Carolyn Hunter
The T. A. Barron Podcast.

Doyin Atewologun
Hello Tom!

T. A. Barron
Hi, Doyin. How great to see you.

Doyin Atewologun
Good to see you, too.

T. A. Barron
Well, Doyin, I’ve thought often to our conversation there on that rainy day in Oxford, England, and how much inspiration I took away from talking with you, and that’s what led me to invite you to this podcast. Doyin Atewologun is an extraordinary human being, and I’ve gotten to know her to my great good fortune by working with the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford in England. Doyin’s specialty is leadership and inclusion with success and impact. And she’s woven an academic and consultant business career, together, to do that. Before, she took on the Deanship of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University, where she oversees the whole Rhodes Scholar experience and program, which is no small feat. How many countries are represented, Doyin, in the Rhodes Scholars?

Doyin Atewologun
That’s a great question. I would say over 50.

T. A. Barron
It’s phenomenal. It’s really a global effort, isn’t it?

Doyin Atewologun
It is.

T. A. Barron
To encourage young leaders who will go back home and do wonderful things in their home countries and for the world. Well, before that, Doyin was a PhD in organizational psychology, and she founded a very successful consulting firm in the UK to help businesses, schools, and fields like medicine to promote values of inclusion and diversity and effective leadership. So this is a woman who loves big, important, meaningful challenges. And I’m so glad to have you on this podcast, Doyin.

Doyin Atewologun
It is such a delight. Tom. I’m very much looking forward to this conversation.

T. A. Barron
As am I. Let’s dive in at the beginning, which is your story. I must say, your story is so powerful. Doyin, tell us about the childhood you had in Lagos, Nigeria, and how you walked the trail from there to doing what you’re doing now as the Dean of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University.

Doyin Atewologun
Thank you for the opportunity to tell my story. I grew up in Lagos, like you said, I’ve lived in the UK 30 years now. It’s gone so quickly, and maybe we’ll come back to the notion of time and chapters in one’s life, but I grew up in Nigeria. And I think one of the endearing memories is of family holidays and enjoying school and kind of big families in lots of different places, parts of the world. And one of the reasons I bring this up right now is I probably – I certainly did not have a full appreciation of how fortunate I was growing up in Nigeria and thriving at school, having lots of role models and kind of family members who wanted the best for me.

Things changed quite a bit the summer just before I turned 17. Unfortunately, I lost my mother in a car accident. When we lost my mom, the – the family setup changed dramatically. I have one brother, an older brother and a younger sister, and we made sudden decisions, quick decisions, in the time that we had, well my dad did. And so I moved to the UK to live with my auntie and my cousins.

I moved from a large, vibrant, colorful, loud, assaulting all your senses Lagos, to a small town, almost like a large village-type setting. Quiet, often wet, sometimes gray.

T. A. Barron
No, it never rains in England. Never.

Doyin Atewologun
And you know, that was one significant moment or a stage in my life where I felt a keen loss of much. Of much. So not just my mother, which, of course was fundamental, but friends and family, but also privileges that I hadn’t quite brought to my attention.

T. A. Barron
You must have felt so lost and alone in that time.

Doyin Atewologun
Absolutely.

T. A. Barron
How did you find your way in the midst of all of that change?

Doyin Atewologun
It took a while. I think one of the things that I took from that is the understanding of the importance of wellbeing and mental health and having conversations about that, because I probably experienced a period of depression. I wasn’t diagnosed then, but that probably was what was going on for me. So, journaling, at that point, I had always kept a little diary. I crafted a long story. In fact, I can’t even say that I ever actually finished it. I told my life using narrative third person and sometimes first person at that time.

T. A. Barron
Was that helpful?

Doyin Atewologun
It was exceedingly helpful. It helped me retain a memory of the life I used to have.

T. A. Barron
Right.

Doyin Atewologun
Right? That was grounding in some ways. In many ways, it helped me remember who I was.

T. A. Barron
You were telling your story.

Doyin Atewologun
I was, absolutely.

T. A. Barron
And that automatically confers value on that story and therefore on you yourself.

Doyin Atewologun
Precisely, yeah. But my family, I do want to also pay significant, kind of like, homage to my auntie, my dad, my brother. So my cousins – in many ways, my family supported me and we got through it. And I also was able to find joy in my passion, in psychology. I think that also helped me at that point in time. Those are some of the strands that I held on to.

T. A. Barron
Wow. It’s such an inspiring story. And clearly you’ve taken the virtues and the beauties of that struggle, of those difficult times and turned them into a profession that helps and encourages and adds value to individuals and their societies around the world.

