Most of us were taught that play is what you earn once the serious work is finished. Vanya Boardman spent more than twenty years inside that arrangement, then built a company on the opposite idea. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Vanya joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation about psychological safety, honest voices, and what it costs an organization when nobody in the meeting says the true thing. Vanya is the co-founder of PlayInnové, where she facilitates experiential leadership sessions using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, watercolor, and deliberately ridiculous challenges. Before that, she led teams and operations across financial services, telecom, health tech, and real estate. Her moment of knowing she belonged arrived early in a startup job, when she gave her new CEO an answer he had not asked for and learned that her honest voice was why she was valued. Her moment of knowing she did not belong came at a company that recruited her to build culture and then closed the door on every idea she offered. This is a conversation about building belonging in everyday life as much as at work. Vanya talks about her name, the Russian folklore character she shares it with, and the quiet math of deciding whether to correct someone in a room of forty people. She talks about a French mother, an Argentinian husband, and a World Cup loyalty system that keeps the family group chat busy.

Most of us were given a rule early: the parts of a life sort themselves into separate containers. Business in one. Family in another. Structure on one side, empathy on the other. Lauren Zaslansky Conner has spent a career proving the division was never real, and she gives host Christopher Bylone the logic behind it.

Lauren is the founder of ZAZ Business Solutions, where she works as a fractional COO for founders and leadership teams. Her focus is the how: systems, planning, and follow-through. She earned a BA from Penn and an MBA from Columbia, spent over a decade at Disney, and co-founded a virtual funeral company during the pandemic, when families lost someone and had no way to mourn together. Alongside the business work, she helps families navigate special-needs systems and services, using the same skills in both.

This conversation reaches across community, work, and home. Lauren returns to a circle at a synagogue family camp, where she was between jobs and quietly struggling, and noticed that nearly everyone around her was holding something hard at the same moment. She also revisits her first job out of college, where three months in she knew the environment was wrong and quit with nothing lined up. Her larger case, for anyone building an inclusive culture: most conflict is not disagreement, it is two people using the same words to mean different things.

Belonging does not begin at the office. It begins in the mirror, in the clothes that do or do not fit, and in whether the room was built with you in mind. On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Pamela Shainhouse, an entrepreneur, accessibility advocate, and lifelong fundraiser who spent a career proving that the people the world leaves out were never the problem. The design was.

Pamela built Canada’s first size-diverse and sustainable fashion brand years before inclusive design had a name, brought it to the runway at Toronto Fashion Week, and later founded a consultancy that helps organizations treat accessibility as a daily practice rather than a slogan. Her story moves across the arenas of a whole life: the private work of self-worth, the structural reality of disability in public space, and the family legacy that still drives her. This is a conversation about building belonging in everyday life, about authentic leadership earned the hard way, and about the language that lets a person name a sense of belonging that reaches far past any workplace.

Christopher, Principal Strategist of Innovation Unbiased and a voice in people experience and strategic inclusion, draws out how Pamela turned exclusion into design, grief into a mission, and decades of imposter syndrome into the moment she knew she belonged exactly where she stood.

Joy is not a personality trait handed out at birth. It is a practice, it is available in the middle of a hard season, and Rachel Bents can explain the biology of how it works.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Rachel Bents joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation about what changes when joy stops being the reward at the end of the work and becomes the thing that makes the work possible. Rachel is the founder of The Joy Collective, the author of Joy Is the Strategy, and the creator of the ENJOY Method, a framework grounded in wellness, connection, giving, and purpose. She hosts the Joy Unfiltered podcast and holds two master's degrees, in education and kinesiology.

What gives this conversation its weight is where Rachel locates her own belonging, and where she lost it. She did not know she belonged in a room somebody else designed. She knew it in a community she created almost by accident in her fifties, when roughly five hundred people joined a joy membership she had started on a whim. She knew the opposite at a four-person consulting firm, at the table where leadership was rewriting its values, when she proposed fun as one of them and the chief executive dismissed it in a single sentence. That night she told her husband she needed a new job, whatever the salary.

