A Straight White Man Talks to Lisa Koenecke: “Your Everyday Gay!”

Speaker, inclusivity and diversity expert, and absolutely lovely person Lisa Koeneke join me for today’s podcast. Lisa bills herself as an inclusive ally, and only partly jokingly called herself Lisa the Everyday Gay.

I absolutely adored this conversation. Not only is Lisa a tremendously likable and fun person, but her story and insight it’s so important and valuable.

I’ve eager to better educate myself about all things diversity. Race. Ethnicity. LGBTQ+.   Anything and everything.  I’m a middle-aged, white street man from the suburbs. So much of these topics seem new to me. It’s been a fun journey learning more and I feel very lucky to have experts in these fields as my guest on this podcast.

I was really eager to learn about this Inclusive Ally.  

I met Lisa very briefly at a professional conference where we hit it off in spite of the fact that we had very little time together. I was thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed.

There are 1 million things that I loved about this interview. But let me give you just a few of the highlights.

Coming Out Story

Lisa grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. She didn’t know she was gay until she was 22 years old and her sister told her. I can just imagine how mind blowing that conversation must’ve been for Lisa. It took her two years to more or less be at peace with the concept of her sexuality, meaning she really came out to herself at age 24.

After she got married to a wonderful woman she was out to many of the important people in her family, but the people at her job had no idea.  She came out publicly in her 40s willing to be fired and ostracized.

She had both success and bad luck with this process. Her family is now estranged. (Wait till you hear that story… Listen to the video!). But happily she was accepted at work and even got regional and national attention in her chosen field as a school counselor. Her personal experience helped fuel her expertise when counseling children.

Keynote Speaker

Now she travels the country as a professional keynote speaker. She trains people on all things regarding inclusivity and diversity in a way that I find very generous. She’s very quick to make you feel comfortable, safe from judgment, and generally glad to be learning from her.      

There are so many reasons while you’ll love this podcast….I encourage you to give it a listen.  But in the end, Lisa’s wisdom around diversity and inclusion comes down to this:  just be kind.  If you don’t know what to say, be kind and say nothing.  If you want to ask questions, be kind.  In the end, we are all humans…let’s just treat each other with kindness and all of the other “stuff” around diversity will be less scary. 

Love that.  I’m with you, Lisa!   Be kind!