Um My name is Natalie Egan. My pronouns are she, her and hers. I'm the CEO and founder of a company called translator, where we build diversity, equity and inclusion training and analytics software for corporations, schools and nonprofits.Um by way of background and this is where my story begins, right by way of background. I'm a serial entrepreneur. Um I uh have been trying to solve problems and start businesses and um you know, help people and make a little money along the way since I was about six or seven years old. I had my first real business when I was eight years old. Um That's a different, a different story. Um But today I run translators and it is my second sort of major venture capital backed uh hr tech, uh what I call change management, software business um designed to change people's hearts and minds and behaviors and make it scalable and repeatable. Um So, um prior to translator, uh and prior to my transition, uh I was a very different person. Um So about six years ago, I came out as a transgender woman.

Um Prior to that, I had had another company called people links, we were venture backed where we raised about $8 million. Um It was a social media guidance software. So it was designed to show you what to do on social media and when to do it and make it scalable and repeatable and, and meet you where you are, you know, meet, you know, a lot of people, some people were new to social media. Some people, you know, were, they hated social media and some people, you know, were kind of in the middle or, you know, some people thought they knew everything. So I had to meet you where you are and get where you need to go. And uh the technology we're building today is very similar to that actually. But instead of teaching social media, we're teaching empathy at scale. So we're teaching people, we're meeting people where they are and getting them to where they need to go. Uh And so that's the technology we're going to show off a little bit today and, and have you experience and, and see how it works. Um I position it, we position it as a social learning technology because it is literally designed for live groups of people, cohorts of people to experience together. So the technology itself helps facilitate difficult conversations uh specifically in the workplace.

Um but it is designed to, you know, for people to learn together, we always say with translator, we learn together. So it's not an asynchronous solution it's not, you know, an L MS thing that you go and do you know when you're supposed to be doing other work or you're actually doing other work when you do it? Um So it's kind of a unique blend of technology and people. Um And it's designed to, you know, help elevate and amplify the de I learning experience, the diversity, equity, inclusion learning experience. Um So that's a little bit about my background and how we got here. Um Just to kind of help you understand a little bit more about the technology itself. When I came out as a trans woman in 2016, I experienced biased discrimination and hatred for the first time in my life, you know, academically and, and theoretically, I knew what those things were, but I had never actually experienced like the cold, hard reality of somebody, you know, not looking me in the eye or not, you know, not giving me service or uh I've never felt like a threat to my physical or psychological safety just because of who I was or how I looked.

Um And so that was a really eye opening moment for me. Um And, you know, and it started this journey um and it's an ongoing journey, right? It's a continuous journey. But I, um you know, I, I oftentimes talk about this journey to becoming Natalie is also my journey to empathy. Um So, prior to my transition, I lived in a bubble of white male privilege with access and resources. Um And I didn't, I, I confused the word sympathy with empathy my whole life, you know, I use them interchangeably, right? Where sympathy is, is sort of feeling sorry for somebody, but empathy is being able to feel what they feel, being able to walk in their shoes. And so, you know, when I had this particular experience, I remember I was in a Starbucks. Um and I, I got, uh, you know, uh, uh, there was a really nasty inter altercation interaction, um, with another customer in line had nothing to do with Starbucks, but I was in a Starbucks and I remember watching them walk out of the Starbucks and thinking, you know, if they only knew my story, you know, if they only knew how hard I've worked my whole life to try and fit in and, and how much damage that's caused, like, like, you know, trying to, to fit in, then they wouldn't judge me this way.

They wouldn't judge me for, for who I am, if they knew how hard I tried to, to fit in my whole life and, and the problems that that had caused. Um, and that's when I had this sort of light bulb moment when I realized, you know, I need to build technology to help us understand each other better. Like that was the original idea. Um And I didn't know what it was gonna look like. Of course, but I just thought, you know, we need to build technology to help us understand each other better. And what I pretty quickly realized is that we can't understand each other better until we understand ourselves first, right? And I was like almost like my own living, you know, case study of this whole thing. Um And so the core of our technology really became what I call self-awareness technology, right? It's designed to help you understand your own identity and your own lived experience. And then that becomes a gateway or a segue in order for you to be able to start to understand other people's identities and other people's lived experience. So, what we're about to show you hear today is a very foundational, you know, um kind of learning experience that doesn't replace other diversity, equity inclusion trainings or, or programming or content or resources.