This is belonging as a whole-life reality: in the version of yourself nobody else is present for, in the communities you choose, in recovery rooms, and in a workplace where one sentence can tell a person they are finished there.

A parking lot. A lunch counter. An empty chair. A baby left with somebody who had never met him. Four moments from four lives, with nothing in common except the thing happening underneath all of them.

Season four of I Know I Belong When… brought twelve guests through twelve conversations. This recap does what the season could not do in real time. Host Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, lays it across the six arenas where a life is lived: Self, Home, Learning, Community, Work, and Society.

What comes out is a map. Belonging in the workplace is one arena of six, and this episode is direct about what happens when one gets treated as the whole picture. You will hear a woman change a verdict about herself in a room in Detroit, a ten-year-old learn what mattering registers as in the body, a four-time chief human resources officer ask a boardroom to justify a parking lot, and two men in 1975 eastern North Carolina find out whether a door would open.

Two guests appear twice, in two different arenas. That repetition is the argument. The behavior a person practices in one part of life is what the other parts are already asking for, which means the skill you think you are missing is one you already have somewhere else.

A parking lot. A lunch counter. An empty chair. A baby left with somebody who had never met him. Four moments from four lives, with nothing in common except the thing happening underneath all of them.

Season four of I Know I Belong When… brought twelve guests through twelve conversations. This recap does what the season could not do in real time. Host Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, lays it across the six arenas where a life is lived: Self, Home, Learning, Community, Work, and Society.

What comes out is a map. Belonging in the workplace is one arena of six, and this episode is direct about what happens when one gets treated as the whole picture. You will hear a woman change a verdict about herself in a room in Detroit, a ten-year-old learn what mattering registers as in the body, a four-time chief human resources officer ask a boardroom to justify a parking lot, and two men in 1975 eastern North Carolina find out whether a door would open.

Two guests appear twice, in two different arenas. That repetition is the argument. The behavior a person practices in one part of life is what the other parts are already asking for, which means the skill you think you are missing is one you already have somewhere else.

The room where Julie Pham knew she belonged held none of her credentials. No Cambridge doctorate. No Gates scholarship. No bestseller list. It was a prison, and nobody inside knew who she was on paper.

Dr. Julie Pham is the founder and CEO of CuriosityBased, and she joins host Christopher Bylone for a conversation that travels from a refugee family’s naming decision, to a correctional facility, to a weekly team meeting where a third of the agenda goes to how everyone is actually doing. Her argument is simple and inconvenient. Curiosity is a practice rather than a personality trait. It can be learned, named, and shared, and nobody gets to opt out.

This episode of I Know I Belong When… is about what happens when the labels come off. Julie walked into Washington Corrections Center through the nonprofit Defy Ventures and sat across from men serving time for serious crimes. She arrived carrying assumptions. She left understanding that people hold lives far larger than the worst thing they have done, and she has asked ever since where the edges of our compassion sit.

She also reframes code switching as strategic communication rather than loss, names the moments her work was not counted as real work, and offers one question worth asking a colleague this week.

Building belonging is not a program bolted onto a culture deck. It is something a person knows, across self, home, community, work, and society. This conversation gives language for all five.

Some people wait for a door to open. Salomão Cunha Lima decided the room needed to be built.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host, Christopher Bylone, is joined by Salomão Cunha Lima, founder and CEO of Sal&Co, a Social Architecture Lab in São Paulo, Brazil. The conversation moves through every arena of a life: self, home, community, work, and society.

Salomão calls his work social architecture rather than social impact, and the difference is structural. On one side is a company. On the other is a community. Neither side changes shape. The work is designing something strong enough for both to cross and durable enough to outlast the announcement. Across eighteen years in Latin America he has mobilized more than two million dollars in corporate partnerships for clients including BMW, Disney, and Deloitte.

