Build A Joy Centered Team With Thea Monyeé

Rebel Therapist

How do you build a team within a joy centered and decolonized business?

To answer this question, I've brought you none other than Thea Monyeé!

I’m gonna ask listeners who haven’t already discovered Thea Monyeé's work to go listen to the Shaping The Shift Podcast and explore MarleyAyo and The Blacker The Brain and the Free Joy Experience. So go do all that and then come back.

The way Thea Monyeé runs her company is so brilliant.

The part I want to focus on today is how she builds her team.

In episode 27 of Shaping The Shift, she invited her team on to talk openly about how the company works.

It’s a glimpse into what is possible with a team.

Before I dive in, let me share a little more about her:

Thea Monyeé is a licensed therapist and Oya priestess in the Ifa tradition, committed to creating healing opportunities to Black/Marginalized bodies through decolonization of joy, mental health, and pleasure. In addition to appearances on HBO, OWN, Fox Soul, and The Red Table Talks, she is the host of Shaping The Shift Podcast, founder of MarleyAyo, and The Blacker The Brain: A Mental Health Decolonizing Campaign, Conversation, & Cohort, co-host of Dem Black Mamas Podcast, and co-creator of The Free Joy Experience. She currently serves as a contributor on a policy working group supporting the objectives of the 2021 U.S. COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.

Here's some of what we talked about:

• Cultivating a decolonized work space
• Breaking out of the cycle of distrust and control
• The onboarding process MarleyAyo uses to unleash joy and resist the limits of capitalism
• Moving with change while also setting goals
• Using a seasonal rhythm with their company
• A reframe of how she'd "fire" someone from her team (it wouldn't be a firing)
• Finding her inner circle of entrepreneurs and leaders she turns to for counsel
• How they cultivate trust as a team
• The new web home they just launched
• Her new book, Blood & Bajareque

Here are some takeaways that particularly stand out to me.

Takeaway #1:

Creating a joy-centered, decolonized team is a process. We've all been living in this white supremacist way of doing things, and it takes a whole process and lots of time to learn and create a liberated way of running a company.

Takeaway #2:

Thea and her team use goals, but they work to use those goals in service of a bigger vision.

She works hard to stay out of the failure construct around not reaching a particular goal in a particular way.

Takeaway #3:

When they bring on a new team member, they pay attention to what brings this person joy, rather than starting with a job description. They co-create what that role will be based on what they're needing and what brings this person joy. In that way, they open up to new opportunities that this new person may bring.

Show notes at http://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/148