Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: Welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast! I’m your host, Britt Seva, really excited this week to pull back the curtain a little bit. I’m going to be sharing with you the journey that my company and I have been on in learning to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in my business.
So for those of you listening, who might not know me well, maybe you’re newer to the show (which if you are, welcome), if you’ve been around for a while, you still might not even know that the Thriving Stylist is created by a beautiful team of souls.
I am blessed to have 16 incredible employees who show up to work for me every single day. I also have a group of contractors who work for me as well, so the production behind Thrivers Society, Thriving Stylist, our social channels, everything is far from being just me.
That was a piece of this DEI journey for me. The biggest piece was choosing to better myself and gaining awareness. My goal through this show was that I hope that this is one of those episodes that inspires others just to think a little bit differently, hopefully inspires a few thousand people to take some action.
I know some of you want to make efforts in making our industry, our salons, this profession more equitable, more diverse, more inclusive, but you don’t know where to start or there’s this element of shame or confusion. My goal through this is just to break a little bit of that down, start breaking down some of the walls so we can get more steps and more action and more momentum in the right direction because that’s what’s going to take to see real change. We’re not going to make massive change overnight.
That’s one of the hardest things I’ve realized through this journey, but also one of the realest things is that the way to truly create diversity and inclusion and equality and equity, which are two different things, P.S., is by creating a movement and actually infiltrating change into everything that we do. That’s going to take time and it’s going to take a massive amount of energy.
My hope is that in listening to this one, you get some ideas, you gain some insights, you get some direction on where to turn for maybe some education, some inspiration, and maybe just a little bit of self-reflection.
I started prioritizing DEI way too late in the game. I’ll be the first to say that. Certainly this came to the forefront for me after the murder of George Floyd. There’s just no denying it, and when I realized that I needed to really radically change the way not just my business shows up, but I show up, it was intimidating.
Something that I’ve shared to a few people is it’s been a while since I have felt completely naive to a topic, and this was one of those that slapped me in the face of just how uneducated I was. I don’t generally consider myself to be an uneducated person, but this really slapped me in the face.
For me, this journey started with massive self-reflection.
I did a lot of the assessments. There are some really great ones out there. If you’re looking for some resources, I’ll share some with you now. One really good one is going to be Project Implicit out of Harvard. If you look up Project Implicit and just look up Project Implicit assessments or something like that, what you’ll see is there’s a lot of different, totally free digital assessments on things like gender science, disability, age, precedents, weight, weapons, religion, skin tone, the list goes on and on. There’s a ton of them. Transgender, sexuality, gender, career, race, Asian. It’s interesting. There’s a ton that you can take.
One of the things that it helps you to uncover is your bias.
We are all here living on this planet with this underlying bias, that at surface level, we tell ourselves doesn’t exist. “I’m not racist, I’m not judgmental. I accept all people, all genders welcome here. I’m all for equality.” We say these things, but from the time we were born based on how we were raised, where we went to school, our family’s beliefs, there’s certain things that start to become ingrained in your DNA. No matter how much you, as a more informed person or you as an adult, don’t want to believe those things, there’s a part of you that’s still wired in that way.
When you take these assessments, it’s very eye-opening because you can actually try, like, “Oh, see, see the way I’m taking the test. I’m doing really well,” and then, in the end, you look at the results and you’re like, “Well, shoot, I guess this is right.”
I think for a lot of us, for me, one of the big takeaways from the test was not the results. The results were certainly a big takeaway too, but realizing and going through the process that we’re often telling ourselves, “No, no, no, I’m good.” “No, no, no, I’m not this or that.” Or “I am this, that, and the other thing.” But do your actions actually show that? Are you actively working to support the things that you are in support of or are you just silently in the back corner saying, “Well, I’m not doing anything to disrupt this and that makes me a supporter”?
That’s one of the things I had to realize.
Step one for me is what I call self-reflection. For me, it was very humbling. Like I said, to realize, “wow, this is an area where I’m a complete novice,” to own the fact that a lot of what I had actually been taught or told in the past is untrue. And not untrue just from a belief or value system, but factually incorrect and that I had believed it.
That’s the wild thing is like, we’re just told things, you believe it to be true, and so it is! And then when you actually look and dig deeper, you’re like, “Wow, there’s actually all this information that’s not wildly available, and then when I look it up, it’s in complete contradiction to the facts that I’ve been told.” Having to have this reflection of, “Wow, how much of what I’ve learned, how much of the way I’ve lived my life is incorrect?”
