Available

If you’ve ever worked with me you know that one of the ways I approach visibility is according to one of its underused definitions: available. As in, what are you available for?

It seems as if overnight, what I am personally available for has shifted dramatically. Having done this work a while now, I know that there is no overnight success, transformation or change. The moments of change are swift but the circumstances and seeds planted are usually a long time coming. Regardless, I feel radically different.

What you are available for ends up defining you which is why as women, we need to be constantly asking the kind of questions that help us master our boundaries, visibility, using our voice and refining with whom we share the energy of ourselves and our gifts.

Alexis Jones is asking these questions not just of, and for herself, but also with a goal to innovate humanity.

The author, speaker and winner of The Jefferson Award, our country’s highest national honor for public service has also been featured in Oprah’s #SuperSoul100. While she was still in college, she started a different kind of conversation among her sorority sisters that quickly turned into a conversation with 300 girls. The seeds of those first meetings have turned into a movement #IAMTHATGIRL that is 1.2 million strong.

But it’s not just women who she is changing the conversation with, it’s also with men, specifically men in sports, a group that, I’m not going to lie, terrifies me. With #protecther and her work on the Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why—one that is must-watch if you have teens—she’s asking young men to redefine “bro” culture and helping them to ask what it means to a be a good man, especially when it comes to their treatment of women and girls.

But what I love so much about Alexis is that she gets the intersectionality of all of the things we’re struggling with in this moment, whether its #BlackLivesMatter #MeToo or what it means to be a woman leading in this moment.

I came out of the conversation feeling a little bit lighter and for a moment, like maybe we’re going to figure all of this out after all.