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This episode and the following transcript were originally published by Stand Together Foundation.
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Jeff Proctor
Hi everybody. I’m Jeff and I’m joined by Ski. How’s it going Ski?
Ski Ahmad
Good brother. How you doing, man?
Jeff Proctor
Doing great. So we heard from Evan, Dr. Soaries and Antong last week about empowerment in action, and when I think of the concept of empowerment, my head goes to one of our core principles of self-actualization, and I’m excited to be back today talking about the principle of self-actualization. So Ski, my first question for you is, you living your best life?
Ski Ahmad
Oh man. Absolutely, man. Life is grand. I mean, with flights being on time the other day kind of getting me in and out of places, and family’s good brother. I’m living my best life.
Jeff Proctor
That’s great, man.
Ski Ahmad
What about you?
Jeff Proctor
Doing well. Doing well. This is a subject that I have taken a pretty deep dive in over the last year, as you know, and I think our listeners probably know pretty well at this point too. Self-actualization’s become kind of one of the go-to things that we talk about. It’s really been elevated in the Stand Together community as a principle that’s really important to us.
It’s always been there. It’s one of the first things that I learned about, when I learned Market-Based Management back in 2007, but it’s really kind of come to the forefront in terms of our focus at Stand Together and I personally couldn’t be more excited about that.
When we first started really elevating self-actualization, one of the things that occurred to me was, alongside some of the other principles that we’ve talked about on the podcast, it seemed weird to me. It didn’t seem to fit in the same way that a lot of the other ones do. Things like dignity and mutual benefit. To me, those are kind of obvious societal principles.
But when we started talking about self-actualization, my first thought was, “Well, that’s kind of just about me.” Right? That’s a thing about how I might live my best life. I might understand and grow into my full potential. Where have you seen that? Where have you seen that self-actualization has become the key result of the partners that we work with?
Ski Ahmad
What’s interesting, you talk about the self-actualization and when it was introduced and it was something that was great for you, you immediately gravitated towards it. I think for me, I actually didn’t understand what in the world it meant. So for me, I had to take a little bit of time to kind of go, “Alright, so what in the world does this even mean?” And to your point, I mean for a long time we talked about humility and respect and kind of facing reality, no matter how painful it was, in the vein of humility and so this self-actualization came about and it was all about self.
And for me, I was like, “Well, no. But I’m actually not all that interested in self. I’d rather go do something for other people.” And then it kind of dawned and clicked because I had somebody go, “Well, that’s a lot of what self-actualization is all about.” And I was like, “Oh. Oh, okay, well, so say more.” So then that’s when I began to go on my journey of understanding more deeply about self-actualization. But I’m glad that I’ve been on that journey to further understand it because it is transformational with our partners.
It literally is at the cornerstone of everything that our partners are working on. And for our listeners—I mean, we’ll hear shortly from Kirk Brown at HANDY that it’s the key cornerstone. The reason why the leaders of our partner organizations are doing what they’re doing, and why their brother organization even exists, is so that the organization can go on this journey of self-actualization, truly trying to pour into the lives of other people, so that those being impacted by the organization can yet go do the same thing to folks that they interact with. So I’m excited to unpack with each other.
Jeff Proctor
Yeah, you talked a little bit about going back to basics. Listeners probably don’t know this, but I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology from 20 years ago. So I’m a social media psychologist. And a big part of my interest in psychology going back that far was really this idea of human potential and being frustrated that the field of psychology often studies what’s wrong and doesn’t spend enough time studying what’s right.
And most of our listeners will know the one thing they’ve heard about this subject is hierarchy of needs and Abraham Maslow, right? Maslow is one of the first psychologists to really say, “Hey, there’s plenty of folks studying what’s going wrong, let’s study what’s going right. Let’s study people at their best and let’s really dig into trying to understand what human potential looks like and what the process of reaching that potential looks like.” And that was really the key for me in seeing our partners as unleashers of human potential, and barrier breakers that get in the way of people being able to reach their potential.
Self-actualization not being something that you give to other people, that you can make other people do or create for them. What you can do is remove barriers and create space for that to happen. And this idea that maybe we’ve underestimated human potential, maybe we’ve sold people short a little bit on what they’re capable of.
And I know that some of your experiences that we’ve talked about in prior episodes working with, let’s say The Phoenix and other partners, you’ve seen that firsthand in terms of individual people walking through the doors of The Phoenix gym and their life being transformed. They will self-report, having done things that they never thought they would do in their lives because of their involvement with The Phoenix.
Ski Ahmad
You’re so right. And at The Phoenix, I mean, there are folks that are walking through the door at The Phoenix, and we talk a ton at The Phoenix about the kind of the thousand pound door, which is pretty heavy to walk in and cross the threshold, but their lives become transformed.
I remember a story from one of The Phoenix members named Nick, and Nick was homeless and just wanted to shower, and he saw the doors of The Phoenix and eventually kind of came in and he just wanted to shower but one of the folks at The Phoenix said, “Well, hey, you got to get a workout in.” And so he ended up working out in order to get a shower, and he left and he said, “I just kept coming back every day.” Every day and the environment that was created there at The Phoenix, he said, “Hey, they didn’t push me, they didn’t prod me, they knew exactly what I needed without talking a ton to me and with me.”
