Cynthia Pong, JD, is an award-winning executive coach, speaker, and Forbes Contributor on Leadership Strategies who equips women of color leaders to advance into positions of influence across Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, and global organizations.
It is difficult to capture Cynthia Pong's career through a single direction. There is the public defender who spent years inside the Bronx courthouse system, and there is the founder and entrepreneur of Embrace Change, who tells women of color to stop trying to fix the system from within.
On the surface, these seem like two different women: one working inside institutions, the other building outside them. Yet both chapters are, at their core, telling two parts of the same story, that systems built on extracting labor and loyalty without proportional return will eventually require a person to either become complicit in their own erasure or leave.
The difference between the two chapters of Pong's career lies in her response and in what she was willing to risk to act on it.
Pong did not arrive at this conclusion abstractly. She arrived at it standing outside a courtroom, explaining to a new client's family that the more serious charges had been dismissed but the lesser ones would take roughly three years to resolve, watching them react with the alarm any reasonable person would have, and hearing her own voice respond with a flippant, can-we-move-this-along normalcy that did not belong to the person she had set out to be.
The moment was audible evidence of a burnout that had been accumulating for years. "I realized my burnout had gone to that point where I really just had become an apologist for the system that I was trying to dismantle," she says of that moment, "and I was like, I gotta do something, because I didn't come here to do this."
After years as a public defender, Pong took an unpaid sabbatical and, within months, launched Embrace Change—an M/WBE-certified coaching and training firm now credited with generating over $2.5M in career and economic impact. As Founder and CEO, she's built an award-winning practice equipping women of color to advance into leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, and global organizations, all while writing Don't Stay in Your Lane and building a platform as a Forbes Contributor and LinkedIn Top Voice.
What Pong is building now is a recalibration of an advocacy directive. Her older answer, the one she says she would have given years ago, was about the workplace: negotiate harder, ask the right questions, learn how much you're underpaid. Her current answer pulls the frame back further, no longer supporting advocacy confined to a single employer.
"Actually, I think the best thing that women of color can do to advocate for themselves is to build multiple revenue streams," she says. "It is absolutely an incredibly risky strategy to have one job and to have that be the main source of how you support yourself financially and economically."
Black women earn roughly sixty-four cents for every dollar paid to white men; Latina women earn about sixty-five. An estimated three hundred thousand Black women were laid off within the past year alone, a figure Pong suspects is itself undercounted. And the lifestyle most Americans imagine as a baseline, the house, the car, the two kids, has become a squeeze to sustain, which Pong argues tightens for women of color once every invisible tax, the underpayment, the overperformance, the unpaid emotional labor, is accounted for.
Against numbers like these, advocating for a raise is not wrong; it's just insufficient. Her advice, instead, is structural: build multiple revenue streams now, before the layoff arrives, because a single paycheck has become an especially fragile financial architecture.
Pong's account of burnout follows the same logic of early recognition that defines her financial advice, routed through the body instead of the bank account. She describes her own burnout manifesting physically, a sensation of having been struck in a place that had never been touched, before later instances of stress announced themselves.
"It's noticing those early warning systems of like, okay, something is different, something is a bit off," she explains. The lesson she draws from this is a discipline of pattern recognition, the same hyper-attunement to a room's dynamics that she argues people of color develop out of necessity from childhood, redirected inward rather than outward.
To the students and early-career professionals entering a labor market reshaped and, in places, replaced by AI, Pong's counsel resists the urgency of the moment instead of matching it. "What the times really call for is... a people-first job search," she says, arguing that relationships, not applications, are what survive economic disruption.
"There will be some decision makers where they're like, this is something where I need an actual person... so you want to know as many people as possible." Her closing advice carries the plainness of someone who has tested it twice, once leaving a courtroom and once building a company, and found it durable both times: "Just plant as many seeds as you possibly can."