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The Class Conversation: What We Call Everything Except What It Is. Part 2 of the money arc. Last week we got into why America doesn’t talk about salary. This week we get into the thing underneath the silence: class. Keith opens with the airplane — first class is still first class, but we’ve built a whole coded vocabulary around it. Comfort Plus. Priority boarding. Group One. Gerren pulls Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree research on elite hiring — cultural fit as the single most cited hiring reason, and what it actually meant was shared schools, shared vacation geographies, shared leisure activities. Not values. Not competence. Class markers. Also — the Kraus study on how we judge class from speech, Keith’s story about being told he dragged his feet in the office and still thinks about it, and Gerren’s record-scratch interview with a room full of white dudes in ties. The silent sort that lets gatekeepers filter by class without ever admitting that’s what’s happening. Part 2 of 3. Part 3 next week — what you inherit. Key Topics: The coded vocabulary of class in America, Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree research on elite hiring, how we judge class from speech, the racial layer underneath the silent sort, why the middle class is dying, and the Jonathan Pride callback on seeing people differently than their job title. The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — The Salary Conversation: Why America Doesn’t Talk About Money 🎧 Part 2 — The Class Conversation: What We Call Everything Except What It Is 🎧 Part 3 — [coming next week] Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

The Salary Conversation: Why America Doesn’t Talk About Money. Part 1 of a new three-episode arc. Keith opens with his mom’s birthday — the political conversation she didn’t want to have and the friend who pushed anyway. Gerren pulls the thread: politics, religion, money. The three things Americans don’t talk about. The first two we’ve covered. The third is this arc. Keith walks through what he found trying to trace when the silence started — the National Labor Relations Act, company towns, union busting, and why corporations had a vested interest in employees not sharing numbers. Gerren brings the Gen Z counter-pattern of posting salaries publicly on TikTok. Keith brings the research complicating the “transparency is always better” story — Norway’s public tax records widened the happiness gap, UC employees who learned they made less than peers reported lower job satisfaction, and one European pay-transparency law reduced overall pay by 2%. Also — the Mexico/India bargaining culture as the counterpoint to American money taboo, why the freelance world can’t afford the silence, and the SAG-AFTRA strike as the current-day version of the same fight. Part 1 of 3. Part 2 next week — the class caste system America doesn’t name. Key Topics: Why Americans don’t talk about money, the National Labor Relations Act and corporate suppression of wage talk, pay transparency laws, the counterintuitive research on what public salary data actually does to happiness and compensation, bargaining culture outside the US, and why freelancers can’t afford the silence. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

The shirt comes untucked. Both hosts show up exhausted this week — and the arc gets demonstrated in real time. Gerren was out late at a gala, then a college bar. Keith hasn’t slept right in three days. Keith walks through his pattern on-mic — hard training, undereating, waking at 2am with “the hum” in his body, snapping at his kids by day three. Gerren tells the gala-to-dive-bar story: the tight utensil work, the smaller movements, and the moment the shirt comes untucked at the second bar. Code-switching as a physical act. “Not everybody knows how to act” — what the friend who invited him said. Also — the environmental privilege of being able to design your own recovery, and Gerren on carrying a goldfish memory for the things he can’t control. Arc closer. Part 3 of 3. Key Topics: Performing through exhaustion, environmental privilege and recovery, Keith’s sleep-nutrition-cortisol cycle, code-switching as a physical experience, and the gala-to-dive-bar transition. The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — The Zebra Who Can’t Stop Running 🎧 Part 2 — What the Body Remembers and What It Doesn’t 🎧 Part 3 — The Shirt Comes Untucked Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

