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PODCAST 02 | LOVELYN NWADEYI

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

L Nwadeyi I grew up in a super-conservative Christian household, and then I would go to school with people who don’t necessarily hold all those views.  I grew up in a very traditional Igbo household, and then I’d go to school with people who don’t come from a traditional Igbo household.  Every day I was moving between two worlds, and the moment I learned that I could use those perspectives, those learnings, those different versions of Lovelyn to communicate, to come up with ideas, to challenge, to debate, that’s when I really hit that sweet spot.  

F Sweeney: Social justice advocate and Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity Lovelyn Nwadeyi on the challenges of having to move between different cultures at home and at school, and how she gradually learned to harness and work with those challenges.  

Welcome to CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE with clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson from the Global Brain Health Institute in Dublin, and me, Fionnuala Sweeney.  Ian is the author of HOW CONFIDENCE WORKS: THE NEW SCIENCE OF SELF-BELIEF.  In this series, we speak to Fellows from the Global Atlantic community about the role of confidence (or lack of it) in their lives, both growing up, and in their work today as Atlantic Fellows advancing fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.

Now, back to Lovelyn:

L Nwadeyi: I grew up in Queenstown, now known as Komani, in South Africa. A key word for me in my life has been duality:  growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, just a few years after the fall of apartheid, arriving as a little immigrant child, and then being exposed to so many things that made me sometimes happily, and sometimes unhappily aware of my race, and my gender, and my nationality, and my ethnicity and the salience of those identities has really shaped me. So, I often think about myself as a bit of a chameleon, not in a manipulative way, but just that I really have had to learn how to shape shift between different identities and different spaces, and that’s really characterised most of my life, and how I navigate work, how I navigate relationships.

At this point in my life, I’m very much active in the work of social justice, and that has had various iterations over the last few years.  Some of it was in student activism, some of it has been in the corporate space, some of it has been with schools, and universities, some of it has been in the faith community.  I’ve really committed myself to being part of making the world a better place, or at least leaving the world in a better position than what I found it.

F Sweeney: Could we break that down a little bit and talk more specifically about the kind of challenges you faced in trying to live that duality, to live with the greyness of the ambiguity that that might mean for some people?

L Nwadeyi: I would start from when I was younger.  So, being a Nigerian Igbo girl at that time when I started in school, I think my class was probably the third or the fourth class of kids who were of mixed racial backgrounds, that were allowed to go to the ex-model C school that we went to in South Africa, so formerly whites only government school. It was at a time where South Africa was still figuring itself out. And for me, at the age that I was five, six years old starting school at that time, I didn’t know anything about race, I didn’t know that it mattered that I was not South African.

So, for me, those earlier challenges involved things like just feeling awkward about my accent.  I was very fluent in English at the time, but my English didn’t sound like the English I’m speaking now - it had quite a strong Nigerian accent - so I always felt awkward about that. It also meant that in terms of connecting with fellow black students, I was strange to them in the sense that I was a black girl like them who could not speak Xhosa, but I could speak English and interact with my white fellow students.  So, my earlier friends, we might have been different racially, but at least could share the same language, but it was still awkward because I didn’t feel like I fitted in with them racially and culturally and then I did not fit in with the people who did look like me.

One of the things that I was very determined about was learning to speak Xhosa, so by the time I got to Grade Two, I was fluent in Xhosa.  We had a school taxi driver who used to pick us up from school, and from home in our neighbourhood, and so he taught me how to speak Xhosa.  His name was [Putsola].  He’s passed away now, bless his soul, but he taught me how to speak Xhosa, so that was a big barrier to navigate.

Class was a big one as well.  We were not a wealthy family.  I often talk about our upbringing as being middle class adjacent.  We never went to bed hungry.  My parents really did an incredible job in making sure they provided for us. But there was always a sense that we were one crisis away from falling into poverty. And so that awareness I think as a child, also means that you become quite aware of what you can and can’t ask for, you become quite aware of what you can and can’t have compared to your friends.