It is tough, but it doesn’t mean we don’t do it, but that is, at least for me, the first piece is that self-reflection and realizing how far you have to go and just becoming aware of the concept that maybe I don’t have all the answers. That’s truly step one.
Just some curiosity. If you can develop curiosity, you’re like, “All right, well, maybe I am imperfect,”—because P.S., we all are—”and maybe there is just some more that I can learn.” If that can be your step one, that’s beautiful. That’s a wonderful first step.
Next for me was making that commitment. After the self-reflection, I was able to see pretty clearly within a few, it probably took me a good month to clearly see where some of my gaps were and to say, “All right, I see it. It’s slapping me in the face. I need to do more.”
For me, the next step was self-education, meaning I had to learn myself as the leader of an organization, the leader of a family, even right. I’m a mother of two kids and I had to learn myself before I could just start taking action.
One of the things that bothered me pretty early on after the murder of George Floyd and a lot of the more performative stuff that we saw happening on social media was I think that a lot of companies chose to take action before they had actually changed anything internally, before they had educated themselves. They just wanted to put some stuff out there.
I didn’t do that. However, I understood the pressure of it because there was so much shame around, “we should have been doing this.” At least for me, I’ve been in business for a decade. I should have been doing this from day one. Some of these companies should have been doing this for decades, right? And so there’s this shame.
So often when we feel the shame, the natural reaction is “fix it”. I’m a natural fixer in my personal/professional life. “Here’s a problem, I’ve done wrong. Let me fix it.”
When I first started learning, I thought, “Well, how quickly can I fix all of my mistakes?” And through doing this work for 18 months, I realized first of all, there is no timeline, and to truly and deeply understand the work, it will take the rest of my life. That doesn’t mean that I can just say, “Well, by the end of my lifetime, hopefully, something cool will happen, but the changes will be incremental,” because to just make blatant changes without changing the person I am on the inside, without changing the beliefs and the way that my organization operates would be artificial and performative. From the start, I knew that was not what I wanted to do and having that knowing didn’t make it any less frustrating because I was so annoyed with myself that I hadn’t taken action sooner.
However, I also knew I didn’t want to just do stuff to look like I was doing stuff. I actually wanted to make progress and progress takes time.
In the self-learning, which to me was just personal learning for myself, I started off exploring. I’m somebody who has a fairly unique learning style. I’m not a traditional learner. I struggle with a learning disability, and so I always have to figure out, “All right, how am I going to best learn this information with tangible impact?” I started with books, podcasts, following some social influencers who have some meaningful messages that I really felt like I was learning from and were really good.
Once I realized that I was getting a sense of where my blind spots were, the next thing I did is I scheduled some paid listening sessions. I paid some of my students to express to me what it was like to go through my programs. I listened to a lot of people give me some feedback about how I’ve shown up, things that I’ve said, things that I haven’t said, things that I’ve done, things that I haven’t done, verbiage that I’ve used, right? All of these things. It was truly just to listen.
Listening sessions are one of the things I’ve been taught by my coaching consultants, which I’ll get there in a second. I didn’t have a coaching consultant at this time. It was just a trigger pull. Listening sessions are one of the most powerful things you can do because it’s the opportunity for you to just sit and listen, not get defensive, not even try to understand. There is such power in just listening to how your actions or words or efforts have affected another is mind-blowing.
Just taking a step back to listen, then doing some equitable, invested learning, meaning pouring funds back into people who are much brighter, much more educated, much more knowledgeable than I am on DEI-related topics.
And I did that, like I said, through some paid listening sessions. I’ve taken several digital courses, and the two biggest investments I made were through two different consulting companies.
Going back to learning style, the first consulting company that I worked with came highly recommended from a peer that I trusted. She had a great experience working with this person and was like, “Listen, I think you’d really hit it off,” so I said, “Great.” I gave it a try. I really liked working with this organization. I had a really great experience. I liked the energy. I felt like we understood each other. When it came time to integrate my leadership team with this consulting company, it wasn’t a match. I won’t go into fully why, but I will say some of the people of color in my organization didn’t love the coaching and consulting.
Because they didn’t feel supported, I couldn’t head that direction, so I decided to wrap up that relationship. Still much respect to that organization. For me, I actually learned a lot from that organization, but because it wasn’t a good fit for the leaders on my team, I couldn’t continue heading that direction.
So I went back to researching more and I found an incredible diversity, equity, and inclusion company that has served us really well. I’m going to share their info in case you’re curious. They are Elevated Diversity. The CEO of the company is a woman named Rhonda who’s exceptional, but she does not show up alone, and she has an amazing team of experts to support her who have been wonderful to us. We’ve had a really, really great experience with them.