What the body remembers — and what it doesn't. Part 2 of our body arc. Where last week was about chronic stress chasing us like an endless sequence of lions, this week is about what the body holds — the stuff from earlier that doesn't go away just because the circumstance changed. Keith opens with revertigo — the How I Met Your Mother concept for how you can be 30, independent, functional, and the moment you walk into your parents' house, you're six again. Nothing wrong with you. The context is just doing what context does. Which means the hardest conversations we have — the ones with family, especially about politics or ideology — happen in exactly the environment least likely to let us access the dialogue skills we've built. They engage honestly with The Body Keeps the Score — what van der Kolk's clinical work got right, and where the specific cellular claims aren't actually backed by peer review. Same with Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research on Holocaust survivors and their children — the real science, the honest hedges, and Gerren's direct question: what does three or four hundred years of generational stress do to a person's genes? The strongest moment of the episode — Keith admits he can't empathize with what it's like to be a Black man in the South and be called "boy." He can understand the concept intellectually. He can't feel it in his body. That gap is the thing the arc is about. Part 2 of 3. Part 3 next week. Key Topics: Revertigo and context-dependent memory, cue-dependent forgetting, ACE studies and HPA axis calibration, honest engagement with The Body Keeps the Score, Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research and FKBP5 methylation patterns, cultural trauma and dominant-culture recognition, and Mark Bouton's extinction learning as a path to changing the signal. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

The zebra who can't stop running. Part 1 of a new arc — pivoting from the mind to the body. After months of talking about cognition, judgment, communication, and loneliness, Keith and Gerren finally get into what all of that is doing to us physically. The framing is Robert Sapolsky's zebra — get chased by a lion, escape, calm down, go back to grazing. Nervous system reset. Modern humans don't get the reset. We're chased by an ongoing sequence of lions — inbox, kids' schedule, news cycle, credit card, dinner-table politics — where one stops and the next one picks up. Chronic fight-or-flight activation without the resolution the system was designed for. Gerren pulls in McEwen and Wingfield's research on allostatic load — specifically type-two overload, where the stressors are social and structural, and can't be counteracted by escape. Only by learning and by changes in the social structure itself. Also — Repetti's research on workload spillover to home (showing up as absent, not just angry), the person sitting in the driveway trying to reset before walking inside, and the honest permission slip at the center of the whole episode: you're not lazy, you're carrying a lot of load. Naming it is the first move. Part 1 of 3. Part 2 next week — how we talk about all this now, and what the body remembers. Key Topics: Sapolsky's zebras-and-lions framework, McEwen and Wingfield on allostatic load, technological pace of change vs. biological adaptation, Repetti's workload-spillover research, closing margins for connection, box breathing and the parasympathetic nervous system, and rest as a discipline rather than a reward. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Keith spent 15 years convinced he was an introvert. Then he wasn't. Part 3 closes our "It Is What It Is" arc — the personal turn. After two episodes on how the phrase functions as a permission structure and how marketing sold us pink and blue as biology, Keith and Gerren turn the framework on themselves. Keith on the introvert-extrovert binary he lived inside for a decade and a half — using "I'm an introvert" as the reason to leave every party at 10pm and disengage. Until his wife, whose extroversion "stands alone," became the forcing function. Turns out he actually gets energy from people, too. He just needed the vocabulary to discern when he needed what — and permission to stop letting the label make the decision. Gerren's version is the opposite problem. His whole life has been about refusing to settle — Bay Area to LA to Mexico, careers changed on rotation, always evolving. Keith flips it on him: is your never-settling itself an "I am who I am"? (Also — a Kanye West story from Gerren's Apple Store days, including an invitation to a house call he declined.) They close with what they're passing to their kids — please, thank you, bless you, the rules of the roost — and the honest recognition that those kids will eventually need the agency to question those things too. That's the whole arc, really. Arc closer. Part 3 of 3. Key Topics: The introvert-extrovert binary as a false frame, using a spouse's opposite tendency as a forcing function, discernment vs. label, the identity work of refusing to settle, lifelong insecurity as an ongoing project, and what we pass on to our kids — including the agency to eventually question it. The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — "It Is What It Is." — Is It, Though? 🎧 Part 2 — Pink Is Just Marketing 🎧 Part 3 — The Introvert Who Wasn't Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