Just lastly on the piece about that sense of foreignness, when you overlay that with questions about gender - so I was going to a very Victorian English type of school where they were raising ladies.  We got badges for walking straight with our stomachs in and our chests out for deportment. Our school had a very colonial legacy, and so being a little girl there was a very clear expectation of what type of girl, what type of woman I needed to become. And I think there’s a way in which when you are a black, foreign girl in South Africa, you just don’t fit into the definitions of femininity, and so there was definitely a tenderness that I often did not feel was extended to me as a child.

F Sweeney: You’ve really understood what was happening for you as a child in a way that not everybody would?

L Nwadeyi: I don’t think I understood it then.  I think years and years of just studying society, being a student of social sciences, and years and years of therapy, has also helped me to be able to put a name to it.  But that understanding has been necessary though for me, in becoming the person that I am today. So, being able to challenge the narratives about the type of woman I want to be, or the type of person I want to be, that is both because of, and in spite of my race, my gender, my sexuality, my immigrant status, my citizenship status, that awareness has become a source of my confidence, and my self-awareness, and my trust in myself.

I Robertson: As Fionnuala said, you have such a sophisticated analysis and understanding.  Often the privileged and the powerful don’t need to develop an understanding because it’s all granted to them and they’re blind to the sources of their privilege, and they take the confidence that comes from privilege for granted. What you’ve described, you were to a certain extent an outsider, you couldn’t even have another strong source of confidence, which is being part of the group, the collective sense of we are together, I am part of this group, I am of this community.  And that collective confidence can often be a very powerful bolster to self-confidence that’s weakened by stigma, or stereotype, or prejudice.

You didn’t have that luxury.  You were an outsider, and you were missing out on privileges to do with gender, to do with race, to do with sexuality, to do with socioeconomic status.  And yet, what you’ve just described is somehow jiu-jitsuing that experience into actually being a source of confidence, which I just thought was a remarkable analysis.  I’d love to hear how you think you did that, and were there any people, or experiences that were critical in you doing that?

L Nwadeyi: Oh my gosh, there are so many steps to how we got here!  As a child, whilst I was feeling all these things that I described in the first few minutes, whilst I could be quite talkative and energetic with some of my friends, I was quite shy in the sense of being the one to give a speech, or give a talk, or do something big in front of people.

And so I distinctly remember in Grade Seven, your last year in primary school in South Africa, in Grade Seven I started doing public speaking.  It was one of the extra murals offered at our school, one of our teachers was running a public speaking club.  And I remember the first session that I attended was an improv session, so unprepared public speaking, which we sort of would do in class for English, where we would do English orals and presentations. But this was a mixed group of people, so across different Grades, anyone from Grade Four upwards could attend public speaking.  So, it was a mix of girls across different grades, different backgrounds.  And I remember watching some of my peers do this unprepared public speaking, and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, they’re so cool, like I want to be like them!”  So, for me, it was seeing people who in many ways were similar to me, just doing this thing, and I thought well, that’s cool I really want to try this. And so, I did try it, and my parents would say that was the beginning of the end, but I think for me that was really the beginning of an incredibly transformative journey.  Because once I found my voice in Grade Seven, I have not shut up since then, literally!  

So, I started public speaking, got really good at it, and what I found was that my ability to argue, and debate, and convince people was actually very much because of how I had learnt to see things from different perspectives.  I grew up in a super-conservative Christian household, and then I would go to school with people who don’t necessarily hold all those views.  I grew up in a very traditional Igbo household, and then I’d go to school with people who don’t come from a traditional Igbo household.  Every day I was moving between two worlds, and the moment I learned that I could use those perspectives, those learnings, those different versions of Lovelyn to communicate, to come up with ideas, to challenge, to debate, that’s when I really hit that sweet spot.  So, in Grade Eight I started debating, competitive debating.  We pulled together a team, we would debate against other schools, and we just had like a solid winning streak all through high school. Of course, we had a few losses, but generally we were quite a well-respected team, and each time we were debating social issues, I felt I was able to tap into this very nuanced perspective that I had, which helped.

