Title:
Disability Pride and Business Strategy | Jonathan Kaufman
Subtitle:
A Conversation on Revolutionizing Disability in Corporate Advocacy
Transcript:
Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.
Let’s go.
Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. This is the podcast where we celebrate, disability inclusion, and we are celebrating the season of Disability Pride Month, and boy do I have a guest that’s gonna be able to lift that up for us.
Joining me today is Jonathan Kaufman. He is a business strategist. He’s a licensed psychotherapist, he’s an executive coach. He’s a powerhouse thought leader. He’s everywhere consistently in disability advocacy. He was born with cerebral palsy and, he’s breaking boundaries and advocating and making space for all of us.
He does extraordinary work. He’s also an adventurer. He’s hiked the Ecuadorian Highlands. He’s skied down mountains. He’s repelled cliffs. Wow. And he’s been named top 50 global thought leader in diversity and inclusion and mental health by Thinkers 360 for three years running.
Thank you for joining the show.
Jonathan Kaufman: I so appreciate you having me. Truly
Alycia Anderson: It is exciting to meet you.
Okay. So let’s dive in.
Jonathan Kaufman: Let’s dive in.
Alycia Anderson: You’ve lived your entire life with cerebral palsy, so you’ve got the lived experience of disability lifelong, just like me.
Can you take us back to the early moments and how that has shaped you into the space that you’re in, in this world? Can we look back a little bit?
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah I think there are a couple of, sort of real moments that shifted the way I look at disability. I was brought up understanding I have a right hemiparesis, a form of cerebral palsy. So obviously that’s sort of the medical definition. I have a father who is a practicing physician and professor of medicine at Yale.
So growing up we would have these sort of arguments from the medical model and the social model continuously. Yeah, it was really, I mean it’s still to this day it’s still fascinating. But I think it’s shifted. There were sort of various moments. The sort of first moments is my dad was raised in Brooklyn and lived around the corner from Judy Huemann. So
I knew Judy a long time, and actually, we would never talk about disability per se. She’d always asked about my dating life, my sex life, anything. But that was here nor there. When I realized like was a world that I was interested in, not just from the perspective of the lived experience, but I was interested in it from an academic world.
I was training as a social scientist, whatever that meant. There wasn’t such a thing as disability studies when I was going to school, so I had to make it up. And then I went to college at Oxford University, so I went abroad which gave me completely different perspective of disability globally. I also was in a college, that was built in 1612, so it wasn’t exactly the most accessible place you could be, but you figure it out. I am old enough that I was right around the start of the ADA.
That’s when I was coming into being, and my consciousness was raised at that point. Came back to the states, said, what do I want to do? And went to graduate school, went to the University of Chicago and was studying human development, public policy. It was a combination of things and I was being trained as a psychotherapist. I was studying sociology, anthropology, two people shifted everything. One was the future President of the United States, Barack Obama, and I was on a medical ethics committee with Michelle for many years. I was in Chicago for about six and a half years. And the other was a guy by the name of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who was a professor. He was the founder of Positive Psychology. He wrote this famous book called Flow
Alycia Anderson: Can we break that down though? Let’s stop for a minute. Okay. So you just dropped the Obama’svery casually, so let’s talk about that a little bit. He was one of the moments that shifted, like what happened?
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah, okay, so I was at the, School of Public Policy at the time, and he was teaching class on diversity and inclusion of the law. He was a law professor, so I was interested in that, and so I went. I had a lot of friends who knew him were at the law school, and then I went back to New York, ’cause I went to Columbia University to do my MPhil and PhD work, in applied anthropology.
And I was interested in the culture of work through a disability lens. That’s the world I was really interested in. And studying businesses and studying organizations and how they worked. And this has led me, to what I do now, or a lot of what I do now. And so friends of mine were like, he’s running for President of the United States.
