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Erica D'Eramo 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the Two Piers Podcast. I'm your host, Erica D'Eramo. Today we have guest Naeemah Elias joining us. Naeemah is a TEDx speaker, leadership coach, and founder of Elias Presence Ventures. A former finance executive turned entrepreneur, she helps leaders and organizations create environments where people can speak up, show up, and thrive. Her signature message, Thriving as an Outsider, explores how difference can become a source of influence and impact, and that's what she's here to talk to us about today.
Erica D'Eramo 0:48
Hello, welcome to the podcast. Really good to have you on.
Naeemah Elias 0:51
Thank you, Erica. I'm excited to be here.
Erica D'Eramo 0:54
Yeah, I really was excited about this episode, because this concept of thriving as an outsider has been such an area of interest for me throughout my own personal career, and then also working with coaching clients in the, in the consulting capacity. So, really excited to explore this today and gain some of your wisdom. So, first, so tell us a little bit about yourself, like, what, what is your story? What brought you to this, this place in your life?
Naeemah Elias 1:26
So, I, I've been an outsider my entire life, I was the weird kid growing up, and then got my autism diagnosis as a 49 year old, and so all of the weirdness started to make sense, I was a kid who hid in the corner with a book at all times and didn't interact with other people, and I got in trouble for that a lot because I was supposed to engage and I was supposed to participate, and I had no interest in participation. I also, so I grew up in Harvey, Illinois, town south of Chicago. I went to Harvard. At Harvard, I was an outsider, because, again, I did not come from wealth, I did not come from privilege, everything about this experience was unique, but also I didn't have the type of academic foundation that I think a lot of the students around me had, so that was challenging, because I didn't feel like I knew how to learn, and then going forward in my life, I had a lot of other experiences where I was the weird kid, and I think, like, people around me are very comfortable saying, "Oh, Naeemah is just weird. Then I climbed the crooked ladder in finance, right? And so working in that space, I was, you know, I was learning a lot, and I was figuring a lot of things out, but I don't have a finance background. I did a lot of process design, I worked in the corporate functions, and then just figured things out. So the outsider label has just been a part of how I flow through the world, and so when I left my organization in 2023 and started talking to folks and thinking about this coaching journey, the outsider conversation just kept coming up. I kept talking to, you know, women who were in male spaces, people of color who were in white spaces, people who identified as being neurodivergent or introvert in loud spaces, and I kept talking to people who just really kind of struggled with, like, how do I, how do I navigate this? It doesn't make sense, and the breakthrough moment, not breakthrough, but like the moment that was really surprising for me, that changed like my full perspective. I did a talk on imposter syndrome at my 25th college reunion, and I was just kind of talking about my experience with walking through the world, waiting for people to realize I was a fraud, and one of my classmates came up to me afterwards, and he is a man of wealth and privilege, and like generational wealth, like I'm pretty sure his family name was on one of the buildings on campus, right, like that kind of, you know, experience, and he came up to me afterwards and said, I feel like you told my story, and I'm like, sorry, I know that you wouldn't expect this, but he's like, my entire life is built on preserving the family's legacy.
Erica D'Eramo 4:23
Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 4:23
I'm an artist, but I don't get to be an artist. I don't get to go into the world and be the person that I want to be. My job, my only job, is to continue the family business and move it from my generation to the next, from my parents' generation to my children's generation. And I don't have any choices, and I don't get to be myself, and I don't get to show up in the world the way that I want to show up in the world, and the stakes are really high. If I break it, I'm destroying generations of work and dedication and focus, and I was like, oh my god, pressure, so. This is this helped me to kind of broaden my lens and really think about like outsider from a much bigger perspective than you know, race, class, and gender. So that's some of my foundational like space around like this outsider identity.
Erica D'Eramo 5:16
Yeah, I never really thought about the dynastic pressure and what that does to people's ability to be themselves. I mean, I guess I've thought about it, but interesting that that imposter lens would resonate so much. It's fascinating hearing you talk about that broadening of the lens too, because I think for me, having come up through like the engineering spaces and being one of the only women, I really initially thought a lot of the work I was going to do was around women, right, like women navigating male-dominated environments, but in particular when I was working in Angola, and I really saw that a lot of the same struggles I was having with adhering to this very kind of hierarchical type of leadership, this very, I'm going to say it like British type of leadership, where hierarchy is extremely important and power differential comes into play a lot, a lot of my Angolan colleagues, that is not actually the way leadership works in that culture, and so they were also really struggling to find a way of leading that was both authentic, sustainable, effective, and would be deemed by the deciders to be quote unquote leadership behavior, right, and that, and so I realized, like, oh, this isn't just about gender, it's really about, like, it's really about navigating environments where your way of operating is not the majority way, or not the norm, or you're being held to standards that don't fit how you operate, but yeah, yeah,
Naeemah Elias 7:03
Navigating spaces that weren't designed with you in mind,
Erica D'Eramo 7:07
Right. Yes, or maybe even designed with you in mind, but not to include you, maybe, perhaps, yeah, um, yeah, interesting. So then I'm, I'm curious, like, what, what are some of the themes that you've seen in your work that have been most impactful for you? Like, when you started to explore this space and and support people, what, what did you notice as recurring themes,
Naeemah Elias 7:41
so foundationally I think our outsider identity gives us rules, it gives us expectations for how we're supposed to navigate the world, and a lot of those rules are based on safety, on the expectations of your outsider society, so if you grew up in poverty, there are a lot of expectations about how you navigate money, how you navigate food, right? So, for example, the idea of you have to clean your plate,
Erica D'Eramo 8:17
Yeah.
Naeemah Elias 8:18
If you have limited means wasting food is a crime, so we are raised to eat every single thing that's put in front of us, because we cannot waste, but the problem with that is that it cultivates this really unhealthy relationship with food, and then you have to clean your plate in order to get dessert right, because so you're cleaning the plate to get to this goal of more food, but you're full before you get to the end of your plate, but you're forcing yourself to eat the rest of it, and then you also want the reward, because that's what you were working for, but you're again not hungry anymore, right, so then you go into the world and your relationship with food is kind of toxic and kind of problematic, you look at wealth societies of wealth, societies of privilege. I think that you know there are certain places where, like, it is expected that you will leave something on your plate, right?
