#141: The Unspoken Cost of “Service-Driven Leadership” with Meera Mohan-Graham

In this episode of The Quiet Rebels® Podcast, I’m honoured to be joined by my dear friend Meera Mohan-Graham to speak with us about how we might be doing a disservice to ourselves as business owners and leaders when we pride ourselves on being “service driven” to our clients.

In this conversation, we discussed:

1. The #1 sign we internalise oppression without realising it
2. The battle between having a sense of belonging vs betraying ourselves in the process
3. How to start re-examining your values to see if you’re disguising them under a oppressive lens
4. Why being “service-driven” may not be as noble as we thought it was…
5. What to expect when you start letting go of the proud label of being service-driven

& more!

To connect further with Meera, here are links mentioned in this episode:

• Meera’s Instagram
• Meera’s Facebook
• Receive Meera’s Email Love Notes

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TRANSCRIPT:

Mai-kee Tsang: Hello, my wonderful Quiet Rebels. Welcome back to the podcast. In today’s episode, I’m really excited to have this conversation that I’ve been waiting for months to have by now. And it’s all about the unspoken cost. Of service driven leadership. So if you are a service provider and you pride yourself on, even if you’re not a service provider, if you’re simply a business owner, a leader who really prides themselves with being service driven, then this is conversation that you’re going to want to listen to, because there may be some things that you haven’t thought about that is actually maybe a little bit more damaging.

Then you think, and this is a very nuanced conversation, by the way, and it’s one that may leave you feeling a little bit tender and also one that you might want to just take your time with. And I couldn’t think of anyone better to have this conversation with me than the one and only Meera Mohan Graham.

So Meera, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to talk about this because we have never covered this topic before. In the history of this podcast, which is nearly five years at the time of this recording. And so thank you so much for being willing to open up this conversation with us. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: I am so glad to be here and to be having this conversation with you and other people who are thinking about sustainable leadership and taking care of ourselves as we lead.

Mai-kee Tsang: Yes, please. More of that. So before we get into this much needed conversation, for those who have yet to know you and your work, could you zoom out a little bit, just to tell us a bit more about the work you do and how you really came to this A whole conversation as a whole about the, cost to service driven leadership.

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah. So for a little bit of context on me and the identities that I bring to the work I do, I am a queer woman of color. I’m the daughter of Indian immigrants. I am U. S. born. And I am married to a white transgender man. And I also have other stuff going on internally, but that’s who I am in the world and how I have walked through the world and the things I’ve faced.

And the work that I do is supporting folks that I call high functioning, marginalized people. So folks that have learned to manage the world very well in challenging the subtle ways that internalized oppression is driving their behaviors, their actions, and their choices. In other words, I am trying to help us.

get free in deep and true ways so that we are not replicating the patterns that we learned in order to survive. 

Mai-kee Tsang: That speaks to me so deeply. And when you and I have had, we’ve had several conversations now on zoom leading up to this one. And every time we speak, I’m like, that’s me. I need to bring this to the podcast and what brilliant work that you do.

And I’m curious what drove you to really even dive into this at all. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: I could start from the age of five, but if I start right before, and what kind of brought me into this work? I was a documentary wedding photographer prior to, I’ve had a few different careers, but that was the work I was doing before I started doing this work of coaching marginalized people on internalized oppression.

And as a documentary photographer, as you might imagine, given who I am and how honest and open I am about my identities. I drew a lot of people like me. So it would be queer couples, interracial couples, or just couples with really complicated families. And everyone was super authentic, because that’s who wants a documentary photographer.

Because a documentary photographer is not creating posed epic photos. We’re actually capturing real emotion, real experiences. And I would go to these weddings. And I always say, wedding planning is a microcosm of every pressure that exists in a human being’s life. The wedding industry puts all of these very normative expectations on people, fairy tale normative expectations, and then every family or life dynamic you have comes to the surface.

If it’s boundary issues, if it’s messy family dynamics, like all of it seems to just all coalesce on a wedding. And I started seeing that As a documentary photographer, I’d get to these weddings and I’d want to document people feeling true to themselves, whatever real emotion came out, and people didn’t always actually feel free, like my couples, to be who they were.

They were stifled, they didn’t feel present, they didn’t feel emotionally available to their day, they were so busy managing these complicated dynamics and feelings. And so from that, I realized I had a deeper purpose. I couldn’t just say, good luck, I’ll document what I document because I felt so committed to these sets of people that were coming to me with this trust.

Mai-kee Tsang: And 

Meera Mohan-Graham: so I started coaching them. I started doing year long work where I would essentially coach people on how to make value driven choices and values aligned decisions about their weddings. What would be included? How do you bring yourself to a wedding even when you’re experiencing pushback around who you are or what your identities are?

