Welcome back to the first episode of 2021! In this episode, Bill reflects on life in 2020, effects of the pandemic, and a lot more including an interactive segment at the end of the podcast! Enjoy this episode and don’t forget to subscribe and share the podcast with your friends!
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The origination Point
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Origination Point Podcast
It’s been a while since I put anything out there because, like so many of you, I’ve been working to get through the craziness of 2020 and trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing, how I’m supposed to be doing it, whom I’m supposed to be doing it with. I was going through so many emotional roller coasters, I can’t even tell you, from being sad to being excited, to being angry, to being frustrated to being lonely.
I didn’t want to put stuff out in that frame of mind because I didn’t want to share a perspective from a deficit place. When I see the things that I went through, sometimes the way that I thought about them was deficit-based. I didn’t want to put stuff out there to come off as a victim or as somebody who’s being inordinately affected by what we’ve all experienced in 2020 because we’ve all been impacted in more intense ways than we’ve been aware of. For me, that’s true. The awareness and the things that I’m seeing come to fruition are both scary and encouraging.
I’m going to talk about a lot of different things during this episode that you’re reading. What I want to start with is letting you know why I do this because it’s important. I read Simon Sinek’s book, Find Your Why, and he says people don’t follow how or what they follow why. For me, the reason why I do these episodes, why I talk to hundreds of people a week, and why I don’t say no when people want to talk about personal growth or the systemic structures we operate in race, class, or bias is because I want to create a more humane world.
That why has been driving me for many years. It’s important for you to know what my motivation is in sharing my work. It’s not to label, judge, demean, or denigrate, which also are all deficit-based words. It’s meant to lift, empower, inspire, and encourage. I hope you take it that way. If you don’t, if you read something that I say, or if you don’t agree with something that I say, take a minute and think about it. Don’t judge me based on your lack of understanding or lack of agreement with my perspective because that’s not what this is about.
Understanding Multiple Perspectives
This is about understanding that in our country and in our communities, there are multiple perspectives. We are essentially cutting off each other’s perspectives through the lens of the stereotypes, the judgments, the biases, and all of the labels that we’re putting on each other rather than seeing the humanity that we have and how we work together to continue to move forward from where we are.
Where we are is pretty crazy. We have a pandemic that, depending on your perspective, you either believe it’s real or you believe it’s all made up. Yet millions of people are dying around the world because of it. This pandemic disrupted everyone’s normalcy. By that, I mean it disrupted all of our routines, the little things that we do day to day. I’m starting to see how much I depended on those, how much I relied on some regularity in my day.
I’ve also realized that some of the relationships that I have, I probably didn’t take as good care of. Now I’ve had to see what life is like without them, having to stay in my own little bubble and not feeling like I can go out without a mask or in crowds of people. That’s my personal choice. We’ve even created this identity around people who wear a mask that if you wear a mask, you’re this and if you don’t wear a mask, you’re that.
There’s so much of that going on. That’s one element of what we’re all facing. We look at things like the educational system and how kids across this country are now having to do things that most adults couldn’t do, which is sitting in front of a computer for 2 or 3 hours at a time, attempting to learn with varying levels of support at home and with the internet. Nobody knows how we’re going to fix the educational system. Nobody knows how we’re going to get through this pandemic. There are a lot of experiments going on and there are a lot of people testing out a lot of things and yet we still haven’t found the answer.
The racial unrest that we have is not new or not surprising. That’s been brewing in our country for hundreds of years. What we’re seeing with that again is another repercussion of labeling each other based on race. Not only do we label each other, but we have also created these stereotypes about each other based on skin color and we can all say, “Race is a very small percentage of who we are or the science says it’s less than 1% of our total genealogy.”
Don’t quote me on that because I’m not a scientist. I know it’s a very small amount, though. Yet, from a socialized perspective, we put everything on race. That’s the first thing that we see. We see a White person and we think are they supremacists or are they not? Do they like people of color or do they not? Are they rich or are they poor? Are they in power, or are they not in power?