Erica D'Eramo 9:17
Oh, yeah,
Naeemah Elias 9:18
Right. You know, and so, if you don't grow up with the comfort of wasting even, even a small piece of food, then you have this interaction that can be really awkward, that can be really uncomfortable, or there's a perception of you, and you don't even know why it's happening.
Erica D'Eramo 9:39
Yeah, the unspoken rules are so funny too, and like cultures come together, because I've just, I've read about these cases where like two families will get together and one family is like you have to clean your plate to be respectful, and the other family is like oh no, that means we haven't fed them enough, so we need to like feed them more, and then it's just this like vicious cycle of of the food happening, um. But we assume that our norms are shared by others because they're not always even visible to us, or these like belief systems are not always visible. But when you were talking, when you were talking, sorry, when you were talking about, yeah, go ahead.
Naeemah Elias 10:14
No, I was just, I was just agreeing, like that, that's right, like we, we don't see that we can't see our norms, right? It's like this is how life is. And then when you're someplace where somebody else is doing something different, then all of a sudden you have this pause, and you're just like, well, why are they? And that's when you start to question. You only start to question your norms when they are faced with someone else's that are different.
Erica D'Eramo 10:37
Yeah, like the joke about the fish in the water, and like, the fish swims fine, is like, isn't the water lovely today? And the other fish, like, what's water? Like, we don't know what we're breathing in sometimes,
Naeemah Elias 10:48
Exactly.
Erica D'Eramo 10:49
Yeah, that commentary, though, around food really made me think through kind of almost financial success, too, though, or like this career ladder. And so I'm curious, how do you see some of this show up in terms of you touched on themes like almost gratitude, you know, sometimes if you didn't finish your the food on your plate, it's like you're not grateful for what you have, which then if you translate that into the workplace might show up in really interesting ways, so
Naeemah Elias 11:22
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I think there's this concept of weaponized gratitude, and I think that there are folks who either know they're doing it or don't know that they're doing it, but who recognize that you can utilize gratitude as a means to keep people in their place, right? I had a recruiter tell me, when I was trying to negotiate a salary, you should be grateful that she wants to work with you, and I was just like, I have a great job, I am working for a great company, I have a fantastic manager, like she asked me to come and interview for this role, I don't understand what's happening here. Like, why am I being penalized? Negotiation is supposed to be part of the conversation. This is just part of the process. You should be grateful. Feels so he turned out to be a really problematic person. He said a lot of things that were inappropriate over, and I ended up having to work with him closely when I moved into the new role, so that was fun. The weaponized gratitude, I think, is really super dangerous, because if you have been taught by your family that you should be grateful, then you walk into a space where a person in a position of power tells you you should be grateful, then it's language that has more power than they realize, right. Language that has the power of your entire upbringing, that says, you know, you should be grateful, is standing right, stop pushing, stop trying to make yourself seen, sit where you are, and you'll be fine, like this is good enough for you. So that's really challenging, and then you mentioned financial success, right? Like, how do we think about the challenges that come with financial success? So, my brother's a financial planner, and at one point when I was working on a promotion, he said to me, we spend the same percentage of every dollar that we ever earn, so when you make $20,000 a year, if you spend 87% of that, then when you're making $200,000 a year, you're going to spend 87% of that. We spend the same percentage of every dollar that we ever earn. So, the challenge there is, How do you trick your brain into not realizing that you're making more money, so that you actually can save it, invest it, and do other things with it. So he taught me when I was moving from, you know, front line to leadership, and there was this big jump in my salary. He said, "I want you to look at how you organize your money right now, and that was when I got my paycheck, a certain amount would go into this account for groceries and kids' stuff, and my mom managed that account because she was my nanny. And then a certain amount would go into this account, and that was my allowance, that was my play money, that was for, you know, shopping and like bringing myself joy, right? And a certain amount would go into this account, for you know, the for savings, and then the rest went into the main account for managing the house, rent, utilities, all of those things. So I had separate bank accounts for these different things, and he said to me, How much are you used to seeing in your main account? And I said, you know X amount, and he said, "Okay, so if you continue to do it in this way, where the balance goes into this account, that number is going to grow, and you're going to spend it, shift it, so that the amount you're used to seeing is the amount that goes here, and the balance goes into your savings account, so when you look at your bank account, you will continue to see the same amount of money that you. Always seen, and your savings account is what will grow, and not your spending. That was mind-blowing for me, and I did it immediately, and I did it from that point forward for the rest of my corporate career. Right, he gave me a rule that I could set up and, like, automate, and then not have to think about it going forward, and I saved much more aggressively, right? I was much better at having, you know, play money in various, like, to do other things, because I didn't shift my spending to align with the new money that I was making. So this is something that, like, I don't know how many people know that, how many people think about that, how many people think about, like, what is the way to intentionally shift your financial behavior as you climb the corporate ladder, right?
Erica D'Eramo 15:52
Yeah, I mean, even the belief that, like, debt is bad, right? I grew up thinking, like, debt is bad, and then when you.. it wasn't until, like, I hate to say it, like an executive MBA, where it was like, well, that isn't necessarily bad. I mean, just depends, right? It just depends what you're doing with it. If you're borrowing at 2% and you're making 10% off of it, like that's savvy. If you're so.. but that's not really those are not things that you're thinking about when you know. Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 16:19
I had a colleague who didn't have a college degree, and and it was something that he talked about, it was something that he lamented, and he felt like not having a college degree was holding him back from the career growth that he wanted to have. We worked together in various different ways for years, and at some point I heard him make a statement about not sending his daughter to college because he didn't want to take on the debt. Over time, I was able to have conversations with him about different kinds of debt, and the fact that college debt is the best debt that you can write right now in terms of shifting your family's situation in the world, shifting your family's opportunities in the world from your generation to the next, things can change dramatically. You just want to be intentional about where your daughter goes to school, how much debt she accrues, but it shouldn't be a question of if there's college debt, it should be a question of how we're intentional about how much college debt you take on. Not sending your daughter to college isn't the choice, just it just isn't. And now I think she has a medical degree. Now I think she's a whole doctor, and like how exciting, like what a dramatic shift in the family's fate, right? Because he decided to make that choice, but he was of the belief that debt is bad and we avoid debt at all costs.