How do you truly create a space where you are welcomed into your own day because it’s your wedding? And then I would document it photographically. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Okay, first of all, what a gift the experience of working with you must have been for all of these couples because as someone who is in a same sex relationship, and I come from both my partner and I come from a culture that doesn’t celebrate same sex relationships, let alone marriages.

And so to know that there are folks like you who exist to really, truly celebrate this union. It’s such a gift. So wow. And a part of me is darn it you you don’t do this anymore, but I would love for you to work with me for my wedding. I know 

Meera Mohan-Graham: and people will sometimes ask me and I always say, I don’t know anyone else that does it.

I created it from nothing because I saw a need, and I felt it’s felt so resonant, and then I never trained anyone to do it. And so it’s so heartbreaking because I do, I wish I could just say, Oh, go to this person. They’re doing that work now. Or go back in time. Sometimes people are like, I wish I could go back in time and you were my person.

Mai-kee Tsang: Yeah. Yeah. I have met someone who specifically works on LGBTQIAP plus weddings here in UK and I’ve always said to her like, Hey, whenever I’m ready, I’m And I even said about, hey, I might want a Pokemon wedding because my partner and I we, that, we are childhood enemies. We’re not childhood friends.

We met when we were, yeah, we met when we were 10 years old. And the thing that bonded us. in an unspoken way with actually Pokemon, because when we first met, we did not like each other, but it just so happened on this L shaped sofa that we were sitting on, like as far away as we could from each other we were playing Game Boy Advance.

We both had Game Boy SPs, which is the flip one, and we were playing the exact same game. And then when my auntie took us out shopping, we both went to the same shop which was called game and we were staring at the brand new game that we both couldn’t buy and we’re like this is weird anyway i digress point being see this is what i mean this is one of those things that i would feel Like, I would have to hide on my wedding day because it’s not so mature, it’s not so elegant.

But actually, do you know what? Who gives a damn? Because it’s our wedding day, our union. And so what it sounds to me here is that you have created a space like in your past work, and I’m sure your current work as well, but just in this context of weddings as we’re speaking about it. You’ve created such a space for these couples to not only celebrate, but to feel liberated.

For the decisions that they’re making and they have made so far up until that point. And like I said before, what a gift that must have been for every single person that you’ve or every single couple that you worked with. So I am curious now to hear how this coaching that you started doing as a documentary wedding photographer to span beyond the photography side of things.

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah the deeper I got into the wedding work, the better I got at it. And the better I got at it, the more capable I became of also having, I would have individual conversations with people. And so I had a couple where one person just experienced terrible things around her body and her size when she went to try to shop for clothing.

And. we would have a one on one conversation about what she experienced and what would be a more aligned choice and way to access what she needed and also what she needed to attend to. And what started happening in some of these one on one conversations is just my deep awareness that we were touching on old stories and old coping mechanisms and so much old stuff.

that was so much bigger than a wedding. And I kept things focused to weddings because it’s very important to me to know the scope of my skills and what I was ready to take on, and this was the way I was doing it. But over time, it just got clearer and clearer that What my heart and my soul and just every, everything calling to me was pulling me towards was really how do I help marginalized people move through this world, knowing.

that we get to choose who we are. We get to choose the stories we tell about ourselves. We get to self define instead of constantly echolocating what’s acceptable off of the dominant narrative and dominant people. And that is so much bigger than weddings. And I was just craving to move to just being able to do that work and stay focused on that work.

And so letting go, because just like you said, it was such an honor and a joy to give this to people through something that they were already doing that naturally offered them celebration and to I still have all those relationships with all those people because we had such rich relationships.

So letting it go was actually really hard because it was so celebratory and beautiful, but I realized it’s time for me to get trained in coaching, in being very skilled at doing deeper work, and then to figure out how I would bring my lens and my internalized oppression focus to that work and just do the thing that clearly my heart was trying to find a way to do through any other means possible.

Mai-kee Tsang: It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we find that piece that you’re so drawn to, and it’s through a medium you did not expect. And it makes sense because, like you said, weddings, it’s a traditional day in which a lot of things come up, and suddenly we are very up close with any, issues that we may have with ourselves, with our family dynamics.

And you want it to be a day that they can look back on and remember. And I love that you captured it during that moment. And now you found a way to keep doing that without the need for a wedding day. That is how we move about in our day to day lives and in our forms of leadership. So this is so interesting.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So that is how you started and you’ve gotten coaching to allow you to feel more grounded in how you guide more people. And so I’m curious as we lean into the bigger question for today, which is what is your quiet rebellion? So we, like you and I have connected multiple times and I could not shake the idea of what That there is a cost to being service driven because it’s something that we think is something to pride, right?

So let’s get into this a bit more I’m just gonna leave it to you tell me where to go. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Would you like me to take off with a conversation about how this relates to me or talk first about just how I’m rebelling against this? 

Mai-kee Tsang: idea 

Meera Mohan-Graham: of service driven leadership, which feels, 

Mai-kee Tsang: that’s a hard choice.