And eventually Nick became, he was sober, he got sober, he became a volunteer for us. So leading some of our classes and actually now, he’s an employee with The Phoenix, and so he would tell you he would’ve never, ever imagined that would be a part of his life. And I think there are those stories across our entire Stand Together community partners doing amazing things, helping others self-actualize.
Jeff Proctor
I think my personal favorite Phoenix story is I admitted to them that I have a deep fear of heights. The kind of fear where when I’m up high and my body shuts down, I can’t function. And of course, immediately they’re like, “You got to get on the climbing wall.” And I was like, “That is the opposite of what I’m going to do.”
And sure enough, I get buckled into the climbing wall and the guy is, my lifeline is clipped in and I’m going up and he starts to tell his story and he says, “You know, I never thought I’d be doing this.” And my first thought is, “This is not the time to tell me that. I need this to have been your life calling.” But when he talks about his own journey and his recovery story and realizing that whole new world of opportunities was available to him, and that his experience with The Phoenix both as a team member and an employee was integral to that.
And then I started seeing that all over, right across the portfolio partners that we work with, where they might be working on a million different things, working with different groups, different populations. But the thing that ties it together is that they’ve identified a barrier to self-actualization and they’ve worked to break that.
So I want to introduce a couple of things, maybe some nerd philosophy stuff to frame the conversation, get your thoughts on it, and then we’ll get Kirk in here to share his story and to plug into some of this.
So I mentioned Maslow a little bit about the history there. He passed away in 1970, relatively early in his life and probably had a couple decades at least of work ahead of him as a scholar, had that not happened. And by the end of his career, he was really studying this idea, like I said, of people at their best. And he’d introduced a couple of frameworks and concepts that have really shaped my thinking on self-actualization.
The first is, the idea of people existing on a spectrum at any given time between what he called the deficiency realm or the D-realm and the B-realm, or the being realm, the idea of the wholeness of being. And an author that we use a lot, Scott Barry Kaufman, kind of makes a joke in his book about the fact that we created a word for when we show up to the world with a deficiency of having our hunger needs met, we call it “hangry”, right?
And he challenges people to say, “Well, let’s look at the other needs in the hierarchy of needs and talk about how we show up when those needs are unmet.” When our human connection needs are unmet, when our self-esteem needs are unmet. So my first hard question for you Ski, and we’re going to get Kirk on this later too, is how do you show up sometimes, let’s say maybe less than ideally, when some of those baseline needs are unmet? What does that look like for you?
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. Oh man, that’s a… Man, you put me on the spot. My goodness. It’s interesting that you put it that way because I think now, I understand that you got a psychology degree. I just got a business degree out from college so maybe that was why that first introduction to self-actualization didn’t hit me nearly as immediate.
But I think a lot of it, when you talk about food, shelter, belonging, and it really—I would say for myself, I get a bit worried when those needs aren’t met. And I also recognize what it feels like when those needs are met and the types of behaviors that I exhibit.
I like that how I’m behaving in that space versus when some of those basic needs are not met. It’s worried, anxious, and I consider myself an optimist, but when some of those basic needs aren’t met, I mean, I recognize that in that moment I’m not the person who I enjoy or like to be.
Jeff Proctor
You hit a key word. This idea of belonging, and it’s something I haven’t thought as much about until recently, until really kind of elevating this self-actualization principle. But I’ll say for myself, when I feel like I belong somewhere, that opens the door to me being my best in that group of people and when I feel like I don’t belong, I’m obnoxious.
My clamoring for belonging turns into, quite frankly something that’s probably going to make it less likely that I am welcomed into that group, right? That unmet belonging need really turns me into a version of myself that I’m not proud of. And I think Maslow’s point with this deficiency realm versus being realm is take a concept like love. To say, I love you from a deficiency realm is more like saying, I need you, I desire you, or I value what you solve for me.
Love from the being realm. If I bring a full well person into any kind of relationship, and I love that person, love looks a lot more like admiration and adoration and celebration.
Ski Ahmad
Right.
Jeff Proctor
How much of what we think is love is really deficiency realm love, D-realm love? Where we are clamoring to have a need met as opposed to simply celebrating, adoring the people around us? And so that’s Maslow’s idea of how we become and how we treat others. Maslow had this idea that when we are self-actualizing, we naturally become other-regarding.
Ski Ahmad
Right.
Jeff Proctor
We don’t need to convince people to care about others, we need to help people self-actualize and they’ll care about others naturally.
Ski Ahmad
Right. So Jeff, really quickly on that point, what do you think about how conditions or the environment that someone is in and the impact that their environment has on the choice around whether to be motivated by the D-realm or the B-realm?
Jeff Proctor
Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s actually my second philosophy nerd point that I introduced earlier. All of my thoughts are stolen from Maslow. He wrote a paper that actually came from an interview that he gave, and the paper is called Eupsychia, which is a made up word. And he was trying to get this to take off. He was very unsuccessful in doing that. But as a kind of a counter to the idea of utopia.
So if utopia is material abundance and we all have all the things we need, he wanted eupsychia to be mental abundance, emotional abundance, wellness. He put out a thought experiment that I think is kind of interesting. He said, “Picture two desert island societies. Thousand people on each. One is a thousand random people, assigned randomly, and the other is a thousand highly self-actualizing people.” And he asked, “What would be the difference between the two?”
And he sort of concluded that the highly self-actualizing people would create culture and thrive in ways that the other couldn’t even imagine. And that we, the reader really couldn’t imagine what would happen because while the other society might engage in exchange, and they would help each other with their hunger needs and their thirst needs and their basic connection needs and all of that, the other society would be consistently identifying and solving higher and higher order needs, working with each other at varying increasing levels of self-actualization.