But the second thing was debating itself as a practice forces you to learn to argue for things you might not personally agree with.  You don’t get a choice of what side of the debate you fall on.  I think honing those skills in debating and public speaking, layered with the complexity of my own experience, really, really has been something that has shaped me, and brought me this far.

By the time I then got to university, and started exploring authors that were of colour, authors that were from Nigeria because that was not a huge part of my education, when I started reading and listening to speakers, and authors, and writers, and academics, who had shared in my experience, I actually found a language to start to articulate why my own experience was not just bad, that there are actually incredible things that come from the groups that I’m a part of.

I Robertson: Wow, Lovelyn, I’m learning so much from listening to you.  That experience of  first of all the debating.  The fact that your school offered you this opportunity to perform publicly, which for some people would be, maybe most children would be a hugely scary experience.  The fact that you did this, and found you succeeded at it.  It sounds to me as if that experience of doing something which many people find stressful and anxiety arousing, you must have felt, I’m guessing, anxious the first time you did it, but the fact that you continued and you got that cumulative success experience which builds on confidence, that actually started to be quite an important part of this journey of your ability to do the things you’re doing now.

L Nwadeyi: That is absolutely accurate.  I think if the first time I did public speaking, everyone just booed me, and silenced me, I would have never gone back!  So, I think it helped that there was constant positive reinforcement.  

So, when I would do a speech, or I would do an Eisteddfod – in South Africa,  we’d have these, it’s basically like a cultural event where for a week kids would competitively participate.  So, you would do drama, you would do a musical piece, you would do a speech, whatever it is, and then there was external judges brought in, respected people in the arts, who would then come and judge, and you’d get a gold, silver, platinum certificate.  When I started competing, I really did do well, and that absolutely helped.  And I will say I still get nervous till this day.  I still get so anxious and so scared. I think as a child when I did it, I would really just push through that anxiety, and that nervousness because I really believed that what I would do was good, so I hoped that it would get recognised with a gold certificate, or a win, or an award or whatever, which often it did.

I think as I’ve grown older though, I’m less invested in the recognition, and what helps me push through my anxiety and my nervousness is often, “Am I telling the truth?”  Whereas a child I was very much invested in that award, affirmation, reinforcement, now as an adult my commitment is, “Am I going to speak the truth?  What I’m saying or doing, is it the right thing to do?  Do I feel strongly convicted about it?” If that’s the case, then I’m less interested in the reward or the reaction at the end, and I’m more interested in doing it because I feel it’s the right thing, and that’s what tips the scales for me away from my anxiety and nervousness into, just do it.

I Robertson: It’s so important what you’re saying.  One of the biggest sources of confidence is doing stuff in spite of anxiety.  It’s taking that step forward and not being frightened of the anxiety. Because fear of fear drives many people away.  They think, “Oh, my goodness, this is horrible what I’m feeling.”  And they get anxious about the feeling.  That of course, makes the feeling worse.  The thing about anxiety is unless you do what you do, which is to do the thing in spite of the anxiety, anxiety makes you avoid and retreat, and anxious people across the world tend to avoid, they tend to retreat.  Why?  Because they’re anticipating threat and punishment.  You’re going forward anticipating success, in spite of your anxiety, and that is almost the definition of confidence, that ability to take the step forward when the outcome is uncertain, and your emotions are telling you, “No, don’t do this.”

F Sweeney: You reference action being the antidote to a lack of confidence, but what is it that goes on in the brain to ensure that some of us do take those steps, while others maybe feel they can’t?