He also makes an argument here that reorders two words people often treat as interchangeable. Inclusion, he says, carries a hierarchy inside it. Someone grants, and someone receives. A sense of belonging works differently, and it begins with permission a person gives to themselves.

This is a conversation about inclusive culture, authentic leadership, and human-centered innovation. It is equally about faith, a name he almost surrendered for the convenience of strangers, and what a person does when no existing room will hold them.

Belonging is not a program that gets rolled out at work. It is the durable knowledge that who you are is enough, and it has to hold at home, in your community, and in the wider society, not only in a conference room.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Darlene King Turner joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation that refuses to keep belonging inside the workplace. Darlene is CEO and president of the Unity Collaborative, where she designs strategic initiatives that dismantle systemic barriers for businesses, youth, families, and whole communities at once. She led the Michigan Diversity Council for ten years, and before that she directed training and development for all thirty-four school districts in Wayne County. Before any of that, she spent six years as a national concert promoter, touring the world and producing shows across Detroit. She learned to fill a room long before she learned to change one.

Her central claim arrives early, and it reframes everything after it. Belonging does not belong to an institution or an entity. It belongs to every living, breathing person. No degree and no title is required to create a space where another person knows they belong. That is true for a chief executive, and it is just as true for a student, a neighbor, and a store clerk.

Belonging does not begin at work. It begins in the people who hand you a baby at a family picnic and never think twice, in the neighbors who show up when the holidays fall apart, and in the quiet moment you finally let yourself ask for help.

On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Rebecca Taylor, a people strategy leader who has spent more than a decade in HR saying the quiet part out loud. Rebecca co-founded SkillCycle and helped scale it onto Inc's fastest growing companies list three years running, and she now leads community and content at All Voices, where she hosts HR Voices. She is also a Queens kid who will not go 10 minutes without telling you so.

This is a conversation about building belonging across every arena of a life. Rebecca traces the four-generation friend family that raised her, the moment at work when she knew she did not belong, and the leader she chose to become because of it. Belonging, here, is not one more pillar of inclusion work. It is the outcome of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility done well, and it gives listeners language to name a sense of belonging in their own lives.

Most people treat a book as a finish line. You write it, you print it, you set it on a shelf, and the work is done. Fabi Preslar spent close to three decades proving that idea backward. In her hands, a book is not where a story ends. It is where a person finally gets seen.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Fabi Preslar, founder of SPARK Publications and the nonprofit Radiant Chapters Collective, for a conversation that reaches past the workplace. Fabi came up through a high school trade school and a community college design program, then built a nationally recognized publishing firm with over 350 industry awards. Along the way she learned something this show returns to again and again: belonging is not one more pillar of inclusion work. It is the outcome of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility done well, and it shows up across every arena of a life, from self and home to community, work, and society.

This is a story about knowing you belong to yourself first, then finding the rooms, tables, and people where that knowledge holds. It offers language for belonging in everyday life, not only at work, and models the authentic leadership and inclusive culture this show champions.

Most people treat inclusion like a feeling, something you hope for and revisit once a year. Effenus Henderson spent more than forty years proving it can be something you design. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes the president and CEO of HenderWorks, the strategist who convened the international working group behind ISO 30415, the first global standard for diversity and inclusion.

This is a conversation about belonging as a whole-life reality, not a workplace perk. Effenus traces his path from a small farm in eastern North Carolina to the General Assembly of the United Nations, where he spoke on intercultural diversity. He shows how a sense of belonging is something a person knows, not something they wait to feel, and how it grows across every arena: in who we are, in the rooms where we work, and in the wider society we all help shape.

Effenus wrote three books, including The Architecture of Inclusion, and co-founded the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion. He has also written more than sixty original songs, because he believes equity work without a soul does not last. What emerges is authentic leadership grounded in structure and heart at once, and a language for building belonging that any listener can carry into everyday life.