We see a Brown person and we might wonder if they’re one of the bad ones or one of the good ones. With Black people, we’re socialized to fear. In some ways, we’re being socialized to be afraid of each other every single day. As we see the civil unrest now that we are experiencing, I have to say that it’s not going to play itself out in the short term. This is another adaptation that all of us are going to have to decide how we are going to move through this.
Personal Reflections: People are being socialized to be afraid of each other every single day, as evident in the civil unrest currently happening in society.
When you look at education, when you look at our healthcare system, it’s fully strained and every inequity that’s always been there is now fully known and then we look at our political system, what we are seeing, in reality, is not so much the unraveling of these systems. We’re seeing the transformation of these systems. All of these systems were designed to benefit a small group of people. It was those mostly White men back in the 1700s and 1800s when they were designing systems.
Maybe in their mind, they said, “This is what this country’s going to look like, so let’s create and design these systems for people who look like us.” The most challenging piece that was connected to that was this narrative or this stereotype that anyone who doesn’t reflect us is inferior. That was based on race and gender. Pretty much if you weren’t a White man, the narrative is and was that you’re inferior. All of these things were set in motion hundreds of years ago.
Increasing Self-Awareness And Humanization
Now we’re at a point in our evolution where we have to work through these things by talking, by fighting, by whatever it is that needs to happen over the next few years for us to move through this. The destruction of people and property to me is not the approach that I want to take. I believe more of an approach that gets people talking, gets us thinking, increases our self-awareness, and starts to humanize who we are. I see all kinds of leaders demonizing and denigrating people and making excuses for people’s behavior.
I don’t see a whole lot of leaders that are speaking to the question of what is my role in this. How am I complicit in this system that is going through this huge transformation right before all of our eyes? We can choose to be complacent and watch it, or we can choose to blame other people and say, “It’s their fault.” My choice is I’m going to self-examine my role in this system critically.
Understand that if I’m going to go through this and learn something, then I have to look at it what it means for my own personal growth, for my own transit thoughts or my own narratives for my own ways that I see people through my lenses of stereotypes, biases, and judgments. I guarantee you that the way we’re going is not going to get us the results that we want if we want to have a more humane world as I do or if we want to create connections with each other.
As you read some of these things, when you get emotionally charged, stop reading and think about what it is in you that’s causing that emotional charge. I’m not doing that to you. All I’m doing is sharing with you a perspective and a lens. All I’m asking you to do is think about it. There are no absolutes in this work and everybody comes into it from a different perspective. I also know that personal work is the beginning of any sustainable change. By that, I mean increasing your self-awareness, being critical and self-reflective, understanding what it means for intent and impact, and making changes based on the impact.
Personal work is the beginning of any sustainable change. Increase your self-awareness, become more critical and self-reflective, and understand what it means for intent and impact. Share on XTo me, intent is aspirational. It’s something future-oriented. When I work with a group, when I go to an event, when I’m speaking, when I’m sharing, and when I’m interacting with my family and my friends, I have an intention. Typically, that intention is for things to go well for me to not say something that’s demeaning to another person, and for me to be respectful, caring, and compassionate because those are things that I value in my life. To be open, to hear someone else’s point of view, to take it in even if I fundamentally don’t agree with their perspective, and doing my best to do that all the time, which is hard.
When I’m talking about personal growth and being aware of what’s happening in intention, it’s understanding that all of that is aspirational because none of it has happened yet. When we get to impact, that’s factual. The impact is what actually happened in this interaction, conversation, and gathering. What was my role?
What we saw in our Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was thousands of people. What I know about those thousands of people is everyone had an intention of being there. I will probably never talk to most of them, so I will never know exactly what their intention is. All I can do is cover the spectrum of things that I think might be true. There were some people going there who thought they were supporting someone who they believed in and an approach that they believed in. At the same time, they were feeling like what happened wronged him. They wanted to go there to show in bodily form their belief in that perspective.