Doyin Atewologun
Indeed, I feel very privileged as part of the Rhodes community. Like I said a few moments ago, it wasn’t until I left Nigeria and moved to the UK that I realized how fortunate I had been in many ways. So, for example, a relatively simple example is, I was very fortunate, growing up, in that my granddad had a house in London. So when I moved to the UK, like using the tube, kind of like getting from whatever gold is green to Oxford Street. Very straightforward. And one of the things with the Rhodes community, it’s a scholarship for international postgraduate students who are phenomenally successful in many ways to come to what it can be, for some, quite potentially a very different space and experience, right. And sometimes just being in a place or space that feels so alien, the building, the climate, like you’re familiar with the language, but it’s not quite… doesn’t sound exactly the way you expected it. Right?

T. A. Barron
Right.

Doyin Atewologun
And then all that, you know, or all that you thought you knew or very little of it is present, and that can be quite disorienting. And so one of the things that’s important to me is noting that and remembering that for all of these superbly talented young people who may be taken by surprise at how potentially disorienting this new transition –

T. A. Barron
I agree. And I can’t tell you how striking it is to me that that very challenging, youthful experience of your own life landing in England, such a faraway place in such a different culture and different in every way must now ground you in such a crucial way in helping, reaching, listening to these extraordinary young people who come from all over the world and are having a parallel version of that experience.

Doyin Atewologun
Absolutely.

T. A. Barron
How could you have prepared for that better? Really?

Doyin Atewologun
Indeed. And, you know, there are moments of humor, right. That’s the other thing. You can just exchange a little, just a little short joke with each other, with you and this other scholar. Yeah, no, I got that too – the pronunciation of some of the words, some of the cities, some of the colleges.

T. A. Barron
Oh, man, I remember even just as a kid from Colorado landing over in Oxford, I remember walking across the street to the stationery store and asking, do you have tacks here? Because I wanted thumb tacks and I wanted to put some posters on my little wall in Balliol College, Oxford. And the guy looked at me and said, oh, we have tax on everything. It’s a horrible situation. The labor government has gone amuck, and there’s 18% on this and 18% on that, and I’m about to go out of business and the country is going to hell, and it’s just – and I endured a ten minute lecture on the tax system because I’d asked for tacks instead of drawing pins, which is the correct word.

Doyin Atewologun
Excellent. Love it.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
Doyin, let’s discuss those wonderful young leaders from around the world. How do you empower them once you’ve established a way of connecting with them? How do you empower them to go back home and help their societies and the world after their time in Oxford?

Doyin Atewologun
One of the things I want to kick off with is, each individual, as you will know and some of our listeners will know, like each Rhode scholar, is so phenomenally talented and special and unique in their own way. So because the process of identifying Rhodes Scholars is – it’s been going on for over 100 years – the character, the spirit, the thrive to bring the best of oneself to the service of community and society more broadly. And I have so much admiration for that.

Yet there is such an opportunity to nurture the connections between each unique individual in a place such as Oxford and within the Rhodes community, within Rhodes House. So one of the things that we are quite conscious of is, it is so tempting, of course, to when you, bearing in mind what we’ve said, you arrive in Oxford and it might be a little disorienting, destabilizing, it’s so tempting to latch onto the familiar. Right? So the people who look like you, who sound like you, who came from the same constituency or country or part of the world that you came from, who belong to the Rhodes community. And one of the things that we do is we provide the opportunities and the spaces for connections that perhaps ordinarily wouldn’t necessarily have naturally happened to come to be.

So there are many organic, social, informal opportunities, but we also have some more formal programming opportunities for the young people who have just come into Oxford and are joining the Rhodes community to take the space and the time to pause and reflect on the impact they want to make in the world as individuals, but also as members of this community. There’s a magic in working one on one with the scholars to create the space for groups and connections and cohort and community, where we turbocharge in some ways the possibilities for impact through that kind of building a sense of a community.
And one of the expressions we use, which I love, is the idea of the Rhodes community and scholars and residents being unlike minded. They’re so diverse in terms of their pursuits and their disciplines and their interests. Unlike minded but like hearted. Right?

T. A. Barron
Lovely. That’s lovely. Listening to you, this strikes me as extremely important work for anyone, to any human being on this planet, at any point in life, to have an opportunity to go deeper and ask questions about what are your core values and what will you do in this life that you are given. But I think there’s an especially important opportunity with these outstanding young people from all around the globe who have been incredibly capable and proficient in doing other people’s assignments. Basically, that’s why they have such great grades, that’s why they are always successful in what they have done until this moment.