It's actually, if we do our job correctly, I always say it will do three things. One, it will start a conversation, two, we're gonna create awareness and three, hopefully we'll ignite a spark, right? And that igniting that spark is what gets people to lean in, to want to do the work to go and, and, and, and, you know, listen to the podcast or, you know, read that book or attend the other trainings. Um So this is very uh foundational uh work that we're doing here. Um So I'm gonna let you actually do that. Uh I'm gonna share my screen again here in a second. Um And I know some people are just joining, so try and um sort of uh fill in a little bit of the blanks here, so I don't have to go backwards. But um this is uh this is just kind of what we, I just covered my story. So for anybody that's just joining, I was just telling a little bit about my background and now we're going to hit the second bullet point, which is really about how do we scale empathy through technology and this live immersive experience that I'm gonna let everybody do here is a piece of that, right?

So there's a whole portfolio of learning experiences that we've created, they are designed to blend, you know, technology and people together. Um So that we, so that we can learn more effectively um in, especially in these kind of hybrid uh remote distributed workforce environments.

Uh Part of the thesis of this is that if we can, if we really to make the change, we have to work with corporations, schools and nonprofits, right? They're the biggest lever to effectively create change. Um So I'm gonna give you sort of a run of show of one of our uh learning experiences. Um This one in particular is called the empathy and self awareness workshop. So all of our technology is delivered in, in, in workshops just like this. They're just usually 90 minutes to two hours. So not 40 minutes. That's why I'm moving through so much of this, so quickly, but we were asked to do this. So somehow we got signed up for the 40 minute version. Um But if we were to do a run of show, if we were to do one of these webinars right now, and that's how they're delivered. Imagine 50 people, 500 people, you know, logged into a webinar with a facilitator. In this case, it will be me and we're going to introduce in this case, this exercise, one of many exercises that we can deliver called the Walk of Privilege, right? So some people on this on this call right now have potentially already done this exercise, right? They might have done it, you know, freshman year orientation in college or maybe as part of a work retreat or maybe they saw the video that went viral a few years ago. But it's a really powerful exercise that was based on original research by Peggy mcintosh.

So Peggy mcintosh pioneered the original research on on privilege about 20 years ago and it was turned into an exercise over time by trainers. And while it's a really powerful exercise, it's also highly problematic. And Peggy mcintosh never fully endorsed the exercise because, you know, of all the challenges that go with, you know, turning it into this exercise when it was in her research, she that she created some, some uh hypothetical questions that are designed for self reflection to ask yourself.

Like, did both of my parents go to college? This is a question to ask yourself. The exercise was turned in or that it was turned into this exercise by trainers over time by lining them up, shoulder to shoulder in a room. And then they would read statements like step forward if both your parents went to college or step backwards if you have a visible or invisible disability. So what ends up happening is you end up shaming and outing people for their privilege or lack of privilege. It's also distracting, right? You're not self reflecting on your own privilege or marginalization. You're staring at the person in the front of the back of the room, right? In cases you might be really angry about that, right? There's all kinds of frustration that can come up for people, emotions. Um So it it while it's powerful, it's also highly problematic. Uh There's a couple of other issues with it, it's an ablest exercise that assumes you can stand and walk. Um You need the literally the facility to do it. This is only about eight people right here. So imagine trying to do it with, you know, 50 or 500 right? Or 5000, you wouldn't be able to do it. Um And then from a technologist perspective, I think one of the biggest issues with it is that there's nothing to show for it afterwards, right? The people in the moment may have learned something but how can the organization learn from this? Right?

