Consuelo The Jada Device invented by the Cal Poly students, Davis Carlin and Alex Norred.
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HOLA CHICAS!
I am Consuelo Crosby – born with both sides of my brain fighting for attention.. structural engineer & creative, mother & mentor, center of any spontaneous fiesta if I’ve had my morning latte… I give it all to being a 1st generation Peruvian badass chica!
So grateful you’re here today, wanting to shed that armor, relax into your truth, your value… pick up your salsa step, tune out what’s getting to you and be lifted from goddesses in generations past that taught us to live life large and out loud… cuz we’re not blending in…
LIFE LNXX… knowledge you didn’t even know you had TO BE THE BADASS CHICA YOU WERE BORN TO BE!
{Episode 4}
Hola Chicas!
I am on a slow recovery from that bicentennial celebration for Peru last week. That was really fun, truly epic! So much joy and revelry and celebrating my family and our heritage, especially my mom, who gave me this entirely different viewpoint of how to live life large and out loud.
Thank you to all the love you sent for the holiday and for the Pisco sour recipes. Plus, the shout outs and stories I received after posting the video of people dancing La Marinera, the traditional dance of Peru. They were dancing and celebrating at our local restaurant just filled with happiness. And then all the stories came in on what your version was like.
I love that your families did the same thing in dancing steps of their Homeland. Love that the folkloric dances are still celebrated across the globe and passed down to the next fancy footwork peeps. Maybe that should be one of our live sessions, dancing the moves from your heritage. I bet they overlap just like we should.
We love it. We have to do it.
Thank you to my listeners for requesting some more in-depth convo on the topics we have already brought to light so far. It is totally necessary to flush out the topics because they are so complex, not in understanding, but in how they affect us all as individuals so we have a larger comprehension, and therefore empathy, of what this life is like for each of us. And then we can come together in unity to support one another.
Not unity of like-mindedness, but unity to have empathy for each other so instead of being the census taker on life, instead of checking boxes to categorize people and track our difference, we’re more like the chef who creates something new and exciting by mixing ingredients together that have never been in the same dish before.
Think about when you read the menu of a modern place and there’s all these new dishes that you have never experienced before. They might seem intimidating because they are so different, ones like Sea Urchin Tacos at Eleven Madison in New York or the pickled Deviled Egg rage that swept through the country. Typically, you wouldn’t put these ingredients together but that’s more because of tradition rather than result. The courageous chefs who thought, “Hmmm, I bet this would be great!”, have vision and are successful risk takers, exactly the personalities that leaders should be!
Anyway, in that mix, I would totally be the spicy in a dish that had some crunchy and maybe some smooth, cool salsa to blend us all together. I love crunchy personalities. They take awhile to get through, but then it ends up there’s more than what you started with. It’s like, instead of getting smaller, as you move through it, it gets bigger and the flavor changes. I’m not crazy. Give it a try, try chewing on something like carrots or peanuts or toffee. Your mouth just gets more full of a completely different version.
Shout out to all the she’s out there. I love you and I love your personalities so join me in my space.
The main point of us meeting every week is to get a deeper understanding of each other, rather than for me to tell you how it’s done. I’m not driving some SEO search success story here, or throwing at keywords so that Google’s going to ramp this to the top. You know the stories I’m talking about, the how-tos and the top fives and the tricks to avoid.
This isn’t a hierarchical, bad parenting, bad boss experience. You come hardwired. It’s here for a reason. There’s purpose in what you have been gifted with and how you express it to the world. It’s not up to me to tell you what to do. It’s just for me to support you in it.
So none of that should be put through conformity. No one should be telling you to step behind and get in place and follow me. We should be linking our arms together. We should be Life Lnxx.
But that’s not to say you have to figure out life on your own. No way. This is the cheat sheet for life right here and life is way too difficult to do alone. So having a unique gift that others may not get at first is no reason to hide it away. Life is definitely a dance. We all have our own groove to it, can pop ourselves in different moves because it’s coming from the soul, expressing it in our own unique way.
The trick is understanding, learning what your unique gift truly is and how to bring it into a constantly changing world, that big dance. This is where we look back in generations a bit to get an understanding of the now and look forward in generations to see what’s coming.
I heard you groan. You think this is a history lesson. I promised you no bad parenting, no bad boss. It kind of is a lesson, but think of it more like a cheat sheet on why your bosses might do what they do and why the world is the way that it is and the power coming of age to make quick and monumental changes we need in our lifetime to secure well-being and generational financial security of our families.
Okay. I heard your brains pop, that’s a lot, but think about it. Things have changed really fast in your lifetime. I know that I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. A lot faster than previous generations.
So let’s take advantage of that and create a system of support for each other. Then instead of diminishing under the current struggle, we will be growing, growing in wealth, growing in health, growing in strength, not by making the next penis shaped rocket, but in filling the needs of women as they rise so quickly and so successfully at this current moment. We can’t maintain that success on a system that was never built for women to begin with.
