Michelle Bazargan

S7E1: Courageous Self Discovery: Unlock your true professional self with Michelle Bazargan

What a way to launch a season! In this interview, host Anika Chabra draws a relationship between childhood experience, identity and the professional self.  Guest Michelle Bazargan, a technology executive advisor, conscious leadership coach and author encourages listeners to go inwards, uncover their stories and really get to know oneself in order to show up at work as your true self.

Michelle shares the early experiences that shaped her, provides examples of childhood triggers that show up in work relationships and encourages an abundance mindset as we find our place in the workplace. Recognizing that corporate systems are slow to adapt, calling for personal responsibility is the change that Michelle wants to inspire in the world, one person at a time.

Check out her book “Unmask Your Brilliance. Thriving beyond workplaces designed to hide you” and pick up your own copy at Amazon.

About our guest:

Michelle firmly believes that leadership is not a title—it’s courageous behavior. Throughout her two-decade professional journey, she has invested countless hours fostering connections with hundreds of dynamic teams, from nimble startups to midsize to Fortune 500 organizations, collaborating with individuals across diverse levels and industries.

She is known for her ability to be an “alchemist,” translating complex, outdated business, leadership, and technology buzzwords into “human speak” with pragmatic actions that ignite culture change. An immigrant who escaped war, and faced a great deal of adversity, she exemplifies what’s possible with bravery and curiosity. As a global technology and innovation executive advisor, conscious leadership coach, and sought-after speaker for TEDx and keynotes, she guides a wide range of organizations and is deeply committed to inspiring people to shed limitations, use their voices, and embrace their brilliance. In her new book,"Unmask Your Brilliance - Thriving in Workplaces Designed to Hide You" she unfolds a powerful journey, offering an “insider” perspective on workplace pressures for conformity and false narratives, while providing practical tools to become a conscious leader, with no title required.

Michelle

 Ask the questions about your background and your family. Uncover those because the stories and the experiences are where these identities and these skills, as I call them, are hidden.

Anika

Welcome back to Root and Seed, a podcast about tradition seekers who are sparked to explore, define, and celebrate their family and cultural identity. I'm your host, Anika Chabra.  Welcome to season seven. Over the past three years, we have had the good fortune to have spoken to some incredible people. By immersing ourselves in their stories, in their passions, understanding their relationships, our guests have pulled back the curtains on ways of moving through the world that truly inspires.

And in response to your response to our platform, we have launched over 15 different decks of conversation prompts. From learning about your family's heritage to preserving the details of your favorite holiday traditions and uncovering the pains and joys of being a parent to celebrating the uniqueness of birthdays and milestones,  we have basked in pure joy with your feedback and learned a thing or two about how you use the cards in our technology and community. 

In response to many of you taking the conversation prompts to the office, you showed us that there was a craving for deeper and more intimate conversations with our colleagues. These workplace conversations stimulated inclusivity in your teams, leading to more comfort in collaboration and innovative thinking. 

Our workplace deck was born, but more importantly, it sparked a desire to meet other professionals who are helping people bring their whole and authentic selves to work. This season, we will meet authors, consultants, therapists, researchers, and just plain amazing people who evangelize the value of being true to ourselves in corporate environments. 

This brought us first to Michelle Bazargan, a technology executive advisor, conscious leadership coach sought after speaker for TEDx and keynotes in her new book, Unmask Your Brilliance: Thriving in workplaces designed to hide you. She unfolds a powerful journey, offering an insider perspective on workplace pressures for conformity and false narratives while providing practical tools to become a conscious leader, no title required. She is bold. She is delightful and she is incredibly relatable. She wants people to understand themselves first, inviting them to go inward because it's our stories that make us us and helps to round out who we are as we show up at work, revealing skills that no degree or title or professional experience can explain. Here's our conversation. 

Michelle, thank you so much for being the first person we're recording for the seventh season of the Root and Seed podcast. 

Michelle

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to do this with you. 

Anika

What do you want the listeners to know about who Michelle is? 