I Robertson: Lovelyn, I think you took these steps because you had a good teacher who was motivated and committed, and who set you up in situations where you were going to get a success experience as opposed to a failure experience. The environment is so important here.

The second thing is there’s a kind of higher-level mental realisation that in the words of the great Persian poet, Rumi, the road only appears with the first step.  All of humanity, all human civilisation is based on that willingness of people to realise that they have to do stuff sometimes without quite knowing where that action is going to lead.  And that’s the definition almost of an activist, of a leader, to envisage some future state of the world that they’re acting towards without being certain that can happen.

And the third thing to say about action is, confidence is linked to action.  Confidence is not optimism, it’s not self-esteem.  It’s this belief that you can do something.  And when you believe you can do something, it actually changes your brain, particularly the reward system of the brain, gives this little increased level of dopamine activity, which actually lifts your mood - it’s a kind of natural mini antidepressant - and lowers your anxiety, and increases your motivation and makes it more likely you will do the thing. You just described it so beautifully, Lovelyn, how the first time you were really terrified doing the public speaking, but then you got quite a good response, you got that success experience.  Of course, the greatest source of success is success, and the greatest source of confidence is success.  So, these built on themselves.

L Nwadeyi: I love that Rumi quote: as you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

There’s two things you’ve said actually, Prof, that resonate with me.  One is the piece about the environment, and here I want to just add the social justice lens to it, about why it’s so important to talk about class and identity. The environment absolutely set me up for success.  When I think about those public speaking sessions, they were after school, it was a small group, it was a really cool teacher - we would take her class apart and move all the desks and sit in a circle.  She really made an effort, and if she listens to this, her name is Mrs [Odendaal].  She really did an incredible job in making sure that it was a safe and easy space to do this.

But the second thing that I think is worth paying attention to, and this is where identity becomes important, is that in the small town that I grew up in Queenstown, it was only the two former white government schools that offered public speaking as an extra mural activity. My brother and I often talk about this because my brother also did public speaking and became an incredible debater, an incredible public speaker, but him and I always laugh/cry/joke about the fact that had we gone to any other school in Queenstown, our lives would have taken a very different trajectory.  Because where most other black children in Queenstown were going to school, they absolutely did not have the same exposure to the kinds of additional extra mural resources that we had access to.  

Our school was a government school, so it wasn’t a private school, it wasn’t a very rich and well-off school.  But comparatively from a class perspective, because it was initially designed as a whites only school, it did mean that in comparison to the other schools in the region, our schools were the top schools in that region.  And so, for me, the fact that literally I make a living from speaking, from talking to people, from convincing them about my ideas, and my strategies, and my plans, it always humbles me to reflect on the fact that if my parents decided for one month that they just couldn’t do it anymore, that things were too difficult, or if we just had one or two extra crises in our childhood, that could have completely derailed the entire path of our lives.  Because literally those extra murals is what has secured not only my career trajectory, but my class position today, my social position today, that allows me to “transcend race and gender when I can.”  So, being a well-spoken, articulate, eloquent, black immigrant woman is part of what has actually allowed me to enter and navigate the spaces that I navigate.

And then part of what the experience of being an immigrant child, who’s not coming from a wealthy background, teaches you is we can do hard things. One can say, well, maybe from a trauma perspective that’s not always good. But the truth is, when you do grow up in an immigrant household, you’re very aware that your choices are limited.  You’re very aware of what feels good, and comfortable to you, is not actually what is always going to be prioritised.  So, I think in a way some of what pushed me to push through my anxiety, or my nervousness in those moments was because it comes with the territory of being other that you learn how to do hard things, you learn how to push through your discomfort because you’ve got to do that for your survival.

Those are just two things I wanted to add to some of the more neuroscience aspects that Prof was adding because I think how we make the way, is we make the way because it was necessary for survival.

