Meet Antoinette Klatzky
By: Hannah Scharmer
Tags: Business, Gaiajourney, Leadership, Practitioner, Women

Meet Antoinette Klatzky

Being in service of the now

If you participated in the GAIA Journey (GAIA: Global Activation of Intention and Action) Antoinette will certainly be a familiar face. Antoinette serves on the board of the Presencing Institute (PI) and has been part of the PI community since 2010. You might also recognize Antoinette as the executive director of the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute (EFLI) or as the host, facilitator, and co-creator of the Eileen Fisher Foundation’s Women Together initiative. Antoinette has been working with Eileen Fisher and her Foundation to facilitate empowerment workshops with young women and educators, build the early stages of a recycled clothing initiative to fund those programs and set strategy for the foundation’s work on human rights and climate justice for 10 years.

Carried by a Lineage of Strong Women

Antoinette comes from a strong line of independent women. Her mother, after leaving a secure academic tenured career, gave birth to her at the age of 40 as a single parent by choice. Her grandmother, who gave birth to her mother at the age of 40, was the daughter of a Russian Jewish seamstress, who fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia. “It’s this lineage of strong women that carried me into this life and to the journey that I have been on,” Antoinette reflects.

Antoinette dreamt of attending a college that would allow her to travel and attend other schools abroad. This dream became reality when she discovered the International Honors Program in the last pages of a magazine. This program allowed her, and a group of fellow students, to travel to Britain, Tanzania, India, New Zealand, Mexico. The goal of this endeavor was to rethink globalization through the lenses of ecology, anthropological field methods, rethinking our economic systems, “and we were doing that by actually going to these places.”

“ I just felt a spark of something, I knew that this wasn’t the traditional abroad program but this is really how I wanted to learn…via experience. It was activating the head, heart and hands. That experience opened me up, and when I came home, I didn’t want to do the ‘system’ in the same way.”

Eileen Fisher and Antoinette at a Women Together event

Upon returning home, Antoinette took on two jobs: a social justice position in her local YWCA as well as a retail job. “I didn’t know it then,” Antoinette said with a smile, “but that retail job did give me a grounding in the clothing industry before I worked with Eileen Fisher.” When Eileen wanted to start a young women’s leadership program in order to provide young women with the leadership skills practiced by the company, Antoinette stepped into this project in order to translate these leadership practices into workshops. As it turns out, the leadership practices at the company were heavily influenced by Otto Scharmer’s work. In a way, “Otto was writing Theory U and Eileen was living it.” That was Antoinette’s “initial dive” into Theory U and Presencing.

This “feels more like my life’s journey rather than just my journey to the Presencing Institute.”

Group shot at the We The Change/Women Together event with Women leaders of BCorps

Grounding Knowledge in the Body

When Antoinette was 14, she started teaching swimming at her YWCA. She noticed how there’s “something that happens in a person’s body when they have the ‘aha!’ moment.” When you tell someone to “just kick their feet”, they might not really get it. But if they’re told to “make their ankles floppy and loose, or if I actually help them by holding their ankles and moving their feet…then they get it and it just clicks.” What’s so wonderful about the kinesthetic learning experience is “you then actually can’t not know how to do that anymore!” Suddenly, you feel it. Antoinette has found the kinesthetic learning experience to be the “quickest way into knowing how to do something differently.”

This embodied learning experience was what Antoinette was teaching as a teenager, and, at the same time, it was “also how I, myself, needed to learn.”

Learning by doing is still a part of how Antoinette learns and works. In her leadership programs with young women, she often does an activity called Strong Voice. In this activity, they go around in a circle, saying a word. The group then echoes back not only the word itself, but also the manner in which it was said. Because how a word, like “yes” and “no” is said informs how it’s felt. Antoinette says, “young women come to me and say: I’ve never used that part of my body to speak before…I’ve never spoken from my gut, I’ve never spoken from my belly.” Antoinette noticed how many teenagers and young women speak with “a lack of surety” in their voices, even when they often do know what they want. So actually “dropping into the body” in order to use the body and the voice differently carries with it immense potential. Embodied practice is “a part of me now,” Antoinette reflects, “it’s part of how I live and work.”

Antoinette holding a mindfulness moment during a Women Together event

Facing, and Being with the Pain of, the Problem

Reflecting on the interface between business and leadership, Antoinette says that “what’s required of us is to actually look at the problems…we can look at the problem and say I don’t want to look at that right now and go in another direction.” For example, when looking at a fabric that might not be environmentally sustainable, company leaders have two options — change the fabric out for another one or dive into the chain and try to change the way the fabric is produced. They might not want to do either of those things and might do something else that feels easier in another area of the company for an easy PR story.

The reality is that “if we don’t look at the problems we can’t solve them.”

Antoinette has been looking at how business leaders might address some of the crises of our time — like climate change and social justice. She says “While there can be a great deal of pain that arises when we actually look at the problems we’ve caused or been part of creating, there is a lot of possibility too.” If we don’t look at the problems of our industries, we can’t begin to address them. Antoinette notes that it can be overwhelming to look at all the problems in an industry, but taking it one step at a time, deeply listening, working as a collective, “it’s doable,” she says.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement would be an example of this, where it might be easier to deny the existence of racism by turning away from the problem. Yet, “the much more difficult, but necessary, thing is for us to actually look, and ask ourselves, where do I benefit from the current reality?”

We must also ask ourselves “where am I actually benefiting from low wage labor? Where am I actually benefiting from a system that keeps this wage gap in place… and where am I a part of the problem?” This is work that needs to be done both on an individual, as well as on a company, level.

Instead of turning away, what we need to do is “sit with the pain of it, because by sitting with the pain of it we can actually look at what we need to do to be with each other and solve it.” For Antoinette, this also means asking “what companies I am supporting, where I am getting my food from, where am I getting my clothes from, how do I live on this earth?” And… “it feels daunting.” For Antoinette, it’s about “taking it one step at a time and also being with the pain.”

As Arawana Hayashi has reminded me — Being with the suffering allows me to have compassion and tenderness and go for basic human goodness rather than for the perfect.”

What Is Needed Now?

In this moment of disruption, rupture, pain, and potential, Antoinette, like so many others, finds herself in a time of transition, where “there’s something that’s shifting in my life and work.” When COVID-19 hit, there was this moment of “dropping everything and asking: what wants to happen?” That’s when GAIA came in. Within the span of 12 days, GAIA grew from an idea, born in a small team meeting, into an online journey that touched over 13,000 people over the course of 14 weeks. Antoinette is “still processing what happened.”

GAIA stands for Global Activation of Intention and Action, and “the global activation has been happening for quite some time now…and what the GAIA Journey is inviting us into was to recognize that it’s time for us to stand up. It’s time for us to come together and do what needs to be done.” In many ways, it’s on us to connect with each other and talk with each other because “ there isn’t some else out there who is going to do that for us.” A key part of the GAIA Journey was, and is, “to apply a collective sensing mechanism to what’s actually going on so that we can see it… “

Everyday Antoinette asks herself what her purpose is that day, with an openness towards what might be needed of her in the future. At the moment, “I’m putting my arms down and asking: what am I being called into now? And how can I be of service to that now?”

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