An episode of Changing the Conversation podcast
Roni Hodges and host Ashley Stewart discuss non-negotiable strategies for navigating wellness with joy and purpose in 2025 and beyond.
June 2, 2025
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Ashley Stewart, Host (00:05): Hello, and welcome to Changing the Conversation. I’m your host, Dr. Ashley Stewart, the director of the Center for Health Equity at C4 Innovations. And today, I’m really excited to talk about the nonnegotiables of navigating wellness in 2025. In order to have this dynamic conversation, I’m joined by one of my esteemed colleagues and friends, Roni Hodges. Roni is a project manager by trade, but also a strategist, creative, and problem-solver, working at the intersection of equity and economic justice at ARC4Justice, joining us from Jacksonville, Florida. How you doing today, Roni?
Roni Hodges, Guest (00:44): I’m doing well. I am being present in the moment.
Ashley (00:47): There’s a lot to be present for in the moment right now. So that’s a good thing for sure. [Laughter] So, Roni, today, we’re talking about the nonnegotiables. These are things that we are not willing to compromise, sacrifice, pivot on, but the things that just have to be in place in order to navigate wellness for ourselves in the year 2025. For context, it’s February. The year just started, and we are getting right into thinking about the impact of this. So let’s start off with, what is a nonnegotiable for you, Roni?
Roni (01:25): Well, I’ll just start by saying January was a year long. There was 365 days in that month alone. I think for me in this year and this season, I have a few nonnegotiables. Wellness is nonnegotiable. Joy is a necessity, and purpose is not up for debate.
Ashley (01:45): I love that. I appreciate the leaning into purpose. And for me at least, that purpose and that joy piece are very interconnected. Right? That deep-level joy that nothing can change or shift is also deeply connected to being able to live in purpose and to do the things that are meaningful to us. I wonder, how do we maintain, or what are some of the strategies that you utilize to maintain that joy, and especially as it intersects with purpose, when there might be some challenges or barriers to you being able to lean into your purpose in some of your work, if at all?
Roni (02:25): I think first, you need to make the decision that joy is something that you want to maintain. It can’t be an afterthought or something that you, after having a long, hard day, say, “I need to find a little joy now.” I think you need to begin each day with that as the purpose, the intent, and it should fill all the spaces, the crevices, the work, how you interact with people. That should be the root of everything that you do.
(02:52): I think being clear about what it is that you’re trying to accomplish helps that, and not being scattered. A lot of times, we are playing defense on our days. We’re just trying to block this, move here, and we need to play offense on our days. We need to say, “How are we going to move the ball of life forward? What is it that my goal is? How do I get to the end zone?” I guess it’s very appropriate for this time of year if we talk about football season, but how do I get to the end zone of my day, of my life, and carrying the ball of joy?
Ashley (03:26): It’s an intentional decision. And inevitably, there’s going to be things throughout the day that will test or challenge it. But when joy is the state of being, when it’s an intentional choice that we’re making, when it is a perspective, when it is an approach versus something that you’re seeking or getting or pulling from somewhere external, it really helps to keep that be grounded. And I think a big part of that is also being in an environment where you can laser-focus on it and not compromise on it, or to be able to have that appropriate discernment about what feeds that and what fuels that and what can essentially be a distraction. So how do you keep from being distracted?
Roni (04:10): Throughout your day, your life, you will have things that will try to take you off course, but it’s important to not to be distracted by your detractors, people who are trying to pull you off course of your purpose, people who are trying to get you to stop making the progress that you intend to make. They try to throw things at you to avert your eyes, like, “Look over here,” [laughter] when you already know what you should be doing. So it’s important to be strong in that, to walk in that, to center yourself in that and know that the distractions are intentional, but you have to be even more intentional about not being distracted.
Ashley (04:48): Yeah. One of my favorite quotes is, “If they can’t make you bad, they make you busy.” Right? So get you flustered and looking at other things and really distracted from that purpose. And I think that sometimes it’s intentional, people trying to be those detractors. And I think that other times, it’s sometimes folks who are in our circle, folks who we work with closely. Sometimes it’s even folks in our lives who might be wavering in between those intentional choices, but also feeling the overwhelmingness of any particular climate.
(05:21): And there is that space of healthy and productive communal processing, but there’s also the ability to choose our framing and how we look at things and how we engage with things, and how we’re intentional about it, that will inevitably put us in a position to continue to make informed decisions around change and opportunity versus become overwhelmed or maybe even inundated in those distractions that keep us from making the important next steps. Being strategic, not moving in that crisis brain, but moving in a stabilized mindset that allows us to say, “Okay. These things are on fire. I see the fire. I see this distraction, but I have a plan.”
(06:07): We have a plan for how to put out fires, and we have a plan to remediate things, and I think that that could play a big role in it too. I’m wondering, how do you see that in different roles in your life, whether that’s in personal, professional, communal spaces where not necessarily people are intending to be distracted, but that the weight of things can be so overwhelming that it becomes distracting?