On the other extreme, there were some people who went there to do damage and you could see it by people carrying zip ties, carrying shields, and things to hit each other with. You have a whole group of people in the middle who have as many people as there are reasons why they were there. What we do is then we put this label of White supremacists on every one of them and we treat them all like we believe that to be true.
That’s the challenge of our humanity now. We have to stop seeing each other as labels and start to see each other as people and have conversations about what’s actually happening. There’s a group of people that want to be engaged in a more physical approach to change. They will do that no matter how I ask them not to, at least at the beginning, because there’s a lot of energy there. It’s a lot of pent-up energy. When people feel wronged, this is what happens.
Undergoing Personal Growth
How do we look at our own personal growth and become self-aware to look at our complicity in this same system that we now see is in a huge transformation? That’s what I believe is happening and where I’m going to put my energy. Thinking about it from that perspective, none of these things happened overnight. We didn’t get into these racial issues in the last 4, 8, or 12 years or even our pandemic and these systems coming to a head. Everything happened for a reason right now. It’s these systems that we operate in which aren’t designed for the diversity of people who are now here.
When we look at systems, as a human being, I am a system. The places that I operate in are all rooted in some level of systemic structure. When we talk about wanting to disrupt systemic racism or bias, these are some of the things that are happening as a result of that desire because we can’t look at them in a vacuum. We can’t look at them from an intellectual perspective. This work is about understanding the experience of another human being and how they’re marginalized.
Personal Reflections: If we want to disrupt systemic racism and bias, we cannot look at them in a vacuum or from an intellectual perspective. This is about understanding other people’s experiences and how they are marginalized.
Right now, there are a lot of groups in America being marginalized based on every identifying factor you could think of. Race, age, gender, religion, political ideology, or profession. We are good at labeling and dividing each other. The only way that’s going to change is not from a political perspective. I spent six years as a politician on a school board in Colorado and worked at the state level at the legislative session. I saw good bills that would have benefited a lot of children go down because the person who brought it was a Republican and all the Democrats vote voted against it or the person who brought it was a Democrat and all the Republicans voted against it.
This division that we’ve had is built into the system. It’s not new. It’s come to the point where it can’t continue in this way because it’s hurting the same people that the system is supposed to represent. Representative government is a great idea, only it’s changed in 400 years. When the representative government started back in the day, the 1700s or 1800s, it was hard to get your stagecoach or your horse or walk to the capitol where the seat of business was being done as the country was growing to have your voice heard. We elected representatives and the idea is that they would go and represent our point of view.
America was much smaller then and the lenses that people brought were a little narrower because most of the people of color were not engaged in it. They were slaves, they were told to assimilate, or they were killed, or something else happened where they were marginalized. This marginalization is still completely inherent in what we’re seeing now. Only now can we justify it. You see people arguing, “That was taken out of context,” and the reason why this happened was because of the internet or because of this or that. It’s making excuses and you can’t make an excuse for the impact.
The impact of what we saw on January 6th was pretty horrific. For those people who that was not their intention, they still have to own the impact of their overall behavior. Even though I stood in the back and all I wanted to do was honor somebody, I was part of a group that did harm to others in the same name of that person.
Instead of focusing on the person, let’s talk about the harm and impact. What’s going on here? What is the real conversation that we need to be having? It’s not about a president that’s about to leave and it’s certainly not going to be about a president who is coming in. The reason that I say that is one of the things that I learned about the political structure is it’s not designed to solve our community issues.
It’s set up to hold people in power, mostly White men, and to use that power in ways that they believe are representative when mostly a number of politicians are representing their role in a way that feeds their ideology and not mine. What needs to happen in the political system is we have to talk about what representative government looks like in a diverse democracy.
As we start to think about these things, there are some deeper-level conversations. The race conversation isn’t about who’s more marginalized based on skin color. That’s pretty obvious. It’s Black people. The bigger question is how do we deconstruct all of these socialized stereotypes that we have about each other to see the humanity that we all bring?