Michelle

So…where  to start…One thing that's shocking (I'll start with shocking). Most people are shocked to know that I actually spent the majority of my life thinking there's something wrong with me,  not realizing what I used to call weaknesses or shame or whatever, was the strength of who I was. Most people....and I think this goes probably for you and a lot of people that are driving and trying to change the world, so to speak, or make an imprint on it. Is that you only see the end product and you don't always know the trials and tribulations anyone has really gone through or they're still going through, right? Because we're so good at image, we're a society of image.  And so for me, without the details on paper of the things I've accomplished. When I meet with people that even ask for me to mentor them or guide them, I share that I've spent the majority of my lifetime thinking there was something wrong with me because I was so desperately trying to fit into a corporate box. I've been in the corporate environment since I was about 18 years old, believe it or not. And I've been in technology since I was a kid. I entered tech when I was about nine, ten years old with my father. And so it's always been swirling around me to fit myself into something that I didn't always fit in or wasn't true for me. And so I have committed the rest of my lifetime, so to speak, to undoing those boxes and structures and wrongness. And the more I talk to people and have vulnerability and they have it back,  I'm starting to see without formal research or survey that a lot of people are functioning that way. Hence, it shows up in the things we see in society: Highest suicide rates, highest depression rates, highest alcoholism, and all those things are just the result of symptoms of how much people think they're wrong, think they're shameful, can't be themselves, all those things. And so I've dedicated myself first to try to  be as much as I can be genuinely through everything that I do. 

Anika

Thank you. It's such a courageous way of starting out. So I appreciate that. Michelle, tell us a little bit about your cultural and your familial background and how that feeds into your identity. 

Michelle

My family and I immigrated here from Iran. It wasn't the traditional style of immigrants. Sometimes you just pick up, decide you want to pick up and move to another country.  But, it wasn't that -  it was pretty traumatic. Literally overnight, there was a war that happened in the middle of a winter storm. And my mom and I boarded a bus and escaped Iran when nobody was really leaving. I mean, it's shut down. It's the middle of the war. Bombs are going off. And my mom courageously knew in her gut that there wasn't going to be an opportunity for me in that country as a woman, especially as we've heard of things that have happened to Iran and then a few years ago, the killing of Mahsa Amini for exposing some of her hair through a hijab. And so one bag, a couple hundred dollars, no plan.  We got onto a bus in the middle of the night and we escaped through Turkey. And sometimes people will say to me (I was about six or seven), they’ll say, “you probably don't remember that.” And, I do remember it. I remember machine guns being  flared around like it was an ice cream cone, like it was no big deal. I remember vividly watching children that didn't get, let's say, paperwork being sent back with their families.  I couldn't play with them, for example, the next day. So that really stays with you. And it took us a couple of years to be able to immigrate over to the United States. And it was filled initially with so much excitement and so much relief. My father was actually in the States studying computer engineering and getting his degree. And we were also separated from him for a couple of years. So it was reuniting with him. It was coming to this place that was sold as the “American dream”, so to speak. And to be honest, it was a rude awakening because the real trauma and terror started when we landed in the United States. Right around the same time that regime that had destroyed Iran had also taken Americans, hostage in the U. S. Embassy in Iran. And so, it was a time where the media portrayed every Iranian as a terrorist. And people often don't ask questions. They just see what's on TV and follow right along. Every Iranian was deemed as a terrorist. Kids would leave little notes on my desk at school, “go home terrorist”. So it became very quickly a game of hiding my identity as a kid. I changed my name. My real name is Mehrnoush. My parents sent me to linguistics classes to make sure that I did not have an accent because they were so badly bullied in their workplace for their accents, for their names. As I got a little older, I even dyed my hair blonde. I mean, you name it. The name of the game was to forget my identity, forget where I came from. I told people, and a lot of people still do, I was Persian because most people didn't understand that.  People from Iran call themselves Persian. They thought it was like a whole other continent or something.  I leveraged that, lack of education for my benefit. So I became entrenched in just hiding my identity and being very shameful of who I was. And I never realized because back then we didn't talk about trauma and PTSD and things like that. And I never really understood that not only the escaping of the war left such an imprint on me, but also the experience of coming to the States and the things that sometimes we take casually, like
“What is that name? Where is that from? As a kid or as a younger professional entering the workplace, you feel wrong. You feel shameful. Or I didn't understand the innuendos. The American slang, I just felt like I wasn't intelligent enough. I felt like I didn't understand. And so I thought it was just me. I didn't think anyone else felt this way, right? We all, we all think it's just us.  And as I went through a lot of experiences in the corporate environment, I started seeing a lot of those patterns reemerging, because I think what a lot of people don't realize, and this has been studied by doctors and scientists, we actually replay all of our childhood and all of our early experiences in the workplace.So our interactions with bosses, with our colleagues, with the way we shrink, with the way that we're not comfortable to use our voice in a meeting, all of those are actually linked to an original experience you had. I never got any of that. I didn't understand that. I just thought there was something wrong with me. And so I spent so much time because of the immigrant trait of resilience and pushing and that all at all costs pushing through that, but there becomes a moment where it crashes because you're not healing, you're just pushing forward. And that's what happened to me over the last three, four years. It all collided.