Then he goes on to talk about, “Well, what would that actually look like?”, to your point about environment. “What would that look like?” And his conclusions ultimately that the thoughts and behaviors of the people in that culture would be more around understanding and supporting needs, so that people could spend more time in the higher levels of the hierarchy.
And that’s something, as you know probably better than I do, is a key part of the management philosophy for Stand Together, right? Is that we don’t just try to hire great people and ask them to do well, although we do that, we try to build in a lot of things into the organizational culture and the management philosophy that create the environment. That help people more likely exist at higher parts of the hierarchy than they would, otherwise if they were somewhere else.
Ski Ahmad
I think that’s a great point, and I completely agree.
Jeff Proctor
All right, well, we’re going to take a short break, and after the break we’re going to be back with Kirk Brown from HANDY to talk about his story, his organization, and the role that self-actualization has played in both.
[Short Break]
Ski Ahmad
All right. Welcome back, and I’m super excited to be joined by Kirk Brown from HANDY. How you doing Kirk?
Kirk Brown
I’m doing well. I’m doing well.
Ski Ahmad
Awesome, awesome. So quick question for you. I mean, are you today living your best life?
Kirk Brown
No doubt. I am definitely representing in the universe and also building in the universe that I exist in. It’s beautiful.
Ski Ahmad
Oh, that’s outstanding. Well, Jeff, dude, I mean we got Kirk Brown hanging out with us, man. I mean, how do you feel about that?
Jeff Proctor
Well, now we definitely are living our best life. That is 100% true. Kirk, I saw you a few months ago talk to our Catalysts in Austin, Texas, and sitting there, listening to you, tell both your story as well as the HANDY story. I immediately went to self-actualization.
Now, I might have a bias that I have acknowledged on this podcast so far, but I heard both your own growth and identifying your potential and having your, I believe you called them your solid ground people, help you see that. And then I saw very directly how that was built into HANDY. So I’d love it if you could tell us a little bit about you and what you do at HANDY.
Kirk Brown
So I’m the CEO of HANDY, but also my proudest moment is being someone of lived experience in the environment with our young people and the team that I lead. The team that I lead, and the team that also leads me, right?
So to be realistic, for those who didn’t hear the talk itself about solid ground people, I’m just a youth born in extreme poverty in the Caribbean, and had some wonderful people, really take personal stake in seeing my human value. They didn’t see me in need and think I was needy. They saw my talent, abilities and drove me towards a purpose. And so I was blessed to have that.
And when I became a professional and saw that, you could really, you are the universe in which you build, right? And so being able to look outside of myself and really see, I know what I look like at 14, I see it every day in my building, and I know how self-actualization really leads us to elevate beyond just self and go into those places with other individuals.
It really, for me, speaks to about the how. The how you do things, right? I could give you a gift card to buy food, but if I put it in your hand, hold your hand, look you in the eye, you’d be surprised how many people in need never get looked in eye, right? Looked you in eye and tell you, “We’re here for you.” That’s the how. That is the care and a compassion that goes into seeing human value. And I strongly believe that seeing human value and instilling human value leads people to actionable self-worth.
Jeff Proctor
I think this is a subtle point that gets overlooked a lot in this conversation, but the difference between seeing need, versus seeing potential. Seeing need, versus seeing value. Tell us a little bit more about that in your own story.
Kirk Brown
So for me, I was in need and there were individuals who really believed that you’re born with talent, right? You’re born with talent in you, but if someone doesn’t see it and cultivate it, it never becomes your abilities.
And so there are people who really invested in the fact that, “You know, you’re smart.” Saying simple words of affirmation. My math teacher was the first person to tell me I was smart. I didn’t believe it at the time. And he just stayed consistent with it and treated me like a human being.
Ski Ahmad
And at what age was that?
Kirk Brown
Oh wow, that was 11.
Ski Ahmad
Uh-huh.
Kirk Brown
And staying consistent with it. I think consistency is really key on the human value spectrum, but there’s so many of us that go through life in need and because we’re in need, people forget that there’s talents, there’s hopes, there’s dreams, there’s purpose in that life. And for us to elevate, as I heard a portion of what you were saying earlier, for us to elevate as a being, we have to be able to see value in each other.
Jeff Proctor
I love that. And we talked on a previous podcast about inherent dignity and treating all folks with dignity no matter what. And I think that’s a huge part of it and really a big connection to self-actualization. A big reason why we would prioritize self-actualization in the first place.
Ski Ahmad
I mean, when you talked about abject poverty at lunch, you describe what that was and I’m going like, “Yo.” I mean, I grew up rough.
Kirk Brown
Okay.
Ski Ahmad
Right? I grew up rough, but when I went to your home country, I mean I saw what poverty looked like when people are lacking some of those basic needs. I mean, you lived it.
Kirk Brown
Alright. So when we talk about poverty, and I mentioned being a poor kid from Jamaica. I mean there’s still things that make rationally no sense to me. I’m from a place where I saw people fight over the food that they found in a garbage can, right?
Ski Ahmad
Wow.
Kirk Brown
So when you’re living at that level of existence, those basic needs are things that are elevated to kind of like a want, right? And so when you come from that level of existence, it’s different. And so the first time someone saw me, human to human, saw me, I remember crying, I remember… I grew up with no father so the first time, just in passing, this guy just said to me, “I hope you have a good day today, son.” That’s the first time I was ever called a son.
