Three questions to Tatum

Before we dive in Tatum, tell us a little bit about yourself!

I'm from Montreal and Princes Town, Trinidad - not in equal measure, and yet it makes complete sense. The body carries both, and I've stopped trying to resolve the ratio. I speak three languages, move between two cultures daily, and somewhere in that permanent in-between I discovered that my superpower isn't in choosing - it's in connecting. Alchemising. Bridging.

By day I'm a Quality Analyst at a global financial institution. By ongoing compulsion, I'm a doctoral researcher building a companion book to my thesis - translating dense concepts from systems architecture, organizational friction, communication and the geometry of how we disagree into language people can actually use in their lives and their work.

Early bird. Reluctantly, joyfully, completely.

What fills my cup right now is presence. A radical self-rediscovery that has deliberately shed the labels and the markers. I'm exploring life as a ritual of self-realization - and finding that the most generative thing I can do is show up fully to what is actually happening, in this body, in this moment.

What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently?

I used to believe that courage was the single clean act. The one moment you chose the earned room over the inherited one - and everything shifted.

I no longer believe that.

What I've come to understand - through my research, and through living it - is that transformation is an accumulation. It's the small sovereign acts performed in the presence of active resistance. The email you send anyway while the wave of self-doubt is still running. The sentence you let land without softening it, even when every groove in your nervous system is pulling you toward the apology.

The groove doesn't release you heroically. It releases you incrementally - act by act, email by email, one dropped qualifier at a time. That's not a lesser kind of courage. That's what practice actually looks like..

Who is someone you admire, and why?

Frida Kahlo; she painted her own suffering into sacred art and called it self-portraiture. She didn't aestheticize her pain from a safe distance. She went to the center of it, picked up the brush, and said: this is also beautiful. This is also worthy of the canvas. That is the most honest creative act I know.

And Toni Morrison; because she insisted that the interior lives of Black women were not peripheral to literature. They were the center of it. She wrote about inheritance - what travels through generations, what wounds get passed forward, what it costs to carry language that was never built to hold you. That is also my work. She did it first, and she did it without apology, and she did it in the most precise and devastating English ever written.

Both of them taught me the same thing: go boldly to the center of everything. Bring all of you there. Leave all of you there.

An idea that deserves more attention?

That the words we use to shrink ourselves are not bad habits - they are inherited survival scripts.

When someone prefaces their idea with "this is probably wrong but" or drops a "just" into every email, we treat it as a confidence problem. A communication skills gap. Something to be coached out of them.

But those words have a lineage. They were passed down - through families, through institutions, through generations of people who learned, very accurately, that taking up full space had consequences. The word isn't the problem. The word is a receipt. An inheritance receipt showing exactly what was paid and by whom.

When we start treating language as archaeology instead of failure - when we ask "where did this script come from" instead of "what's wrong with you" - everything about how we design organizations, families, and learning environments changes.

That's the idea. It deserves more than a workshop. It deserves a complete redesign of how we listen.

What's something exciting you're working on?

The Empathy Lab is my podcast and the living laboratory for all of this. Each episode is a field report - part research translation, part real-time practice, part transmission. We've been mapping the Blocker arc this season: the linguistic patterns, the inherited scripts, the rooms we keep living in long after we've outgrown them. It's research made listenable.

Alongside the podcast, I publish Field Notes on Substack - the intellectual architecture behind the episodes, rendered in plain language - and the Inefficiency Tax series on LinkedIn, which translates the same frameworks for organizational and corporate contexts.

Underneath all of it is my doctoral thesis - working title: The Geometry of Disagreement - and a companion book I'm building for the reader who will never open an academic paper but deserves access to everything inside one.