Roni (06:32): Yeah. That’s a really good point. And even going back to the football analogy. A football game is not just a bunch of downs, like just going to the end nonstop. They take moments to pause, to reevaluate what’s going on on the field. They have people who are looking from a bird’s-eye view to say, “Hey, you need to read this,” or “This block is coming, this screen. They’re blitzing.”
(06:53): So I think we have to do that in our lives as well. Take a step back, come to the sidelines, read the playbook, be able to read the blitz, be able to make adjustments. It’s not about just getting there the fastest. It’s about being strategic in how you get there, and really taking time to evaluate what’s going on so you’re really doing it in an intentional way and not just running all over the field.
Ashley (07:16): I never thought that we’d be doing a podcast on football analogies, but we’re here. [Laughter] And something I really love about this analogy of football is, football in itself is a very chaotic sport. There are so many things going on. I mean, in fact, they’re intentionally trying to make you think they threw the ball one way, but it got thrown the other way. It was passed off, and it is a chaotic thing to observe. You’re never exactly sure, but the focus is to keep your eye on the ball at all costs.
(07:46): And I think that that’s a friendly reminder to us, even in the chaos of it, even when people are trying to make us think it went somewhere else. We have to narrow in and focus on where that ball is and recognize what the purpose is, which is to get to that overarching goal. And in order to do that, that also requires us to have some critical understanding of what that goal is, which I think gets really back to that beautiful conversation you started us off around purpose.
Roni (08:13): Yeah. You don’t go into any situation not having any idea of what you want to do. So, I mean, even if you are not fully sure what it is, you know the feeling of it. Right? You know how you want to feel, how you want to be, the state you want to arrive to. So really, how do you build your days, your weeks, your months to get to that place? You feel it in the things that you do. What brings you joy? What do you need to do more of? What do you need to do less of in order to get to that kind of state of being?
(08:46): And you’ll feel it more as you get closer to your purpose, but you really have to be clear and zero in about what it is that you want to feel, do, have. And anytime you do things, be able to read your own energy and to say, “This is not serving that purpose. This is not giving me that energy that I know I want to feel,” and being able to pivot.
Ashley (09:13): Absolutely. And rolling with our analogy, let’s talk about the fans. Let’s talk about the fans. Let’s talk about the people in the stadium. [Laughter] Right? There are many times in this work, and particularly working in the field that we’re in, and the listeners, many of our listeners are in, there might be some critical components about being in community with other people that plays a really big role in how we show up or how we’re able to do the work.
(09:45): And a lot of times, there’s two teams. People are on one team or the other. Right? But sometimes there’s folks who are spectator, who are engaging, who are there for the game, but maybe not necessarily connected to a particular outcome. And so, I think talking about what it means to be in community as part of the process of our nonnegotiables, part of the process of being committed to joy and to peace and to wellness and to purpose is also about looking at that environment. So I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit about that too.
Roni (10:19): Yeah. I think, what is the saying? Everybody who is in the room with you is not in your corner? Just because people are in the same space as you, doesn’t mean they’re holding community with you. A lot of times, you’ll find that people are against what you are against, but they’re not necessarily for what you are for. It’s easy to rally against something. We see it all the time. People are like, “Oh, no to this. Boo to that.”
(10:43): Even in football, right? Like, “Boo this team. Boo that player.” People come together all the time to call out systems, to fight injustice, to say, “This doesn’t work,” to challenge narratives, but being against something is not the same as being for something. There needs to be clarity of purpose, like, “What are we here to accomplish? Is everybody here to accomplish the same thing?” It’s not about just breaking. It’s about building.
(11:10): Dismantling is necessary, but if you don’t have a vision to build, it’ll always just be a path of destruction. And so, that’s not what we are trying to do. We’re not just trying to tear things down. We’re trying to build things up in their stead. So it’s important to check the temperature of the rooms that you’re in and to see why people are truly there. Are they there just because they don’t like something that’s happening right now, but as soon as there’s a shift and there’s something else they don’t like, they leave your side and go to the next one? You need to make sure people are there to be architects and not just the demolition crew.
Ashley (11:45): I love it, with even more analogies. One of the ways that I like to also talk about it too is, people need to be prepared for the yes. I think so many times, we are so prepared for the nos. And in this work, people are ready to, like you said, dismantle, but don’t have the blueprint for the architecture that you just described.
(12:07):
And so, a lot of times, we’ll see really good advocacy initiatives, but without that necessary strategy to be prepared for the yes. So when we do get a yes or a window of opportunity does present itself, people are shocked and surprised and excited, but not necessarily ready to move forward when that window of opportunity presents itself.
(12:27): So it’s equally as important that we’re prepared for the yes, and being prepared is actually one of my nonnegotiables. I would also say that it’s joy, but being prepared for the yes, being ready to go, having the necessary strategy that feels so safe and peaceful and well to me as part of the process. And so, navigating 2025 is about being ready, about thinking things through, about giving things the time and space to process, which means creating intentional time in our days to process, to say, “Does this align and reflect with my values, with my purpose?” And I think that that’s a really understated space that maybe we haven’t made as much intentional time for in the past.