And there's a whole framework that we've created around empathy development that also applies to the organization. Like how do we create an empathetic organization? And in the same way, you know, it is at the individual level, like you can't have empathy unless you understand your own identity first and a company or an organization cannot have empathy for its employees unless it understands who they are, right? It needs to have be able to look in the mirror and say this is who we are. We know who we are and most companies don't really actually know who they are. So this becomes a self reflection tool for the organization to say this is who our employees really are. And if this is who we are, these are the changes we need to make. So I'm just sort of setting us up to do this exercise here. Some of you may have done this in the past. Um You know, and, and sometimes they get sort of um uh they might be uh early versions of this might have just been too focused on like socio-economic status, um which ultimately becomes a race issue where they're all focused on gender.

This version we've created is, is very broad across all the different dimensions of diversity intentionally. Um But we're asking you to do this today, you don't have to do it. You know, it's just something that, you know, it's always you, you don't have to do this, right? We always, when we take that approach with our clients, like you don't have to do this, but, you know, we ask that you do just to lean in, maybe get comfortable being uncomfortable. Um but this can bring up a lot of emotions for people that's intentional. Um But we don't want to, you know, trigger anybody unnecessary. So if you know that, you know, this is not for you, you don't have to do it today. Um But you know, hopefully that you're a little bit curious, maybe this is something you'd like to do to explore your own identity. It's a self reflection exercise. Um So I'd encourage you to do it if you're, if you're OK with it. Um But if you're on your cell phone, if you could bring out your cell phone, um you know, there's two ways to join, you can go to this website and put in a pin or you can actually just scan this QR code if you're familiar with how to use QR codes. Um But if you're not familiar with QR codes, just go to www dot join dot host on your, on your web browser, uh preferably chrome or internet uh sorry Chrome or Safari don't use internet explorer. So go to that website. It's 100% anonymous.

There's no personal identifiable information we have at all. There's no app to download. Obviously, it's web based, you can put your phone in private browsing mode if you'd like. And this exercise that we're, you need to do is truly for your own personal growth and reflection.

It's not for other people. Um So again, you may say, you know what, this is not for me, that is not what I signed up for. That's totally fine. No judgment. And if any time you want to stop during the, you know, during the, the the exercise, you don't have to do it. But what's gonna happen is when I update your phones here in a second um by pushing a button on another page, um It is going to update your phone to look like this on the, right. And it's going to ask you a series of 35 questions that are designed to make you think they're designed to make you feel. It's designed to help you reflect on your own identity and your own lived experience as well as the identities and lived experiences of others, right? If we do our job correctly, we'll start a conversation, we're going to create awareness and hopefully ignite a spark. Um So the only thing I'll tell you before I update your phones is read the instructions carefully. Uh We intentionally designed this with instructional designers to slow you down.

It is not Tinder or Grinder, one of like an app that you use every day, right? We don't want you to get in the motion of just swiping up or swiping down. So we're gonna force you to think. Right. So, the, the little caveat is you swipe the opposite direction if it doesn't apply to you and it'll tell you that in a little tutorial that's gonna pop up on your screen. But just remember swipe the opposite direction if it doesn't apply to you, um, take your time. We really did this intentionally to slow you down. Um, but read each question very carefully. There's no right or wrong answers. If you swipe the wrong direction, don't worry about it. Just mentally adjust your privileged position, one or two the opposite way, just hold on to that number in your head. Um, and you can't skip, you can't go backwards. Right. And that's intentional too because we don't want people gamifying it or skipping questions. So I'm gonna update your phones right now and I'll go check the chat in case people have been, you know, chatting in. But I'm gonna, uh, update your phones to the walk of privilege. It'll update right now. Uh, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. So, uh, you can also, uh, well, you can't, you, I forgot there's no video feeds but I'm gonna check, um, take my, uh, check the, the text. It looks like somebody says it's taking a long time to load. I just updated it.

