What Bias in You is Being Revealed?
What a year it has been! So much opportunity to examine our lives, beliefs and where we are unconscious with how we live. With the death of George Floyd amidst the pandemic, we are seriously being asked to take some time to educate ourselves, listen to ourselves, our brothers and sisters, and use our time to look at how we can move our thinking and our actions from the mindset of “Me” to “We.”
The death of George Floyd has me examining where I don’t take time or action to educate myself about the black community that is part of our humanity. I have been fortunate to be on several diversity and inclusion webinars this month learning from black leaders about the impact of our actions as white people. I am hopeful in that the area I work in (coaching leaders in corporate America), we are seeing the trend toward inclusive leadership. Companies in Germany are already putting metrics around hiring for diversity and implemeting inclusion on boards and executive leadership teams. If they don’t meet the metric, they don’t sustain their position. Real accountability is what is important for all of us right now.
What are you becoming aware of in your world and within yourself that has been biased? As one black leader said when conducting a webinar on this topic, “Where have you not been accountable to supporting we and just been looking out for me?” We all are biased, even if we think we are not. Where are you putting the magnifying glass to uncover your own bias? We can’t make real change until we have the awareness of our own blind spots. This has been the theme of the year; even the pandemic is causing us to think about how we want to live and be in our lives. The race relations in our world are having us go a step deeper in healing this divide in ourselves so we can heal it one by one in our world.
I am learning from a variety of resources, and one of the most powerful has been the podcast focused on trauma from Resmaa Menakem, New York bestseller and body-based therapist. Resmaa spoke about how racism starts in our nervous system. There is so much rich opportunity right now to learn, heal and grow parts of ourselves that may have been asleep, lazy, or just in pain up until now. Now is the opportunity to heal ourselves and, as a result, help support the healing of our planet earth so we can shift our consciousness to one focused on humanity as a whole.
I hope this finds you allowing yourself to sit with your anger, pain and any emotion you may be feeling, while listening to your body and what it is trying to tell you. Follow its direction, even if it is painful and know that it is only in moving through the pain and having uncomfortable conversations that we free ourselves from it. This is the time to lean into and allow what is uncomfortable to guide you. Most of all, remember that you matter: your actions, words and ways of being matter to the whole.