The race conversation isn't about whose more marginalized based on skin color. It’s about deconstructing socialized stereotypes about each other to see the humanity we all bring. Share on XI have worked in this profession of talking to people about the emotional and behavioral impacts of biases, stereotypes, and judgments in our interactions for many years. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to thousands of people across the country. What I have found is there is a very silent majority of folks out there and you might be one of them reading this who don’t believe in what’s happening, who aren’t approaching it from a political perspective, and who also aren’t speaking up.
Somebody said in a workshop that we had that people don’t talk because they’re afraid of saying something stupid or afraid of making a mistake. In my conversations with many people in the last couple of years, the majority of them understand that something that they say may be offensive to somebody else. That’s not the biggest fear. The biggest fear is how we treat that person once they say it. We label them, we call them whatever, a racist, a sexist, a homophobic, or anti-Semitic. We fully treat them that way and then we denigrate and demean them for saying it. “You didn’t say it right. You used the wrong word.”
Essentially, we beat them up verbally, and then, they disengage. We don’t even see that we were part of that disengagement. Had I not treated you in a way that was demeaning and denigrating, we might have been able to have a conversation. Had I been able to say something else? A lot of times, what I hear is somebody does something based on race and regardless of whether anybody knows that person right away, they label them as a racist immediately.
It kicks in this whole marketing campaign in our heads that says, “Racists are this, racists do that, and racists act like that.” This person may be unconscious, have a blind spot, and not even be aware of what they were doing and the impact that it had, which doesn’t take away from the impact. What I’m saying, though is that we can’t keep beating each other up for being normal because nobody’s perfect. I make mistakes and I say things incorrectly from somebody else’s perspective. I would rather have a conversation because labeling you with any of the isms is going to put you on the defensive and it’s going to make me justify, “Yes, you are. No, you’re not.” That’s a lose-lose conversation.
Asking The Right Questions
Another approach is to think about, “What’s a question I can ask here?” There’s a question in everything that goes on, especially now in our country and in our communities, because we are in this adaptive time where nobody has the answer. There’s a guy named Ron Heifetz who talks about adaptive leadership. The idea of adaptive leadership is that we don’t have the answers for the things that are going on.
No one person holds the answer to how we’re going to get through this pandemic. No one person holds the answer for how we’re going to transform a political, healthcare, justice, or economic system that is having disparaging impacts on certain people based on race, stereotypes, biases, and judgment. All of these systems are now to the point of saying we need to be looked at. We can either choose to do that or we can choose to not do it. I don’t think there’s a gray area.
I can’t make excuses about what I see political leaders do on all levels of the political spectrum and in all parties. I can’t deny that education has not been meeting the needs of a certain group of kids for many years. Nor can I deny that when I was an administrator in an educational system, there were days when I perpetuated systemic racism because I had to carry out policies and practices that I knew were going to impact largely our students of color. I didn’t have the power to change it.
Understanding that and not calling myself a bad person allows me to be able to think about how I want to interject this narrative or this mindset that I have now and support people in all of these systems to have the conversations that are so necessary. I’ve shared a lot with you. I’d love for people to take it in and think about what you’re saying. We’re going to put some beats on.
For those of you who don’t know beats, it’s a rhythm of music that’s going to be put on by a friend of mine, who I’ll tell you about later. As these things play, think about what you heard, what you’re feeling, what you’re angry about, what you don’t agree with, and what you agree with. If I were sitting right there in front of you, what would be the conversation you would like to have?
I’m not sharing this with the world for agreement. I’m sharing this so that we can start to remind ourselves and practice having conversations with each other and getting to know each other because that’s been exacerbated through the pandemic. We’ve been seeing each other through screens and there are ways to develop deep relationships through Zoom. You just have to facilitate things a little bit differently.
It’s still a challenge because we’re used to being in the presence of each other, of feeling emotion, of seeing emotion, of hearing all the things that we now see over a screen that in your mind might be talking about it from a perspective that you can’t connect with that person. Take a couple of minutes to think about what’s up for you right now and then we’re going to talk about narratives.