So it wasn't updated before if you have any other issues. Just refresh your browser and most issues are refreshed by the internet connection. Um It's just an internet based thing. So, uh I'm gonna give you about 34 or five minutes uh, to finish the exercise, take your time, I'll check back in with you in a second. So it looks like there's some completions already. So if you're done just kind of hold some space for yourself. Um, we're normally would have a facilitated conversation out loud. Um But uh what I'd love is uh if people can sort of chat their thoughts through, um you can use the anonymous chat through translator, that's the yellow button in the bottom right hand corner. So you can just share your thoughts anonymously with me. Uh If you're also comfortable, you can share your chats uh through the hop in platform uh that's obviously tied to your name and your identity. Um But you can also use the anonymous uh chat through translator. So, you know, just anything that's coming up for you that you might, you know, what, what questions might make you feel uncomfortable and why or um you know, what sort of struck a chord, um What's showing up for you. So feel free to share through the platform and I'll pull those into the conversation and it looks like some more people are joining. So we're actually doing an exercise called The Walk of Privilege. Um If you wanna join, you can just uh follow the instructions on the screen.

Um, and you can use the QR code or you can just uh dial in at www dot join dot host and put in the pin. Um And thank you, I see some comments coming through. Um and uh and I'm gonna bring all those into the conversation in just a minute. So give me about 30 more seconds. Then I'm gonna just keep moving with the sort of talk track in the curriculum just to keep us on track. Um If you're not finished, take your time, um you're, you know, you can finish at your own pace. Um OK, so um I'm just gonna keep us going with the conversation. So first, I just want to thank everybody for your participation today. Um Your representation really matters. Um It really, really matters to be a part of this. Um So your participation, you know, not only helps other people but, you know, potentially in this case would help your organization better understand your lived experience. So hopefully, it helped you. Um But I absolutely assure you that it does help the people around you. It's about representation, it's about storytelling. Um And what we're gonna do here in a second is tell some stories. So um I'm gonna actually have to stop sharing this screen for a second and I have to reshare another screen. So I'm actually going to show you the real time distribution of privilege uh and marginalization for this cohort. So far.

So it looks like we have about 40 people logged in. Some people are still completing it. 2028 people have completed it so far. So when I push this button results here, it's going to show us the anonymous distribution of privilege and marginalization for this particular cohort.

And I want to assure you because I've also seen some comments alluding to this, that this doesn't define you, right? This doesn't define your privilege, right? In fact, you know, and some people are sort of sort of saying, well, I, I thought I had more or less privilege, like in some dimensions, you probably do have more privilege or you might have more marginalization as well, depending on how you look at it. This exercise is just designed to make you think it's designed to make you feel it's designed to help you reflect et cetera. So if we change the questions or we changed your uh the cohort, your position could change quite dramatically. And when I talk about position, that's what this is, right? So each bar here is a person and this is where you'd be standing in the room relative to the neutral line if we had done it in person. So these folks over here would be more towards the front of the room. And as we move left to right, these people would be more towards the back of the room more marginalized. But again, if we change the questions, you know, this could change quite dramatically, right? If we change the cohort, you could go from towards the back of the room to the very front of the room. Right. We actually, it just depends on the questions that we're asking. Uh Now that doesn't mean that some people are more marginalized than others.

Uh It doesn't mean that some more are more privileged than others. Um In fact, I'll try to get into some definitions on that in a second. But I want just to kind of baseline and look at this. Um If you think of this as like a race, like I'm a, I'm, I like to run road races. So I like to use that analogy. Um And this green line up here was the finish line in, in this context for this set of questions, these people over here on the left could walk to the finish line faster than the people over here could sprint and that's not meant to shame anyone. It's just, it's just a moment, right? To just recognize that we have privilege. In fact, everybody has some privilege some of the time I'll get to that. But the the point of this exercise is, you know, how do we use our privilege to lift other people up? Right. That's kind of like what we really want to get to. And if we don't have a lot of privilege, how do we create representation? How do we tell our stories to help insti instigate change, right? So that's just a quick little snapshot of the um the, the privilege and marginal marginalization distribution for this group. Hopefully, that gave you a little bit more to think about in the context of the relative privileged position on your phones.

