Ofon-Mbuk, What Are You Thinking About?

Hello, Friends!

This week's essay is a little different, and I've been looking forward to sending it more than most. Instead of starting from my own life, I sat down with someone and asked her five questions about the people who shaped her, and the people she has shaped. I hope there will be many more conversations like this here, with people who think seriously about what their presence does to the people around them. But for the first one, there was only ever one person I wanted to ask. She's one of the people who matter most to me, and by the end, I think you'll see why.

We start here.

Her name is Jessica Ekong. We met in 2017, in the first weeks of our master's program at Pepperdine, and I'll come back to that. She's been a CHRO and an HR executive, and she's led talent teams at brands like Nike, Target, and Amazon. Today she runs her own firm, MindShift Coaching Group, teaches at Portland State's School of Business, and advises the executive co-chairs of our program's alumni council.

I've listened to the recording of our conversation four or five times now. Every time, I end up going back to the same few minutes, in a car in Cleveland.

The Passenger Seat

Before her dad went to seminary, there were stretches when he was between jobs, and Jessica, not yet school age, spent a lot of time riding around Cleveland with him. Errands, mostly, and a few stops that might give his congregation a good chuckle today. He's an ordained pastor now, and he preaches every Sunday.

She spent those rides in the passenger seat of his gray, boat-shaped car. Sometimes the car would go silent. And into the silence, her dad would ask:

"Ofon-Mbuk, what are you thinking about?"

Ofon-Mbuk is her middle name, from Ibibio, her father's language. She told me it means a good story, or something worth talking about.

To understand why that question mattered, you have to know what surrounded it. Her dad is a Nigerian immigrant. Her mother and grandmother are from Montgomery, Alabama, and they raised her by the rules that a lot of Southern Black families kept, even after moving north. Children are to be seen and not heard. You speak when you're spoken to. You don't talk back, and you don't challenge adults. "If someone in authority says something to me, I'm not supposed to question it," she said, "but then when I become an adult in the workforce, I'm magically supposed to know how to advocate for myself."

Her father's question cut against all of it, one car ride at a time.

"It taught me that I should have thoughts," she told me. "It taught me that my thoughts deserve to be heard. That a man should want to know what I'm thinking."

It taught her something practical, too: if someone might ask what you think, you'd better have an opinion, and be ready to say why. Later, that gave her the nerve to question bosses and executives, people with more money and more power than her. "I understood that it was my right to ask the question," she said, "and often my right to have access to the response."

It didn't always go over well at home. Her mother was not a fan of a daughter who often asked "why," always wanting to understand how and why things worked a certain way. "Because I am your Mother and I said so" didn't really land well for a kid who was logical and an avid learner. And her dad, she said, enjoyed it plenty when she agreed with him, and a good deal less once she started wanting different things for her life.

I've known Jessica for nine years. I've watched her ask the question nobody else would ask more times than I can count. I always assumed it came naturally. Some of it surely did; something in her was ready for that question before it was ever asked. But the practice came from a passenger seat.

Before She Had to Ask

As an adult, Jessica was working in talent acquisition at Target when the company began staffing its move into Canada. Out of roughly 350 talent acquisition professionals across the company, she was the one chosen to lead the campus recruiting team going north.

The leader who hired her into that role had thought highly of her long before Canada came up. So when he saw her pay, and the pay grade she'd been sitting in, he was surprised. Then he was angry. In her telling, his reaction amounted to: "Girl, you're underpaid."

He didn't stop at saying so. He gave her the largest increase he could alongside the promotion, and then he apologized. He was sorry, she said, that she had been doing work at such a high level, with her talent and her results, for what she'd been paid.

"I didn't have to ask," she told me. "Someone else said, you're not getting what you deserve, and then did something about it."

It would be easy to file that away as a good boss doing a good thing. Jessica hears more in it. "For many people, we're often just happy to be there," she said. "Particularly if you grew up with a scarcity mindset. Particularly if you grew up as a member of a marginalized group, and you're told at home you have to work twice as hard to have half as much." And then, she said, the world shows you that's true.

From where I sit, I can tell you this is rare. I have watched so many leaders let the chance to pay someone fairly go by, even when the person deserved it, and even when they'd asked for it outright. I know Jessica was grateful. I'd bet she never once mistook it for common practice.

Her father had taught her that her thoughts were worth hearing. This was the first time someone with power showed her what she was worth before she said a word. Years later, she'd be a CHRO herself, the one in a position to see the number first. Her approach, she told me, comes down to this: you've already done the work to be here, so pay people in a way that says, "I value you today."

What It's Like to Experience Her

With one of the alumni council co-chairs, someone she met only when the work began, Jessica kept noticing the same thing. She'd offer an insight or a piece of feedback, and this person would go somewhere. A long pause, eyes off in the distance. Jessica is direct, by her own description. She says the things that need to be said, and she pays close attention to how they land. She wasn't asking about tone, she told me. She wanted to know whether how she showed up felt like too much.

So she asked. "I noticed you have these long pauses, and you seem to go off into another place after I share some feedback. I'm curious, for you, what is it like to experience me?"

It's her father's question, turned around.

The answer has stayed with me since the first time I heard the recording. Being in conversation with Jessica, the co-chair told her, is like being in a well-lit room. With each insight, it's as if she flips on another light switch, revealing what was there all along that they had never noticed.

"My God," Jessica said, telling me about it. "That was powerful."