The new system needs to be built using the knowledge of all generations at the same time, rather than in hierarchical process. It isn’t just about the knowledge at the top being handed over to the next generation. That doesn’t work because by the time the next generation comes, the world, that dance, it’s totally changed. It’s changed music. It’s changed locations. It’s changed style.
Can you imagine going clubbing this weekend and breaking into, I don’t know, a polka. We love our Homeland dance, but seriously, it’s not going to fly. You’re not prepared.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m going to give a huge shout out to my album. Cal poly San Luis Obispo, go Mustangs!, the “learn by doing” university that lets you be the game changer while you’re still a teenager. This empowerment definitely gives you the advantage when you get to the workplace because you know exactly what to do from day one.
Two professors there at Cal Poly created the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship that, in turn, developed an onsite hotspot; an entrepreneurial community where anyone in San Luis Obispo County, from students to business owners to residents, can come together. This is the perfect mentality to begin with no tech bros secret handshake to get in just a large net invitation because again, we never know who has the answer.
Because of this hot spot center, that brings good ideas into fruition, two Cal poly bio-med students, Davis Carlin, and Alex Norred took their senior project idea to market. This is less about the process, less about the team, although the company that was developed to create their idea just sold for $240 million, another shout out to the young people, but it’s more about the generational empathy.
You see the bio-med students developed a device, called the Jada System, to inhibit maternal mortality and morbidity due to postpartum hemorrhaging. Woof! Brilliant! Twenty-one year old men. Just imagine how many mothers will get to see their babies live a full life because these young men wanted to ensure their health and well-being.
How many college guys are doing this and how many business people are even listening? This, this is the immediate change that can happen when we disregard our census taker mentality of what we can do, what we should do, of what is expected of us and become the shafts to make something completely different and unexpected.
Seriously! If these guys just went along on the prescribed path of learning, of graduating, getting a job, getting in line to gradually rise in a corporate medical setting… Do you hear the disdain in my voice? … this brilliant invention would never have come to be. They would have been slotted into some mind numbing position, the leadership thinking they were just some kids out of college and that they had to learn from the higher ups because only they knew better.
This is sounding familiar, isn’t it? So many babies would have grown up never knowing their moms and wondering why the heck no one did anything about it. I say that because it’s not like this is a sudden medical discovery. Mothers dying from postpartum hemorrhaging is not a new thing. It’s been happening since the Dawn of man. So many women, especially black and Hispanic women have lost their lives at childbirth because no one had the empathy to change the outcome. Even Serina Williams shared with us how close she came to dying from a postpartum blood clot because no one took her seriously. No one cared.
If Melinda gates and McKenzie Scott were to buy out the company that holds the device, then we would be assured that the device would be available to all women around the world with empathy, rather than profit as an end goal. Women would not be subjected to the, “if only you had money, then you could live” mentality.
This is how we can reach across generations, across differences and literally is the definition of empathy; feeling the experiences of others and being motivated to make life kinder for them. Bravo to these young men and to the business students that developed the strategy for viability for investors.
A huge hashtag Cal Poly proud moment from the rest of us. I would love to hear their story. What moved the twenty-one year old men to feel the need to save mothers.
When I speak about generations, it’s not passing the torch. It’s including all the knowledge. If we take a moment to engage with each other, with every generation in any direction to learn what each other knows, then we can adopt that into our own lives immediately.
Combining all the knowledge at the same time gives us power to create a system that hasn’t been seen before because typically the world has been operating on a singular set of knowledge. It’s been a hierarchy of “wait your turn”, but then how often have you looked around and said, “what the heck? I’m not even in the game!”
But again, that’s a system in place from a generational mindset of me-first, which, unfortunately here, infected a second generation of me-first, but now there are so many more young people and bad-ass chicas disrupting the system, more than ever before, because the door is being held open by the persistence of the past.
The few of us in my generation that had any capacity and interest to break through that barrier can help hold that door open so the next one, and I emphasize one, could hold it next. But now people are showing up in throngs and collectively they are the game changers that are going to tear that door off its hinges if not tear down the wall and all the structure to go with it.
This “I’m not waiting for my turn in a game that I have no piece in” is epic and will get even bigger by spreading across all the generations that have the same thoughts and ideas but didn’t have enough numbers to make it widespread all at once.
We have a real chance here to make change in this moment and it’s so exciting. We tried to erode at this one wave at a time and we did some damage. We had some major storms every once in a while. But today, today, this is like a tidal wave and it’s going to make that whole cliff just collapse instantaneously.
I can feel it. I am so grateful to see it in my lifetime. That’s another hashtag for me, by the way, in my lifetime, because for as much as my generation’s efforts were making a dent in the system, it really took a toll on us and I just got the feeling that we weren’t going to see it happen.. The professional women had it really rough in a society when women were expected to just stay home and wait for the man.
