Mona Patel, Entrepreneur and Author of Reframe, Reframes Empathy

Mona Patel

Mona Patel is a creative glitter bomb – a pioneer in customer experience and design thinking and an expert with two books written about reframing the way you think. Companies like First Republic Bank, Nike, and PayPal hire her when they need to understand what their customers want. Her fascination with shifting perspectives led her to start Gray Zones, a social experiment + theater format that over 1000 people have joined, to inspire more generous listening and empathy of other people’s perspectives. Past shows have included a focus on driving conversations about sexual harassment, racism, and love.

What is Gray Zones all about?

Gray Zones is an online, interactive play. You watch a performance about a socially relevant topic, like racism, sexual harassment, or love. You vote about what you see, and then join a live, moderated discussion to see how your vote compared to others and learn from other people’s perspectives. The goal is more awareness, empathy, and understanding of other points of view and to show people that their truth may not be the truth.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?

My degrees are in Engineering Psychology and Marketing, so I’ve always been fascinated with how people think and behave. I’ve run Motivate Design, a user experience research and design agency for 12 years, and spun off Gray Zones last year to create experiences where people can learn how to shift their perspective and reframe their point of view. I’m the author of Reframe and The Thing About Swings, and my TEDx talk is called, See Problems as Opportunities, and I love seeing the “aha” people have when they are guided into doing so.

Like Motivate, Gray Zones just sort of accidentally happened. I was passionate about some research findings we got from one of those unique research methods (Insider Insight™ about why women don’t report harassment. I wanted to create a way to have people feel what it feels like to not know what to do next. I was reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and it inspired me to put on a show where people could experience the gray area that women often face. I had no background or knowledge whatsoever in putting on shows or writing plays, but I figured why not. Worst case, I would fail. So in short, I was inspired to try something new and see what happened.

What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?

Resilience, Reflection, Execution.

Resilience: You will fall, you will fail. The question is will you quit? At times, entrepreneurship is hard and it has shown me so many shadows in my personality and way of operation, and I’ve had to get over it and start again each time.

Reflection – looking in the mirror is informative, but it’s not always fun. I’ve seen some deep shadows through entrepreneurship, like how I can get emotional or angry vs. focused by anything that feels disrespectful or how sometimes I just want to give up and blame others for something I didn’t do well, or how hard I am on myself sometimes. To be successful, I have to see it, disassociate from it, and then come up with a plan to tackle it. This ability to separate and see objectively has been key for my growth.

Execution – I’ve been blessed with the gift of being able to excite or inspire or shift people, which is fun on stage, but it’s not enough to be successful in business. Entrepreneurship has taught me the importance of following through on the details and sticking with something long enough to make it happen. This is very tough for me – I love to move on to the next fun, easy thing, but having more discipline and focus, especially on the things I don’t love or do well, has really helped me get to success versus bounce around and not achieve what I set out to achieve.

How do you separate yourself from your competitors?

I’m equal parts strategist, researcher, and storyteller, and that combo is a bit rare. So my approach, as natural as it feels for me, helps differentiate what we are doing. I care more about the awakening and creating that “aha” than the story, and I really care about telling a good story. I want to provoke people, and although I don’t love making them uncomfortable, I do know growth only happens when we feel uncomfortable. It’s how we can grow and see our blind spots, We have to tread that cautiously because people don’t always like to see their own blindspots. That’s why the show + voting + live discussion combo gives people to take whatever they want on the experience and it has never been done before in this way.

What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?

Sometimes I’m too stubborn. 🙂 It feels like conviction when I’m in it, but sometimes I don’t want to hear other people’s advice on what I’m doing, especially at first when I’m coming up with a new idea like Gray Zones, because they “don’t get it.” It turns out the reason I’m friends with them is that they are smart and they DO get it, and me, and I could listen more. 🙂

People don’t like to be wrong or see their blind spots. Gray Zones is designed to reveal blind spots, so this gets a bit hairy – I have to convince you to want to reflect on yourself, and as I mentioned above, sometimes that’s not fun. This mistake is more about positioning and branding – and I’m still working it out – but thinking about what people need to hear versus what I want to say has been a huge lesson in creating Gray Zones.