Ski Ahmad
Wow.
Kirk Brown
And I remember it just froze me and it threw my entire week off. I went to school that whole week. My head was in the daze. So I know what it looks like when our young people walk into our building and their head’s in the daze. It’s not something as extreme as people believe but being called son for the first time shook me, and that belonging to something shook me.
So when my math teacher told me I was smart, I was a smelly, dirty kid in the class with an anger problem. And yeah, I showed up with anger. I had a lot of reasons to show up with anger, right? You sleep the night before and get rained on and show up at school the next day, you’re going be angry.
And so when he made that value proposition to me, from a moral perspective, I didn’t know how to treat it. I remember I was in shock. I was like, “Smart? Me? Nah.” Immediately I was like, “Nah, you’re probably mistaken.” But he said it the next day and he said it the next week, even after I cussed him out because I was an angry teenager. And so I stuck in it and he kind of really molded me in that aspect.
When I came to America and my teacher, I wrote an essay and the essay was about, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said, “Alive.” Because at that point 90% of my friends were already dead.
Jeff Proctor
And how old were you if you can remember?
Kirk Brown
I’m 16 years old. And they died gruesomely. So I’m sitting there and I look at this English question and these are the wonderful things in literature class where they ask you these profound questions. And when they ask people like me that question, I hope they’re ready for the answer because I kind of like, “Okay, let me write about…” I came up with all of these things, but I just want to be honest.
What did I want to be at 21? Alive. “What’s your five year plan?” When you ask someone that comes from extreme poverty, “What’s your five year plan?” They’re like, “I don’t know if I even have dinner tonight.” That five year plan is not really resonating with me, right? And so when I got asked that question and I answered the question, the essay, “Alive.” She came over to me I think two days later and she said, “You should go to college. This was greatly written.” And I’m thinking to myself, “What’s college?”
Jeff Proctor
Mm-hmm. This story brings up a point that comes up a lot as a criticism of self-actualization. And as a focus on self-actualization is that a lot of times it can come across as being ignorant of needs. So we’re going to focus so much on the positive, we’re going to focus so much on the potential, that we forget that people have needs and that people exist on a spectrum of needs being met even down to those fundamental needs.
What do you think about that? How do you look at your own experience through the lens of both acknowledging the existence of severe want, but also having a focus on potential and value?
Kirk Brown
That’s a great question. The severe want, I do believe is a preparation for actualizing the value. I look at it and go, “You know, I stayed outside in the rain for three nights in a row.” I was in my college algebra class, I was like, “Yeah, college algebra is easy.” Right? I know what it feels like to go to bed at night without food to eat.
You mean, I got accounting 101 tomorrow and I’m sleeping in a dorm room with cold air conditioning? It becomes the way you lens and view it. But when it comes to the value part of it and the B-realm, getting to that place from the D-realm to the B-realm, right? Sometimes we view the D-realm as a crippling effect because it’s a need, instead of a journey that your life is going through that is preparing you for that greater value statement.
I call it grit, right? Greater resilience intention. And so when I look at that from that perspective, I see it in our kids. I see it in the families that walk through the door. The grandmother that walks in and she is in the D-realm, she’s living the D-realm but we walk her over to: “There is purpose in what you’re doing, there’s abilities in the kids that you’re caring for.” And then when she sees that we care is when she starts valuing herself as a caretaker and then she starts seeing what that family can become.
Jeff Proctor
I was wondering if you could give folks kind of the deep dive on how HANDY does that? What do you guys do? How does it result in that impact that you just described?
Kirk Brown
Well, it’s three, just three simple areas for us. It’s 57 services boiled into three different areas. You walk through the door, we’re going to embrace you, we’re going to meet you at that D-realm. We’re going to embrace the need that exists and we’re going to embrace it with a very tight embrace. Not something that’s short lived, it’s a long term embrace, a hierarchy of needs, you got your food, your shelter, your clothing. We’re going to make sure we’re not talking to a hungry youth about workforce, our employment.
And so we embrace and then we educate. And we educate around the sense of belonging, around education itself, your value in the human system, your value to society, and that you play a role and all of us winning and that you play a role in our community becoming great.
And from the education we empower, we walk you over to empowerment because I can’t tell you about the workforce, I can’t tell you about your economic value statement or even your moral value statement in the workforce society, if I don’t tell you, “You have a value” from an educational perspective. And so those three simple factors is given to everyone that walks through our door.
Whether they’re homeless, whether they’re in 10th grade, whether they are the 65 year-old grandmother who’s going back to work to take care of her three grandchildren because the mom is in jail and the father’s deceased, right? Whoever walks through the door, gets embraced, knows, and gets educated about their place in the world. And gets empowered to make this a better place for them.
Ski Ahmad
So share with our listeners an example of an embrace. So someone, and you can mask the names if you need to, but somebody that came in, got that embrace, got the education and had been empowered. Tell us a story.
Kirk Brown
So I’m going to tell you about 10:05 AM this morning. Brian. So my phone rings and it’s a phone call from Alabama and I’m like, “Okay, who’s this?” I don’t know the number. Like most people, I tend to answer my phone for numbers I don’t recognize. Because there’s so many of our young people out there.