Can we have 

Meera Mohan-Graham: both? Would you like the story or the punchline first? I think punchline and then we’ll get to the 

Mai-kee Tsang: story. Yeah. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Okay. Okay. So the punchline here is that

often we will take really painful patterns that we taught ourselves to have or develop because the world. was terrible to us. So we have found these ways of feeling okay, or good, or trying to find belonging that actually aren’t good for us, that can hurt us so deeply. And because they hurt us, at some point, when we start to free ourselves from the terrible ideas we might have had about being a queer person, or being, in my case, a brown person, we’re still not ready to let go of the patterns because they make us feel safe.

Ironically, yes. Yes. But some part of us also doesn’t want to keep doing the pattern because it reinforces something so painful. I’m only worthy if, or I only have value when. And so what we do is we roll those painful things up. And we put them into a beautiful costume of something that we call a value and my deepest rebellion both for myself and in the work that I’m doing and helping other leaders do and other human beings do is for us to say, Where are these secret agreements I’ve made?

What am I disguising them as? And am I ready to let go of all of that to actually feel free and able to be a full human being in this world that so wants me to flatten myself down?

Mai-kee Tsang: Starting the thinking process now. Yes. And just as you said all that, suddenly my childhood flashed right in front of my eyes. as it might do for those of you who are listening right now. Because if there’s one thing I can pinpoint, it’s the fact that I used to, it sounds silly, but it’s true. I almost try to hide the fact that I’m Asian, which is pretty impossible when you look at my name, when you look at the color of my skin, when you just look at me as a person.

And I think the reason why this is coming up right now is because My step mom asked my father, Why didn’t you teach Mei Kei and her sister how to speak their mother tongue? Because we can’t. We can’t speak it fluently. I can barely speak a couple of words, to be honest. And he said, he looked at us and said, because we brought the girls to the countryside in England.

Yeah. No one else around was Chinese. So they already look so different and we didn’t want them to have to sound different as well, basically to give anyone a reason why we should be othered. Yeah. And I remember I had this conversation with a previous guest on this podcast way back when, and it’s when I realized, Oh, I’m still trying to hide my Asian ness because I remember when I used to be a copywriter, so naturally you would have to be pretty fluent in writing in the English language.

I used to emphasize so much the fact that I was British. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah.

Mai-kee Tsang: Oh, so I don’t think it was till 2020 2021 where there was some big shifts happening with very global events that hit so many of us at our core, and it, that was when. I really realized the extent of my ignorance and my lack of awareness and how I’ve truly been crushing my Asian ness into a box and try to hide it away.

And that was the year in 2021. Also the year I had a lot of therapy and also when I did my certification for trauma conscious leadership when I started to actually bring that to the forefront now. And now it’s a huge part of my conversations that I have around sustainable visibility that really factors in these intersections of your identity and how that influences your capacity to be seen and to be visible.

Yeah. Oh, the work that you do, I think that’s just going to be like, simmering away at the back of my head for the rest of this conversation, what have I disguised as a value? 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah and I just want to name something in what you were just saying, because I think We have this idea of internalized oppression, and it’s a true idea.

It’s in the research, it’s everywhere that internalized oppression looks like I hate myself because other people treated me this way. And that is absolutely true. Nearly all of us have experienced those things and have had those messages and maybe had to dissipate them. But when we think about what you’re describing What you’re describing is these layers and efforts of your father out of love, trying to protect you by teaching you that safety comes from disappearing certain parts of yourself.

And just the internalization of that coming from a pathway of love. And protectiveness and the ways that then those patterns to us also feel connected to protectiveness and love for ourselves. And that’s how it gets so secretive. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Yep. And on the other side of the conversation, another part I feel or felt had to be hidden and disappear was my relationship.

Because I’ve been with my partner for a total of nearly 14 years at this point. After we stopped being childhood enemies. It was that, I kid you not, we have the kind of love that is in movies, in romance novels, seriously, the things that we’ve gone through, my goodness. But anyway, there was a point where people in my family started to suspect that there was something going on with us.

And there was one person in particular, I’m not going to name who it is because I don’t want to, I hope, I’m not trying to bring shame to this person at all. They know who they are, but they very publicly outed me in front of my entire family that I was lesbian and yelled at me, told me how it made everyone uncomfortable, and then stormed out.

left me in tears sobbing in the center of the living room and it broke my heart into a million pieces. And that was actually a time when we weren’t together, actually. We were just simply best friends that were a little bit socially anxious, and so went to the corner to play Pokemon again. Like really bond us all.

And then that’s why it took me 10 years to tell this person. And that was the gift that my partner and I gave each other. That we would tell the significant people in our family that we were together, that was our 10 year anniversary gift back in 2000. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: What a beautiful the gift of asserting your truth to give each other and your relationship.