I Robertson: I so take on board what you were saying about the quality of the education, and the quality of the experience you were getting in that school, and how your life could have been totally different had you not had that experience.  The evidence is that education, and the ability to think abstractly that goes with that, is one of the huge, huge ways of escaping the shackles of stereotype, and prejudice, and disadvantage, and lack of privilege.

It just struck me there’s another fact we know that people who live between cultures, who can shift between two or more cultural domains, end up being more creative because their minds have to develop a certain sophistication of realising that there are alternative cultural realities.  And so, there’s a capacity to transcend any one particular reality, or inhabit it provisionally, as you choose.  It can be hugely terrifying for some people, but hugely empowering for others.  You mentioned earlier about you could inhabit a few potential identities, depending on the situation. And a huge part of confidence, particularly in the early stages of its development, involves a bit of ‘fake it till you make it’.  A lot of people, the first time they public speak, they may appear to the outsider to be very confident in speaking out loudly, but inside, as you described, you’re a jelly.

So, that not being fully in one in group, the fact that you inhabited, and could function in several different groups gave you this power to build sets of habits which really built your confidence, particularly when speaking publicly and expressing your opinion.

L Nwadeyi: When I reflect on that being able to inhabit different identities, absolutely, I think it did and it does help me to be more versatile, definitely helped me to think of creative solutions or ways around things.  And I guess, the optimist, and the idealist in me wishes we lived in a world where one does not need to do that amount of labour just to be successful, or just to get by, or just to be comfortable. What I mean by that is it takes a lot of work.

I remember actually a funny story.  I was in Grade Six.  I’m having this conversation in this accent, and somewhere the Nigerian accent slipped, and instead of saying, “I was so embarrassed”, I said “I was so embarrassed” because that’s how you’d say it in a Nigerian accent.  And it was just this awkward moment of like it’s hilarious because what are you saying?  It’s embarrassed, it’s not embarrassed!  But it also is embarrassed because I was embarrassed!  I was a child, so it was funny, but I felt embarrassed, and it was awkward because now my Nigerian accent came out whilst I was still trying to sound like I’m speaking the Queen’s English, and it was just messy.

Fast forward 10, 15 years later when you’re in the workplace, for example.  Having to do that level of shape shifting - of when I leave my house I put on Lovelyn, when I get home, I’m Lovelyn; when I leave my house, I’m one type of lady, when I get home, I’m just like a girl who doesn’t always like wearing dresses – and so that level of shape shifting absolutely does have its benefits.  But I think it’s benefits that are rooted in a world that is unjust because the world says we need to be a particular way in order to belong, we need to sound, or speak, or act, or fit into a particular mould in order to be taken seriously, in order to be respected, in order to be protected, loved, etc.

And so, for me, whilst I can completely acknowledge that any form of difficulty, adversity provides the opportunity for growth, the optimist in me wishes that it didn’t have to take that.  So, the optimist in me wishes that my accent is not what determines how I get into a room, that my social class is not what determines all those things. And yet, the contradiction of our lives is that we are stuck in that paradox, and so we aim to achieve those things because those are the markers of access, those are the markers of belonging, those are the markers of success.  But I hope that we get to a world where it doesn’t take all that to get there.

F Sweeney: You speak about the Lovelyn that goes to work, and the Lovelyn that comes home.  In the Fellowship, we talk about living with the ambiguity, and being comfortable in the grey areas because as humans we crave certainty. I wonder have you learned to live with the ambiguity, or you might say contradiction, that that presents in terms of being confident about it, that you are all these things?

L Nwadeyi: Yes, I have absolutely learned to make peace with that ambiguity, and I think how I temper that ambiguity is to the extent that it does not detract from my own sense of self and authenticity, and to the extent that it’s not expensive for me.  What I mean by that is, if my mother called me now and I answered the call whilst on this podcast, you would immediately hear me switch accent, and it almost happens automatically in my head.  But I’m not switching accent because I feel awkward and embarrassed about it, it’s just more like I really want my mother to understand what I’m saying so I’m just going to keep to the accent that allows us to understand each other.