So I answer the phone. He’s Brian and he starts talking about, “I know you guys put me in construction and I got a certification. It went well, but I’m not in construction anymore.” But he immediately goes, “Oh but don’t worry, don’t worry. I’m working for this wonderful place. I’m making $35 an hour. I’m a great father, I have my baby, I’m engaged, but I’m scanning her.” Which means he’s still evaluating the situation, right?
And I’m listening to him for 15 minutes and he’s just downloaded. He’s just telling everything and telling everything. “And I live in a three bedroom house in Alabama. It’s cheaper than South Florida.” He’s right. And he’s going and he’s going and he’s going and then he just pauses and says, “Thank you.”
And when he said thank you, I realize this is a call you give later on in life when you’ve reached that place and you’re just sitting there and he was like, “I’m sitting here in my sweats on my day off. And it just hit me.” And he called.
Now, in some societies that’s a call you give your relatives, your mom, your dad, when that aha hit you like, “They were right.” You make that phone call. That’s the empowerment that I’m talking about. That is he’s reached his potential. He’s reached a place where he now sees the pouring in and then he goes on a call, he says, “And I want to do something like HANDY. So how do I get something like that starting in Alabama?” And I’m like, “Okay. So now he is reaching outside of self.” Now, he’s reached a place where he gets to create his universe. Because we all live this life every day saving ourselves or our implication of ourself. And so that’s where he is. That’s 10:05. That happens every day.
Another example is my girl T, can’t say her name but it starts with T. Angry 14 year-old, will cuss the teacher out at the drop of a dime, lives with her grandmother. Went missing for a year, we found her, brought her back and she graduated from high school and she’s accepted to eight different colleges. This is a child that… Three grades behind in math, two grades behind in English and about five grades behind in social interactions. If you know what I mean, right?
Ski Ahmad
Yeah.
Kirk Brown
Every second word was a curse word. Like, “Who you looking at?” Just looking at her. And then there were so many levels and layers of not belonging to anything there.
And so once we showed T that she belonged, once we embraced her. Now, she’s just confident, just flying above your head, looking at down at you like, “Okay, get on my level.” She’s just overly confident. You could see it. You could see that thing about her, that there’s something there that is greater, that self-worth is just permeating. It’s just all over the place. We find joy in that. We call that success.
Ski Ahmad
So take us back to the embrace part for T. So embrace and then educate and maybe even for Brian, because you say the Brian call happened today?
Kirk Brown
Today.
Ski Ahmad
Today? Before coming in here to record all that. Today?
Kirk Brown
Yeah.
Ski Ahmad
Wow. So maybe kind of take us back to the educate, and embrace because it sounds like, I mean what you’ve described is a lot of the empowerment piece that we’re seeing that manifested. But what was the embrace like?
Kirk Brown
The embrace is hugging thorns.
Ski Ahmad
Okay, so say more about that.
Kirk Brown
Okay. So the embrace is hugging thorns. And I really believe that the deeper we go into the D-realm, we got to learn how to hug thorns longer. And so Brian came in, a child of domestic violence, beating up himself, persuaded to deal drugs. He was a very skilled marketer and so he would’ve gone far in that game.
And if not for us pulling him aside and saying, “You know Brian, if you can sell drugs at 2:00 AM in the morning on the most dangerous streets out here, you really can do business management. There’s a lot of risk associated with that. Your ability to persuade people.” And really dove into that world to pull him out. And that’s what the embrace looks like.
And they’re walking Brian over to things that he’s really good at. Simple things, not complex things. Daily goals. Hey Brian, today I want you to come in with your pants at your waist.
Jeff Proctor
Simple.
Kirk Brown
Simple. Hey Brian, today I want you to convince everyone in here to pay attention to the life skill class. “Why? Why I got to do that?” Because Brian, you have a power of persuading people. He doesn’t know that yet because he is using it in the wrong direction, right? Sales and marketing 101, right?
Jeff Proctor
Right.
Kirk Brown
So you have the power, you have the talent. Now, let’s show you that you have a talent that we’re going to form into an ability. That’s the embrace. Helping to subsidize his rent with his uncle, helping him to get a job and subsidize paying for his employment. We’re in the background, also doing that. His case manager is also taking him to regular youthful activities, because Brian has never been a child.
And so Brian chose construction, the educate part. “What’s your value? What can you really do legally that won’t put you in prison?” And Brian chose construction. And then Brian went to Georgia to work for a construction company. We paid for the certification. And so Brian calls, now at this stage saying, “I chose that but like most of us who went to college for something else than what we’re doing…”
Jeff Proctor
Right.
Kirk Brown
“I chose that but I found out I elevated to this and I’m really good at this.” So that’s the embrace, educate, and empower in Brian.
[Short Break]
Jeff Proctor
I’m hearing a cool trend here in the story, whether it’s T with college admissions, or Brian’s story, both with the housing and the job. A lot of times when people think about programs in our sector, and you talk about a housing program, it’s about the getting the house. And if you’re talking about workforce, it’s about getting the job. And if you’re talking about college admissions, it’s about getting into college.
But the way you described all of those stories, there’s something else going on in each one of those stories. Something else about the relationship that you build with the person that seems to be the factor that makes it helpful. It’s the barrier-breaking side. Can you talk a little bit more about that across HANDY’S work?
Kirk Brown
So it’s the who, inside of the person that we see. And so I’ll bring it to this, I literally almost walked off of a college campus, my freshman year because of imposter syndrome. I was really, I looked around and I was like, “I do not belong here.” These kids from two, they have two parents, right? I’m sitting there like, “Oh no, this is not me.”