Erica D'Eramo 17:56
Yeah, yeah, these are those like beliefs that we just don't even challenge until we're confronted with them, and they're not necessarily surfacing in many of the cases, and so those like tells that we have that we are not of the in crowd, I think can be so tricky, and especially if, if a couple of them have bitten you, sometimes it can. I don't know. I feel like sometimes it can create almost like a hyper vigilance, or this. So, where have you for folks who are successfully kind of navigating life as the outsider? What are some of the key learnings that you see people use that, they end up helping them thrive.
Naeemah Elias 18:45
So one is networking, and like real relationships. So I always, I always sort of attach myself to more senior people. I found mentors, I found senior folks who could guide me and give me feedback as I was figuring things out, and all the way through. Right there was always somebody more senior that I'd be like, okay, here's what I'm grappling with. Am I thinking about this the wrong way, or how would you behave in this situation? How would you respond to this? Whenever I have, whenever I was got a salary offer, whenever I was offered, you know, a promotion, and I got a salary offer. I had folks who are more senior than me that I would go to and say, if you got this offer in my place, would you accept it or would you negotiate? So it's just.. it's a simple question, but it's from someone in your organization who has more insight into the financials and what that level looks like. Like, I can't see what the salary, you know, differential looks like at the level up from myself, but someone who is more senior can see that, and they can say you're at the bottom of the band, or you're in the middle of the band, or this is a good offer, or the circumstances in the organization right now are really challenging. And you don't actually like, I had a leader tell me you don't want to be the blade of grass that's sticking up, because right now we're looking at savings, and if your salary is too high, then it positions you as a target at some point, so this is a good number, it's not the bottom of the band, it's strong, you should accept it, right, so being able to ask how would you behave in this situation is going to help you, and, my, you know, my understanding is, you know, from my background, it's not our instinct to challenge, it's not our instinct to push back, it's not our instinct to not accept an offer as soon as it's placed in front of us, right. So, teaching my clients that you never accept an offer on the spot, right. Thank you. I'm so excited. This is a great opportunity. Can you give me 48 hours to think about it? Right, and then you go and you ask for guidance, and then you come back, and you're able to counter or accept based on a fuller knowledge of, you know of what's what, so I think learning how to negotiate, learning how to find those allies who will help you to understand how to navigate situations, and then whenever I feel uncomfortable, whenever I feel like something is not quite right, having somebody that I can go to and say, here's what's going on, am I thinking about this in the right way, right? And you want to have a collection of people, it's not one person that you're going to all the time, you want various different folks that you can go to, and you can talk about the different things that are happening, and that gives you insight, right? So you are, you're a tourist, right, in this place where everyone else has grown up. So, as a tourist, you want to operate as a vessel, you want to collect information, you want to learn, you want to understand, and you want to look for feedback. So, there are situations where you're like, I feel like this is weird, so you're asking, but you also want to position yourself for people to give you feedback naturally, right? So I had people who I got comfortable with, and I knew that they would come to me and be like, "Hey, so Naeemah, you did this thing in the future, you should not do this thing, right? So the neurodivergence piece of it, I didn't know that I was neurodivergent. I just knew I was weird, and that was the word, right? Like, I'm not using it in a derogatory way. I accepted that I was weird, and that's how people talked about me. I had a leader say to me at one point, Naeemah, your emails are abrasive. Okay? Why? Because everybody feels like you're telling them what to do, you send an email, you get straight to business, and you're like, here's what you're supposed, here's what I need from you, everything is all business, and there's no, it's not friendly, I'm like, okay, How do you make business emails friendly, and she told me in your email you say hi so and so, hello so and so, good morning so and so, whatever. And then you say hope you're having a great day, happy Tuesday, blah blah blah blah blah. You know, how's your morning like something right? She's like this spot right here, like that's a place where you need to add something that softens the email that humanizes the interaction before you go into the work, so that translated in my mind to a field. There is now a field there, so whenever I write an email, like, I'll start writing it, blah blah blah blah, and then I go back and I'm like, oh, I need to put something in that field, and I just know that that is there. Well, that was a piece of guidance that she gave me, because she had people complaining that, like, Naeemah is aggressive, right, Naeemah is like super direct in her emails, she's always bossing us around, and it literally changed the energy, like, now that I'm saying, "Hope you're having an amazing day, they were just like, "Oh, this is a friendly email, now I need blah blah blah blah blah, but indeed I immediately went into business because I had that field right, so that was a thing that, like, she gave me that point of feedback, and I have kept it and continue to use it for the rest of my career. So, positioning yourself where there's somebody who can give you real feedback, real time, and that you're comfortable receiving from them, and they know that, like, it's okay. That's important too, because you can't anticipate all of the things, because, as you said, like, you're the fish in the water, you don't see the water, but you're a tourist, so it's necessary for other folks who live here to help you to gain the insight you need to be able to navigate it safely and in a way that is not uncomfortable for you or for the folks around you.
Erica D'Eramo 24:50
Yeah, I really like the tourist framing because in so many of these cases, like when we know that there is going to be a cultural difference if we're traveling abroad, we're on vacation. We maintain so much more curiosity and observation around what's happening. We connect the dots that we might not be otherwise. If somebody hands us our card with two hands, we might observe that, and then, oh, take the card with two hands, right? Or things with money, like different, all these different subtleties, we're on the lookout more, because we assume there are going to be some potential hiccups, we might kind of step on toes, and yet when we are in the workplace and we assume we're all operating of the same relative workplace culture, I think we forget that sometimes, and yet, when you were saying, like, you know, it was just the weird one. I've heard a lot of folks describe themselves as, like, feeling like an alien sometimes, and that resonated for me so much, right? Like, trying to understand these unspoken social cues, and, oh, I talked too much, or I didn't talk enough, or I didn't emote in the way I was supposed to, like, oh, what is the dance I'm supposed to do? Let me try to learn these steps, but if you're that, like, tourism framework is really interesting, because it just, to me, it brings us back to that, like, curiosity observer mode, not like you're wrong, but just we're in a different space, and we're trying to figure out how to navigate that.
Naeemah Elias 26:25
Yeah, yeah,
Erica D'Eramo 26:26
Yeah.