Pink is just marketing. Girls didn't naturally gravitate toward pink. Boys didn't naturally gravitate toward blue. In 1918, a garment industry trade publication argued the exact opposite — pink was the "more decided and stronger" color, better suited for boys. It took the garment industry roughly 60 years to lock in the version we live with now. Then prenatal sex determination arrived in the 1980s and made the segmentation permanent. Now we throw gender reveal parties in the color scheme a marketing team invented. Part 2 of our "It Is What It Is" arc. Case studies week. Keith and Gerren get into pink vs. blue, boys will be boys and the meta-analyses on when emotional differences actually emerge, the American work culture that traces back to Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1900s factory management principles, the seatbelt story, and a genuinely uncomfortable detour into Joseph Henrich's The Weirdest People — specifically the 500 CE Catholic Church ban on cousin marriage that reshaped how Western civilization thinks about trust, family, and strangers. The through-line — none of the things we accept as biological default are actually biological. They were designed. Someone benefits. And the ones that stick get baked into cognition so completely that a few generations later we call them common sense. For the record: Keith is not pro cousin marriage. That got clarified on air. Part 2 of a multi-episode arc. Part 3 next week — the personal turn. Key Topics: The pink-blue marketing history from 1918 forward, how gendered emotional conditioning emerges in preschool and elementary school, Joseph Henrich and the WEIRDEST People framework, the 500 CE Catholic Church cousin marriage ban, Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management as the origin of American work culture, and the seatbelt story as an example of how fast cultural change actually can happen. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

"It is what it is." — Is it, though? Keith and Gerren open a new arc on the phrases we use to shut conversations down — and the systems that benefit when we do. It is what it is. Boys will be boys. That's just how it works. Common sense. Every one of them functions as a permission structure: a way of accepting a condition without ever inspecting whether it's actually inevitable, or whether we've just been told it is. Gerren lays out the three-part framework: the stuff we don't want to think about, the stuff we don't want to be responsible for, and the stuff we don't want to change. Keith names the tension — sometimes "it is what it is" is legitimate cognitive load management. And sometimes it's just laziness dressed up as acceptance. The difference is whether you actually inspected it. Also — callbacks to our arc with Mónica Guzmán, why the Jordan Klepper problem matters, why Keith is deliberately getting worse at social media, and the sentence that names the whole arc: nothing that is conditioned is inevitable, and most of what we treat as inevitable is conditioned. Part 1 of a multi-episode arc. Part 2 next week — the designers, the beneficiaries, and what we can actually do. Key Topics: The "it is what it is" permission structure, capitulation vs. acceptance, cognitive load management, the boys-will-be-boys responsibility dodge, the sample-size fallacy in political comedy, and why the uneven weight of "it is what it is" hits harder when you're not in the dominant group. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

You have more power than the algorithm. Part 3 closes our arc with Mónica Guzmán — journalist, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, senior fellow at Braver Angels, and author of I Never Thought of It That Way. Last week we ended on a cliffhanger: how does the system itself stay curious? This week, the answer. Keith opens with a story from the weekend — a real conversation about healthcare with his conservative dad that was going well, until he noticed his dad was drinking from a "leftist tears" tumbler. The dialogue was working. The identity object in the room was working against it. Mónica introduces the concept of conflict entrepreneurs — people who profit off division — and reframes what a system actually is. There isn't one system. There are many. Put down the one that isn't serving you and pick up the one that will. Also — the astronaut cord metaphor for holding identity loosely (probably the sharpest visual in the whole arc), the surprising research that shows cognitively smarter people are actually worse at accepting information they don't want to hear, and the callback to our own tightly held values, loosely held beliefs arc. Ends with rapid-fire questions (Citizen Kane, puchero, Maui, Blink-182), Costco chicken fingers, and the honest close of three episodes that changed how we think about this work. Key Topics: Conflict entrepreneurs and the economics of division, the attention economy, the pattern of losing consciousness in argument, the astronaut cord metaphor for identity, the counterintuitive research on cognitive reasoning, and the many-systems reframe. Guest: 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🎙️ A Braver Way podcast — YouTube & all podcast platforms 🌐 reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 braverangels.org The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — When the Conversation Gets Political, Can You Stay Curious? 🎧 Part 2 — What Nobody Tells You About Staying Curious 🎧 Part 3 — You Have More Power Than the Algorithm Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 📸 https://instagram.com/gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