I hope that you took those couple of minutes and thought through what you are feeling, thinking, agreeing with, disagreeing with, want to know more about, or don’t care about after reading this up to that point. If you got to the last question about if I were sitting there, what would be a question or a conversation you want to have with me, I would encourage you to take that and find somebody that you’re close to and you care about and have that conversation with them.
Ask a question. Tell a story. Talk about what you’re feeling. Understanding impact means that we have to increase self-awareness and critical self-reflection. When I was looking at the impact of my behavior when I was young and I didn’t have the skills and the understandings that I have now, I looked at it through the lens of what’s wrong with everybody else. Obviously, the way I think and the way I do things are the correct way.
Now what I’ve learned over the course of my life is that my way is one perspective and my approach is my approach. If in some way, my approach hurts another person, I want to understand that. I don’t want to play the victim anymore by blaming other people. I don’t want to have so many blind spots that I don’t see the real impact of my behavior on others.
Personal Reflections: If your approach hurts another person, do not play the victim or blame others. Do no indulge in so many blind spots that could hinder you from seeing the real impact of your behavior.
Thinking About Narratives
When we go back to the intent, it’s the story that we tell ourselves or the narrative. The narrative is an important part of this process, way more important than I ever thought until I started jumping into my work. We all tell stories all day long either inside or head or outside to other people. Some of us may talk to ourselves telling stories while we’re in the shower, riding in the car, or sitting at home.
These narratives drive our behavior. It’s not my behavior that creates the way that I think. It’s the way that I think that creates the behaviors that I have. I’ve learned that both through my own experience, and in my own personal growth journey, which is going to keep going until I die. I will never be perfect at being human. For me, this work is about practice. It’s not about perfection.
Narratives are an important part of what drives us. Narratives, again, are those thoughts that you think every day consciously or unconsciously about things, people, processes, systems, or outcomes. They’re everything that encompasses what goes on in our brain every single day, which is a lot. The number of things that are conscious is small. Part of my desire to do this work is if I’m only going to be conscious of a small percentage of the things that I experience in a day, I want to know what they are. I don’t want to miss any of them, whether they’re 10, 20, 30, or 40. I want to be aware of them and be conscious and present.
Here’s how narratives play out. When I grew up, my dad was hurt, and hurt people hurt people. He had his own stories of pain and trauma that I never got to hear because we didn’t have a great relationship. He started to take his anger out on me when I was very young, 8 or 9 years old, both physically and verbally. The message that he gave me verbatim is, “You’ll never be successful and you’ll never amount to anything.”
The stories that I made up about those narratives in my life were that I was a loser. I didn’t deserve care. I’m not any good. I won’t have good relationships. I did not create the narrative. I was given that. The behaviors that I created from that narrative are mine. While I don’t have to own the narrative, I have to own the outcome of the narrative.
When other people create narratives for you, it doesn’t mean you have to own them. You can discard them and own the outcomes instead. Share on XWhen I grew up not feeling like I should be cared for, that I’m a loser, I’ll never amount to anything, or I’m a bad person, then I created behaviors to show that that was true. In some ways, I modeled the behavior I saw with my dad. I would take those same command and control type of behaviors out into my relationships, all the while with this narrative that I’d never be successful. I’d never remount to anything.
When I was young, I was completely unconscious of this. I had no idea it’s what you call implicit. There was no understanding of any of that happening nor the impact that it had on my family. I was that unconscious and unaware. As I grew up and I started to see how this narrative was impacting me, it wasn’t very fun.
I was 17 or 18 years old when I had to start looking at myself and realize that the one thing I did know is I didn’t have very many friends and very few people trusted me. When that is happening to you over and over again, at a certain point, I have to look at and say, “What is it about me?” A hundred people can’t be wrong. Forty, maybe.
After I saw it hundreds of times, I had to start to look at my own behavior. I had to start looking at these narratives. The narrative about not being successful was a hard one because, up to that point, I didn’t think I had been successful. I didn’t do great in school. I didn’t care about working. I wasn’t heading off to college. I was in trouble, essentially. I had to shift that narrative.
