About Angela Fontaine | 8 ½ pieces of a Russian nesting doll, mom, coach, consultant

As an ICF Certified Coach, Consultant, and ELI Master Practitioner, Angela possesses knowledge in multiple fields and industries. She has over ten years of experience focusing on transition and managing change in various sectors.

Angela believes that the strength of an organization lies in its ability to hold space for diverse thought and experience, as well as its ability to welcome change while staying focused on its vision and purpose.

She is a lifelong student of philosophy and theology. Her passion for these disciplines has deepened her understanding of the fundamental questions that shape our lives. This intellectual curiosity infuses her coaching and consulting work, allowing her to guide clients toward self-discovery and personal transformation. Her family's roots are as dynamic as her professional background, providing her with many experiences and a mosaic of diverse perspectives.

www.seraphstrategies.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelafontainecpc/
@angela_fontaine_coaching
facebook.com/seraphstrategiesllc

Angela Highlighted Southside ReLeaf aims to educate the community on environmental justice and increase green spaces in the area and the state! Learn more at: Southside ReLeaf

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

About Anela Seliskar Barboza | She/They/ʻOia, coach,

Anela is a Somatic, Transformation, and Leadership Coach and Mentor Coach. She is deeply committed to creating a safe and loving container for exploring questions of identity, culture, race, relationship to place/home, and resiliency as a means of personal transformation and healing. Anela’s perspective has been shaped by her experience as a diasporic kanaka maoli, born and raised away from her home, culture, and into assimilation. Impacted by cultural isolation, her personal transformation included Somatics as a means to healing the cord that connected family to land and to one another. In 2022, she returned her family back home and lives full-time on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, in the sunbelt of Keaau, Puna. Learn more at https://www.anelabarboza.com/.

In lieu of a specific non-profit, Anela invited us all to learn about the peoples who lived on our land before colonization and find out: Where are they now and how can we serve them now?

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Anela describes herself as a human:

• Humaning in progress, constantly working to arrive in a basic outline while leaving room for growth
• Someone exploring how all the versions of self can coalesce into one form
• A multi-racial person of color with mixed ancestry and deeply rooted in her Hawaiian heritage, raised on the assimilated mainland

…what Anela is all up in:

• Two years into coming home to Hawaii and noticing who she is in this context that she’s craved for so long – including the logistics of moving and making home of a place and the intuitive/instinctive acts of connecting with place
• Navigating being invited into rooms exploring diversity while having to confront Model Minority biases and the desires of those in power for her to be somehow responsible for their emotions – to provide more in the form of soothing rather than growth-oriented challenging
• Growing a business that is inherently inseparable from Anela as a person while also experiencing the exhaustion of being in primarily white, cis-gender, heteronormative spaces
• Finding rest in community, with people who welcome her unmasked self
• Living at a time when the Hawaiian language is being revived and, along with it, the oral history of that part of her heritage

…her tools include:

• Learning, in academic settings but also farther afield, particularly experiential learning
• The longitudinal view of her heritage, into and before Hawaii
• Being in a place where her brown skin is more “normal,” a place where her nervous system can settle more fully than when she was living on the American continent

…the non-profit she chose to highlight was:

Learn the land you’re on, who the indigenous people are who lived on the land before colonization, where they are now, and how you might serve them even in some small way. (I used this website years ago to discover that I live and work on Tutelo land.)

About Eric Larson |Coach, coach supervisor, musician, crying-on-the-inside clown

By vocation, Eric is a Mental Health Coach and a Mental Health Coach Supervisor. He's been doing this for long enough that he starts to feel old when he thinks about it. By avocation(s): Eric is a sometimes singer-songwriter, sometimes theater artist, sometimes cross-stitch enthusiast, sometimes long-distance walker, and ... lots of other stuff.

Eric highlighted The Mattering Movement, an organization shaped around answering the questions: What can we do to combat the pandemic of loneliness and despair that are harming our youth? How can we combat today’s widespread mattering deficit? Learn more at https://www.thematteringmovement.com/

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All Up in It is a project by coach SB Rawz focused on telling stories of growth and change from the thick of learning. Learn more about SB, coaching with her, & her projects at https://rawzcoaching.com

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Eric describes himself as a human:

• Understanding himself as patterns set in motion way back then and that the more he explores the things that set other things in motion, the richer he becomes. We noticed together that this is akin to karma, the complex original version, not the snappy bumper sticker version
• He finds this exploration one that will always be a deep mystery yet still worthy of exploration
• Eric parsed out the cause from the meaning, noticing that they’re interconnected and both important yet unique from one another

…what Eric is all up in:

• He describes himself, too, as compulsively always asking the big questions like the core question that he circles around, “What the hell is going on around here?”
• Making theater and healing from complex trauma
• The theater is maybe about an exploration of his mother’s death from Alzheimer’s in a co-creative and playful process with a creative partner; he’s not sure what this project will do for him but he knows he wants the audience to feel their hearts break while they are genuinely laughing, akin to the tradition of the tragic clown

…his tools include:

• Relationship and the coming together regularly beyond his usual habits of cutting and running
• Similarly: crawling toward what he wants to run from
• We noticed together that collaboration is counter to the popular story that creativity et al is accomplished by brilliant individuals working alone

About Sarah Hines | Firekeeper, grief advocate, parent, friend

Sarah has spent 25 years serving those that end of life. She has learned so much from the people she has served and has determined that it's not grief we need to heal but our relationship to it, that community care is self-care and that death belongs in the hands of love. you can find her work at www.griefadvocacy.com

Sarah highlighted The National Home Funeral Alliance. They support people in creating funerals and burials that are more personal, intimate, ecologically-sound, and financially accessible where legal.