What nobody tells you about staying curious. Part 2 of a multi-episode arc with Mónica Guzmán — journalist, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, senior fellow at Braver Angels, and author of I Never Thought of It That Way. This is the honest episode about the cost of the work she teaches. Mónica opens up about a footnote in her own book — "sometimes I'm too curious for my own good" — and what that's actually meant across her career. The friendships lost with people who share her politics but not her style. The exhaustion of being the person the room turns to for the answer. The reality that curiosity is contagious, but only if you have the capacity to keep offering it. And why "waves crashing on a cliff" is the right metaphor for what she does, and why sometimes it's still too insurmountable. Keith and Gerren push into the harder questions: what happens when the framework is asked of people whose humanity is on the table? What does curiosity look like from the non-dominant culture? Mónica lands somewhere honest — the luxury of not asking questions when you're in the dominant culture, the reality that curiosity aimed inward is also curiosity, and that if the choice is always "I'm never safe so I will never be seen," the non-dominant group is never made visible at all. Ends on a cliffhanger — how does the system itself stay curious? Part 3 next week. Key Topics: The cost of being professionally curious, friendships lost to stylistic disagreement, the exhaustion of the framework, the uneven ask across dominant and non-dominant cultures, curiosity aimed inward, Julia Minson's research on receptiveness language, and why "your uncle isn't talking to you, he's talking to all liberals." Guest: 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🌐 Reclaim Curiosity → reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 Braver Angels → braverangels.org The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — When the Conversation Gets Political, Can You Stay Curious? 🎧 Part 2 — What Nobody Tells You About Staying Curious 🎧 Part 3 — [coming next week] Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

When the conversation gets political — can you stay curious? Journalist Mónica Guzmán has spent her career trying to answer that question, and she has more standing to ask it than most. Her Mexican-immigrant parents voted for Donald Trump twice. She didn't. And she never stopped talking to them. This week Keith and Gerren open a multi-episode arc with Mónica — journalist, founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity, senior fellow at Braver Angels, and author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Part 1 is her origin story — a shy kid who found her way to journalism through pure fascination with people, the sobremesa tradition (the Spanish word for the conversation that follows a meal that English doesn't have), and the moment when her sense of the fight had to sharpen from "win the argument" to something more sustainable. Also — the reason the movie Pearl Harbor made her a movie reviewer, the trap of "avoidance that calls itself brave," why every relationship is a mini society, and what she does with the flash of anger before it dictates her actions. Part 1 of a multi-episode arc. Part 2 next week. Key Topics: The sobremesa and why English doesn't have a word for it, how bilingual/bicultural upbringing shapes curiosity, the American dinner table rule about politics and religion, meeting division with strength, naming emotional escalation out loud as a de-escalation tool, and effective vs. performative convictions. Guest: 🌐 https://www.moniguzman.com/ 📚 I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán — Available on Amazon 🌐 Reclaim Curiosity → reclaimcuriosity.org 🌐 Braver Angels → braverangels.org Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

You're not for everyone. Neither is anyone else. That's Keith halfway through this week's episode — and it might be the sentence that closes out the whole two-part judgment arc. Where Part 1 was the intellectual framework, Part 2 is the personal application. Gerren opens with the answer he almost didn't say out loud last week: "It's kind of a white guy thing." Then he goes into what it's actually like to be both hyper-visible and invisible as a Black man in American society, what it's like to be a Black American content creator in Mexico who represents an entire community every time he steps outside, and the fear of his own success creating a level of surveillance he doesn't want. Keith gets into who he still lets judge him and why he still wants everyone to like him — plus the friend he almost wrote off after 10 minutes who is now closest family. Also: karaoke Hamilton, the traffic stop math (the 10% racist cops who will kill you make the gamble bigger than any statistic), why the biological default explanation of judgment doesn't hold up, and how literacy in 1517 actually reshaped the physical structure of the human brain. Ends with: this isn't for our lifetime. It's for our kids. And their kids. And that's why we keep showing up. Key Topics: The dual experience of hyper-visibility and invisibility, being a Black creator in Mexico, the traffic stop math and percentage-of-consequence, how judgment shapes our judgment of others, The Weirdest People and how literacy reshaped human cognition, the friends we almost wrote off, and every situation not requiring all of you but every situation requiring a sincere reflection. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