Mai-kee Tsang: Yes. And all that to say that there are definitely multiple parts of my identity that I have to say. definitely felt the need to minimize, to hide away, out of fear of not being accepted. And then, as I started doing a lot of internal work and being aware of so much of this internalized oppression, that, you know what, if my relationships will not survive me telling my truth and owning it, then clearly those relationships have already done their part in the chapter of my life.

And, If the people who I thought would be there are no longer there because of this truth, then I’ll have to bless and release them. And as heartbreaking as that is, I can’t, I can no longer keep living without being so proud and honoured of who I am and who I’m with.

Yes.

So Meera, you’ve spoken a little bit about internalized oppression, and I’m curious for those who are listening right now, who may actually be thinking about this for the first time, I’m curious, where can we even start to think about where we’ve been dressing things up as values and where we actually may be internally impressing ourselves?

Yeah.

Meera Mohan-Graham: So the simplest way. that I can help people find internalized oppression that might be hiding in a value system and disaggregate between those, is to look back at the behaviors that you started to enact as a result of your internalized oppression. Even using you as an example from a moment ago, you shared how this hiding and invisibility of certain parts of yourself, our habits and ways you found of keeping yourself safe.

And you learn some of that directly from the messaging that you were given, but also from these painful experiences that you had. So we know right away that for you, The act of hiding the act of minimizing parts of yourself are things that stem from internalized oppression. They are the shape that your internalized oppression takes.

And the reason that pinpointing that behavior. is so important is because then you can look for other places you are demonstrating the same exact behavior but calling it something else. And a really good example that I have of this from lots of clients that I’ve worked with who have that same thing of shrinking minimizing is that they’ll move into social justice spaces where we’re thinking a lot about privilege and suddenly they will say, I have to demonstrate humility.

In my leadership, and when we say, okay, what does humility look like conveniently, sometimes it will look like true humility, real consideration. Other times, humility always takes the shape of silencing themselves. and minimizing their identity. And the same thing happens when I hear people say I need to check my privilege.

I need to consider other people’s marginalized identities. I’m not the most important person in the room. And again, that all sounds really good. And of course is really important and a genuine value. And it’s often tethered to the exact same act of shrinking. minimizing and disappearing. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Oh, hit the nail on the head there.

That’s so true. Very relatable as well. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah. So that’s the pro tip if I can hand it to people, look for your behaviors and then say, where have those behaviors placed themselves in other things? Some things that I believe deeply and other places where I know I’m carrying around a bit of a wound.

That’s how you check this. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Yes, because you mentioned to me in the green room about knowing where your choices are coming from, whether it’s it from a place of internalized oppression, or is it genuinely because of value that you do hold that’s not dressed up as anything, right? So what I’m hearing from you is just paying attention as to what the driver underneath all of these actions are.

And is it from a place that actually makes you want to camouflage yourself, hide yourself, shrink yourself? Because if it is. We might be playing dress up a little bit. Exactly. Exactly.

Yes. You and I have spoken about, in particular, not exclusively, but especially, marginalized people priding themselves with being super service driven and that is how they make their mark. Why is it that you’re very wary about that? Yes. Ah, 

Meera Mohan-Graham: okay. I would like to share snippets of my own story to illustrate why I feel this is so dangerous and then explain it more broadly.

Okay. So I want everyone listening to picture this like the montage of my life leading up to the present moment. I’m just going to give you some snapshots. I grew up in a predominantly white town in the United States. And I’m a little brown girl with a unibrow and a tiny mustache by the time I’m like five.

And as an adult, I look back at those photos and I think that’s adorable, but it was not adorable in the context of the world that I lived in. And so as I grow up in this town, I am very different. That difference is pointed out to me over and over. And just to make things more complicated, I of course haven’t realized it yet, but I’m queer and my brain works a little bit differently than other people’s.

And so I also don’t fit in my family

and I’m a little too opinionated and, I think my parents would have called me like Americanized to fully fit. Within Indian culture, and I’m way too Indian to fully fit into the white American culture around me. And so I am just wandering through the world at such a young age when belonging is safety, knowing very early on you will not belong, and in fact, if you stand out, as you always will, there’s trouble.

And so I grow up like this, just trying to figure out how to survive all of it and just to make things extra difficult, because my brain works a little bit differently, I really struggle in school. I’m not one of those, the role available, I think, to Asian American people is as the very smart kid, the academically capable kid, and I’m not that kid either.

And so often teachers even seem enraged at me. Because the few other kids that look like me that are around are generally very academically capable studious. And here I am. So I really struggle, and I really struggle, and I fit nowhere, and I’m bullied a lot trying to figure things out, and around the age of 14, something major changes, and what changes is that a new choir teacher joins my middle school.

And he asks each of us to sing, and he discovers something that only I have privately known until then because I did not ever want to stand out, which is that I have this beautiful voice that makes me sound basically exactly like a Disney princess. And the moment he hears it, he, his eyes light up like I have discovered, it’s every teacher’s dream is to discover some talent.