Naeemah Elias 26:26
I think you know we're we're either learning and growing, allowing ourselves to be curious and to absorb, or we're showing up, assuming and creating uncomfortable situations for ourselves and the folks around us, and I, you know, I have clients who say, I think that I've reached my ceiling, like I can't grow any further in this company, and the question is, Do you understand the company culture? Right, are you navigating the company culture in a way that will allow you to grow, or are you just showing up, bringing your whole self to work, doing you, and not learning or growing right. And I'm not saying that you should not bring your whole self to work, but there's there's this necessary curiosity that is going to create space for you to be able to climb the ladder, and there's a necessary relational interaction, right, like the people who get the most senior roles, the people who get to run the world are navigating relationships in a different way than I've been taught to navigate relationships, right, and if I don't learn how to do that, then I'm only going to get so far because the rest of it is relational, not about like there's a ton of us who are really, really good at our jobs, right, and being good at my job isn't the thing that's going to distinguish me, being good at my job, playing well with others, and understanding the social responsibilities, that's what's going to get me, you know, to the next step.
Erica D'Eramo 28:04
Yeah, I do want to also mention, too, that like that awareness, the intentional awareness of it, also allows us to make some choices about like what is going to be sustainable and what's not, right? Like, sometimes the code switching, the masking, it takes a toll, right, and sometimes it feels inauthentic or not aligned with our value system. And then not being observant of it means that sometimes we do it without thinking, or we, or we pay a price in a different way. But at least the way you're describing it allows people to make a choice to opt in. Do I want to try to navigate that path, or does it require something of me that I'm not, that I don't feel safe doing, or comfortable doing? Or, yeah, what? Yeah. What are your thoughts?
Naeemah Elias 28:53
There's a bunch of tactical stuff that you can do that's not emotionally connected, right? Me deciding to add in that field and say, you know, hope you're having a great day, like that doesn't take anything from me. It's a tactical thing, it's something I can automate in my brain, and it works, and I can continue to do it, and I don't think about it anymore, right?
Erica D'Eramo 29:10
Right.
Naeemah Elias 29:11
And then there are other things. So, returning back to work after Covid, you know, my husband was just like, like, why are you resisting this so much, and I'm like, because I like not having to talk to people all the time, I like choosing, I like knowing who's going to be on the other side of the screen, right? I, I don't remember names, and it's, it's been a problem my entire life. It is incredibly frustrating to me. It makes me feel bad, makes the other person feel bad. It's awful, right? But when I log into a Zoom and the person's name is on the bottom of the screen. It's the most amazing thing. So, I had a year of knowing who I was going to interact with, and being able to emotionally prepare myself for that interaction every single time. No surprises. And my husband's just like, "I don't understand, like you liked going to work. And I'm just like, let me explain to you what a day looks like, going to the train station, and knowing that I'm going to run into a coworker, and therefore my quiet time on the train, listening to my music, or reading to my reading my book, is going to be hijacked, and I'm going to be talking about work the entire way in, and then I get to the office, and two or three people are going to say hi to me on my way in, and I'm not going to remember who they are, or I'm not going to remember their names, and then I'm going to get in the elevator, and I'm going to have to have an awkward interaction with someone who wants to talk to me about something that I'm not prepared to talk about, because I haven't, like, prepped for the day yet, right? And so, like, there's these interactions that are happening all day long, where I have to show up, and I haven't prepared to show up, and I just have to do it, and I got good at it, because I had to do it all the time, but then I had a year where I didn't have to do that, and I'm like, this is better, this is better, and also having to be on right, like if I'm on the train and I'm listening to an audio book, or I'm reading a book, I'm not interacting with anyone, I'm just sitting and I'm receiving, I'm not on right, but if I run into a coworker on the platform, well, now I'm on, and this 40 minutes of commute is now part of my work day, the switching on, switching off, switching on, switching off, and then learning what was, so there's different types of communication that that is effective at different levels, so where I'm talking to folks who are, you know, forward facing, client facing, like those folks I'm training, right? So I'm teaching, I'm in training mode, I'm in information mode, right. And then when I'm talking to folks who are kind of my peers, I'm exchanging information, but it's at a very different level. It's much more tactical, right. And then when I'm talking to more senior people, I'm asking for something, so I'm trying to figure out what are the pieces of information that you need to give me what I need, so that we can move on with our lives. Because you don't actually want to have this conversation, you're not going to stick with it as long as I need you to stick with it, so how do we just get there?
Naeemah Elias 32:04
So navigating all the different levels of conversation and making sure that you're doing it effectively, and the code switching piece of it, right, like how I show up with my girlfriends, and how I show up with my team, and how I show up with my kids, and how I show up with my peers, and I, how I show up when I get invited to a gala, or to a very senior room. It's all a lot of code switching. It's a lot of showing up the way the situation requires, and I got to a point in the corporate space where I was like, I don't actually want to play anymore. I am utterly exhausted, and would like to opt out, right? Now, I spend a lot of time at galas and events and things like that, but I'm saying when I want to be in the room and when I don't want to be in the room, and it's a different energy for me. So I think for folks who are navigating this, and there's an emotional component to the code switching to how you're showing up, and it's, and it has a toll. At some point, you probably will decide that it's not for you anymore, right? Or some folks enjoy it, right? Like, it's a game, and they're having fun with it, and they're doing really well, and they like the money that they're making, and they like their prestige, and so they're like, I'm all in, right? And I work with clients in both places, right? Like, I work with clients who are just like, help me figure out how to take that next step, like, we're doing this, we're moving forward, we're gonna, you know, and then I have other clients who are like, help me walk away, understand what it means to walk away and help me figure out how I build my next stage of my life outside of that space, right. So it's a personal choice, and I think that the client has to decide, and that's sometimes part of the process, right. Like, like, do I stay or do I go? Do I stay with this company or move to another company, do I stay with any company at all? Do I start my own? Right, there are lots of pathways, lots of options, and I think where you are emotionally in your relationship with your company has a huge impact on how you approach those options and potentially which one you'll take.