The most brilliant person in any room may be the one no one thought to hear. Pasha Marlowe has spent more than thirty years changing that. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Pasha joins host, Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist, for a conversation about worth, design, and the quiet decision to know you belong to yourself before you ask anyone else to make room for you.

Pasha is a global speaker on neuroinclusion and relational intelligence, a mental health professional, and the author of Creating Cultures of Neuroinclusion. Her work has reached teams at Microsoft, IBM, SHRM, T-Mobile, and Hasbro, and it carries a single stubborn idea: you do not unlock creative capacity by collecting creative people. You unlock it by building a place where every mind can offer its own kind of genius.

This is a story that lives in more than one arena. It begins inside a person, in the moment Pasha decided her own worth was not up for a vote. It moves into workplaces and conferences, where a seating chart can quietly tell someone they matter less. It reaches into home, community, and society, where the same design choices decide who is heard. Belonging in the workplace is part of it and never the whole of it.

What happens when a capable person stops asking what is wrong with them and starts asking what is wrong with the room around them? That question anchors this conversation, and it reaches far past any office.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Grant Harris, MBA, Certified Diversity Executive, neuro-inclusive speaker, human-centered performance strategist, and founder of GTH Consulting. Grant is known for one deceptively simple charge to leaders: fix your process, not your people. He is also a late-diagnosed autistic leader, a three-time author, a Hall of Fame athlete, and a man who has memorized every country's flag.

Grant joins Christopher to trace his own before and after, the years he spent believing he was the problem, and the moment he knew he belonged in a room full of his people. His story moves across a whole life. It lives in the self, in the quiet work of knowing who you are is enough. It lives at home and in chosen family, where the people closest to him learned how his brain actually works. It lives in community, where he found others who show up differently and know they belong anyway. And it lives at work, where he helps organizations build belonging in the workplace by redesigning the systems around people instead of labeling the people. This is a conversation about human-centered innovation, strategic inclusion, and the language for belonging that one honest story can offer.

There is a story we tell ourselves about high-performance work: that winning costs you the people, that greatness and humanity cannot share the same room. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, HR executive, coach, and founder Kate McKinnon shows that the choice itself was never real. Across more than 15 years in human resources, most recently as head of people inside the pressure-cooked world of sports, Kate built cultures people refused to leave, earning recognition as both a Most Loved Workplace and one of the Best Employers in Sports. Host, Christopher Bylone, joins her to trace how belonging in the workplace grows from something quieter and more personal: the moment a person knows they can bring their whole self to the room.

This is not a conversation about choosing humanity over results. It is about how the two rise together. Kate names the false trade-off many leaders still believe, then offers a human-centered way through it, one rooted in authentic leadership, strategic inclusion, and the daily practice of building belonging. She traces her own moment of knowing she belonged, the day vulnerability stopped reading as weakness. She also names a moment she knew she did not, and the lesson it taught her about who culture chooses to include. Whether you lead a team, guide a family, or are still working out where you add value, this story gives you language for belonging you can carry into every part of your life.

Most of us were taught to earn joy. Land the results, hit the numbers, and then maybe you get to feel good. Greg De Koker spent a career proving that this order is backward, and that the truth reaches into every part of a life, not only the office. On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Greg joins host Christopher Bylone. He is a brand and culture transformation expert, a bestselling co-author, and the mind behind the forthcoming book Joy Squared: The Hidden Power of Joy in Leadership.

Greg carries a mission with a number attached to it: forty-four million people living, working, and leading with more joy, on purpose. That mission grew from a pattern he could not ignore across hundreds of stakeholder interviews. There was too much suffering at work, and it did not stop at the office door. He named it the global joy deficit, and then he built an ecosystem to help close it.

This conversation moves from the boardroom to the family cottage and back again. Greg reframes joy as rigorous strategy rather than a soft perk, and he shows how a single childhood moment reshaped what home means to him. This is a story about building belonging and creating belonging in everyday life, across self, home, community, and work.