And so all of a sudden I go from being a nobody who tries my best to hide or is bullied to someone who’s placed on stage over and over with a deeply gifted instrument. And that creates a little bit of power because I realize or I am treated by others as exceptional and remarkable. And along with that experience of doing that, I also start to realize, hey, I’m not, I think I used to think of myself as a dud, as a nobody.

And I was like, I’m capable. I have these talents. And so then I taught myself how to learn. And as I taught myself how to learn, it involved things like me making gigantic study packets and all kinds of stuff. And all of a sudden I’m also excelling in school, but it’s in my way, and I’m not a very competitive person.

So I would be in these honors courses with other kids and I would share my study packets with them. I also started mentoring younger students to make sure younger students weren’t getting bullied. So just as I stepped into being a leader or being someone who was noticed and prominent, it was like, wow, Meera, she is so talented and extraordinary and exceptional.

And Meera is so generous. These were the two things that, as soon as people experienced them, it literally overrode every other way that they had chosen to other me until that moment, including people in my town who had treated me in racist ways. All of a sudden it was like, Meera, have you seen her? She’s in the musicals.

She’s amazing. And all these people around town, they knew me, they loved me. I was like a beloved member of this small town. So fast forward and I get to college. And just for the record, I go to a women’s college, Wellesley and our literal motto, translated from Latin into English, is not to be served, but to serve.

Interesting. So I am in a place where the pride and joy is creating women who are service leaders. And I get to this college, and it is a space where I think at that point maybe 40 percent of the college students are white, so I’m finally in a place where there’s more people of color than white people.

And for the first time, I don’t have to hide and flatten my identity. I get to actually explore my racial identity. I get to claim my South Asian ness. I get to know all kinds of other South Asian people. And at the same time that’s happening, I am also realizing I’m queer. I was queer the whole time.

It was one of those moments. I don’t know if you’ve had this or I don’t know where you, when you realized your queerness, but for me, the moment I realized it, all of a sudden, a thousand moments prior made sensE. so I am realizing I’m queer. And so I’m having this experience of deep belonging for the first time around my racial identity.

I’m stepping into activism. I’m challenging white supremacy culture. I’m really fighting all this internalized messaging I have around my race. And I’m feeling like, this is the early 2000s, there’s no room in my community and many communities of color for a queer person. And all of a sudden, I’m like, oh my god, I finally have a chance at belonging.

I finally am claiming my Indian ness and my Indian American ness fully. And I’m about to have to snatch it away from myself because look, a new way that I’m broken and don’t belong. That’s how it felt. And so I’m walking around having these simultaneous experiences and in the midst of it I fall in love with a, my best friend who is a young trans man.

And my parents are not happy about it. They are troubled by my decisions, they were troubled by me dating a woman before that. They love me, they say they’ll stand by me, but they’re just so unhappy. And so I’m just seeing belonging handed to me for a second and then crumbling away. And so at the point that I leave college to start my first job, I am again feeling totally adrift.

You could have belonging, but you’re going to have to choose where you belong. You can love this person you love and lose everything, or you can choose belonging and you can betray yourself and have to make do in your life. And I’m feeling, again, like there’s nowhere to be held as all of who I am.

And so I lean into the things that I know. I get a management job, and I very quickly am known for being an exceptional leader. and a very generous leader. My employees are like, she is just so generous with her time and energy and everyone around me is she really leads in her own way. She’s so exceptional and I become a total workaholic and I don’t use that in a cute way.

I use it in the almost addictive way. There were multiple times I almost got locked into the warehouse at this location because the custodial staff would be locking up the place at 10 o’clock and I was still sitting there working. And this is not a workplace that asked for that. They actually looked down on the idea of people who couldn’t get their work done within work hours and leave.

So we again see that when I don’t feel belonging, When I feel adrift, when I feel afraid, I would lean on the one thing that felt like it guaranteed me belonging. Generosity and being just extraordinary. And now I’m gonna leap us forward one more time, much closer to the present. So I’m not gonna give you the whole story of how this all unfolded, but I over time, when we get to today, I am married to that person.

once upon a time young trans man. He is my wonderful spouse. We are soulmates. We also have a sort of storybook love. And I’m so lucky. You’re so lucky. We’re lucky.

So worth it. I am out to my entire community and publicly, I feel no contradiction between the idea of being a Desi person, being a Desi American person and being queer and being all the things that I am. And I just am doing this work that I talked to you about. I’m so embracing my identity as a marginalized person.

And I’m thinking, I am free in the process of all of this. I’ve tackled my workaholism because as I ran my own businesses, I started to say, what am I doing this? I can’t be like this. I’ve questioned capitalism and I’m like, okay, I’m liberated. I’m free. I’m free. And then, of course, 2016 comes along, the Trump era comes along, 2020 comes along, and there’s all these moments that I am absolutely overwhelmed.