Uh I'm gonna go jump back to the, the presentation deck for a second. Uh We've had almost a million people go through this at this point, right? So we can actually do some really cool uh analytics on it and, and show you how you might stack up to like all people all time. Uh But what I want to do now is focus on just a little bit of language around privilege and marginalization, right? So what is privilege? Privilege is a unique unearned competitive advantage, right? Some people might argue that they've earned their privilege, but I would simply point to the fact that they've probably earned their privilege based on the core basic privileges that they have, right, which in some cases can be very, very basic. Um I mentioned this already, right?

Everyone has some privilege some of the time and yet some people have more privilege than others. Everybody has some marginalization some of the time and yet some people have more marginalization than others. And there are many different types of privilege and privilege can change over time and privilege can change based on context such as location, et cetera. And not all privileges are, are created equal, right? It's very important to understand that not all privilege and marginalization is created equal.

The simple plus one minus one is just for the help us do the exercise. Um But understanding and or validating your privilege or marginalization is the first step to being able to act decisively in both small and large ways, which is lifting other folks up. It's creating representation, et cetera. And I like these last two definitions, right? You know, if you're kind of one of just a simple formula like privilege is the opposite of, of oppression. So privilege does not, you know, if you're, if you're being oppressed, you don't have, you don't have privilege, right? Um And then finally, the more privilege you have, the less energy it takes to navigate through the, right? No, I shared my story up front, you know, prior to my transition, I had so much privilege, I would have broken this, you know, this exercise. And then I came out as a trans woman and I lost a lot of that privilege, right? I kind of went to the very back of the room actually. Um Now I thought that I had lost all my privilege and it took me about, you know, 12 to 18 months to realize that I still actually have a lot of privilege. Um And so that's kind of part of my learning experience and journey. But here's where I wanted to have a little bit of a group discussion, like am mini group discussion. I saw some comments coming in. So these are the guideline questions. I'd love it.

If you chat through on the chat tool, you can lose that little yellow button up top to provide feedback. What did you like? What did you not like? I see some of these chats coming in. So I'm going to respond to a few of these. This is really fun when people can take themselves off mute and, and fun is probably the wrong word. I say it's really powerful when people can take themselves off mute and share out loud. Um You know how, what their experience was. Um You know what question made them, I think the most and why? So I'm just gonna read some of these out um that came in through the chat. Um Somebody said that they really like the 50 books question, right? Um And I love that question too. It's one of my favorite questions and it brings up a lot of great conversation. Um Just a few weeks ago, we had uh somebody very vulnerable share in front of their entire company. Senior vice president, white man, shared with everybody said the question that hit me the hardest was, you know, the 50 books question. And everybody on the call was expecting him to say, I never thought of that as a privilege. And in fact, he said the opposite. He said, he said, not only do I grow up with no books in my house, but I grew up with empty bottles of whiskey and beer cans, right? And my mom died when I was seven.

And I had to raise my three younger brothers because my father was never around because he was suffering from this disease called alcoholism. And everybody had thought that he had had everything handed to him on a silver platter. And yes, he had white male privilege and he acknowledged that, but he, but nobody realized what background he came from. So it was a real wake up moment for everybody to say, you know, what assumptions am I making about people? What assumptions am I making about myself? Right?

It's kind of like check your, check your assumptions, right? Um Check your privilege in a lot of ways. So thank you for bringing that one up. Um Other great comments that are coming in. Uh And somebody just said, um you know, maybe consider questions surrounding health status, thin versus obese. There's significant judgment in these areas as well. This is exactly why we do the facilitated conversation, right? Because we can't ask all the questions. In fact, you know, it was a pretty intensive process of like whittling it down to the 35 questions that we did add, I would ask, I would love to ask like 50 questions, 100 questions. But, but thank you Alyssa for for bringing that up because it brings up the topic. It, it actually effectively does the same thing, right? And there's a whole area that we could dive into around like beauty privilege. And, you know, there's also height privilege, there's a voice privilege.