But this is the moment for them to start to ask themselves, what assignments do I want to give myself? This is not a life I want to lead forever. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve grown a lot in doing that. But now I want to give myself direction and assign myself, what are my priorities? And to do that, you have to go deep into yourself, right, and ask those big questions.

Doyin Atewologun
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think, for example, one of the inspiring conversations I was privileged to be a part of, as part of the Rhodes community, most recently, we talked about the impostor phenomenon right. And how you potentially can come into Oxford carrying the weight of being a student at Oxford, being awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, being able to work the academic system prior to coming into Oxford. And then coming and then sitting with the significance of this opportunity that’s been given to you and making sense of it yourself, of what expectations you might be setting for yourself but also what expectations others, or you have inferred that others, have kind of laid for you.

And we had a very open, quite vulnerable conversation around all our experiences, including mine, of a sense of how you might find yourself in a space that raises questions to you about whether you ought to be in this space or not. And going back to the idea of authoring and self-authoring, one of the strands from that conversation was acknowledging and accepting and noting that you are here. So it’s no longer a question of whether you ought to be or not, because you are.

T. A. Barron
And in writing that story, as a young girl who had landed in England, you were doing that intuitively. You knew you needed to honor your own story before you could go beyond that and do things in the world.

Doyin Atewologun
Definitely, Tom. You know, the other thing that’s coming to mind that directly linked to one’s ability to honor oneself is another theme that comes up in the Rhodes community, is the value of self-compassion, giving yourself permission.

T. A. Barron
So important and so difficult.

Doyin Atewologun
Absolutely.

T. A. Barron
You’ve heard me talk with the Rhodes Scholars, Doyin, about the metaphor that I like to use of see your life as a story. And part of what I like about that is it’s empowering. Because when you think about that metaphor, it means you get to be the author of that story. No one else. You. It’s your story.

But the virtues of that is that if you say, my story matters, it means that my choices matter, and that means my life matters. And it takes on a weight at that point. It takes on a bit of gravitas. This is my life. What am I going to do with that precious, fleeting, fragile, vulnerable gift that I have? All the skills, all the intelligence, all the heart that I bring to it. What kind of story do I really, truly want to write? What will my story be?

Now, if you’ve never been asked that question before, it’s a scary, big question, right? But it’s such an important question. And as you and I know, the sweet spot is if someone answers that question by going inside and saying, this is what I truly care about, and this is what I think the world needs that I could help, and puts them together, then that is absolutely the path to a meaningful life.

Doyin Atewologun
I fully agree. Fully agree. And the thing that strikes me as that metaphor and when we think about the young people that I’ve had the privilege of working with over the last few years is yes, absolutely. It gives you that agency. Right? But also when we think about any story or a particular story, we can imagine in that story, of course, the multiplicity of perspectives, of narratives, of possibilities, of where that’s going. However, with any story, there is a beginning and there’s an end, there’s an arc. And so there are choices that are made or there is a particular path to be taking.

And for me, the idea that it’s on one hand, okay to understand and appreciate that there are many possibilities. But however, for now, at this moment in time, for this plot, perhaps, in this particular sequence of events, drawing on my values, drawing on my passion and all of that, I will go in this direction.

T. A. Barron
Right.

Doyin Atewologun
I love that for me and for the Scholars, because sometimes with some of them, often, sometimes you can perhaps experience a sense of anxiety and maybe even a sense of being frozen and unable to move because you have so many choices to choose from.

T. A. Barron
And that’s where it helps to think of not just the overall story you want to tell, but this particular chapter.

Doyin Atewologun
This particular chapter.

T. A. Barron
Break it down into a small bite and say, I’m not going to eat the whole pie at once, but I just want this bite, and this bite is about X. And then after that, I’ll be in better position to pursue Y. And you don’t have to eat the whole pie all at once. In fact, you might choke if you try to do that, especially if it’s one of those English steak and kidney pies, let me tell you.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
Let’s transition a bit here, Doyin, to that question about individual identity, because you are an expert in that realm. How does identity balance with leadership? How do they interact in particular? Because identity seems to me to be a very deeply personal thing where leadership has to be a very deeply community-oriented thing. How do you sync the two up in order to lift both?

Doyin Atewologun
That’s a great question, Tom. I will answer it in two ways. I think one of the things in my work that’s important is acknowledging that we have multiple identities. Multiple facets, multiple attributes or characteristics that intersect to be the whole. And the reason I bring that to this conversation is often historically, when we think about the way in which we’ve looked at leadership, leadership has tended to be defined quite narrowly based on a limited set of attributes or characteristics. So the first thing is the idea of kind of blending the idea of identity with leadership helps us expand the notion or the assumption of what identities can come together in the service of leadership, so to speak.