The narrative of you’ll never be successful, you’ll never amount to anything, I had to shift to, “You can do anything you set your mind to.” When I was eighteen years old, I didn’t believe that at all because for the last several years, my narrative had been, “You’ll never be successful and you’ll never amount to anything.” That drove all my behaviors.
As I shifted this narrative to, “You can accomplish any tasks that you want,” I didn’t know at the time what I do know now, though. I didn’t want to use the word success because that’s a subjective word that’s open to interpretation. Any of you reading will have a different idea about what success looks like for you. I didn’t do this at the time I started this, but now I’m choosing not to use that even in my work now. I can accomplish anything I want. I can make a difference because success is based on factors that may or may not be in my control. I don’t want to have that driving everything that I do.
At first, I didn’t believe it. It’s that whole thing, fake it until you make it. I was faking it. I didn’t believe I was successful. Even when I was successful at accomplishing something, I’d walk away and at some point, in the next 24 hours, that little voice would come in, “You’ll never be successful. You’ll never amount to anything.” Every time it came in, I pushed it out. I became more and more aware of how frequently I saw myself as a loser and someone who would never accomplish anything.
As I started to grow, I started to see how the things that happened, almost being kicked out of school during high school, were a reflection of that. The relational issues that I had connected to my sister dying suddenly all connected to that. The problems that I had with the police before I turned eighteen were all a part of that whole narrative of, “You’ll never be successful. You’ll never amount to anything.”
As I started to shift this narrative, I started to believe in it a little bit more after a number of years. I’ll be honest, this stuff doesn’t change overnight. I noticed that I wanted to change my behaviors. My behavior slowly started to change. I did more work on bringing up the feeling emotions of empathy, compassion, love, and caring and started to use them more and more. Eventually, I don’t even have to say the narrative that I can accomplish anything because I know that I can as long as I put my mind to it.
I’m pretty tenacious with things and I don’t give up easily. I am driven to my why, which is to make a more humane world. If you want to change your behavior, think about the narratives that drive the behavior. Think about the things you think about yourself, about other people, the stereotypes you have, the way that you judge them, and the way that you categorize them.
Personal Reflections: If you want to change your behavior, consider narratives that drive them. Think about the stereotypes you have and how you judge or categorize other people.
It’s not to say that we’ll ever stop doing that because that’s a normal part of our humanity as we take shortcuts. We put people into these boxes. If the box I put you in, if through getting to know you, I realize that it doesn’t fit you, then I need to take you out of it. It’s my box. I need to realize that, “You don’t behave this way. Even though you’re this ethnicity or race or gender or socioeconomic, you don’t act like that.”
It’s up to me to take you out of the box that I created for you to get to know you for who you are. Regardless of what we call this work, when we are creating the structure to be self-aware and self-critical about our biases, judgments, and stereotypes, the question that we’re solving for is, “Do my biases and stereotypes inhibit or enhance my ability to be an authentic relationship with you?”
An authentic relationship means getting to know you for who you are and not the story that I’m making up about you through my lens of stereotype, bias, and judgment. We’re going to have two completely different actions based on how I show up in that conversation. When I was young, I didn’t see people as authentic. I put everybody in a box. Depending on the box you got put in, in my world, that’s how you would be treated.
The Capacity To Change
The other piece that I want to talk a little bit about is the capacity and the ability to change. Every human being has the ability to shift narratives and behaviors if you feel like they’re not serving you. I didn’t even know that was possible when I was younger. I had to ask myself this question many times and I ask it to all the groups that I work with, “What is it that we’re holding onto that no longer serves us?”
I had to ask myself, “What is it that I’m holding onto that no longer serves me?” That’s a great question if you want to dive deeper into your own shifts in narratives and behavior. What are you holding onto that no longer serves you? Our ability to change is also a way that we’re all similar. We all go through similar brain aspects. Research shows that we have similar ideologies around fight or flight and getting into our prefrontal cortex and how we use the cognitive part of our brain to be able to make changes.