Do you want to hop on board? I was like, yeah. But I was moving to Los Angeles at the time. I lived in LA for a few years and I was flying back and forth. Eventually he won and I was advising, doing some advisory work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and then also had a portfolio of working with several different US Department of Labor, Veterans Affairs various other things within the administration, but I wasn’t there full time. And, when I left I was like, okay, what do I wanna do with my life? I knew I didn’t want to go into academic, and so I started consulting firm. I started consulting practice and my interest was really looking at the intersection of business, disability, innovation, leadership, mental health and culture. That’s the sort of space that I inhabit. And as I said to you right before we got on, there’s a saying that anthropologists have, we are the professional strangers and very much so in similar ways as a psychotherapist, which I continue to practice.
You are the professional stranger in terms of understanding sort of the inner workings of how people think, and that’s much so in the same way how organizations run. So I had the sort of organizational perspective from the anthropology perspective as well as sort of the life of the mind. How it works. And, coming at it from that standpoint really gave me a unique point of view. So I ended up starting this business, and I said, look, the fact of the matter is I have to create my own world. I have to create my own opportunities, people with disabilities, the world is not made for us. So I have to say, okay. And, what was really important for me is like I’m one person with a disability and I met John Kemp, who’s very famous disability, civil rights leader when I was teenager.
He always used to say, when you meet one person with a disability, you’ve met one person with a disability. And having the experiences I’ve had both as a clinician. As a social scientist, you realize that’s the case and that disability is, to me, it’s the essence of diversity. It really is. It runs across race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, and what’s fascinating is that what we’re seeing is if you’re lucky enough to age and most of us age. This is a community we all join. So it’s inclusive by definition. And the fact of the matter is I often tell people who are aging, I said, welcome to my community. This is something that’s to be inclusive.
And,the idea of the notion of accessibility. When you think about the notion of how you navigate this notion of disability in our lives, this should be something that’s seen as not commonplace, but a natural progression.
That disability is part of the human experience. It’s not separate from, and it weaves itself into the natural order of things. And, that’s why I think understanding disability is so important and that for businesses, it isn’t about a cost center. This is about creativity.
This is about innovation. This is about design. And, the fact of the matter is that’s what’s been really fascinating to me and being able to create my own life around this have the sort of diverse experiences that I continue to have has been phenomenal.
Alycia Anderson: I love everything that you just said, and that whole progression of being a human and disability being a part of that is so true. And you’ve witnessed this life from Judy Huemann to Barack Obama to going all these amazing schools experiencing accessibility around the world. Why is it so difficult for us to understand this?
Why in the heck is it so difficult? What are you finding, like specifically in this like search of finding the connection of disability and business and like culture, like what’s going on?
Jonathan Kaufman: I mean, what’s going on is, it’s always interesting. So there was a wonderful book by a French author named Henri-Jacques Stiker. He wrote it.
I’d say 30 years ago.
It’s called The History of Disability, and it was in French. I had to find it in English. My French wasn’t that good. But I found it about 15 years ago. Read it. And what’s fascinating when you look at the history of disability, it was always a sense of others. In and that othering. And so he traces disability 2000, about 2,500 years back to biblical times through the Greeks and really around Western civilization and this is just Western civilization, what we’re talking about, because I can go beyond that, but let’s start there. There has been a sense of othering. That has been a natural part. If you look at even, you go even within the last, let’s say, a hundred years, 150 years to be exact, you have, the ugly laws, for example, and how they created this barrier. And ultimately what it comes down to is the F word fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of othering. And, what that often does is, either this is something that’s different that’s not quote unquote normal or other, or you have people who are, this could happen to me and if it happens to me, will there be a problem?
Now, the problem isn’t the person, the problem is society. The problem is that, oh, we’re not designing, we’re not creating. A culture that really leans into this type of society. Now, the good thing is, the positive thing that we’re, what we’re noticing is we’re having a global aging population. And, what that says to me, in this global aging population, from an economic standpoint, you have a lot of people with a lot of money or disposable income globally. Now they recognize, wait a minute, if the world is not made for us, then we have to do something about it. And thankfully, there’s this convergence of technology and in terms of where it’s going, and particularly in the world of AI and portable computing in, in variety of capacities. It’s gaining enormous traction. The ability to see architecture in new ways when curb cuts, for example, is one thing that has, I tell people all the time, when I speak to people or whether it’s when I’m teaching or whether I’m giving a lecture or wherever it may be, how many of you text and everyone raises their hand or says yeah.