For years, when she shared something like that, what came back was a blank stare, or a nod. She took the nods as agreement: yes, I saw that too. Only this year, talking with friends, did she learn what the nodding meant. She makes things sound so simple that people nod along, and what they don't say is that it had never once crossed their minds until she said it.

My own sense, having been there more than once, is that the simplicity is what does it. What she says is so plain that it takes you somewhere deeper than you expected to go, and you're still down there thinking when the conversation moves on. Whatever you might have said back to her gets lost in that gap. She's left with a nod and very little to go on.

Nobody had told her. "For a very long time," she said, "I would just end up thinking I was crazy." She got frustrated enough to wonder whether she should start keeping her thoughts to herself.

The girl from the passenger seat, taught that her thoughts deserved to be heard, came close to deciding they weren't worth saying. Nobody had asked her to stop. Nobody had told her what her voice was doing, either. What she's starting to hear from people now sharpens her, she said. "That is the gift that came back to me."

Across the Circle

I've been on the other end of that gap for years.

I've spent a lot of nights on FaceTime or Marco Polo with Jessica, talking through whatever I was in the middle of while she put words to what I was actually experiencing. I can't point to one specific time I left her with nothing but a nod. I know there were plenty of nights she left me somewhere deeper than where I'd started, and I'd bet what she got back from me was thinner than what she gave.

She does this everywhere. Some of you may remember the friend who walked with me through the National Museum of African American History and Culture in "Another Line in the Ledger." That was Jessica. I was looking at the exhibits. She was also watching the people around us: who was letting the experience in, and who was hurrying through it.

Our friendship started in a circle. Jessica and I began the program in August 2017. By our second residential intensive, the following February at Pajaro Dunes on the California coast, we had already found each other. That week we were placed in what the program called an Experiential Learning Group, a descendant of the old T-group. If you've never been in one, picture members of a cohort sitting in a circle for two days, more or less staring at one another until someone breaks. Then people start to share, and to say out loud what they notice in each other. People cried. People got angry. People got hurt. It was intense.

The whole program is built on an idea called self as instrument: that the most important tool you bring to helping people and organizations change is yourself. What you notice, what you feel, how you show up. Most of us spent two years learning what that meant. Jessica arrived already practicing it.

She sat directly across from me. I couldn't tell you now what either of us said. What I remember is that when it was my turn and the tears came, I kept finding her face. It made it easier to keep going, and safer. In a few moments over those two days, I felt seen by her in a way I'm not sure I have felt before or since.

Six months later, the cohort was in Lyon, France. We did client work during the day and spent our evenings doing personal work with one another. I was ten years into a relationship that was not good for me, and by then I had gotten very good at looking fine. During one of those evening sessions, my mind was back home, and I couldn't shake the unease. I got up to go to the restroom. Jessica followed me.

"I can see you're not okay," she said, "and I just need you to know I'm here."

That was all. I teared up. I wasn't okay, and I hadn't been for a long time, and I had been so sure nobody could tell. She could tell.

Before we left Lyon, she asked one more thing of me. She asked me to reflect on whether I was actually happy, or whether I was only telling myself I was, out of a sense of obligation to the relationship.

It was a question my therapist hadn't even asked yet. Jessica already knew the answer, even though I wasn't ready to say it out loud. It would be near the end of that year before I could answer it honestly. She was one of the first people to see through my carefully constructed smile.

Here's the part that gets me. Jessica has never let me wonder what I mean to her. Over the years, out of nowhere, she'll send me a screenshot of a conversation we had years earlier, something she's still been sitting with. Not long ago, she was telling me about a way her thinking had shifted on something personal, and she stopped to say, "I just want you to see your impact." She gives that away freely. It's part of the gift, too.

I've gone back to Lyon again and again in the eight years since. And I don't think I've ever told her.

What Are You Thinking About?

This is the twenty-fifth essay I've sent you, and the first time I've handed the page to someone else. There were a few reasons it had to be her. Partly because she, more than anyone I know, wants to understand what it's like to be on the other side of her. Partly because a good deal of what I try to bring to these essays traces back to her. And partly because she deserves to be written about, by name, as the Black woman she is: one who has changed the people around her, me among them, in a world that has rarely made that easy.

When I set out to interview her, I thought I was asking a leader about the people who shaped her. Somewhere around the third or fourth listen, I realized I was also hearing a question she has been asking for years and rarely getting a full answer to: what is it like to experience me?

I've never given her a full answer. This essay is my attempt.

Her father couldn't have known what his question was doing on all those drives around Cleveland. He asked because he wanted to know what his little girl was thinking. That question went with her into executive meetings, where, she told me, she still scans for where the power sits. When you've so often been the only Black person at the table, that habit doesn't fully leave. She brings her voice anyway.

It went with her into a circle of near strangers at Pajaro Dunes, and out of a session in Lyon, after a friend who wasn't okay.

Most of the people who shape us never find out. Most of the people we shape won't tell us, either. They'll nod, go somewhere deeper, and the conversation will move on.

So here's what I haven't been able to put down since I first heard her responses. Who is sitting in your passenger seat right now? And when was the last time you asked them what they were thinking?

Her father named her Ofon-Mbuk. She told me it means a good story, or something worth talking about. He gave her the name, and then he spent years asking what she was thinking.

Here we are, talking about her. Talking about what she's thinking.

"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." —MB

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