And then I met Chemistry II. That was a class that made me decide, “Maybe I’m not a college student.” Everyone has had that class, that bump in the road where no one else is present. All the people who whispered in your ear and talked about potential, and then you had to have that talk with yourself in that moment to say, “I can step over that.” That’s the moment we work with our young people to prepare them for. That moment where doubt seeps in. That moment where you have to jump in deeper. And so it’s the who.
So for them getting accepted, we have kids who don’t get accepted at college but they’re in the workforce. But it’s how they show up, who they show up as. That’s really important to us because we don’t want to make highly successful dysfunctional people. We would really don’t want to invest in that. We have enough of that, right? Out here. So we want to spend our time and our equity statement in human lives.
Investing on what are they on the inside? How are they going to treat people? How are we going to grow this outside of us. If I help T, I have no doubt that when T gets to where she’s going, or even on her way there now, she’s tutoring middle school students right now.
She’s already manifesting that hope, putting those hands together to build that net to help the rest of society. She’s already doing those actionable things. That tells me that somewhere she’s self-aware that she has a greater value statement here and that is very represented in how we treat other people.
Jeff Proctor
There’s something really beautiful about that imposter syndrome story, because imposter syndrome is just quintessentially D-realm, right? It’s, “I lack the connection and self-esteem to feel like I belong here.” And the antidote is people providing that sense of belonging. It’s community, it’s surrounding each other with that support that we need to truly feel belonging. And what that does for opening up our potential is so huge.
So one of the things that we cover on these Principles episodes that I wanted to definitely hear from you on, is how these principles show up internally with our staff and our leadership inside our organizations.
So the pitch talk for self-actualization as an organizing principle is, we want to build organizations that help each and every person that comes work for us, be as likely as possible to find their thing and do the heck out of it. How does self-actualization, how does this helping people live in the B-realm happen for staff at HANDY and leaders as well?
Kirk Brown
Oh, we make it fun. We do great things. We do great things. The first part is owning. Owning the greatness that we are together and knowing that all of us show up with talents, but it takes all of us to manifest the abilities. And when you fall in love with those abilities, it becomes purpose. And so there’s nothing more. Even in our hiring, interviewing, and hiring, right?
Five years ago we had a candid conversation in the lunchroom. One of my social workers walked in, she was so frustrated, she said, “This ain’t for everybody.” And I heard what she said and then as a leader, I really heard what she said. And then I had to ask myself, “Is she right? This is really not for everybody. This is not for your regular candidate, straight out of college, I-just-learned-social-work-from-a-book, social worker.” It’s not. Right?
Because on any given day, someone’s walking in, every day with mass trauma. And she was just like, and she sat down and I’m listening as a colleague. First of all, I’m not the CEO, I’m a colleague. I break down all of those barriers of people lying to you because of a position. I’m a colleague. And she’s just venting over some coffee. And she’s like, “I was with this person for 12 hours yesterday and then they called me this morning at seven o’clock and she’s back on the street selling her body.” And she’s so frustrated and I’m listening, I’m listening, I’m listening.
And then when she got close to the end, I said, “Okay, so tell me then why do you do it?” She was like, “That was my momma, and she does it in my neighborhood.” And she teared up, and in the back of my head I’m like, “I’m so proud to serve with her.”
So I walk into my executive team and we’re talking, I was like, “Do we interview for this? Do we interview for lived experience? Do we interview for people who it means more to them than a job? Because what we’re doing here is more than just a job and how do we interview for that?” And so from then we started interviewing for lived experience. We started interviewing for understanding of the communities that these kids are in, because we really need purpose-driven people in our building.
Jeff Proctor
That was my first question. If it’s not for everybody, who is it for?
Kirk Brown
It’s for people with lived the experience, it’s for people with lived the experience that see this as something greater, that matches their abilities. And sometimes what we try to do is we take circles and triangles and try to make them into circles.
We just have to be honest in our environment. Who will be happy here? But at the same time asking yourself, “Why are other people not happy here? But who would be happy here?” And interview for it.
And what we found just doing that one small dynamic of starting to interview for it, people walked in with massive talents, not for the position we hired them for. And then we started every month asking them about their abilities. If this was your organization, what would you do with it?
Jeff Proctor
I love that. One thing I find really hard to remember is that for every job, no matter how awful that job might sound to me, there’s somebody in the world that that job will make them come alive.
I wonder if you have a story about anybody at HANDY who has a job that would drive you up the wall, but they do it with the passion and fire that you’re talking about.
Kirk Brown
Her name is Esther. Esther is my director of education. And if you’re one of my university partners and you’re listening, I really enjoy partnering with you. Thank you for all that you do with us. I know on any given day, Esther is an angel and also a thorn.
And so Esther goes hard in the paint on behalf of all of our young people and our families when it comes to post-secondary education. My fondest moment for Esther is, I’m in my office and I look out the window and she’s walking through the parking lot just punching her hand in the other hand. And she looks so frustrated. I’m like, “Oh God, is she going to quit today?” And I walk out there and I’m like, “Okay, so what’s going on?” And she goes, “We have to do better!” I’m like, “Okay, I like where this is going. What can we do better at?”