And I looked in the mirror and I was like, I don't even recognize myself or who I am or who my real identity is with all these masks and things. And that set me off into not only healing myself and understanding myself, but really researching and starting to unravel that. Almost everybody is doing this  and putting some math and science and all that, especially for the research for my book around it and really starting to unveil what is  systematic and epidemic. This is for all of us.  And so that's almost become my passion. I sit in a lot of obviously work in corporate environments and people say it's the environment or it's this or they point outwards. And I really want people to understand that we are so much more powerful than we think and we do have the power to change it and look inward. So that's kind of become my story and my mission and what really you know jazzes me up in the morning so to speak.

Anika

So tell me the value of understanding your full identity?You know, people say, I use the term, bring your whole self to work. Unpack that for me. What is, what's the value of you, Michelle, me, Anika, whoever it is, entering the workplace, really understanding what their identity is. What is the value that that provides? yourself, but the workplace as well and your peers and your colleagues. What's that real value come down to?  

Michelle 

Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is we bring our whole work self to the workplace, right? All the other parts and pieces because workplaces are still emotionally phobic, don't always show up. And so I think there's two aspects. One is. Really getting clear yourself because identities change, they change based on life triggers. They've changed based on your circumstances. If you move your desires, what, what all of us, you know, would call our identity at 20 may not be what we are at 40 or 50 or what have you. So identities morph. And so one of the biggest things I think first is to really look at what your identity is in a continuous way, not a, “I am a mother” or, you know, “I am a VP of blah, blah”, it's, you know, what actually makes you happy and gives you joy that without a title is who you are.  I think that's first. And also an exercise on your strength, or even the things you call a weakness that if you probably reframe could be a strength, because I think a lot of times we don't look at things that are transferable in the workplace. Sometimes you’ll have a mother of three that knows how to juggle everything. And then you'll look at her or even there's some dads as well. And you'll say things like, well, they do have project management skills?. And I'm like, really? They can manage three kids. How could they not have project management skills? You know? Or people that speak multiple languages, like their minds naturally actually think differently.