Text. Do you know where that started? And people are like, no. It started at Gallaudet University in 1976 for the deaf community. So, if you look at technology and where it’s emanated from, the provost of MIT told me this is now four or five years ago. He’s anecdotally speaking, about 67% of our student body is somewhere on the autism spectrum. So if you think about it, just from those two data points,
Alycia Anderson: Wow.
Jonathan Kaufman: you realize that technology in itself has always been a necessity. And we have had, we collectively in the disability community have had to create a new, because it had to be. It was part of our DNA. We had to continue to evolve and create. I always think about it when I’m walking down the street in New York, which is where I live, and saying, okay, I gotta go to the subway. I have to think 10 steps ahead it’s okay, am I spastic today? Am I, am I tight today? It depends again in, obviously in the East coast we have seasons, so it’s is it snowing?
Is it not snowing? But what that also does is. It informs the fact that people with disabilities are great strategists by the mere nature of their lived experience. There we’re always constantly thinking and strategizing I’ve noticed that and say, how can you take that knowledge and that skillset and modify it in different ways?
Alycia Anderson: I love what you just said and I wrote it down ’cause I love it. Disability, we’ve always had to create a new, like disabled people always had to create a new.
It’s so true. That is such a beautiful, a really beautiful way to say it,
And we’re forced to.
Jonathan Kaufman: I wrote for Forbes for four and a half years. I wrote a series of columns called Mindset Matters and during that time it evolved and I recognize disability is a language of innovation. It truly is. That lived experience is a language of innovation. And I also think, it’s an art. The way in which we live. Those of us that live with disabilities. Yes. Art can be heart wrenching. It can be awful, but it can be beautiful and it is that spectrum that we live. But it’s important to understand that and to have some perspective on that so that when I am looking at this and saying, wait a minute, how do people with disabilities reclaim power? How do we, it’s how we perceive disability that’s going to become the way forward. We have to say, how do we reclaim our understanding of that power dynamic. And that’s where I’m writing about and I think for the first time and in part in a large part due to social media, is that there is this access in which we can, we, the proverbial we. Can communicate to each other, to other people, and really pull down those walls, that artifice that’s there of the unknown and say, Hey, these are people who enjoy everything just like you and me. This is part of the human experience. That’s all it is. Simple as that.
Alycia Anderson: Totally. I love it. And that’s very interesting.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah, I write as I write all the time.
So it’s like everyone has said to me, why aren’t you writing a book? Why aren’t you writing a book? And I’m like I’ve been hesitant about it. I’m like, why? Why? Why should I fear it? I write constantly anyways. I have been writing since as far back as I can remember, and I love it. So yeah it’s in process.
Alycia Anderson: I feel like that’s a very natural fit for you.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And it’s just putting stuff that I’ve already written before and reworking it and then also new stuff and new ideas .
Alycia Anderson: So as a psychotherapist.
Yeah.
And, a business strategist.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: How do you see the intersection of mental health? I know mental health is a big piece of your platform and disability showing up in leadership and in workplace culture.
Jonathan Kaufman: I think there’s several things. One, when you’re always looking at leadership, I think the idea of leadership has changed over the past, I’d say 30 to 40 years there’s been this sort of, this top down approach and now we’re in this new phase of understanding radical honesty and radical honesty is one way of thinking about it.
And, also psychological safety. If the world of work is changing, the culture of work is changing. The idea of having a nine to five job is going the way of the dodo. The fact of the matter is we are in this digital world where people can do remote work, which opens up a cadre of possibilities for people with disabilities.
Yes, there is pushback in these days, but I do think if you wanna get the best and the brightest and you wanna retain the best and the brightest, you have to be flexible. In that flexibility, what does that mean as far as mental health is concerned and wellbeing?