And she’s with so much passion and vigor just telling me about post-secondary education and, “If we just did this or we need to do this, and I know we don’t have enough money to do this, but we need to do it!” And I’m listening to her and two years before she became our director of education, I knew she would be our director of education because that kind of passion and zeal matches up.
And she has the talent. She has the abilities. And when I was talking to her, it was already her purpose. You could see it in her eyes. This woke her up in the morning. And so when she got into the director of education role, you could just see it.
Everyone in the building just rejoiced about it because she literally will walk into a middle school, a high school, a post-secondary institution. We’re forming four educational institutes in our own building and that is all because of the vision and that person self-actualizing in our environment of our greatest purpose, right? And as an organization, we’re made up of the bodies of the people that are there, that find joy there, and so for me it’s Esther.
Jeff Proctor
I love that. You don’t have to convince people to find their purpose. You just have to let them.
Kirk Brown
Yeah.
Jeff Proctor
Right.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. And so let me maybe go back to this idea of lived experience and ask you why? Why is that so important? I have a theory, but I want to ask you. So why is that so important to you? To the people that work at HANDY and the students you all are serving?
Kirk Brown
You ever been sort of hugged?
Ski Ahmad
Yeah.
Kirk Brown
You ever been really hugged?
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Kirk Brown
It’s the difference. So it’s kind of like what you know you’ll dedicate eight hours to. What you’ve lived, you’ll dedicate a lifetime to. And so it comes with a different level of zeal when they do it. Understanding and for the population we serve, they want to know that people are not just visiting their neighborhoods to fix it.
They want to know that people are in it with them, and they wear it as a badge of honor. And so interviewing for lived the experience and even educating others on lived experience I think is very, very important when we’re serving communities that need hope.
Ski Ahmad
Because I assume for you, because of your lived experience, there’s something kind of welling up in you that you are passionate about this work and will go tear after it in a way that you likely wouldn’t have otherwise done it, if you maybe didn’t have that lived experience.
And then I’m thinking about the people that work at HANDY the same way, and they’re getting benefit out of it because they’ve had these lived experiences and they’re getting benefit from helping and paying it forward and all of that. So they’re benefiting from it and then the students are benefiting from it.
So you kind of see where I’m going here with, for you and then the people that work at HANDY and then the people that you’re serving, everyone is getting benefit from these lived experiences that you all have.
Kirk Brown
Oh yeah. The mutual benefit spectrum is pretty high for us. You know, you walk in and the level of belonging and fulfillment every day is, it’s just wonderful. I don’t have a day at work where one of my team members don’t walk over to me and tell me about their HANDY moment. I had it today.
And sometimes there’s smiles, and sometimes there’s tears, but the tears always come with how they solved it. And it is great to be able to serve to my psychology major friend over here. People who, their lived experience lives in the D-realm, but what they’re creating is the B-realm for so many other people. And so it’s so beautiful to see scars become stars, right?
And so that, for me personally, the lived experience is kind of my prerequisite for what I do. I can’t put it on the resume, but it’s kind of like a prerequisite for what I do and understanding better what I do, and understanding what I need to do and still learn and grow every day in it.
Ski Ahmad
So I got a question for you, regarding your own self-actualization journey. When was that moment that you had felt like in some ways making the switch between that D-realm, motivation to more of a B-realm. Whether you knew it was D-realm or B-realm back then, maybe when was that moment for you?
Kirk Brown
So I have to thank both of you for this because you made me think about it. And so for me it was a homeless kid in a Coca-Cola shirt on a street corner in our neighborhood in Broward County. And I’m driving my Honda Civic, fresh out of college, on my way to law school, I’m enjoying life.
And I saw homeless kid in a Coca-Cola shirt and then it all just hit me, these scar can be stars because not many people can tell him about the wind that blows at 2:30 in the morning when you’re homeless, and get the respect from him that it deserves because he knows you know. When he knows you know, you can tell him about it.
Ski Ahmad
Uh-huh.
Kirk Brown
And so I saw that and I was like, it was just a aha moment. It was just like, “I’m going to go fix that.” I call it youthful ignorance right now, but it was just like, “I’m going to go fix that or it should be fixed.” And I got angry about it, I got passionate about it.
I had a social work degree at the time, but that moment is when I was like, “Yeah, this is it.” And we have a saying, go for broke.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah.
Kirk Brown
So I just decided we’re going to go for broke, this is what I’m going to do.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. Awesome. And then one other thought, when did you realize, I assume at a younger age, when did you realize you had value?
Kirk Brown
Those solid ground people. I knew why the little brother that looked up to me. And I think I was somewhere close to 14, 15. I had a drug dealer told me, “You know, you can’t sell drugs.” I was like, “Why? I know I’m smarter than y’all.” He was like, “This ain’t for you. There’s something greater out there for you.” And I remember looking at him like, “Are you high?”
But the weirdest people spoke words of compassion and just planting seeds. And for me it was like 14, 15 when I realized that there’s something great. I have value. I have value.
Ski Ahmad
Amazing.
Kirk Brown
It’s ground shaking because it’s confusing too.
Ski Ahmad
In what way?
Kirk Brown
It’s really confusing when people tell you, you are worth a lot, but you’re living in need, right?
Ski Ahmad
Really.
Kirk Brown
It’s a dichotomy and the psyche of people who are in desperate need and “You’re smart, you’re going to go places.” And you’re like, “But I sleep with roaches, it’s not adding up right now.”