There's all these areas of privilege that we would love to consider. But Alyssa, you bringing that up, made me bring it up and hopefully that brought to people some, some new thoughts and understandings. Um So another comment that just came in um the question that got me thinking uh uh oh, that's what they're actually saying about the books. One, I'll read that. The question that got to me the most was the books, question, the one about single parents, the one about invisible disabilities and the one about feeling safe in public toilets. Uh And with romantic partners in public, all really great questions. Thank you for sharing that.

Um Somebody else shared. I I was surprised when I saw my position compared to others around me. It was lower than I expected, right? So again, this doesn't define you, right? This doesn't define your privilege. Actually, it's just designed to make you think and give you like a relative like starting point uh to have around these conversations. So you can imagine if this was a 90 minute or two hour workshop, how rich this conversation could be. We usually spend about 20 to 25 minutes here and for the sake of time, I have to shortcut it. We've got only eight minutes left. So continue to send your feedback through the platform. We'll collect it. Um It's super helpful if you can share the feedback afterwards. If you like the session, that's great. But what I want to show you is just a few other things about how we use this to create change. Uh So I'm gonna share my screen again. Go back to uh the, the uh deck. So we, we'd spend about 20 to 25 minutes here. So if this is a 90 se 90 minute session, the 1st 45 minutes, all experiential, we then co cover some more traditional curriculum. We use the app throughout that. So it's very important to help you understand that, that this experience is supported by full curriculum, right? So we're gonna talk about the different dimensions of diversity. We're gonna talk about how these things come together to inform our privilege and marginalization.

Um And that it's more of a lottery than it is something that we control. And obviously, one of the core things here is that, you know, diversity is about a lot more than just race and gender. Uh We're going to move on with a nice segue from that from a conversation about the different dimensions of priv of diversity to talk about equity versus equality, right? What is equality treating everybody the same even though obviously, you can now see we're not all the same, right?

Where equity focuses on outcomes. So we do a deep dive here. We'd probably spend about 10 minutes in a facilitated conversation about equity versus equality. So again, just getting people to share through the platform, share out loud, sharing their stories becoming vulnerable.

We don't have time again for that right now. Um But do we talk about, you know, what, what type, what types of equity are important to you? And that allows for us to end on the allyship continuum. Uh So we introduced the Allyship Continuum and an Allyship action plan. Um So that 90 minute learning experience is what we go to market with selling to schools, corporations, nonprofits. And it's designed to change people's minds, hearts, behaviors, you know, and behavior change is immediate, right?

We can actually measure it through the app. At the very end of our sessions, we ask some questions about, you know, behavior change. We ask some questions about what people are going to do. We also ask some, some demographic self ID questions which we're skipping today. But that allows for us to really dive into the data and the analytics behind all this. So we'll introduce the Allyship Continuum, we'll give everybody an allyship action plan that they can take away. And then the last thing is after the session is over, people would normally get a resource guide for a continued learning and education. So hopefully inside of an organization, they're delivering these types of learning experiences on a regular basis, like once a quarter, that's designed to change people's, you know, behaviors which over time changes culture, right, behavior in the form of, you know, unconscious bias in the hiring process, right, that eventually is going to bring in new people that look different from us.

That's how we change culture over time, right? So when you imagine this at scale, we actually can license this technology to third party trainers as well as uh directly to corporations so that they can self implement it. So you can imagine this just being workshopped over and over and over again, this technology all over the world, you know, helping people create self awareness, making it measurable and then using that data to help organizations better understand their employees. So this is an example of what we call privilege analytics. So this is specific to this workshop and the exercise that you just did. So it's privilege and marginalization analytics. Um depending on the workshop, depending on the exercise, we have different curriculum, we have different outcomes and we have different data sets. So here this is real data from a real client and actually just uh just to kind of give you a more uh real time example. Just uh two or three weeks ago, we did a data review with a very large client out of Seattle, more than 33% 34% of their employees identified as neuro diverse, right? Which is a learning difference, right? It's you know, something, it's like attention deficit disorder could show up as, you know, being on the spectrum, right, of a, of autism.

Um More than so that's like more than one out of every three of their employees or somewhere, you know, uh categorized, you know, identify as having a learning difference. And the organization had never acknowledged that they had never talked about it, they had never created accommodations for it.