Erica D'Eramo 34:19
Yeah, yeah, that's it's that level of informed choice and really understanding how all of these system factors are working together, so that you get to choose something that is sustainable, right, that's is sustainable and giving you what you want. Yeah, I, you mentioned something earlier in our conversation that I actually wanted to circle back to a little bit, the piece around getting feedback from individuals, maybe even around, say, an offer. You know, what are your thoughts on this one phenomenon that I've noticed that I'm sure a lot of folks are. Challenged with is that, especially if all of our mentors or sponsors are people who have maybe lived a different life path than us, maybe showing up in like more privileged capacities, sometimes their advice is really well intentioned and also doesn't actually take into account some of the factors or biases that the user of that information will be facing. So, say, like, you got to negotiate hard for that, right? You got to, like, go in there and demand your worth, and, like, that might work for one person, and it might backfire for another person. So, what have you seen that's worked for individuals who hopefully do have different sources of information, but to kind of filter through what will be most useful for them and what maybe is coming from a good place and maybe less effective or less informed.
Naeemah Elias 35:57
Yeah, so I think that picking your mentor, picking your advisor carefully is really important, right. So, you want to have someone who's got enough insight to understand that you can't necessarily approach the situation the same way that they can, and you can potentially get the same outcome, but the way that you approach it is going to be received differently, right. I navigate the world knowing that the wrong tone labels me immediately as the angry Black woman, and all of a sudden everything I say is seen through that lens, and that's a dangerous place to be, because once that's once that's established as your brand, it's a lot harder for you to do things, to you know, to be effective. So, I think picking the right person is going to be important.
Erica D'Eramo 36:50
Curating?
Naeemah Elias 36:52
Yeah, you want to, you want, like, you know, what did they say, the your personal board of directors, like, you want multiple people who can invite you. I think it's also really helpful to have a coach, right? If you have somebody like when you are going through a job change, when you're going through a job search, when you're going through any sort of transformative period in your life, like your therapist is good for helping with the emotional toll of it, but having a coach who can help you with exactly how you personally approach it, I think, can be really helpful in terms of tactics that have worked. One, when you say, you know, thank you, I'm really excited, like I appreciate, like the offer. I'm looking forward to engaging with this team. Can you give me 48 hours? Couple of things happen. One, you have time to step back and really process the the number, and I never let my clients go into a room without a number already in their head, right? I had a client, I asked a client, you know, what's the smallest that you'll accept, and she said a number, and I saw her whole body react to it, and like, is that real? Like, how did that number make you feel? And she's like, I didn't like that, and I was like, give me another number, and then she said another number, and there was still a bodily reaction to it, and I was like, keep going until you get to a number that doesn't make you physically uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable right now. So, knowing like what that bottom number is is really helpful, but the goal is not to get the bottom number.
Erica D'Eramo 38:20
Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 38:21
The goal is to get something much higher, so you want to, you want to come in knowing what's comfortable for you. When you ask for that 48 hours, if they're really excited about hiring you, they're already thinking about a new number.
Erica D'Eramo 38:38
Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 38:39
Right. And then you come back with a number, like, ask for what you want, that's one thing that I always tell my clients. I had a client get an offer, and she's like, "but what I really want is this, and I said, "so go back and ask for that, and they'll probably give you the number in the middle, right? Probably land in the middle of that, and that's fine, right? So she went back and she asked for the number she wanted, and they gave her that number, and I've seen that happen multiple times. Right, there's generally a range of what they can offer you, and they're going to offer you something sort of lower in that range. And then, when you negotiate, you'll come higher in the range, but you're still within the acceptable number of what they can afford to offer for this role. So, coming back and saying, really excited about working with the team, thinking about my value in this role, thinking about the market value of this position. I would like to counter with this amount, right, and it's based in the work and the market value. I had a woman say to me, "I want more money, and I said, 'Okay, talk to me about that. Like, why do you want more money? And she's like, 'Well, I've got, you know, a kid in college, and I've got another kid going into college, and, like, you know, my husband's about to retire, and I'm like, 'None of what you just said matters.'"
Erica D'Eramo 39:52
Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 39:52
None of that is relevant, right? What is relevant is what can you do for me, right, as your boss, as the person who is. Position to give you the promotion or give you the money. What's the value that you add for me? Why should I want to give you more money? And it's not about your personal family situation, right? It's all about what is the value that you have added to the team. So I coach folks to think about how is the world different because you're in it, right? If you've been in this team or on this role for a period of time on this team or in this role for a period of time, and and you're looking to get a promotion or you're looking to get a salary increase in this role, How does it look different today from the day that you took the role? What changed? What if you built? What if you designed, and when you come in for the conversation, you need to be prepared to talk about the value that you have added and why things are better because of you, right? And that is the conversation that leads them to think about, like, oh my goodness, this person has added an enormous value, and I don't want to lose them, right? I also encourage people to look at job descriptions in the world, right. So, go on LinkedIn, go on Indeed, pull some descriptions for the role that you do, and look at the rates. That is a conversation that your leadership can have, right. My market value is this, right. And even if you're looking for, like, what you want to do next, how you want to expand your role, looking at another job description and saying this is a description for the kind of work that I want to do. This is the description for like how I want to grow. Two things happen: one, it gives them the opportunity to help you grow, to expand your role, to give you these new responsibilities, and help you to get to that right, because it's easier to do it from your seat than to go find a new job to do it. Yep, someone notice that you're looking,
Erica D'Eramo 41:48
yep,
Naeemah Elias 41:48
you're aware of what's out there, and you're not saying I'm ready to go, right? You're saying I'm using this as data to help us have a conversation, but in the back of their mind they're always going to be thinking, oh, this person is looking, so we want to make sure that we are keeping them happy, so whether that's the salary increase, the title change, the promotion, the new responsibility, the expanded scope, the shifted scope, whatever that is, they are now on notice that this is what matters to you, and they have the opportunity to take advantage of any number of these pathways to move you in the direction that you want to go, and and they're more likely to do it because they know the value that you add, because you've clarified that, and they don't want to lose you on the team.