Roni (13:16): Yeah. I will say too that a lot of times, people have the language, but not the lens. They have the vocabulary, but not the vision. So they can say all the things. They can say, “Hey, we don’t want this. We want to change that.” But they don’t have the vision to do it. They don’t have the ability to say, “We don’t want this, but we do want this, and this is how we’re going to accomplish that.” So it’s also important to make sure it’s not just lip service that we’re offering, that we actually have a vision and a way to carry it out, because you can have purpose, but if you don’t have a plan, you have nothing.
Ashley (13:57): Yeah. And I really feel like sometimes so much of what we’re navigating or what people are trying to address also gets really convoluted. One of the things I’ve been talking about is the meretricious nature of the work lately, and I think about what is the actual definition of meretricious. It’s like something that’s apparently attractive, but having, in reality, little value or integrity.
(14:20): And I think sometimes we can play a delicate line with language with that as well. People have been able to form really beautiful sentences and promises around creating spaces that are really centered towards wellness, that are really centered towards inclusion, that are really centered towards action, but that’s where it ends. That’s the end of the sentence. It’s like, “I said that thing, and it sounded good, and it did sound good, and it did look good on paper, and it did make people have feelings.”
(14:53): But ultimately, if it’s not able to be put in an actionable way and people aren’t able to then see culture change that is healing and uniting from it, then it’s good language, yet a good memory of how to recite or put things together, which in itself is its own craft. But when we’re really talking about making change, it is about that lens that you described that gives you the plan to take those words, whether you have those words or not, but whether you have the heart to do it and whether you have the care to nurture actual wellness and well-being within your spaces and environments.
Roni (15:37): I agree wholeheartedly. I really do. And this is probably a podcast subject for another time, but it makes me think about some of the initiatives that are being pulled back out of companies across the country. And it’s very much in real time seeing the vocabulary, but not the vision, because you all said the right things, but if these things were done truly in practice, it’s not something that you could turn on and off because it would have been embedded into the culture.
(16:10): And so, it’s not something that can be removed, because it is a part of how you work, how you hire, how you operate. So when people say that, it just makes me cringe, because it’s like you were never really doing the thing in the first place, or you don’t have a real understanding of the thing. You just threw some words up and said, “That’s what the people want. That’s what’s going to get them off my back. Let’s go with it.”
(16:34): And now, then a new set of people on your back, and this is being for what you’re for or against what you’re against. They was just against what was going on at that time, but they weren’t necessarily for what it is that we were trying to accomplish. So yeah, the evidence is all around this. So we just have to be clear on our purpose and say what we think are nonnegotiable for this year and really move and operate in that.
Ashley (16:55): That was so perfectly timed. I was having a similar thought, a similar conversation the other day. I often talk about all of the different arguments that our trainings to create more equitable and inclusive environments didn’t work, and one of the responses that I often have to that is because we bought in a lot of people to talk about the terms, but never talked about strategy, never talked about what that looked like in action, or even began to really define those terms.
(17:22): And I think no matter what perspective people are taking, whether they believe that equity and inclusion should be inherent values, whether they believe diversity should be inherent values or not, we’re all kind of using these umbrella terms and not talking about what each of those mean. They’re all different terms. All of these things that we’re talking about, they’re different terms. They mean different things, and they look different in action, and the consequences of them being there or not being there are also quite different and varied.
(17:49): And so, to your point, if some of that really strategic, intentional, and authentic processes were happening, it wouldn’t be a matter of whether something could be enabled or disabled in the process, whether something could be activated or deactivated. It would be so embedded and ingrained in the culture that it would be felt and experienced by people in a way that could not be shifted or changed.
(18:13): And I really think that that’s what we’re hoping to continue to illustrate, is that wellness is in creating spaces where people can really thrive, where they can be innovative, where they can be creative, where they can be bold, where they can contribute to the objectives, the visions, the missions of the organization, which are usually in connection to community. And so, if you had one little tidbit to give the listeners about important things to consider when thinking about their nonnegotiables and navigating wellness in 2025, what would you say to the people?
Roni (18:51): That journey will look different for everyone, but I would say, protect your joy. Stand firm in your purpose, and be intentional about building, not just dismantling.
Ashley (19:02): And I would say that every single minute of every single day, we have the opportunity to take a new approach and to give ourselves that grace, to give yourself the grace to say, “You know what? I’m going to start changing my thought pattern about how I address this topic, and I’m going to start implementing that moving forward.” And that’s a perfect time. That moment that you have that thought, that’s the perfect time to make that change in life and perspective and how you navigate through your work. Thank you so much, Roni. As always, it’s a pleasure to be in conversation with you.
Roni (19:35): And likewise. I feel like these are never long enough, but thank you for having me.
Ashley (19:39): And to our listeners, join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
Erika Simon, Producer (19:42): Visit c4innovates.com and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for more resources to grow your impact. Thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Erika Simon and Christina Murphy. Our theme song was written and performed by Peter Hanlon. Join us next time on Changing the Conversation.
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