But similarly, at work for example, there are ways in which I’m now more intentional about how I show up, and intentional about what I’m bringing to the conversation because I know that that is critical for our success in the work that we’re trying to do.  For example, when I was doing some work with schools in South Africa around social justice and education, for me it was important in some of those conversations to be like can we just put at the centre of this conversation what does it mean to be a Xhosa child at a private, white majority school, in the middle of Cape Town which has a 200-year colonial legacy?  What does it mean to walk through that school and all the statues remind you of people that have done harm to your family life? So, there’s a way in which I think it is valuable to bring those parts of me forward, and to acknowledge that, and to be open about it. And then there are moments in which I’m like I don’t have the energy, I don’t want to, and so I’ll be who I want to be in that moment.

So, we can sit with the ambiguity, but I think now for me the ambiguity of the different identities I inhabit is more by choice, and not because I feel forced to show up in a particular way in order to access that.  I think that just comes with years of experience, but it also comes with some growth, some reflection, some healing, and definitely being in a particular social position that allows you to do that.

F Sweeney: And that’s an important distinction to be able to make that you don’t have to be the same person all the time in every context, but that you can have the same values, and bring the same core mission to your work and how you live your life. I was going to ask you, middle class adjacent is the term that you used, and presumably people thought you were middle class when you weren’t, how has all this contributed to informing the work that you do as an Atlantic Fellow, for example?

L Nwadeyi: I always like to sit in that distinction between perception and reality, because I think it’s a really helpful way actually for people to access their own unconscious bias.  If we want to talk about the work of racial equity, socioeconomic equity, gender equity, differentiating between perception and reality, and actually digging into what is it that informs the perceptions that I have, what is it that informs what is actually reality, for me I found is a really great entry point into the conversation.  I think that’s precisely because a lot of my upbringing was navigating perception and reality: the perception is you go to this wonderful school, there’s a particular class of people that you are interacting with, therefore you must be of that ilk.  So, when certain school trips came up, and we weren’t even sure if we could pay for those trips until the last minute, or when certain references come up in class discussions of what people did over the weekend, or what people did over the holidays, and one is not able to participate in those conversations because it’s just not a reality in your family situation, you learn how to walk that line.  As a child, there were definitely moments where I pretended and went along with the conversation. But now as an adult you’re a little bit more comfortable to just be like, “Yeah, I have no idea what hors d’oeuvres is.  Please how do you pronounce that, what does that mean, where is that presented?”  And then you can just be a little bit more honest in the conversations.

I Robertson: Thank you.  I’ve learned an enormous amount talking to you.  A lot of people would find it very disorienting and anxiety producing to be shifting between roles, being able to shift identities like that, so you need a bedrock.  And it strikes me from what you’re saying, your honesty and your commitment to truth, your values are your bedrock, and if you have your values then it gives you a flexibility, and a stability to be able to take advantage of these other, if you like, more superficial behavioural patterns that can allow you to do things that might otherwise be difficult. But the values, as it is for the Atlantic Fellows network, values are absolutely central.  So, thank you so much indeed for this fascinating discussion.

L Nwadeyi: Thank you so much for having me.  Some of these questions actually just opened up and sparked things I hadn’t thought about in quite a while.  So, thank you for letting me take you on a bit of a journey through my own thoughts and memories.

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

F Sweeney: Social justice advocate Lovelyn Nwadeyi, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, bringing us to the end of today’s CONVERSATION.

For more CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE, go to our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.  Here you can also learn more about the seven Atlantic Fellows programs empowering emerging leaders to advance fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.  

I’m Fionnuala Sweeney. Thank you for listening.  I do hope you will join Ian and me for our next CONVERSATION with Le Nhan Phuong, Executive Director of Equity Initiative, Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity in Southeast Asia.

ENDS | DURATION: 31’06

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