That’s essential and that is part of the look, that’s part of the umbrella of disability is mental health. It often, sometimes, if we look at a disability as a caste system, its often sometimes on the lower end and it really shouldn’t. We all deal with mental stresses and wellbeing all the time, but that shouldn’t be seen as something that’s a negative per se. It’s okay. We have to navigate life.
Alycia Anderson: There are situational aspects that come up.Real quick what you just said too is how mental health is on the bottom. Like of the list typically of disability initiatives and like all these things that are up at top of mind.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: I read something the other day that, accessibility and accommodation requests from a mental health standpoint, those are some of the top, most requested from an accommodation standpoint.
So have you heard that?
Jonathan Kaufman: I’ve heard it and I write about it consistently. Because when I go into companies, one of the questions that’s always is, okay, accommodations is one thing. It’s not just the physical nature of the problem.
Alycia Anderson: Right.
Jonathan Kaufman: Or being able to say, okay, what if you need a break? What is it about wellbeing? How do we structure a workday so that you can get the most productivity out of this individual, and that is part and parcel to mental health. What does that mean in terms of quality of work and quality of life?
Alycia Anderson: Yeah.
Jonathan Kaufman: If you don’t have one, you cannot have the other. So it is really critical to say, okay, what are the mechanics?
And a lot of the stuff that I work on with individuals, whether that’s executive coaching or organizations, is how to develop those mechanics around that. What does that actually mean and how does that work fit within our corporate culture or with me as an individual saying, okay, here’s the situation. Here’s what my needs are. Everyone has to be their own best self-advocate. ‘ cause no one knows themselves better than themselves. And you have to say, how can I self-advocate? That’s something that I think for me in my line of work, I can see doing that and working on that as something that’s a critical piece.
Actually, a cornerstone piece is self-advocacy because what happens is, particularly in the disability community, oftentimes is not talked about, but it’s beginning to be there, there’s some light being shed on it is internalized ableism.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah.
Jonathan Kaufman: I certainly grew up with it.
Alycia Anderson: Me too.
Jonathan Kaufman: I know myself, I was like I don’t wanna be seen as that.
When people around me, but then I started to say screw it. You know what, this is who I am. If people don’t like me, goodbye. I was very fortunate to have really loving parents who gave me that confidence to say they’re not worth it
Alycia Anderson: How long did that take you?
Jonathan Kaufman: I’m still working on it.
Alycia Anderson: And you know what, I love that. I love your kind of thinking about self-advocacy as a big part of your platform because especially in business and in work environments, I am just the same as you. I had 20 years in a corporate position and made it to executive level and had a really successful career doing that. And, but I never wanted to be the one to self-advocate and to ask and to say, and I think like overcoming that internalized ableism at work is really hard, as an individual to just have to go in and do the whole hustle and do what everybody else is doing.
And then be brave or bold or daring, or just be you to say what you need. Like that’s really, really, really, really hard. Even if you’re, you feel like you’re somewhat settled with your disability, you know, it’s hard.
Jonathan Kaufman: Listen, I work with CEOs and I work with high level executives. I have to tell you, sometimes they are terrified and even so we do, I do a lot of role play. I said, what if, what’s the worst thing that can happen? They say no. Okay, and what if they did say no? Are you any different than you were two minutes ago? No,
Alycia Anderson: Yeah.
Jonathan Kaufman: you say, all right, so now I’ve gotten it. I’ve received it. That information, yeah, it may feel like a gut punch at times, but now one door closes, another opens. I hate to use that sort of bold terminology, but there is some truth to that.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah, there is.
Jonathan Kaufman: And, you have to be able and being able to adapt and for people with disabilities in terms of their lives. They’ve had to be advocates in other ways. And sometimes that’s not as explicit, but implicit in the sense of I don’t even know that I’m being, I’m advocating for myself, but I am. But it’s recognizing that and what are the tools that one needs so that they can move forward. And those are challenges.
And I will be the first to say to anybody, I’m still a work in progress.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah, me too. Probably lifelong,
Honestly.