Erica D'Eramo 42:37
Yeah, yeah, the the 48 hour thing in and of itself, I've seen multiple times where people have said, like, oh, let me look at this, and they got the company comes back before they even counter with a number higher than what they would have countered, and certainly not always right, but like if asking for a 48 hour time out or a 48 hours to review something is a deal breaker in any way, that's a big big red flag,
Naeemah Elias 43:07
Red flag, yeah,
Erica D'Eramo 43:09
yeah,
Naeemah Elias 43:09
Yeah, and I think I also want to add in this space, because it's something that I've been thinking about recently, I think I'm getting ready to do a video on this, the idea of authenticity, so we're talking about all of the things that you want to do to kind of show up to fit in, maybe assimilate, code switch, that kind of thing to show up in the space, and I think it's important to think about, like, how do I align with this space so that I can be successful. That's very important.
Erica D'Eramo 43:36
Yeah.
Naeemah Elias 43:36
But you have to be your authentic self, and if you shift too far out of who you are, all of a sudden things don't work right. So, I tell people you're going for interviews, don't show up in the interview as the person you think they want you to be, because if you get the job, they're hiring that person, they're not hiring you.
Erica D'Eramo 44:00
Yep.
Naeemah Elias 44:01
Then you get there, and you're like, I like, I don't like these people, and this doesn't fit, and I didn't know this is what this was going to be. But you're not the person they were looking for. They were looking for the person you were pretending to be. So, if you don't show up as your authentic self in the interview conversations, then when you get there, you're going to be surprised, they're going to be surprised, and you have to figure out how you navigate this mismatch.
Erica D'Eramo 44:26
Yeah, yes, and that can be so hard for people to even know when they are being inauthentic, when they've had to do so much code switching, right? Like, if you are naturally a bit of a chameleon, or adjusting, which we do, we mirror, right? We, we pick up accents without even thinking about it. There is some of that that happens naturally, but especially if you've had to navigate a lot of environments where you've had to adapt a lot, it can be hard to even notice, like, oh, am I being like this for the interview, because I want them to like me, and I want to connect with them as humans, but I probably couldn't do this five days a week, 52 weeks a year. I probably couldn't be all smiley and bubbly like this, like every day. Yeah, I know it's..
Naeemah Elias 45:12
I had, and this is an extreme situation. I had a young man interview for me. He was a friend of a person on my team, and in the interview I heard my words coming back at me, like all the way through the entire interview, I heard my words, my language, my freezing, how I talk about the work, how I describe what I need, and I was just like, this is the strangest interview that I've ever had. I don't feel like I'm talking to this person, I don't feel like he's actually here in the room, and of course I did not hire him. And then my employee came to me later, and she's like, "Can you tell me why, like he didn't get the role? Like, he's looking for some feedback, and I said, "My feedback is actually for you. You coached him so heavily that he wasn't in the room. I was interviewing myself, and that's not okay. I'm not prepared to hire him, because I don't know who he is. I'm sure he's a lovely young man, but I don't know what I'm getting. So, in the future, like when you are, you know, when you're coaching someone, give them insight, but don't prepare them so heavily that they can't show up in the room." Now, this ended up being a win. I left that team shortly after I hired that role, and I moved into a new team, the one where I should be grateful that she wanted to hire me, and I had the capacity to hire on that team. So she came to me again and said he still wants to work with you. Would you be open to interviewing him again? And I said, yes, absolutely. So this is a new team, new role, new business, new everything. He couldn't come prepared, he just had to come and be himself and answer the questions. We had the most amazing conversation. I hired him on that team, I helped him to grow and develop as a professional. After me, he ended up moving to a different team, and they sent him to China to build out a process, and like his career trajectory shifted dramatically because he showed up as himself, and he was willing to be curious, and he was willing to explore, and he was willing to play, but that like rigid, like these are the answers, and I have to tell you exactly what you want to hear. It wouldn't work right.
Erica D'Eramo 47:31
I mean, it really kind of underscores your earlier point about the value of having a third party coach, like an outside objective question asker to say, like, what is it you actually want? What would be most effective here? Who are the stakeholders that you're navigating? Like, what does this look like? And we recently read the book Authentic by Jody-Ann Burey for the for a book club, and she highlights the value of having a coach, like an a third party, because even our mentors within an organization have that, have a certain vantage point, a valuable vantage point, but having the third party person to like really ask the questions, not have a vested interest in the outcome, just in your success, your happiness, like what works for you, it's really, yeah, it's really important that folks like you are doing this work.
Naeemah Elias 48:23
I just finished coaching a cohort of leaders for an organization, and in their feedback, the most consistent piece was it was really great to talk to someone who wasn't connected to the company.
Erica D'Eramo 48:36
Yeah.
Naeemah Elias 48:37
It was really great to talk to someone who wasn't feeding back to my leadership, or didn't have a vested interest in a certain outcome, because my company wanted a certain outcome, but who I could just run things by, and who could give me a clean sort of outside perspective, but I also have the foundation of having worked in corporations for years, so I understand corporate politics, I understand the nuance and the navigation and all of those things, so them being able to come into the room and just say, like, here's what's happening, and I'm so frustrated, and blah blah blah blah, but we're gonna make it work, and I'm like, wait, let's step back into the emotion you were just feeling, what are you making work, right? Well, yeah,
Erica D'Eramo 49:23
And you're not going to be like, oh, well, that's just Jim, you know, Jim, you know, or like, that's just that's just the way it works here, like that is, and even our like well-intentioned workplace besties sometimes will further those systems or those assumptions, because we're all swimming in it, right? So, yeah, so I would love to hear a little bit about, like, what are you working on now? What's on the radar for you? What are you excited about? Because you know we want to know how our listeners can get in touch, how they might be able to engage with you. Yeah,
Naeemah Elias 49:57
So my focus right now is summer intern. Is I've got a number of companies who are bringing me in to do coaching for managers who are going to have oversight for high school and college interns, and what does it look like to create a space that is productive and effective for both the manager and the intern, and then I've got a couple of companies who are bringing me in to do a series of training sessions for the interns, branding, public speaking, leadership, collaboration, resume, interview, LinkedIn, all of those kinds of things, so that their students can get the value of some business coaching while they're going through their summer internship, and kind of prep them for the next stage of their career, so that's my like immediate focus over the course of the summer, and then my big shift, so spring and, and summer are a lot of workshops and a lot of coaching. In the fall, I do more keynotes and conferences, so if you, you know, as a listener, if you have access to a conference at a conference, and you're looking for a keynote speaker or someone to come in and run a workshop, that's a place that I like to play, and I do a lot of those over the course of the fall. I also go into corporations, as I mentioned, and I do coaching, I do training within the organizations, and have a lot of fun doing that and helping people who identify as outsiders to navigate these spaces in ways that can be more effective, and if you want to climb the corporate ladder, understanding the rules of the space and understanding how your rules are potentially conflicting with that can be a really like helpful boost in taking that next step.