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. How do you reconcile that? Because right, to your point, I mean, it’s not adding up. So how does one reconcile that? Because I would assume you certainly want to believe these folks telling you all these great things about you, but reality and maybe falsely though, but reality says you’re living with roaches, so these two things can’t coexist, I assume is likely what’s going through. I mean, how do you reconcile that?
Kirk Brown
Dreams live in hungry stomachs, right? So dreams do still live in hungry stomachs. And I compare it to being heartbroken and people say, “But there’s love out there for you.” And it is a place where you have to stay. The embrace at HANDY, you have to stay with the thorn, you have to tell them it’s going to get better. You have to build daily goals to show them it’s going to get better.
And for me, at 14, I started collecting gems. I started to collect simple ray of lights, people that walked in, people that invested. And that’s what our team does today. We’re saying these things, but we’re doing these things, we’re making them actionable. And so it is a reality for people in need and the D-realm telling them that the B-realm exists.
Telling them all of these things, but showing them, because need doesn’t mean needy. Need, doesn’t mean not talented. Not lacking of abilities or not having a purpose. It just means you’re willing to fight harder for it. And tapping into that, right? Tapping into that is where a self-actualization comes from for me.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. So Kirk, in the work that you’re doing when you, I mean, I hear you talk about the embrace, the educate, and then empower, and so it feels like you’re on the right track when you’re talking about those three elements of how you all do what you do at HANDY.
But I would say there’s another school of thought, I think there’s several more, but another school of thought that says, “Well, hey.” At some point along these lines, maybe before the embrace at HANDY, but maybe, “Hey, there’s some discipline and some punishment that some of these young folks, that are walking through the HANDY doors might need some punishment, severe consequence in order to almost scare them straight or something before maybe, and embrace from HANDY.” Et cetera.
I mean, what are your thoughts about this idea of, kind of, punishment is potentially necessary throughout that process, especially if they’ve, misbehaved?
Kirk Brown
I think that’s a great lie. A great lie we tell ourselves, and I call it the great lie because I have two points on this. The first point is you can’t do anything to them that life has not already done. Okay?
Ski Ahmad
Wow.
Kirk Brown
The kid selling drugs at 2:00 AM on the street corner, life got him there. Then wake up in the morning and go, “You know what? This is a great job choice.” No, there’s some, there’s enough punishments and consequences in that life. And so I call it one of the great lies.
The other great lie that lays behind that, is the fact that we behave as if people need to earn love in our society. People need to earn care in our society. And we have to be cautious about that, because it says a lot about us. When someone has to fill out seven pieces of paper to get $50 for some food. For you to give… “Tell me your eye color so I can feed you.” That is kind of some of the things we do when we have more than others and we’re going to help you.
Ski Ahmad
Wow.
Kirk Brown
So that is really a diagnosis of me seeing you as needy, not in need. Needy. So now you got to earn. You got to earn my love, you got to earn my care. And immediately, the minute I know that, because I’ve been on the receiving end of this. There’s an elegant book written, and the woman is sitting in the food stamps office at the state, and she talks about what she sees as a person in need.
Looking through the lens of the person in need, knowing you got to earn food, care, love, or even your smile. One of the things we remind our young people at HANDY’s that we don’t invest in perfect children. You are allowed to fail here. We tell our caregivers, “You are allowed to fail here because failing, falling off is human.”
Ski Ahmad
Yes.
Kirk Brown
No matter what word we give it, we could call… Some people might get offended with me saying failing, but onboarding and offboarding in all life, is that better? Right? You’re allowed to do that here because when you really make a great human value statement, it’s not when the person’s on the mountain top, giving their best life Facebook post.
No, it’s when they’re in the valley and they’re ignoring social media for real, for real. No one posts like, “I’m having a really horrible day today. Look at me.” Right? It’s those moments. And so the punishment, the consequences, the need to earn care and the need to earn love is more on us than it is on those young people and the people that really need to walk into self-actualization. Because if you really think about it, that was your reality. Would you want to be punished?
Ski Ahmad
Wow, Kirk. I mean, yo man, I’m actually now a little disappointed that you dropped that knowledge on us. And Jeff, this is our last episode together, man. So man, we got Kirk here who’s I mean, dropping this wisdom. I’d love to unpack that. Kurt, will you come back again? Because…
Kirk Brown
Oh, definitely.
Ski Ahmad
I’d love to unpack that point and a few more. I’m all fired up, Jeff. I mean, I don’t want… You want to end? I don’t want to end this thing, man.
Jeff Proctor
Yeah, Ski. I actually think I have a longer list of questions now than I did at the beginning of this episode.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah, no, I completely agree. And maybe though that’s part of what we’re talking about, self-actualization, and I think Maslow once said, “What a person can be, they must be.” And so therefore it’s about kind of growing and we got more questions because we’re growing.
So let’s… Man, I’d love to kind of keep the thing going so that we can learn more, apply more, learn more, apply more and keep that rhythm going.
Jeff Proctor
Yeah. It’s the whole, the more you learn, the more you learn you didn’t know.
Ski Ahmad
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Jeff Proctor
So we’ll have to boot this up next season. Well guys, it’s been awesome to be here today, Ski. It’s been incredible to do this series with you.
Ski Ahmad
Oh yeah.
Jeff Proctor
Folks at home, we are so excited that you tuned in with us. Please jump in next week for Episode 13 with Ty Spells on empowerment in action. Thank you so much, and we’ll talk to you soon.
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