My nervous system is falling apart. I’m doing this work with marginalized people, and so I’m holding. So many people’s struggles and supporting them and navigating all of these things and my health feels like it’s falling apart. I just really feel like I’m on the edge of burnout. And what I do in all of my spare time is I get on the computer.

And give as much as I can for free. I’m on social media and I’m talking about how we navigate internalized oppression. I’m writing these emailed love notes that I send, helping people digest and dissect the experiences that they’re having. I am just giving and giving. And Elliot, my husband, is looking at me and saying, What are you doing?

You keep saying you feel like you are on the edge of collapse and you need a break. And you will not stop. Every spare moment. You’re so overdrawn. And you keep giving more and giving more. And I looked at him and I said, I have to serve my people. No one else is doing this work the way that I’m doing it.

My people need me. My people look to me. They need this from me.

And the only difference between this moment and all those moments prior is now I literally do this work with people where I look at them and say, what are you doing? And is it really the thing that you think it is? And that does not mean that I am necessarily wise to myself all the time, and so it still took me months and months of following that pattern for a while.

But there was a moment where I suddenly looked at myself and I just said you are doing the thing you call your clients on. All you are doing is in this moment of feeling out of control. Knowing this world will mistreat people like your spouse, knowing this world will mistreat people like you, and that it feels like there’s nothing you can do about it and no way to be safe or belong.

You are leaning on generosity and the ways that you think that you are exceptional.

And that was the moment. I realized, oh, service leader is in many ways absolutely true of my work and where I choose to put my focus, and sometimes it’s the costume that I put on the ways that I try to survive my pain.

And if it was only me, I wouldn’t have this conversation with you necessarily because it might just be my story or I would just be sharing my story, but I see it every day. Every single one of my clients is a service leader and that’s like how they would refer to themselves or a mission driven leader or a change maker.

It’s these different phrases that we have for the work that we do. And every day I see people. struggling with things that are actually hurting them. And then writing off the need to change or disrupt those things because of this label of being service driven. So it’s people who undervalue themselves and allow themselves to be taken advantage of.

I’m service driven, so that’s why I allow those things, because I really believe in my mission. It’s people like me who are Overgiving and overextending. And it’s cause I believe in the mission. I believe in this change. I serve. I always serve before I think of myself, all of our struggles. We can so cleanly put into service driven and even that word driven.

Why are we allowing ourselves and our choices to be driven by anything other than our wisdom? And our actual agency.

Mai-kee Tsang: Wow. That’s all I can really say. Up until this point. And the question that rises up as you share all of this is that, because Meera, for those who are listening right now, they may be starting to realize how this is affecting the work that they do. And I’m curious, could you share what we may be seeing?

expect to happen or what could happen when we actually start letting go of the feeling like we need to be service driven and what to expect instead. Is there a cost of letting go of being service driven? Because I think for those who are in two minds right now but being service driven has helped me get to where I am.

What do I do now? So I’m just curious. Yeah. Is there a kind of like a transition kind of pathway that you can shine a light on for those of us who are considering slowly letting go of this need to be service driven? 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yeah, yes, there is a pathway. I think the first thing that people should know, and this is such a good question, so thank you for asking it.

The first thing people need to know is we developed these coping mechanisms for a reason.

And often, as you’ve described, as I’ve described, the coping mechanisms themselves we developed to try and stay safe, to try and find something that we desperately needed and was refused to us. We tried to bypass that, and that’s how we felt like we had some control in this world. And then we placed it on a value so it could at least sound kind of pretty, and we didn’t have to totally admit that we were still being run by those things.

So the first thing I want to say is, This is almost trauma work at its heart. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Yeah. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Because oppression is trauma and our efforts to internalize and make things about us and figure out ways around these painful traumas, those coping mechanisms run deep and when you start to change them. Your whole nervous system will want to freak out.

So the first thing that I like for everyone to know is. It’s not as simple as saying, okay, I’m just going to stop. Then I’ll just stop being service driven. I’ll just stop acting in these ways. I had this realization years ago, and it is still something that I am gently disrupting. So be aware that changing the pattern of behavior, which is really what you’re trying to do.

It’s not about being or not being service driven. It’s about not pretending that calling it service driven makes those behaviors less painful for you. So step one is you have to address the behaviors. For me, it was overriding myself by saying I always have to be generous and I always have to offer my exceptional work to everyone no matter how I’m feeling.