Erica D'Eramo 51:40
Yeah, yeah, cool. And where can people find you?
Naeemah Elias 51:44
I live on LinkedIn. I've got a college intern, right now, who's like pushing me to do more stuff on other social media. But find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, come and join the conversations. I've got a video series that I just started called What Would Naeemah Do, and it's one minute videos that I'm posting across all of my socials, answering questions from clients and friends and followers about business, about parenting. I've got three international teenagers about, you know, disaster planning, and like all the different places that I kind of geek out, so you know, follow that. Look for What Would Naeemah Do on your socials, and drop in, ask me a question, and give me topics to kind of play with on the videos in the future.
Erica D'Eramo 52:30
Awesome, cool. Well, we will also link to your, your LinkedIn and your resources in the show notes, so folks can find those on whatever podcast platform they're accessing this, but also we'll have a summary of this episode on the website, along with a transcript, so hopefully folks can find you that way too. So good to have you on. Really, really appreciate the discussion. And what's the one takeaway you want listeners to walk away from today's episode with
Naeemah Elias 52:58
Phone a friend.
Erica D'Eramo 52:59
Phone a friend, let's not do it alone.
Naeemah Elias 53:04
Right? So, when something feels uncomfortable, when something feels different, like, find somebody that you can talk to about it, who is a native, right? So, like, if you're the tourist, find a native who can help you to understand why your reaction or your experience is different.
Erica D'Eramo 53:21
Yeah, cool, quite the gem, and yeah, thanks again for being on the episode, and we look forward to seeing our listeners next episode!
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Thriving as an Outsider: Navigating Spaces That Weren’t Designed With You in Mind
In this episode of the Two Piers Podcast, Erica D’Eramo is joined by Naeemah Elias, a TEDx speaker, leadership coach, and founder of Elias Presence Ventures.
A former finance executive turned entrepreneur, Naeemah helps leaders and organizations create environments where people can speak up, show up, and thrive. Her signature message, “Thriving as an Outsider,” explores how difference can become a source of influence and impact.
Together, Erica and Naeemah discuss what it means to navigate professional spaces that may not have been designed with you in mind, how outsider identities shape the “rules” we carry, and why relationships, feedback, and intentional choice matter when building a career that is both effective and sustainable.
What It Means to Be an Outsider
Naeemah opens the conversation by sharing that she has felt like an outsider for most of her life.
Growing up, she was the “weird kid” who preferred sitting in the corner with a book over socializing. Later in life, receiving an autism diagnosis at 49 helped many of those early experiences make more sense.
Her outsider experience continued in other environments as well: growing up in Harvey, Illinois, attending Harvard without the same wealth or academic preparation as many of her peers, and later climbing what she describes as the “crooked ladder” in finance without a traditional finance background.
For Naeemah, being an outsider was not one single experience. It showed up across class, education, neurodivergence, professional identity, and organizational culture.
Broadening the Lens on Outsider Identity
One of the most powerful moments in the episode comes when Naeemah shares a story from a talk she gave on imposter syndrome at her 25th college reunion.
After the talk, a classmate from a background of significant wealth and privilege approached her and said that she had told his story. His life was shaped by the pressure to preserve a family legacy, even though what he really wanted was to be an artist.
That conversation helped Naeemah expand her understanding of what it means to be an outsider.
Outsider identity is often discussed through the lens of race, gender, class, neurodivergence, or other visible and invisible differences. Those dimensions matter deeply. At the same time, Naeemah’s story highlights that outsider status can also come from being expected to live a life that does not fit who you really are.
As Erica reflects, this connects with her own experience navigating engineering and leadership spaces where the dominant norms did not always fit how she or others naturally operated.
Naeemah captures the idea clearly:
Navigating as an outsider often means moving through spaces that were not designed with you in mind.
The Rules We Carry
A major theme in the conversation is that our outsider identities often come with rules.
Those rules may have developed for good reasons. They may have helped us stay safe, avoid risk, preserve belonging, or survive scarcity. But they can also follow us into new environments where they may no longer serve us.
Naeemah gives the example of growing up with rules around food. In families or communities where wasting food is not acceptable, cleaning your plate may be tied to gratitude, respect, or survival. But in another context, the rules may be different. Leaving food on a plate could signal abundance, refinement, or simply personal preference.
The challenge is that we often do not recognize our own norms until we encounter someone else’s.
Erica compares this to the familiar idea of fish not noticing the water they are swimming in. Many of our beliefs and behaviors are so familiar that they feel universal, even when they are deeply shaped by family, culture, class, or environment.
Weaponized Gratitude and the Pressure to Stay in Place
The conversation then turns toward a concept Naeemah names as “weaponized gratitude.”
This can happen when people in positions of power use the language of gratitude to discourage others from asking for more, setting boundaries, negotiating, or advocating for themselves.
Naeemah shares an example from a salary negotiation where a recruiter told her she should be grateful for the opportunity. The message was clear: stop negotiating, stop asking, and accept what is being offered.
For people who were raised to value gratitude, humility, or not asking for too much, that kind of language can carry enormous weight. It can activate old rules and make advocacy feel inappropriate, even when negotiation is expected.
This is one of the reasons outsider navigation can be so complex. The visible situation may be a salary conversation. The invisible situation may involve years of internalized messages about gratitude, safety, and belonging.
Money, Debt, and Unspoken Class Norms
Naeemah and Erica also explore how class background can shape beliefs about money, risk, and success.
Naeemah shares advice from her brother, a financial planner, who told her that people often spend the same percentage of every dollar they earn. If they spend 87% of a smaller salary, they may also spend 87% of a much larger salary unless they intentionally structure their finances differently.
His advice was practical: as her income increased, she kept the amount in her main spending account consistent and directed the additional money into savings. That system helped prevent lifestyle creep and allowed her to save more aggressively.