Sometimes we think that some of these traits that we have that we call “ personal”, have nothing to do with the workplace. So we don't even acknowledge these traits or these attributes or parts of our identity ourselves. And if we don't do it, then it's very, very difficult for someone else, for you to articulate it, for you to demonstrate it. Or for you to even cause a ripple to  say, for example, the things I did, like, Hey, maybe this person thinks differently because they grew up completely different than we did. And then also looking at the skills that that brought, whether it's..you're a traveler that loves to explore and you know so much about different cultures, whether it's you play the piano, whether it's you're an amateur cyclist, I mean, you name it. We all have so many attributes that also translate to skills that we ourselves don't always identify with to articulate. In the book, I double click  on the immigrant aspects of it, because immigrants don't realize this always, and I didn't realize it until I sat down. There's attributes and traits of courage and adaptability and things like that because of your stories and your experiences. So a lot of times, what I encourage, and I learned this through actually writing the book, is get your stories out, get your traits, your history. And this ties to what you guys are really trying to change, ask the questions about your background and your family, uncover those, because the stories and the experiences is where these identities and these skills, as I call them are hidden and you're not really going to connect the dots until you understand the things that your family has gone through, your parents, yourself. Even when you don't remember, these are the important things that will make you really understand your whole identity and that's step one in my opinion. And then step two is bringing that to the workplace and having that vulnerability. to share those things and expose those things. So the onus is on each of us to unravel those things.

Anika

One of the things that I love, and you have a whole chapter on this, is  the idea of the childhood narratives and the things that happen in our childhood  replaying back in the workplace. What's a common one that you've come across that you're like, “Oh gosh, everybody does this or has done this”. Or it's like, Oh, it’s like spot it and you've, you got it type of thing. Is there one that you've seen that is prevalent in the workplace?  

Michelle

The one that I commonly see, and I've experienced this myself, is the  boss employee kind of dynamic. Typically, it's when you're given, let's say, a performance review or feedback. Those are when I see triggers coming up, or people replaying things that I do. I'm like, that's definitely not the real them. Something is getting triggered, so to speak, or I'm bringing something up, or just observing it even. I would say that is when it's formal. It's almost like a parent that is like reprimanding you in a way, or you've done something wrong or you feel wrong. And to be honest, a lot of the systems that are in the workplace are very outdated. Like even the performance management type. Not the actual systems, but the way that things are done is very, you know, puts people in a box. And so I definitely think that's one commonplace where people all of a sudden react in a way that is not normal because they're feeling like they're wrong or they're feeling like they're judged and they're feeling like that little kid that whether on the soccer field, they weren't good enough or they weren't, you know, good enough for dad or, you know, They didn't make the college that, you know, the family wanted. So they're not going to, all those things seem to, come up and I've experienced it myself personally too. When I'm present and I'm like, Oh, okay. I'm feeling like I'm 17 right now. Okay. That's what's coming up. 

Anika 

Are you familiar with the playground game Red Rover, Red Rover, I call "X" over. 

So for me, um, I was always the last picked lack. So I will sit on zooms with, you know, squares of 30 people on my screen. And if I'm not picked within the first 10 of those 30 people, I start to get really anxious because I think of, well, why aren't I being picked? And I start to think about Red Rover, Red Rover. We call Anika over, usually being the last one at the end. Because I wasn't very popular growing up and I had my issues growing up for sure socially. I'll sit like an adult, as an almost 50 year old, and sit there and go,  Why are, why aren't I being picked? 

Michelle

I mean, look at the level of awareness too, that you're able to be like, Oh, wait a minute, this is coming up, or I'm feeling like in my belly, this. awful feeling. 

Anika

So let me ask you this question. What do you wish for the workplace? What would make Michelle feel like, gosh, there's been a dent in, in your pursuit of a more inclusive, more welcoming, stronger place for people to be a, you know, stronger employee. 

Michelle

You know, it might be a dream, but for me, I am always floored by the lack of abundance mindset that there is in the workplace.