T. A. Barron
Yeah, any cause.

Doyin Atewologun
Yeah, absolutely. And each aspect of yourself. So, for example, if we look at some of the commonly used social identities, the commonly referenced social identities: my Nigerian identity, my being someone who self identifies as black, being someone who self identifies as an immigrant to this country, someone who self identifies as having kind of middle class upbringing. All of those identities, and some of them are privileged, some of them are more privileged, others are less privileged, are important for us to acknowledge. As I think about the work that I do and how I interface with other people when we think about more community level or societal level accomplishments.

Now, I said I was going to answer that in two different ways. So that’s one, just think about the multiplicity of identities. And I think the other thing, for me, the idea of leadership actually connects both the self and the other, or the self and the others, right? Because leadership, one could argue it is more than just the individual. It’s how you relate, how you come together, how you kind of leverage the power of more than one in order to accomplish. Ideally for the benefit of us all, whether in organizations or outside or in a number of ways. I think the idea of identity helps us expand our understanding of what leadership looks like, but also how leadership works.

T. A. Barron
Wonderful. Wonderful. You have obviously thought about this a little bit. A little bit. Doyin, I have one final question for you, which is, perhaps, all of the big questions I have tossed out in this conversation, this wonderful conversation, it’s probably the biggest question of all. As someone who cares so deeply about young people and the world, as you look at today’s young people, what inspires and encourages you the most and what worries you and concerns you the most?

Doyin Atewologun
I will answer what concerns me first and then end on what inspires me, if that’s okay. One of the things that concerns me is when we look, for example, at the literature on attitudes to diversity and equity and equality. Broadly speaking, the research suggests that the younger generation is a lot more kind of open, a lot more kind of social justice driven. They articulate and demand values-led leadership and values-led employment, et cetera. So that’s one body of research.

But other indicators suggest that when young people transition into the workplace or kind of get older and engage in kind of start to live in some of these systems that have already been created, that those beliefs and that agitation – that in some ways anger, frustration, but aspirations for us to be better – that they fade away relative to what they were like before they joined this system.

So one of the things I do worry about is the degree to which we’ve created these systems as adults, such that they are so overpowering or so fixed that even new joiners to these systems kind of lose or, broken is too strong a word, but that energy and that passion potentially dissipates as a result of entry into this. And so I ask myself questions about what we can do, whether we need to just upend the ways in which we work with each other. So that is one of the things that concerns me.

But to go to one of the things that inspires me to balance this out, I’m always learning when I’m spending time with young folk, younger folk, it happens all the time. We go in thinking we have this problem and challenge at the, you know, either at the Rhodes Trust or even with some of the organizations we work with, and then you bring this to a table of young, ambitious, talented people, and they’re like, well, the solution is X, obviously, and the creativity, the problems.

There’s just a sense… I am so energized when I think of all of the creative ways in which problems that I thought were maybe kind of like just a little bit intractable, maybe not a little, quite intractable, right? Like, actually, there are ways forward. And I’ve seen this in the corporate world. I’ve seen this in working with communities, with charities, seen it in the Rhodes community as well.

So having said what I started with in terms of things that I might be afraid about or most concerned about, I would end on an optimistic note, because I may not be able to imagine the solution. But I have seen so many everyday examples of a group of young folk who are like, you know what? Yeah, we’ll just figure this out, and they figure it out. I think we’re okay.

T. A. Barron
Oh, I love that. And I know it’s true. Having the great joy of working with young people and having had the incredible joy of being a dad. I know that young people have that wonderful vitality and vision and high ideals and also relentless drive to make it right and a good sense of humor on top of that so we can always learn so much from them. Doyin, there is no way to thank you for this conversation enough. It has been joyful and inspiring. And I would add, that’s primarily because you, my friend, are joyful and inspiring.

Doyin Atewologun
It’s been such a pleasure, Tom. I have totally enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for the invitation.

T. A. Barron
You’re so welcome. And thank you for taking some of your precious time to join. And I hope that when you walk outside today, it’s not pounding torrential rain like it was when I saw you a couple of months ago.

Doyin Atewologun
It’s not, actually. It’s bright today.

T. A. Barron
Well, enjoy it while it lasts in sunny England. Thank you, Doyin.

Doyin Atewologun
Thank you, Tom. All the best.

T. A. Barron
To everyone out there. Let me just say thank you so much for joining us for Magic & Mountains. We’ll see you next week. And in the meantime, may you have magical days.

Carolyn Hunter
We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of Magic & Mountains: The T. A. Barron Podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a five-star review and share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information and to find all of T. A.’s books, visit tabarron.com. Have a magical week.