The conversation also touches on debt. Erica reflects on growing up with the belief that debt is bad, only later learning that debt can function very differently depending on how it is used. Naeemah shares an example of helping a colleague reconsider college debt as a potential investment in his daughter’s future rather than something to avoid at all costs.
These examples point to a broader theme: many professional and financial behaviors are shaped by inherited beliefs that often go unexamined until we have a reason to question them.
Networking as a Survival and Growth Strategy
When Erica asks what helps outsiders thrive, Naeemah’s first answer is networking, but not in a superficial sense.
She is talking about real relationships.
For Naeemah, mentors and senior advisors played an essential role in helping her interpret unfamiliar environments. She would ask people questions like:
How would you respond in this situation?
If you received this offer, would you accept it or negotiate?
Am I thinking about this the right way?
What am I missing here?
Those relationships gave her access to context she could not see on her own.
That kind of guidance is especially important when the rules are unspoken. Someone with more experience inside the system can explain what is normal, what is risky, and what options might be available.
The Tourist Mindset
One of the most useful frames Naeemah offers is to think of yourself as a tourist in certain environments.
If you are navigating a space where other people seem to know the rules instinctively, it can help to become curious and observant rather than assuming you are wrong.
A tourist pays attention. A tourist asks questions. A tourist notices patterns.
That mindset can reduce shame and increase learning.
Erica notes that when people travel abroad, they naturally expect cultural differences. They observe more carefully and assume there may be customs they do not yet understand. But in the workplace, people often assume everyone is operating from the same culture, even when that is not true.
The tourist mindset allows outsiders to gather information without losing themselves in the process.
Feedback, Emails, and Tactical Adjustments
Naeemah shares a practical example from earlier in her career. A leader told her that her emails were coming across as abrasive because they went straight to the task without a relational opening.
The feedback was simple: add a brief humanizing line before getting down to business.
For Naeemah, that became a “field” in the email. She could automate it without feeling like she was changing who she was.
This distinction matters.
Some forms of adaptation are tactical and low-cost. Others require more emotional labor, masking, or code-switching. Part of thriving as an outsider is learning the difference.
Not every adjustment is a betrayal of authenticity. Not every expectation is harmless. The work is learning what is sustainable, what is effective, and what comes at too high a cost.
Code-Switching, Masking, and Sustainable Choice
Erica and Naeemah spend time discussing the toll that code-switching and masking can take, especially for people who are navigating multiple identities or environments where they have to adjust constantly.
Naeemah describes the exhaustion of returning to in-person work after remote work during the pandemic. On Zoom, names were visible. Interactions were predictable. There was time to prepare.
In person, the day involved constant unscheduled interactions: on the train, in the elevator, in hallways, and across different levels of the organization. Each conversation required a different mode of communication.
For some people, navigating those shifts feels like a game they enjoy and choose to keep playing. For others, it eventually becomes exhausting enough that they decide to change roles, companies, or career paths entirely.
The key is informed choice.
The more clearly someone understands the system and the cost of participating in it, the more intentionally they can decide whether to stay, adapt, shift, or leave.
Choosing Advisors Carefully
The episode also explores the importance of curating the people we go to for advice.
Not all advice transfers equally across identity, context, or lived experience. A strategy that works well for one person may carry different risks for someone else.
Naeemah names this directly when discussing negotiation and professional communication. As a Black woman, she is aware that tone can be interpreted through harmful stereotypes. Advice to “negotiate hard” or “demand your worth” may need to be filtered through the reality of how different people are perceived in different rooms.
This is why a personal board of directors matters.
Having multiple trusted people with different vantage points helps create a fuller picture. A coach can also be valuable during transitions because they offer a confidential outside perspective without being embedded in the company’s politics or invested in a particular outcome.
Salary Negotiation and Knowing Your Number
Naeemah offers several practical suggestions for salary negotiation.
First: never accept an offer on the spot.
A simple response such as, “Thank you. I’m excited about the opportunity. Can you give me 48 hours to review this?” creates time to reflect, seek input, and make an intentional decision.
Second: know your number before you enter the conversation.
Naeemah describes working with a client who physically reacted to the number she initially said she would accept. That body response mattered. They kept working until the client identified a number that did not create that same discomfort.
Third: make the case based on value, not personal need.
Wanting more money because of personal expenses may be real, but it is not the strongest business case. The stronger case is based on the value you bring, the market rate for the role, and the impact you have already created.
Authenticity in the Interview Process
Near the end of the conversation, Naeemah raises an important caution about authenticity.
When interviewing, it can be tempting to show up as the person you think the employer wants to hire. But if you get the role, that is the person they will expect.
If the interview version of you is too far removed from who you really are, both sides may end up surprised.
Naeemah shares a story about interviewing someone who had been coached so heavily that she felt as though she was interviewing herself. She could not tell who the candidate actually was, so she did not hire him for that role.
Later, when he interviewed again without being overprepared, he showed up more authentically. This time, the conversation was strong, and she hired him. His career grew significantly from there.
The lesson is not to avoid preparation. The lesson is to prepare in a way that helps you show up clearly, not disappear behind rehearsed answers.
The Value of an Outside Perspective
Both Erica and Naeemah highlight the value of having someone outside the organization to talk things through with.
Internal mentors, sponsors, and workplace friends can be incredibly useful. They also live inside the same system and may carry the same assumptions.
An external coach can help create space to step back, name what is happening, and explore what options are available without defaulting to “that’s just how things work here.”
For people navigating outsider experiences, that kind of outside perspective can be especially useful.
What Naeemah Is Working On Now
Naeemah is currently working with organizations on summer internship programming, including coaching for managers who oversee high school and college interns, as well as training sessions for interns on topics such as:
Personal branding
Public speaking
Leadership
Collaboration
Resumes
Interviews
LinkedIn
She also speaks at conferences, offers keynotes and workshops, and works with organizations to help people who identify as outsiders navigate professional environments more effectively.
Connect with Naeemah Elias
You can connect with Naeemah and explore her work through the links below:
Final Takeaway: Phone a Friend
When Erica asks Naeemah what one takeaway she wants listeners to carry forward, her answer is simple:
Phone a friend.
When something feels uncomfortable, confusing, or unfamiliar, find someone who understands the environment and can help you interpret what is happening.
If you are the tourist, find someone who knows the terrain.
You do not have to navigate it alone.