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Key moments in the conversation include…

…how Sarah describes herself as a human:

• She’s a firekeeper, in a lodge, stirring a pot, a little inward, waiting for people to come to sit down by the fire and have some soup and have a conversation about whatever comes up
• Someone who has the ability to hold onto the space where others are supposed to be
• Until recently, she’s felt like a gatherer of wood. About a year ago, she started feeling a sense that it’s time to stop gathering and make the fire
• Who sees other people as integral to her self-discover process, that it’s in interacting with others that have guided her to what wood to gather and fire to start

…what Sarah is all up in:

• Her company, Grief Advocacy, is about building a relationship with grief such that we can see it as a reminder of what is importance to us
• Writing her love letter – her legacy – to all of the things that are super important to her and that grief has taught her. This is the fire she’s building
• Legacy, to Sarah, is how we be in the world, how we interact with others and that we don’t always know what it’s going to be. She shares a moving story of her best friend, who died unexpectedly in 2015, and how her legacy in Sarah’s life shows up
• How going to the edge of our knowledge, understanding, comfort is where we find the next learning, the next experiment
• Sarah distinguishes between the discomfort of Wrong Direction! and the discomfort of Something New through intuition

…her tools include:

• Community for the external processing including networking
• Writing
• Spending time in the past, even if it slips into rumination, including with the legacy of her ancestors
• A light touch on the future, holding onto what’s most important to her
• An expansive definition of grief
• Surrounding herself with people and ideas that are wildly diverse to create healthy adversity, focusing on having really great conversations rather than changing minds

…the non-profit he chose to highlight was:

The National Home Funeral Alliance. They support people in creating funerals and buriers that are more personal, intimate, ecologically-sound, and financially accessible where legal.

…how Kim describes himself as a human:

• Kim explains himself as a realist, someone who’s not “all that important” in the grand scheme of things – but in the same breath, it’s all about him!
• While Kim may not think himself very important, he strives to add value of his own to the world
• He may be messy, but that’s just being human!

…what Kim is all up in:

• After 25 years, Kim is going through an amicable separation from his partner – as a family mediator who doesn’t see many friendly proceedings, he’s glad to find his interactions throughout the process have been pleasant (though, of course, painful as well)
• It’s never too late to discover yourself, and Kim’s been relearning his identity and his feelings through resurfaced symptoms of grief
• Kim has been taking the time to reconnect with friends from previous years as he gets older, realizing time is precious and some people may not have much left
• He’s rediscovering the world by visiting places he’s been to, but viewing them in a new light as an older, wiser person
• Kim is moving outside his comfort zone for new experiences!

…his tools include:

• His “PBS” moments – pause, breathe, sense. For Kim, this means being in-tune with himself!
• His own form of meditation, which he practices at stoplights! He takes micro-moments throughout the day to notice and feel his surroundings, to be connected with himself and the Earth
• Kim notes his feelings first as a physical sensation, then dives deeper to discover the emotion associated 
   

…the non-profit he chose to highlight was:

The South West Virginia Wildlife Center, which focuses on rehabilitating injured wildlife and reintroducing them to the wild! The Center gladly accepts aid in the form of volunteer work and donations. Kim also mentions Planned Parenthood, a wonderful resource for men and women looking for reproductive services regarding reduced-cost birth control and pregnancy resources, as well as life-saving cancer screenings and standard check-ups. 

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About Dr. Hoda Kilani | Career literacy expert, podcaster, educator, mom

Dr Hoda Kilani is a Certified Professional Career Coach and the President of Right Career Fit, a career coaching practice that focuses on education and career guidance. Hoda’s continued lifelong learning, career, research and volunteer involvements provide her with up-to-date expertise in career and educational project design. She holds a Master of Education and a Doctor of Education with a focus on youth learning. Hoda strives to be a spokesperson for the importance of career education and works tirelessly to create awareness of its value including career conversations on YouTube and two podcasts, Hoda’s Musings and Hoda’s Career Info as well as a radio show, Career Buzz.

Learn more at https://www.rightcareerfit.com/

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Key moments in our conversation include…

Knows herself as a human who:

• Pushes others to know themselves so that we can find our best-fitting careers
• Keeps happy by focusing on gratitude in which mindfulness is baked in
  • She tries to name 5-10 things she’s grateful for each morning
  • Helps her give back more to her community and family
• Makes a podcast and has a YouTube channel
• Loves to travel
• Speaks Arabic and Spanish
• Has a mission of worldwide career literacy

She’s all up in:

• Trying to take her career literacy work into other languages and the challenges of interpreting rather than translating the messages
  • She committed, right here in the conversation, to publishing in either Spanish or Arabic in January 2024
  • She feels that part of gratitude is stretching outside of our comfort zone
• Dad would say, “If you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’d better go check it out. You can always come back.”
• Hoda described an uncomfortable moment of awareness of cultural differences when presenting in Dubai and how it’s reinforced her concerns about moving into another language
• She also fears that it would sound like she’s less of an expert in career literacy than she is
• That she was born and raised in Lebanon made the cultural gaff stir in the inner critic all the more: “I should have known that!”

The tools she’s using to move through this time include:

• Planning though she understands they are flexible and meant to not always work
• Daily language practice including reading books about careers in Arabic and Spanish
• Reminding herself that it’s okay to fail
• Her value of democratizing info and skills of teaching

For her non-profit spotlight, Hoda suggested local food banks. As she said, we think of ourselves of living in the land of plenty and yet there are so many people experiencing food insecurity.