If you look on their website, we chose to do the 360 Degree Coaching service. It’s broken out in three phases. We’ll be working with them for several years. That was a good fit for us.
That being said, she also has services where she coordinates guest speakers to come and talk to you, they do a review, they can work with your team. They have a lot of different options.
Elevated Diversity has been phenomenal for us, and like I said, it’s almost like they become an extension of our organization. We have slowly started to incorporate Elevated Diversity, Rhonda, and her team into my team.
It started with just coaching myself, then my operations team, then we did some work with my company as a whole. Now we’re going to do in-depth work with my leaders and then continue to infuse throughout the company.
The learning was what was next. So first it was the reflection, then it was the learning.
Then we got into creating a strategy and a plan. So what we had to look at was based and, listen the learning. First of all, we’re still in the learning. We’re going to be in the learning for the rest of our lifetime, but we had to do the reflection first. Now we are in the learning.
It took us about a year of learning to truly be able to put together the strategic plan. Again, I wish I’m a doer and a fixer, so I wish it could have been faster, and it’s not due to lack of effort. I’ve been meeting with Rhonda weekly for well over a year. We’ve done workshops. It’s not for lack of effort, but it’s because there’s so much deep work that has to be done so the efforts are not performative and you actually know what you’re doing, right? If I’m going to stand behind this, I actually have to know what’s up.
When we look to create the strategy and the plan, some of the things to ask is, “Have our values changed and where have they changed? And how does this affect our business?”
We had to design—well, not design a new handbook, but update our handbook, review all of our verbiage, review all of our policies, and make sure that everything is in alignment with this new value-based system that is fully incorporated into the business.
Then we asked ourselves, “Do we need to train members of our teams? How are we going to do that? And how do they like to learn?”
One of the things that we did is we started doing some trainings with the team and then did a survey and asked them how do you all like to learn? Overwhelmingly they said guest speakers and workshops.
I’m filming this podcast at the end of 2021. We are in process now to book all of our 2022 in-house team speakers and Elevated Diversity is helping us to do that currently. Then once we have a foundational base of education on our own and my team is in a place where we are ready to bring in more speakers, that can be something that we can do ourselves.
But for right now, we are building a strong foundation, right? I’m looking to build this DEI house from the ground up, so that’s going to be what we’re working on through 2022.
Then do we need to change our business operations? For us, there wasn’t a ton operationally that needed to change, but it does change the filter through which we look at all of our business decisions.
Do we need to change our marketing? We made some shifts to employee holidays. And then how do you shift verbiage both inside your business, externally through marketing, and all of it?
Once you have the strategy, then you take it to the team. Literally, we have done all of this before truly bringing it to the team, and this is why it takes time, right? When I say it’s self-reflection, then self-learning, then figuring out the coaching, how you’re going to get the support, the strategy, the plan, then we start to train the organization as a whole.
Like I mentioned, we asked for feedback, how they like to learn, and now it’s the infusion of the training.
I have several different departments in my business. Different departments need to be trained more in-depth in some areas, less in-depth than others. There’s some training that needs to be wide and broad across the board, right? Looking at all of those moving pieces and asking ourselves what is the most strategic way to roll all of this training out, and then getting consistency and resources in place so this is an ongoing conversation, not just a one-time workshop, but this is just a part of who we are and what we do.
Then we can begin the true implementation. So changing hiring practices if need be, changing marketing if need be, changing your service menu if need be.
One of the things that we are implementing is something called a Diversity Council. So the Diversity Council is going to be a paid group of people within my company who help us to coordinate DEI-based efforts. They’re going to help us review the business, create suggestions, create celebrations, almost like a student council. If you were ever on an ASB in high school or anything like that, similar. It’s members of my company who are helping to progress things forward. It doesn’t change my efforts. My efforts stayed the same or increase, but there is a support system and they’re helping to create momentum throughout all of the departments in the company as well.
Now we couldn’t start to create this Diversity Council until we knew we had created a truly safe environment. I personally think it would have been incredibly unsafe if within three months of realizing where I was lacking, I said, “Okay, great, and I’ve updated all of the Thrivers modules. So come on in. Everything’s fixed.”
No, first of all, it’s not like fixing. It’s not like putting a Band-Aid. This is a systemic problem so that would have been completely wrong and inappropriate, but also it would have been impossible to do in three months’ time. I would have created this unsafe environment where my team wasn’t trained, they were in the dark, I wasn’t evolved, and now I’m welcoming people in. It would have been so irresponsible.