That there isn't enough to go around, that you have to fight that, you know, if there's a project, for example, then if this person doesn't get it, then that's it. And we're getting hung up on this lack-thinking. I attribute all of those little examples to lack because there's so much to go around. And,  you know, if I could,  I may not change the top, so to speak, because the structures and the corporate conglomerates and all that is very challenging. But if I can put a dent in, the folks at the table, the three, four people that feel like they can use their voice, see that the universe truly is abundant, that this isn't the only job. This isn't the only boss. I don't have to die here. All these stories you make up. I'll never get another job. I can never ask for what I want. All these things. If each individual can even just move 5 percent of the needle for themselves, I feel like that's the ripple that can maybe have a chance of changing our future because I've sat in the bigger discussions. I've sat in board meetings. I've sat in meetings where they rack stack the people, they distribute the salaries a certain way. That's going to be a lot slower to change. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that is going to be a lot tougher. And then on the flip side, I see people giving into that and giving their power away. And I really, really want people to feel as an individual that they truly do have the power to make the small changes that do seem big. It really is just a choice. And there's so much to go around regardless of what the media makes you think. And try to control you or the workplace or what have you. And that's my passion is that I, I wish somebody had told me some of these things are not true and that you do control your fate. And there is so much to go around. Don't shrink yourself. 

Anika

So you're very familiar with our family conversation cards. I know that you are. And we just launched these workplace decks  that have been making their way around corporate environments, senior care homes and community centers. It's just been fun to see who's been picking these up.

Michelle

As luck would have it, did you pick a good one? 

Anika

I think so. it's under the category of stories and it says “Who was your biggest pop culture influence?  There are dig deeper questions. Was there a movie star, a singer or an athlete who inspired you and what do you remember about them? 

Michelle

I'm rewinding back in, in history. Honestly, when it comes to music, I always gravitated towards the women that were themselves across the genre. And there's one name that just today happens to be popping up. Her name is Shania Twain, and most people are probably shocked that I would have listened to country!. And she struck me as someone that was bold and courageous. And I'm always attracted to that. She didn't follow the norm of the way people dress. She didn't care. She was herself and doesn't care and is willing to disrupt the way that it's always been done. In country music, for example, she's one that stands out to me and I will say even pop culture wise or even people that I gravitate towards that I've, you know, admired. Michelle Obama is another one. She wasn't your traditional, I'm now the president's wife, so I'm all appropriate. And, you know, she was herself and I'm sure there's aspects that she had to contain, right? But I find that the boldness, the courage to be yourself, especially when you're in the limelight and the risks are high and you're willing to take it. And so for me, I'm inspired by people that are that way, because it's like, Wow. Okay. If I could just do a little bit of that, of that energy, what would it create? And what if we all did something like that because women, especially within the music industry or even athletics and things like that have kind of been, you know, held back or what have you. Those that step up and have that boldness and courage, you know, to them, I just find that next level.  Are they bold? Are they courageous? And what can I learn from them?

One of the reasons all of the different tools that you guys are creating (are special).  We don't normally have these conversations in the workplace. Or if you do, you put it under this bucket of like, let's have an icebreaker and it all of a sudden becomes weird, you know, so, um, and I think that these are the things that we ask one another, just like you did me and you naturally unravel. II think that's what it's about, and getting to know each other beyond the images and the facades that typically play out in the workplace.  

Anika

Michelle, I wish you the most success with this book and, and more to come I'm hoping and, and  Um, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been truly a blessing. 

Okay, let's take a moment to let that all sink in. The way that Michelle answered the conversation card prompt on one hand reinforced some of the things that she's become known for, but hearing it in the way that only Michelle can articulate added another layer and texture to explore her story even deeper. 

We all have trauma, self doubt, and hidden talents. Doing the type of work to uncover them means that you can truly own them.  Visit our show notes to get a direct link to purchase her book, Unmask Your Brilliance. And the new Root and Seed conversation cards for the workplace are available at rootandseed.com.  

Our next episode features a tech sales coach who has harnessed his professional experience at the likes of Google and Dropbox to now help entrepreneurs and founders to find their voice and seal the deal. Diversity minded and a champion of inclusivity, Peter Ahn, breaks down the sales process in a way that inspires others to present and act and sell with a confidence that only comes from truly knowing yourself. 

Root &  Seed is hosted by me, Anika Chabra, executive produced by Jenn Siripong Mandel and edited by Camille Blais. Bye for now.

Episode Credits

Hosted by: Anika Chabra

Brought to you by: Root & Seed

Executive Producer: Jennifer Siripong Mandel

Sound Editing by: Camille Blais

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