Jonathan Kaufman: I always think it’s lifelong.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah. okay, so you’re talking a lot about your business. I wanna give you space on this show to talk about through a broader lens, your consulting, what you are bringing to the table for you know, your company and your career and how you’re helping a lot of organizations.
Like what is it that you do?
Jonathan Kaufman: And this is the question my wife always ask. She’s she has something in her own, I swear to, she’s I have to tell people what you do, and I’m not really sure what it is. And I say to people, look, and I’ve said this before I work at these intersections, but what people hire me to actually do is to think for a living and not only to think for a living, to say how do we, what are the outcomes we want?
So whether it’s as an executive coach or, particularly, it’s okay, I want to work through particular issues. Help me do that. So that one, we can deal with specific problems. A lot of people are coming to me and say what’s the disability economy? What’s the longevity economy? How do we deal with that?
That’s the external pieces of, okay, because we realize this is a market that we can’t afford to leave out.
Secondly, there’s also, then there’s the other thing, the internal pieces. How do we work in terms of workforce issues? And it isn’t just about, there are a lot of people who do hiring stuff. I do what is called corporate ethnography. I embed myself with an organization to truly understand the culture in which they live. It’s not a turnkey, it’s really about developing what one would say alliances. The alliance is me and them in finding the best solutions. ’cause ultimately these organizations are experts at what they do. So, it’s how do you bring that expertise together so that you can have the best outcome? And whether that is through a consultative process, whether that’s through an executive coaching process, it is, I’ve never done the same thing twice, even if it may be for the same industry. ’cause it’s different people, it’s different organizations. And their different needs. ’cause ultimately what I’m here to do is I am in the helping profession. That’s essentially what I do. And when I get down to the essence of it, whether it’s dealing with sort of corporate issues, whether it’s dealing with organizational issues within, whether it’s dealing with teams, ERGs, or just how teams work. To, okay, let’s see how to structure this business we enter these new marketplaces. What can we do? That’s really it. And then from a psychotherapeutic point of view or coaching that’s more traditional.
Of my clients, they’re dealing a it’s mostly executives, people who are white collar.
I have economists, lawyers, doctors, but then there are people who have become disabled in their lives or aging and saying, okay, how do I deal with change this new identity that I now, whether I like it or not, have to wield, have to wear and have to understand and how to deal with the pain, the struggle, the sadness, but also the joy of I’m still alive.
Alycia Anderson: Yeah.
Jonathan Kaufman: And there is a lot of stuff I can do, but it’s getting over that hump. So there are many things I have the beauty of, again, and I go back to this notion of being the professional stranger in some ways because I have this ability to see the world in very different ways, and I am industry agnostic. So I work with a variety of different companies, a variety of different industries, and excited to do it. Bob Dylan had, a line. He said, I’ll know my song well before I start singing, and it was really important for me in this space of disability. Yeah, I was born, but this is my disability.
It’s not everyone else’s. So I sort of said, okay, I went into academics to really study and understand it and think about it, but it, I was interested in how do you apply it, not just the theoretical, to take this knowledge and apply it in real ways and so that it benefits the organizations or the individuals that I work with. I think that’s the best way I could say that I work. ‘ cause it, it is different. It’s in a consultative manner. So when people come to work with me, it’s okay, you have to recognize this is in many ways, some ways intensive, but it solves a problem. And, we are here to find better solutions.
Alycia Anderson: And you’re in the hands of a psychotherapist, which is like a bonus, you know? It’s amazing.
Jonathan Kaufman: Exactly. When people are having real issues,
Alycia Anderson: I like it.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: That’s really good work. I love it. Congratulations.
Jonathan Kaufman: Thank you. Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: So it’s disability pride.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: I have a question for you about disability pride.
Jonathan Kaufman: Sure.
Alycia Anderson: What does disability pride mean to you?
Jonathan Kaufman: This is always an interesting question to me because I am a firm believer that there’s a feeling that we are all in the act of becoming, and because we are all in the act of becoming. Disability Pride to me, is something that is a sort of a constant evolution, and I think it’s being able to embrace the notion of how we look at disability in itself.