The third mistake, which I’m still making, by the way, is that I still don’t have a solid financial model for where I’m going. I love experimenting mode, and now that I’ve proven the business is viable, I need to work through where we can go and how we can get there. I have not done that yet, and that is a mistake.  It never feels like I have enough data, so my current solution is to create a few models and then see what happens.

Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?

I’ve mainly focused on word of mouth marketing and referrals as we were learning as we go. Now that we are looking to scale, we’re looking both at Linkedin outbound outreach for our B2B diversity offering and social media ads for ticketed sales. We are also looking into establishing relationships with local theater groups and doing a rev-share with them. It’s all trial and error, so the plan is to run in 90-day sprints and look at what’s working every quarter.

What are you learning now? Why is that important?

Although my passion lies in the public shows, I’m learning that there’s a real need for this Gray Zones format in diversity training at mid-sized and larger organizations. We did a round of research on what people think about diversity training, and most (it was qualitative so percentages don’t matter but basically everyone) said they find it stale, boring and it doesn’t actually help them see what they can do differently. Our format is the exact opposite- the most common word used to describe how people feel is “uncomfortable.” We get in there- deep into the biases and beliefs that make you think your truth is more important than other people’s truths. So, I’m rethinking, recalibrating, and reapproaching the business with a DEI-focused approach in mind.

If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?

This started as a passion project so I’m not sure how this would happen, but it would be great to have started this with people with different skillsets who shared the same passion. Starting a business alone is … lonely, and I love the back and forth that partnerships and teams provide.

I would have tried to secure investment earlier. My MO is to create, share and then ask, but as I get advice from others, primarily men, to be honest, they tell me to ask, then create then share. I’m still noodling on this, but it’s something I would consider doing differently.

The racism experience was most scary for me. Although I’m a minority and understand some of the Black experience through my experiences and conversations with Black friends, I was so scared to not get it right and offend someone. For example, in casting some of the female Black actors, I had to ask myself how “black” I wanted the voice to sound. Just thinking about that made me feel awful and seeing my own bias was jarring and very uncomfortable. , However, this is the experience that was most important for me to create, both for myself and those who joined, because it’s the conversation we all were afraid to have but needed to have. As for what I would do differently, I moved our focus over to love at the end of the year (With multi-racial love as one angle), but I wish I had stayed more in that scary space and explored what else I could do. I’m doing that now.

What’s a productivity tip you swear by?

Decide one thing I want to accomplish each day and then put a 90-minute burst on my calendar to get that done.  I only do this 3 days a week, giving myself another 2 days to do absolutely nothing I “have” to do and only things that are “fun” to do (my cheat days!) so that I have the energy, drive, and ambition for the bursts when I need them.

If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?

My singular goal would be to use the $1000 to get $5000 (at least.) So the first question is what is the easiest way to get $5000. In my case, it takes a lot of effort to sell 500 $10 tickets, and maybe the same effort to use the connections I have from running an agency to secure one $5000 grant, sponsorship, or project. So in hindsight, I would have/should have focused there versus the public show. The caveat is that this has never been done, and I feel better about asking for money once I know that what I’ve created is worthy of the investment. So some of the $1000 would be used in validating the concept (let’s say $300) and the rest would be used to secure more investment.

What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?

When I know why I’m doing something, focus comes more easily to me. These days, it feels like we are so divided. Look around – people can’t have conversations with people who voted differently, have different views on COVID and safety, and are isolating and contemplating suicide more than ever.  Things have to shift. Feeling like I’m helping people have more respect, awareness of other people’s points of view and understanding is enough to make me focus on the tasks I need to get done to achieve that goal of raising levels of empathy.

What is your favorite quote?

Most people don’t really want the truth. They just want constant reassurance that what they believe is the truth.

– Raghav

My mission as a researcher turned entrepreneur turned creative is to help people see how their truth blinds them from the truth, and how other people’s truths are just as valid and worthy of respect as our truths. We draw so many lines between us and them, and this division will only continue to hurt us.

How can readers get in touch with you?

You can reach me by vising my website grayzones.org and motivatedesign.com or email me mona@grayzones.org also on social media via Instagram.

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