Um And now they've got a whole program designed to, you know, destigmatize that and embrace it and give people the accommodations, they need to become the best version of themselves. The opposite of that is disengagement, right? It's, it's not getting the best out of people.

And then those people, what they do is they refer their peers, their friends to come work to this organization that sees me or understands me, right? So that's kind of how the system works. That's how we're starting to create scale of, of, you know, through, through technology, right?

So going back to what we talked about earlier, you know, this idea of how do we use technology to scale empathy, right. So this is what you just went through is one of our, our, our workshops that we deliver. Um There's obviously many of these uh but I really wanted you all to get a hands on first experience of what it felt like. I know it was a lot to cover very quickly. So I appreciate you all um going through that you may have things that you want to talk about, right? You may want to continue the conversation, right? You can reach out to me. This is my email address, Natalie at translator dot Company. Um Just remember it's dot Company CO MP A NY, you can email me directly to continue the conversation. You can also find me on social media uh at Natalie J Egan. Um I am on linkedin and Instagram. Those are my two primary uh places to find me. Uh but feel free to connect with me there as well. Um And we do have a few minutes, we have about three minutes until I think they like stop the the session. Hopefully, if you all have any other questions, I can answer them right now. Um Or I can just sort of pick through uh some of the comments that came through to someone, address those. Um But um so thank you, Amy. Uh Somebody said before the session, I wondered if it was possible to teach empathy.

And that is uh and this is definitely opening my eyes and my, my mind to the possibilities. Yes. Actually, empathy has always been considered a skill that we can teach. It was just kind of hard to do it and definitely not something you could scale. It was done in workshops and small, you know, and you know, unaccessible areas, right? Like, you know, 20 people in a room going through leadership development and there's, you know, some pieces of, of empathy built in there. But when you really focus on it, you can create empathy, you can teach empathy, but it's the core of self awareness. And then it's also about storytelling, but you can't hear people's stories until you understand your own story first. So that's something I sort of self discovered and then validated through research by people that were already doing it out there. So, thank you for that comment, Amy uh Crystal. Uh Thank you. Uh Thank you for the comment. This, this has been great for me too. I really appreciate the opportunity. Um You know, if you all could fill out the feed back forms, we really appreciate it so we can, you know, do this again and maybe get a little bit more time next year. Um Sunda or Sunda. I'm sorry if I don't say your name correctly, but thank you for that comment on the eye opening presentation and the awesome questions. I will keep spark spark, I, I would say sparkling, but I will keep sparking as well. Um We'll spark that we'll ignite the spark, right?

Um Jody. Thank you so much. I wish we had more time as well. You can feel free to contact me like I said, uh Mary a thank you. Um Thank you all so much. Uh There's so many great comments there and there's actually a whole bunch that came through the app. That I've had a chance to get through uh quite yet. Uh But I know we're basically at time and you all have more sessions to get to please email me, I'll put my contact back information back up. Um But please email me, contact me, you know, connect with me on social media. I appreciate you all so much. I appreciate women in tech or women tech for putting on the the session today and uh I just appreciate you all. Um So uh I'll just um I'll just stop. I think we're right at the time. So thank you all. Have a great rest of the day and um, and please email me and get in touch. I can't believe I did that all in 40 minutes. So if you're still there, I'm, I'm, I'm just sort of in this mood of like, wow, I can't believe I got through all that and I feel like the talk track was pretty cohesive. Um Claire. Thank you so much Hayley. Thank you uh Priscilla Jody. Thank you all.

Um I was really worried I wasn't gonna be able to get through all 40 minutes of that. Um Thank you, Mary, appreciate you all. Uh Olga. Thank you. Um and uh yeah, so I'm, I wish I could talk to you all. This is, I feel like I'm in a vacuum. I feel like I'm in this like little phone booth, you know, vacuum, but um I'm gonna drop this because I have to jump back to another meeting. I appreciate you all. Have a great rest of the day. Happy pride. Um Thank you all for joining. I'll talk to you soon.