I Got Called Out! (They Wanted to Know How I Walk the Talk!)

Ask any Indigenous person or most Indigenous people and they're going to tell you. The most important element to building a bridge, to building a relationship, to building trust and understanding is being a person who walks their talk. Because talk is easy, talk is cheap. You can do the land acknowledgement, you can say you're sorry, you can say you're an ally, you can say you support Indigenous people. But if you're not in action, doing things, calling out misinformation, posting online to correct things, if you're not walking the talk, then to us it just sounds like an empty promise. And we definitely recognize those. We have experience with those. Thank you very much, Canada today, because I got called out and I'm totally okay with that. I call people out, you can call me out. I got called out about. What do I do besides just talk, besides just doing these videos, telling you what to do? So today I wanted to do something I've never done before. I'm going to show you how I walk my talk. So let's talk about it. Bonjour. Hi, everybody. My name is Andy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northern Ontario. And today we are focusing on how I walk my talk. I've been an Indigenous reconciliation guide for 15 years now. More than 15 years, but surprise, doing daily videos, weekday videos, is not my main focus. This is kind of fun and I kind of like educating the masses and giving you the ability not only to learn from a video, but being able to share it with your team at work, with your family members, with a friend that needs support or someone who's confused on something. But this is not my main work. I most definitely walk the talk that I share in these videos. So today what I wanted to do is walk you through my website, believe it or not, because I've been willing to bet most of you have never been to my website. We're not going to spend a lot of time here, but I think what you're going to find there shows you how I walk the talk. So first off, the header on the main page, I create safe spaces. That is literally my reputation. It's what I became known for. It is not something I thought of, but I'm observant. If you've watched any of my videos, you know that about me. And when I noticed in all of the testimonials, I would get all the feedback from my non indigenous audience, especially was how I created a safe space that I allowed them to ask questions and they were able to say I don't understand or why is this such an issue for indigenous people? And they weren't going to get shamed for that. That what I believe when they ask those questions is they are telling me the education they were not given that's not their fault. So I don't attack. I have zero interest in shame or guilt. I am all about understanding. I create safe spaces. So that is another way I walk my talk. I don't just create safe spaces when I'm here in front of a camera all by myself, I do it with the general public. So the about tab we're not going to talk about that is just literally who I am. You know that. If you're interested, go check it out. The next tab on my website is Flex Consulting. So this is something I do with municipalities usually or with there's government entities, there's corporations, there's businesses of all different sizes. So this is a combination. The people that sign up for Flex Consulting are a combination of we know we need training. There's areas that we don't understand that we need training on so we can sell more products or service an indigenous community or be part of reconciliation, retain our indigenous employees, hire indigenous employees. There's a lot of different reasons why they think they need training, but this is a specific group because they also understand that issues come up in their day to day operations that they would really like to be able to ask someone about. So I said something and my indigenous employee quit. I don't even know what the issue was, that kind of conversation or we want to run an ad campaign. This is what we were thinking the poster would look like in the words how do you think this is going to be received in a First Nation community? Many, many issues. One that happens a lot for a for profit entity is we received negative feedback. Whether it was on social media, whether it was a Google review, whatever the case may be. We had someone complain about our service. In some cases I've even had businesses where we were called racist. We want to find out what happened, where it went off the rails. Flex Consulting includes a one hour lunch and learn session every quarter. So four sessions and up to five hours of consulting to discuss those issues every month. So that's a really popular offering. That's how I walk the talk. The next group is, well, next are my seminars and that's literally how this started. Well, I guess it started with my first book. Those are available on Amazon. But my seminars I am not going to run through my seminars. Click on the tab. I'll put all the links in the notes below the video so you can follow up on this. But I have a whole bunch of seminars and if you click on each one it gives you a little blurb and it also describes now the type of people that would take that specific seminar. So they are either half day workshops or full day seminars. I do them virtually, I do them live. So if I'm traveling. Garen Flip indeed. That's why I'm traveling. I'm off to do a seminar somewhere or a keynote speech. Next is my new brand new, not even launched yet onboarding program. Because I have these amazing businesses and corporations that I work with that took the training. But guess What? In the six months since I did the training, they hired like three new staff people or 10 new staff people and they want to bring them up to speed. But they're not going to hire me to come in and do a full day seminar again because most of them have already taken the training. So I'm in the process of finalizing a three hour video onboarding course that you can add to your regular orientation information and it ensures everyone stays up on speed. Stays up to speed, I guess two different ways you can purchase that. Because I recognize some smaller businesses would be challenged with the dollar value. If you have high turnover, you're or you're constantly, you're growing, you're expanding, you're hiring a lot of people. The number I tend to use is 10. If you're going to hire 10 people in a relatively short period of time, three months, six months, a year, I would suggest buying the program outright. Then you own it, use it for years, use it as often as you want. There's a one time cost. If you're a smaller entity or you only hire one person every year or 10 years, then you pay per employee. And in that case you don't own the program that they received the training via email. They submit their responses, their homework to me so I can verify with the owner that the training was completed. I am totally excited about that. That was definitely a gap in service I identified. So again I found the way to support you to be able to do the work you want to do and benefit from being amazing at servicing indigenous peoples or indigenous communities because like we all want to be amazing. Right? Right. And then of course my all inclusive membership. So that's for anyone who wants to learn at their own pace and go on a journey. It's something they recognize they're going to do over Time. Everything I do is in the membership. All of my books are in there. So if you pay the the fee to get in the membership, you get the books. You don't need to buy them separately. It's PDF. You read them online. All my video courses are in there. The 52 Steps to Reconciliation video course that I did like four years ago here on YouTube is in there. There's downloadable PDFs, there's episodes from my TV show that I used to do called the Learning Curve. Absolutely everything is in there. If you click on the page on my website, you'll learn all about it. And then of course, the free training, which kind of is along the lines of this YouTube, by the way. If you didn't realize, if you don't like just coming to YouTube to watch this, you can click on free training. You get on my email list and this video is sent to you every single day. Yeah, can say, I know people. I can tell they save them up till the weekend. And you know why? Because they email me back with their response or a question or a comment or often just appreciation. And I love that. Yes, I answer the emails. They come directly to me. So I am not just here telling you what to do. I am in front of people, working with people, making sure I create the safe spaces to answer their questions, to give them the direction that nobody's given them. Or worse, they asked a question, they got their head bit off because they didn't know the answer. That's not going to help us. That's how I walk the talk. So the question is, how do you. And please do not tell me that means you're silent. I hope you're doing the talking, but then I also hope you're doing the walking. Please feel free to share this video with whoever you think I might be able to help. Because I want to help. That's how we fix this. Until tomorrow. I love you. Take care. Bye bye.