this is a really sticky capital allocation decision that's not going to go away and is just, is essentially building momentum. That's where I’m very optimistic. 

 

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN:  Well good, I’m glad to hear that you’re both optimistic, and I love this focus on stakeholders and not just shareholders, because I think stakeholders are sometimes left out of the conversation and they are ultimately important to shareholders, so I think that's a very good area to distinguish. 

 

A big thank you to Savita and to Jackie, thanks for your insights of course.  And I know this obviously is a topic that you’re both going to continue to monitor the data around, obviously, in the near future and the far future too. 

 

Thanks to all of you for watching as well. We hope that this conversation and some of these takeaways are really useful and tangible insights for all of you and also inspirational too as we try to navigate the road ahead. 

 

Stay safe everybody and thank you for watching. 

 

 

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