We're all sheep. It just depends on the flock. That's Keith about 26 minutes into this week's episode — and it's the sentence that reframes the whole conversation. Part 1 of a two-part arc on judgment: how we do it, why we do it, what changed, and why our nervous systems weren't built for the scale we're doing it at now. Gerren opens with a story about a friend's 50th birthday party — two baby mamas, three kids, all the grandkids around one cake. The kind of village most of us don't have anymore, and the level of acceptance it takes to hold it together. From there they get into the imagined audience concept from the 1960s, the infinite ladder we're all climbing without knowing where the top is, why judgment is culturally defined and not just "human," and why individualistic societies feel guilt and collectivist societies feel shame — and what that actually costs us at scale. Also — the loss of the redemption arc. Why the interview process is one of the worst predictors of anything. Resting bitch face as an example of misplaced confidence in snap judgments. And why positive gossip might be a healthier sorting mechanism than the culture has given it credit for. Part 2 next week, where we get personal about how this shows up in our own lives. Key Topics: The imagined audience concept and social media's expansion of it, Dunbar's number and the judgmentscape, the difference between guilt and shame across cultures, moral attribution and intent vs. outcome, sociometric status as a happiness driver, cancel culture and the loss of redemption, and positive gossip as a social sorting tool. Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

You don't have to be happy to be grateful. That's the sentence Jonathan Pride lands on at the close of this week's episode — the distinction between contentment and happiness that reframes everything the three-part arc has been circling. You can be in a hard season and still be intentional about gratitude. That's not fake-it-till-you-make-it. That's the actual work. Part three closes out the arc with combat veteran, author, and Caterpillar Leadership Institute founder Jonathan Pride. The why we still do it episode. Jonathan tells the story of the young man in the bathroom before a networking event who never learned how to tie a tie. Chris the welder from New Orleans, who Jonathan pushed into a sales role no one thought he was qualified for — and who became the top salesperson in a 7,000-person company within a year. What Jonathan wants those 37 promoted people to say about him when he's not in the room. And a moment worth flagging — Jonathan names, live on air, that he might be in a cocoon moment right now, and that this podcast conversation might be the prompt he needed. That's a rare thing to catch on tape. Practice intentional praise. Never stop learning. Contentment is not happiness. Big brisket energy. Key Topics: Faith and the unseen outcomes of meaningful work, the individual stories that keep leaders going, systems change thinking, the moment of naming an in-progress transformation, Chris the welder and validating what others can't see in themselves, the difference between contentment and happiness as etymology, and practicing intentional praise. Guest: 📚 Caterpillars Don't Fly by Jonathan Pride — Available on Amazon 🌐 Caterpillar Leadership Institute → caterpillarleadership.org 💼 LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pride-831b3875 The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — Who Are You Proving It To? 🎧 Part 2 — Who's Holding Space for You? 🎧 Part 3 — You Don't Have to Be Happy to Be Grateful Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

Who's holding space for you? Gerren asks it about halfway through this week's episode — and Jonathan Pride, combat veteran, author, and founder of the Caterpillar Leadership Institute, has to sit with the question a second before answering. Because when you're the one everyone else leans on, the question itself lands a little differently. Part two of a three-episode arc. This one is about the emotional cost of always being the rock — representational weight, the impossibility of redeeming everyone's wrongs, the line between real resilience and quiet suffering, and where a leader actually replenishes. Jonathan gets into a funeral that reframed his understanding of his father, the Obama Fellowship moment that birthed his brand, and a permission slip exercise you can try tomorrow morning. Also — the SOAR framework broken down (Storytelling, Ownership, Abundance, Resilience) and which pillar Jonathan admits is hardest for him to live personally. Neither of them settled it. Part 3 next week. Key Topics: Representational weight in predominantly white rooms, systems change vs. surface change, the SOAR framework as a leadership operating system, the Obama Fellowship, micro-communities as replenishment, the fringes of daily life where identity slips, the permission slip exercise, and a regret about a favor asked and never repaid. Guest: 📚 Caterpillars Don't Fly by Jonathan Pride — Available on Amazon 🌐 Caterpillar Leadership Institute → caterpillarleadership.org 💼 LinkedIn → linkedin.com/in/jonathan-pride-831b3875 The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — Who Are You Proving It To? 🎧 Part 2 — Who's Holding Space for You? 🎧 Part 3 — [coming next week] Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection. Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.