You can go to workshops and read books and then, once you go to all those, you have to be able to take the steps. One of the reasons why I do this work is because I realized that when I started out on this path of change, I would go to the workshops and I would read books. The biggest thing I would see was doing the work. It sounds so easy. If you want to change, do the work.
I finally got to the point where I was like, “I would love to do the work. Can you give me a few tips on what they are? What are the steps that I should take?” Only through many years of my own personal change process have I realized that as human beings, there is a similar step that will support all of us if we make the choice to want to do something different or to let go of something that’s not serving us.
If you want to get started on this path or go deeper on this path, the key is self-awareness, critical self-reflection, being honest about intent and impact, and then realizing that when the impact doesn’t match the intent, then something has to change. When I was younger and the impact didn’t match the intent, my question was, “What’s wrong with you?” Now that I’ve gotten a little older, when my impact doesn’t match my intent, my question is, “What is it about me that’s experiencing you like this?”
If we want to get through this tumultuous time that we’re in, we have to stop seeing each other as the other and realize that we have to create a sense of belonging, which has its own challenge because this country was created from a very individualistic perspective. To work together, we have to be more communal. We have to think about each other. We have to understand that my behavior has a ripple effect on numerous people.
Personal Reflections: For everyone to work together, we have to be more communal. Understand that your behavior has a ripple effect on numerous people.
What I see in America nowadays is that we have divisiveness, people calling each other names, yelling at each other, and killing each other all in the sake and in the name of their approach that says, “This is the right way. This is what I’m doing for you.” It’s another form of broken representative democracy. It’s a group of people who are saying, “Let me speak for everyone.” We typically don’t even speak for our group. I don’t speak for a group. I speak for myself. As we go through this time together, I’m going to implore you and encourage you to think about what is it that you’re not saying.
What is it that you could bring into this conversation that would create a way for people to have their voices heard? Part of what we’re seeing in this whole systemic upheaval is what happens when people are silenced for any reason. They’re marginalized or they don’t have a spokesperson because somebody else said that they’re less than others. Pick whatever reason. Until we find value with each other, it’s going to be challenging to create communities that are collaborative and truly do work together as people.
Until we find value with each other, it will be challenging to create collaborative communities where everyone actually works together. Share on XI’m going to close here and as I close, I’m going to ask you to think, “If you wanted to have a conversation with somebody about any of the things I’m sharing with you, what would it be?” I’ll add this too. I don’t do this for agreement. Even if you don’t agree with something, there’s still a conversation there that we could have. It can’t be pushed from this idea of, “I don’t agree with you because it doesn’t match what I believe.”
What I’m interested in knowing is what you believe that leads you to then this behavior of I don’t agree or I do agree because that’s not what it’s about. It’s about acceptance. We don’t have to agree on everything. We do have to find some way to accept that what’s happening here is rooted in some deep conversations that I haven’t even touched on yet.
Later, we could talk about the impact of being White in America as the culture shifts to this Browning of America, as people are calling it, which has been going on for years and years. What happens when we have to share power? That’s going to be a future episode talking about power and privilege overall, and how that plays out.
I want to thank you for reading and engaging. To me, awareness without action is a waste of time. The step that’s most critical in this once you become self-aware is to take any action. Take a step. Do something different than what you did yesterday or ten minutes ago around this same topic. If you’re interested in being a part of this show, you can connect with me through our website DeLaCruzSolutions.com.
My goal overall on this is to bring more voices in, to hear what people are doing, and to get perspectives that we can all start to listen to. I want to thank you. This show is my passion, my why, and I’ll leave where I started. We’re talking about Simon Sinek’s book that people don’t follow how or what. They follow why. My why is to make the world a more humane place. My how is this show. I do development work with people. I do coaching work. I published a book called Finding The Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create A More Peaceful World. Mostly what I do is create a bridge for people to come together, step back and forth, and get to know each other beyond our roles and titles. Thanks again for reading. We’ll see you next time. Keep growing.