No, Meera, you have to stop that. But when you stop doing that, you will feel a lot of fear. You will feel a sense of being unmoored. I have, how will I belong? How will I be safe? And so it’s realizing that’s actually what’s gonna come up, the most core fears and pain you have about letting go in a world that’s never been fair to you.

and to get support around it. Don’t just pull everything away and go incrementally. Start in a really small way. For me it was, how about I don’t post on social media every time a crisis is happening? How about I give myself permission to believe that my people, whoever they are out there, have the resources?

and are smart and thoughtful enough to get the support that they need, whether or not I’m the one leading in that moment. That’s it. The one change. And even that kind of wreaked havoc on my nervous system because it was a way that I felt more in control. So that’s the first piece. Go really slow and be aware when these big things come up, it’s coming up for a reason because it’s a really big change you’re making.

And the second thing is that you’re allowed to have nuance. and you’re going to need to lean into trusting yourself.

Service driven, integrity, any of these words and values that we have, that we genuinely hold, they can be true of us even when we’re not being all or nothing.

And sometimes deep, deep down, we have been managing ourselves and treating ourselves like people that can’t be trusted. If I don’t say I’m service driven and I don’t give all the time and I don’t overgive, I guess I’m actually a selfish person. Under all of this is often a fear that we are a shitty person, that we, if we don’t do it all the time, we’re going to stop.

being someone who serves. That if we don’t stay silent all the time, we’re not going to demonstrate humility or de centering of ourselves in the moments that we need to. And so the thing you’re going to have to lean into as you disrupt these things, as you make room for how your nervous system responds, and as you keep teaching yourself, I’m safe.

You’re also going to need to lean into the idea that you are a marvel. that you are a truly good person, that you can hold nuance, that you can show up for yourself fully, and you can show up for the values that you have, and that those two things are not in contradiction.

Mai-kee Tsang: Oh, you, when you said the word selfish, Immediately. I know. Oh, that’s a trigger word. And what I heard myself say was selfish is unlovable. Being silent is lovable. That’s the conditioning I had growing up. Oh, so what I’m hearing you say. is that as we start to look deeper within ourselves we’re going to find a lot of what’s going to feel very contradictory to us because up until now it felt very safe to be this way but the nuance, the is a beautiful gift we can give ourselves that there are two things that can coexist or multiple things at once.

We can serve ourselves

and also we can serve others. It doesn’t have to be one or the other and I think that’s the key here. You said it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Why does it seem like we have to give it our all or nothing else matters or no minor effort counts? 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yes. Yes. And in you saying that actually you’re getting to the heart of another way to figure out when you’re doing this, because your values, if you think about some of your best values, ideally, they create nuance in your world.

In our home, Elliot and I often say, honest, courageous, kind. Those are three values that we try to bring to everything. And what that does all the time is take a situation that feels black and white, dogmatic, and as soon as we place honest, courageous, kind over it, we start to see nuance. We see different choices.

We see different decision paths. And so as you’re saying this, I’m thinking, yes, that’s exactly it, because the idea of being service driven shouldn’t be you must always do this and it has to look this way and you have to give yourself away. That’s not a value. That’s like a dogma at that point. It’s a specific path that you must follow.

It’s almost religious in nature versus the ability to be like, yeah, service to myself, to others. to the whole to my own existence, like to find yourself seeing nuance every time you name a value or try to move in a value.

Mai-kee Tsang: I immediately think of. this phrase just popped to mind, like allowing color into your world. And I mean that quite literally, if I think of the color spectrum, if we think of every time we are using Canva and we need a specific hex code for a certain shade, there are millions of color combinations that can basically paint your canvas, so to speak.

Oh, there is so much here. And actually you’ve helped me Affirm, the reason why I, my personal niche that took me six years to name is human first because there’s a dual meaning. I have seen beautiful language around like people led and that, that kind of language. But whenever I see that, I see absence of self.

Yes. And so that’s why when I say I help human first business owners, business owners who care about the humanity of their clients, of their community, of their peers, their friends, family, and also run a business where they factor in their own humanity, what they bring to the table, the nuance, the richness, the layers of their identity.

They bring all of that too. It’s beautiful. Yeah. Oh, Meera, I feel like I can speak to you all day long. And I feel like, oh, yep, new things coming up. But I do want to be mindful of your time, of course. And I know that we went deep and we meandered into so many different areas of this conversation.

That is so beautiful, so rich. And so for those who are listening right now, they’re likely going to be feeling some things. So could you share with us how we can bring ourselves to a grounded close? to this conversation for further exploration to happen as we go, but like where can we start now?

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yes. Oh, that’s a really good question.

I want to issue some reminders and some permissions. I think that those might help. So the reminders are that you’re okay, even if as you are listening to this, it’s making you ask a lot of questions. Maybe even making you feel unsteady, because what does it mean if some of your value system is actually not serving you or isn’t quite what it seems?

You’re still okay. You are allowed to continue to use the coping mechanisms that you have been for as long as you need to. And even the act of recognizing that there might be something you want to question Think about, take to therapy, bring to someone like me. That act in and of itself is revolutionary.

You do not need to change yourself right now. You can just sit with the question of it. It’s okay. You’re okay.