Saying it now is so much worse than I remember living it. This isn’t that long ago, and that’s why the disruption that’s taking hold is so exciting because I don’t want you to go through what we went through. There is absolutely no reason for you to, and we do care. We haven’t forgotte and even though it’s harsh to relive, we want to tell you what it was like so that you can carry the knowledge forward. You’ll know what to look out for in case the greedy bastards try to put it all back in place. Like what’s happening in Georgia right now.
Yep. Greedy bastards. I said it out loud. I did not edit it out. I had to mark the episode as explicit, that’s why that tiny ‘E’ on the podcast on your phone. Probably never noticed it, but it’s there. I just felt like cleaning up my holy Hells and F words was losing the emphasis in the moment.
“Greedy, you know what?”, just doesn’t cut it when you’re speaking about the system that’s thrilled by our struggles because it presents financial opportunity for them and a chance to stay in charge. F that.
So this pandemic has definitely brought this problem into the glaring white light of how negligent our country has been in providing structure to care for our children and families. And instead, relied on the backs of women that are being held back from financial gain and without compensation for their multiple full-time positions. And the only way, the only way we even made it this far was because of the empathy of the sisterhood, caring for each other.
Empathy. If you look it up on Google, it pops up the Google books Ngram Viewer that, if you are a total nerd like me, you spend way too many hours manipulating the word search just to watch the data chase. I know too much geekiness. Okay.
The viewer lets you know how many times certain words or phrases have been used in books over time from 1800 to today. So 200 years. Since most of our words have ancient beginnings, you would think they would have popped up and written works over that 200 year period.
Still, if you look up empathy on the viewer, just type it into Chrome and the definition and this Viewer pop-up at the top of the page…If you look it up, the word empathy barely gets off the zero axis until around 1945, basically the end of World War II. The whole idea of empathy, of caring for each other, doesn’t even enter society’s form of learning until seventy-five years ago. And even then, it showed up point zero zero zero zero one percent, PERCENT, of the time, which is still basically zero. Seventy-five years later, it’s only moved over one decimal point.
Empathy is a new concept in the English system. And so little has been written about it in comparison to, oh, I don’t know, wealthy, wealthy men, wealthy men and bosses… But what’s really interesting is that the usage data curve of empathy is exactly the same as the data curve of female boss. Yep. I’m not making this up. Try it yourself. Not the same quantities, but the same uptick of zero axis starting in 1945 and rising still to this day.
Coincidence, no way women and empathy are inextricable. Empathy gets even deeper and more profound in cultures that still live by this standard of caring for others rather than money and profit.
This is why we need women and all the cultures, who sacrifice everything in order to care for their family, to step into leadership. We need them to step into leadership to be the policy makers because they do so through empathetic decisions and strategy.
We saw this during the pandemic with the stability and reassurance in New Zealand and Scotland and Ireland. The female leaders of those countries came together to discuss openly and freely what should be done to protect their citizens from this horrible pandemic, admitting that it was occurring, understanding what had to be done, even if it meant locked down immediately in order to secure the stability of their countries.
But if these women have sacrificed everything, including their profession, how are we going to make this happen, ladies? What type of business model could we develop that would give women the freedom to maintain their professional achievements while still having children or caring for parents and not burning out.
How can we support women so they don’t have to choose between caring for themselves, caring for their expertise or caring for their families? These are the immediate life-changing ideas that can come to fruition if we focus our attention on them all together.
For instance, we know it takes a village to meet the needs of each one and thankfully we are seeing the resurgence of community after a long period of neglect, whether from economic bias disrupting our neighborhoods or loss of faith fueling our consumerism or technology manipulating us into this pod lifestyle, the need for community across all generations is imperative for the security and wellbeing of women and families.
We know things have worked in the past, but it takes empathy to put them in place again. So take a moment this weekend and chat about it with your girlfriends. Talk about your worries, your wants, freely and openly, and just put it all out there. This is much too big to have to deal with on your own.
Let’s really get the discussion going so that we can come to an empathetic soul-ution that gives you the freedom to make choices that are true to who you are. Let’s carry this discussion beyond the census taker mentality, beyond the checked boxes, the spreadsheet, and instead have empathy to consider every woman’s situation and needs, to reach out to each other and openly paint the picture of a healthy and happy life from each point of view.
I would love to hear what came up when you got together on this. I’m guessing that your innovations and ideas are far different than what we have in place today because you are designing it on your own needs and not stop-gap ideas.
If you are living in a supportive and caring community, I would love to share the ideals with this audience so perhaps they could recreate them in their own location.
Also, check out our website at TheLnxx.com, that’s LN Double X, for more information of the amazing Cal Poly students that invented the Jada System and brought it to market.
Move to your groove, ladies, this dance is yours!
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I really appreciate the time you take to rate and review the podcast. Get the backstory and what you’ve heard here today, and reach out to us at TheLnxx.com. That’s L N double X, because it’s about time, it’’s about us. Stay in the groove on our social media at LifeLinks and get ready to make your move, ladies.
Viva!
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