My thesis advisor was a linguist and was an anthropologist, a French anthropologist, and he studied language and the etymology of language. The origins of language. So we always had this conversation when I was a graduate student of, what is this word disability? And everyone tries to change it in different ways. And I think sometimes when we’re, we’ve talked about this notion of how do we reclaim disability as a word, as an idea, as a concept. And so, for me, disability pride has always been about this sort of constant evolution of watching people and how they’re reclaiming it in different ways, and I’m always excited by, because I knew. I’m in the sandwich. I knew people who were part of the early disability, civil rights movement in the sixties and seventies. I knew them later in their lives, and I know people now were coming up and using social media and using technology and becoming influencers in different ways and saying what is disability and seeing that evolution. Of what disability pride is. So I never have a definitive answer.
Alycia Anderson: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Kaufman: Because I always think of it as this act of becoming. What I am really embracing is the notion that, yes, I have a disability and I’m proud of the person I am becoming with a disability, understanding that it is a part of who I am.
It’s not all of me, but it makes me who I am. And, I see the world through this lens and I’m happy to see it through this lens.
Alycia Anderson: Disability pride is an act of becoming. I like that a lot.
Super beautiful. I think that you said that very eloquently and I love that. I do think this is a fluid process for sure.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: Thank you for sharing that. I think disability pride is an interesting month because I think we as disabled people are trying to figure out what that means in the moment, like you’re saying.
And the world is also grappling with what that means for them and understanding why we would be prideful, so I think it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting moment in the year to do some reflection on it. Okay, so before we wrap up,
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah.
Alycia Anderson: we’re gonna leave all of your information, first of all, and foremost in the show notes and clickable links where.
Our community can follow you and learn from you, and hire you and work with you and all of those good things. Whoever’s not following you needs to because you’re constantly putting out very, very insightful, amazing information and I thoroughly enjoy it. Okay.
Did we miss anything before I surprise you with the pushing forward moment.
Jonathan Kaufman: No I don’t think so. I don’t know.
Alycia Anderson: I think this is a really incredible conversation. You’re very interesting. I love it.
Jonathan Kaufman: Okay, so pushing forward moment. Do you have something, a little like mantra quote, you’ve already given us quite a few beautiful quotes that I love. But like, what do you live by that kind of keeps you pushing forward?
It’s this was a book that was given to me. It was written in 1928 and it was booked by a literary critic and the book was called The Wound in the Bow. And one of the things that was really interesting for me is that this has been the mantra of my life. I will make my wound into my bow.
Means is my wound is my disability, I will make it into something that is powerful like a bow. I will make it into something that I can launch things with, that I can launch myself, that I can launch ideas that could be something that is powerful unto oneself and turn something that is seen as a negative into a positive. And, that is the mantra in which I have lived, which I have encapsulated my life because I always am pushing. I’m grateful that I have two very, two Type A New York City parents who pushed me, who never saw, yes, I had a disability. But so what can you do? Not what you can’t do. What can you do?
And let’s find out and not lean in with fear. And this is where the wound and the bow sort of plays into it, but lean in with curiosity. And that is how I live my life, is I lean in with curiosity. I don’t wanna be fearful of anything. Now, there are days where it’s okay, I need a moment, take a beat. But ultimately, it’s understanding that I am here and, I’m trying to create that purpose. So the wound in the bow is how I’ve begun to see my life, live my life in such a way.
Alycia Anderson: The wound and the bow.
I love it. I need to read that book.
Jonathan Kaufman: Yeah, I’d have to see if it’s in print still.
Alycia Anderson: Gosh, thank you for coming on the show.
I’m so excited that we did this. This was a fascinating conversation and congratulations on just living such a cool and interesting multi-layered life.
Jonathan Kaufman: I try.
Alycia Anderson: I think you’re leaving a really lasting impact and a legacy. So congratulations on all the work you’re doing and thank you for your time, Jonathan.
Jonathan Kaufman: Thank you, Alycia. I so appreciate it.
Alycia Anderson: Thank you to our community for showing up again for another episode of Pushing Forward with Alycia, and that is literally how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next time.