So that I think is the main thing because I’ve seen before that when people find something like this or name something like this, that it can suddenly feel like the ground under your feet is cracking open and it doesn’t have to. These are incredible things that you’re. body and your brain put together for you to help you survive a world that is patently unjust and unfair and just think how incredible it is that your brain would go through all these calisthenics to keep you safe.

and to keep you functioning and to give you a way to move through this world and feel like you still have power. These are actually really beautiful things that your system has done for you and maybe, just maybe, you also want to be a little freer. That’s all. That’s all today is. It doesn’t mean you’re broken, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean you have to undo everything that’s ever been true about you, and it also doesn’t mean that the values you have aren’t true, just that they also might be covering up some things that hurt you.

Mai-kee Tsang: Thank you for sharing all of that, and for it to not feel like we have to change everything right now, because No! Because you and I have both shared throughout this conversation, it’s taken us a long time. It’s taken me years to get to this point. And there’s still so much further to go. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate every single step taken to get to this point.

So my lovelies who are listening right now, everything that Meera just said is basically just do what you can with what you have. That’s all you can ask of yourself.

Ah, Meera, I’m sure that for those who haven’t known you up until this point, will want to get to know you more. So I would love to know, where on the interwebs can we further connect with you? For rich conversations? To work with you, perhaps? And yeah, just to be more in tune with the work you’re doing in the world.

Meera Mohan-Graham: Absolutely. I am on social media, so I’m on Instagram and Facebook and I know you all share the links . I also have a website. That’s where I share all of the ways to work with me, whether it’s in a group setting or personally. And then I also send once a month emailed love notes.

Those for now are completely free and it’s the way that I go a little bit deeper with my work than I could go on social media in small snippets. And it’s also where I share things that I’m offering to people. So I love for anyone to connect with me in any of those ways. The love notes in particular, I do a lot of radically honest storytelling, like I did today alongside some of these ideas, because I want people to get permission through me to be really human.

To know that I’m walking the walk, that it’s hard for me too, and that we’re all just trying to do this together. 

Mai-kee Tsang: I love that. So I’ll be sure to link all of those URLs in the show notes, if you’re going to be like, oh, when I find Meera again, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered in the show notes. And Meera, to really, round off our conversation, there is one question I love asking every guest.

And for me, it’s such a joy and honor to hear the answers of these questions, because it just helps me feel even more deeply connected human to human with my guests. So this question is, do you have a fun story or a fun fact about you that no one else knows on the internet? 

Meera Mohan-Graham: Yes, I, This is a fun fact that is actually a series of stories.

I’ll just tell it as a fact. And I think I love, I’m excited to share this because we’re having such a serious conversation and it’s Oh, Meera, self liberation. And I’m like, yeah, I’m also just a human being. I have a true gift for bringing to myself small calamities that feel like they came straight out of the show.

Modern family. Things that I could not replicate if I tried. And some of my favorite ones include right before a photo session, taking a shower, squeezing the soap pump that was well below my waist, and having it fire soap directly into my eyeball. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Oh no. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: And not only did I do that. That time, the worst time, I looked like I was weeping at the point that I met my clients and I could not use my eye.

I told them, I, I’m trusting my camera autofocus and my other eye. I have done it three times since then. If you asked me do this on video, we will put it on YouTube or something. I could never do it for you, but I have managed to do things like that. So my life is full of stories and calamities like that, that somehow I cosmically seem to bring to myself.

All of them are comical and absurd, and I don’t, I just don’t know why. My life is a spoof movie. So when I’m not self liberated, I’m usually having some kind of clumsy failure somewhere in my life that I’m trying to survive. 

Mai-kee Tsang: Oh, bless you. I felt it. As soon as you said, I knew you were going to say eyes, be like, oh yeah, it went straight into the eyeball.

Oh my goodness, how painful that must have been. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: I yelled. I literally, I yelled the F bomb and I yelled, No! Both 

Mai-kee Tsang: laugh Ah, life. Yes, life indeed. I’m also a very complete person. But, thank you for sharing that with us. I think everyone can imagine what that must be like. And also right before client seeing clients as well.

Oh gosh, that must have been quite interesting to explain. But, Meera. Thanks, Meera. I am so so honored and grateful that you showed up for us today and to share all of the stories of how you came to be with the work you do in the world and also for the invitation that you gave all of us as well, myself included, to really start giving ourselves grace as we start to pay just a bit more attention to our values, where they come from and are they truly for us or are they ways for us.

To try and feel safe in a system that isn’t naturally supportive of who we are.

That was beautiful. 

Meera Mohan-Graham: I just sat silently with how beautifully succinct and clear that was and perfect. So thank you. 

Mai-kee Tsang: I try. But thank you. And I look forward to staying in touch with you and for everyone who’s listening right now who would love to be in Meera’s world. Again, the links are in the show notes where you can connect further with her. 

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