Defining and Redefining the Gladiator Way: Our Commitment to Rest and Resistance

By Brooke Black

Like many of our clients, Gladiator Consulting is guided by a mission, vision and set of values. Those values include: Social Justice & Racial Equity, Community, Belonging, Growth, Audacity, and Imagination.

We try (and fail…often) to uphold those values in our lives, in our work, and in our relationships. Gladiator was built by a group of women (often parents or guardians) and honed an intentional culture designed to allow us to be our true selves and bust down the dichotomy of our personal and professional lives. We have been guided by a theory of change:

• If Gladiator Consulting experiments with and dismantles the practices and institutions that uphold current systems, 

• Then new systems and models that influence 

  • equitable wealth, 

  • opportunity, 

  • influence, and 

  • power redistribution 

• will emerge in partnership with the community for the people.

Over the last two years, Gladiator has grown at a rapid rate; we have expanded our core team, independent contractor partnerships, and client capacity. We have been fortunate to be offered opportunities to speak locally, nationally, and globally about our work and have seen increasing demand for our consulting offerings outside of the St. Louis region. Our theory of change and core values connected with potential clients, community members and leaders, and others envisioning a more equitable future. We shifted from the radical women in the back of the room raising our voices to demand justice and liberation, to a national consultancy - still with a set of demands and not afraid to yell about it. 

As any entity grows– albeit a family, an athletic team, a company– there was a moment of blissful panic (perhaps even a little chaos) as we found ourselves growing through more changes than we had the foundation to handle.

Who would nurture our relationships with a wide range of very different, unique, powerful, partners?

How could we manage the influx of requests that followed a speaking engagement, locally, nationally, and globally?

Where have we failed to center racial justice in our work as we have expanded? 

How do we find time to make rest and restoration a part of our practice and work?

Where were we dropping that ball? And sometimes, what balls are even in the air?

Full stop.

We need a group nap just thinking about it.

We closed out December of 2021 with our first staff out-of-town retreat. We tightened up our job descriptions, discovered and shared our boundaries, laughed over oysters, and rested. We returned to St. Louis refreshed, and ready to solidify who Gladiator is going to be in 2022.

Our friends at Beloved Community take a sabbatical for the month of February. Like Beloved, we at Gladiator Consulting recognize and acknowledge that the DEI and social justice work that is often (performatively) requested during Black History Month cannot be done during the shortest month (or any single month) of the year. 

While our infatuation with @thenapministry is nothing new, I don’t think that we at Gladiator have really reinforced the way that rest and self-care can be used as a force of resistance and social justice, as much as we have in the past few months. In the ongoing and evolving fight for social justice, rest is not the opposite of working. 

We know that The Body Keeps the Score. We know that there is scientific evidence of racism traumatizing the bodies of humans of color. So what is first in the fight for social justice, is the sole act of activism to first, heal. 

Part of the culture that Gladiator Consulting has adopted and encouraged, is that true change does not happen through the dollars raised or stakeholders affected in a one-time exchange. It’s transformation. It's revolution. That the process is the product.  Change happens through a system shift (or complete dismantling). And that’s true as individuals also.

Believe it or not, your worth does not equate to the outputs of your day.

“From the time you were born every system in this culture has been telling you that you are not worthy as a human being unless you labor and produce and do. You had no choice in this matter….” - The Nap Ministry

In 2022, we at Gladiator Consulting will encourage and uphold the following forms of resistance from hustle culture:

• Each month, we identify a No Meeting Day, which day we will commit to catching up on all the things– and that means no meetings. We hold each other accountable to committing to these days by stating the day, and marking it on our calendars that we share with one another.  

• Gabi built a set of tools to help us name– and then honor– our own and each others’ personal and professional boundaries. For the first time in a loooong time, Ann turned off her phone notifications while she traveled with her children. Rachel has finally set some boundaries on her calendar, and is not afraid to hold them. What seems like a small step for mankind, was a big step for Gladiator administrators. 

• We revisit our boundaries when they do not work. We fail. We try again.

• We continuously interrogate the sense of urgency in a predominately virtual culture. Sherrell even added a dope tag at the end of her emails: Reminder: It is easy to unintentionally work at a digitally-enabled relentless pace; this is harmful. Please know that I am sending you this email at a time that works for me. I ask that you only respond to it when convenient to you.

• We exercise in the ways and frequency that work well for us. Many of us did the Shonda Rhimes’s Year of Yes Peloton Series. And, we did it in the middle of the workday.

This summer, Gladiator Consulting will continue to honor this commitment to rest as resistance by taking an intentional two week, full team pause, followed by a mid-year retreat. During this time, we will practice rest and reflection. We will intentionally slow our work as we resist a sense of urgency and perfectionism. 

We’d like to challenge our partners, friends, and colleagues to reject the need to race to defeat social injustices and instead rest in the midst of your ongoing work. I propose a movement of activists to heal in the battlefield, of mothers to stop glorifying wine and caffeine just to make it through the day, and of humans to accept the limitations of humanity and reject the implicit pressure to be superhuman due to virtual urgency, fear, and all the things that (no longer) drive us.