Belonging is bigger than any office. It begins in the quiet knowledge that who you are is already enough, and it follows you into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Öykü Api, a thought leader in inclusion, change, and leadership whose story stretches across self, home, community, and work.

Öykü spent twenty years inside corporate finance and walked out with three published books, a Cornell credential in women’s leadership and diversity, a law degree, and a passport stamped on all seven continents, Antarctica included. Underneath the resume sits one clarifying thesis: when a career, a relationship, or a place stops serving your growth, the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of leaving.

This is a conversation about knowing your worth in every room. Öykü reframes a sense of belonging as something a person carries inward first, not something a title, a team, or another person’s validation hands over. She gives listeners language for belonging that reaches from the self outward, into chosen family, into community, and into the daily work of building inclusive culture. Through her first-person story you will find new words for authentic leadership, strategic inclusion, and the quiet courage it takes to leave a room that no longer fits. This is storytelling as strategy, and proof that creating belonging in everyday life begins with you.

What does it mean to lead so that everyone in the room knows they belong? Our guest has spent more than 25 years answering that question, and his answer reshapes how we think about people, work, and life.

Meet Dean Carter. He has served as chief human resources officer four separate times, at Fossil, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, and Guild, earning national recognition for reinventing the future of work. His book, Employee Experience Design: How to Co-Create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive, became an Amazon number one bestseller. Now he leads Instill, an AI-native culture operating system built on a single, human-first conviction, that technology should protect people and culture rather than thin them out.

In this conversation with host Christopher Bylone, Dean shares the story of when he knew he belonged and the harder moments when he did not. He moves from a Texas office under the sodomy laws, to a community that once shut him out, to a Santa Barbara theater where shy kids sang off-key and knew they belonged. His through-line is human-first leadership, the daily practice of making sure the quiet person, the new mother, and the overlooked kid are seen. This is belonging as a whole-life reality across self, home, community, work, and society.

Belonging is not built at the office. It is built wherever a person is, at the dinner table, inside a circle of friends, in the places we worship and organize, and at work too. Season three of I Know I Belong When… proved that twelve times over.

In this special season three recap, host, Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, brings every guest from the season back together to examine what it takes to be fully inclusive. Twelve guests. Six behaviors. One question asked again and again: what does it actually look like to build a place where people know they belong? The answer frames the episode and its title. The question is never whether a person fits. The question is what they add.

This is not a highlight reel. It is a language lesson in building belonging across every part of life, anchored by the Inclusive Behaviors Framework and the Belonging Formula that ground all of Innovation Unbiased's work. You will hear a bank CEO lead with her humanity before her title, a hip hop journalist find belonging in a circle that asks what you bring, and a leader living with blindness move the barrier off the person and onto the design. If you have ever searched for language to name belonging, in yourself, your home, your community, or your team, this episode hands it to you in the voices that earned it.

What happens when you combine a lifelong storyteller, a lifelong protester, and a leader who runs toward the work when everyone else is running away from it?

You get Chris Jones.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Chris, co-founder of Spectra Diversity and a social justice warrior since 1970, to discuss authentic leadership in turbulent times. Chris has spent more than four decades writing in other people's voices, from documentaries on PBS and National Geographic to scientific work for Mayo Clinic and General Dynamics. Now she is using her own voice to do what she calls her last career: helping leaders measure and improve workplace belonging.

While other DEI consultants quietly pivoted to safer industries, Chris doubled down. She launched a second year of her free webinar series, DEI For Real. She partnered with an employment attorney to help leaders navigate what is legal and what is not. And she keeps asking the question every people leader needs to face: Are you actually building belonging, or are you guessing?

This is a conversation about creating a sense of belonging at work when the cultural tide pushes in the other direction. It is about the difference between box checking and real strategic inclusion. It is about why measurement matters more than mission statements. And it offers fresh language for belonging, drawn from one woman's story of 55 years of making good trouble in the service of an inclusive culture and human-centered innovation.