I think for a lot of stylists and salon owners, when we say, “I really do want to have a place in space where everybody is safe, everybody’s comfortable, everybody’s welcome, and everybody can be served,” beautiful. I think that’s wonderful. You have to go through the process. First of reflection, learning, implementation, and then you can start to externally make those moves, right, and start welcoming people in in that really big way.
One of the things that we started this implementation is my professional speaking engagement rider. This year, especially in the last three months, I think I’ve had five major speaking engagement requests. At this point, if some organization, person, salon, whatever is choosing to ask me to come in as a professional speaker, we have a rider that goes out that is prioritizing that there will be a diverse group of speakers. If it’s a speaker group that’s speaking there, it must be a diverse lineup. Now, if it’s just me, that’s one person, you just get me. That’s all that you get. But if I’m going to a massive event where there’s 20 speakers, we have a requirement of what I feel comfortable standing up behind when I work with an organization, and diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of that rider. If there’s an organization that doesn’t feel comfortable committing to that, that’s no worries. It’s just an organization I’m then going to say no to.
That goes back to what are your values. Who do you want to align with and what is important to you? That’s also part of creating the equity. If I’m saying, listen, if you want to work with me, you need to think beyond the norm, and let’s really look at creating opportunity for those who generally don’t get the invite or maybe speakers you haven’t considered in the past. Let’s look at bringing folks in who can add tremendous value to the stage and not just speak to DEI. Let’s bring in speakers who are mega-talented, mega brilliant, just to share their work, whatever that may be. That’s a part of the rider that I’m bringing out today as I go out as a speaker.
Lastly, as you do this work—and this is something I’ve learned in a really big way—you have to continue to listen every single day. When you take action, when you don’t take action, you may or may not get some feedback. I want you to think of that feedback as a correction, not criticism. Even if it’s somebody telling you that what you’ve done is harmful or hurtful or an accusation is made against you where initially you look at it and you say, “Well, that’s completely wrong. That’s not what I meant,” okay. Very good, it’s good that that’s not what you meant, but that is how it was perceived by this person.
This is just solid life advice. Whenever anybody offers you some feedback, if we can have the view of this is a correction, not a criticism, and take a step back and think to yourself what is the lens that this person is seeing, whatever it is you did through, whether it be a Facebook post, a statement that you made, a picture that you posted, who the heck knows, the actions that you took sparked emotions in somebody. And if you could take a moment to just educate yourself and say, “Okay, I can see where, when I did this, it made somebody feel a type of way,” and just have that moment of reflection, it’s a really good first step.
The other thing that we can do too is appreciate the gift of energy that person is giving you. They didn’t have to dedicate their time to sending you a message. I know for a lot of us, we’re saying, “Well, just I’d rather you say nothing at all.” In some instances, nasty comments, aren’t helpful, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about when somebody messaged you and just says, “Well, you’re stupid.”
I’m saying I’ve been in the situation where somebody will send me a super long DM or something, and maybe it doesn’t appear kind. I’m not saying it’s only the ones where everybody’s nice. I’m not saying it’s that either, maybe their tone is not friendly, but they took time out of their day to express to me how they feel. If I can strip my emotion away for a minute and just try and look at what this person is trying to get me to understand, that’s where I’ll learn.
I was watching an interview with Oprah today—it was a little clip—and what she was saying was that everything that does happen to you and everything that doesn’t happen to you is for a reason. And if you can just live life finding that reason and seeking those answers rather than thinking, you’ve already got it all figured out, it’s incredible to see how and where the world opens up.
I hope that this has been insightful and inspiring. To sum it all up. If you are looking to invest in a DEI journey and by invest, I mean, monetarily yes, but just emotionally, physically, mentally, all of it. If you have decided that your business is something that should be diverse, equitable, and inclusive of all, if you don’t want to be a business who’s turning people away who are in alignment with the services that you offer, a really good place to start is self-reflection then doing some learning and then creating the strategic plan and rolling it out.
If you are a salon owner or leader, it is critical that you help yourself before you attempt to infuse anything else into the salon as a whole. The other thing I want to share is trust the process and trust the journey. When I started working with Elevated Diversity, I remember I asked Rhonda, “about how long do you think this will take?” and she said, “I think it will probably take about a lifetime.” I really appreciated those words because she’s exactly right. This is the type of work that there’s not a hard set finish line. It’s progressive type of work and if we can all commit to choosing to be better, to being more open, and to being more accepting, this world would be a pretty good place.
I hope this podcast has been inspiring. I hope you feel the urge to take some action, and as I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
