Activist Michealene Risley on Storytelling, Empathy, Sexual Abuse

Michael Gervais (0:09)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn, to learn from people who are on the path of mastery and to better understand what they're searching for and the path that has led them to that search, as well as the particular mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

I wanna take a minute here to announce a really exciting event that we have coming up. As you continue to navigate the challenges and opportunities of 2024, I wanna pose a question. What are you doing right now to be great with stress? How are you working with stress on your pursuit towards your most important ambitions and goals? And I just wanna get right to the heart of the key elements, one in particular, for what it takes to excel in today's high heat, high stakes world. Because stress is not the problem that we think it is. Stress is a synonym for change. And our ability to be agile with change, that is the real opportunity at hand. So if you're wanting to unlock extraordinary results and sustainable performance in your life, it's not about avoiding or reducing stress. And as simple as that sounds, it's very tricky to do, but it is about fundamentally changing your relationship with it.

And that's why I'm so thrilled to invite you to a special event. It's a free virtual event that we're offering, and it's called The Power of Embracing Stress. It's on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. So to sign up, just head over to findingmastery.com/training, whether it's advancing in your career or improving your health or cultivating stronger relationships, I think a new approach to stress can be one of the most powerful unlocks for you in your life. So join us for this free virtual training, The Power of Embracing Stress, on Wednesday, March 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to findingmastery.com/training to sign up. Once again, that's findingmastery.com/training. And I'm really excited to see you there.

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And she's worked with Fortune 100 companies like Nike and Walt Disney. And while she was with Adidas, she launched the Power of Two, which is the first ever branded maternity line. And so she understands licensing and merchandising and putting concepts and ideas together. And she's got a bend in a particular twist that is very powerful. And so as you're listening to this, if you're listening with children, this conversation, you might actually want to listen to this one alone.

It's intense and it's real and it's authentic and it's adult conversation. So if you're in the conversation or in the car or wherever you are with the children, I'm just going to kind of put an alert up now that you might want to press pause. If you're by yourself, just tune in because I think that this conversation is, it's got a particular way about it that the honesty is so fluent and so easy and the transparency is so real that it's evidence of the work that Michealene has done. And the work, the interior work, when somebody does that, it's powerful and it's noticed by others. And so she's experimented in many different veins of finding mastery in her own life, some in business, some in documentarian, as a documentarian, and some in writing. And she's working out the core truth of her own journey. And some of you might recognize her work for, she co-wrote and directed the film Tapestries of Hope, which was the documentary that exposed the myth in Zimbabwe behind the belief that raping a virgin cures a man of HIV and AIDS.