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The Origination Point Podcast Ep. #22 Judgement, Stereotypes, & Biases
It’s great to have you back. It’s great to be back. Sometimes it takes me a while in between shows to record something because there’s so much going on in the world. I have to focus my thoughts because I could be all over the board. What I want to do in this session is to share with you a perspective based on my facilitation approach to many people from diverse backgrounds around the topic of belonging and inclusion and also talk a little bit about judgment, stereotypes, and bias.
Bias, Judgement, And Stereotypes
I’m going to start there by talking about bias, judgment, and stereotypes. Bias, judgment, and stereotypes are things that all human beings do unconsciously and consciously. The understanding that I have of my own biases, judgments, and stereotypes is that they are impacting people sometimes in ways that I’m conscious of and sometimes in ways that I am unconscious of.
The idea of understanding them is to be more self-aware and to increase your awareness about how your own biases, judgments, and stereotypes affect the way that you see another human being. The challenge with these approaches is that when I drop into bias, judgment, or stereotype with another human being, cognitively what’s happening in my brain is I’m interacting with them based on a story that I’m making up about them, rooted in one of those three things.
That story is based on an interaction that I had with somebody previously that’s in some way reflected in this conversation. It could be with a demeanor they have, a string of words, or behavior. Sometimes I’m completely unaware that it’s happening, so I don’t always know where I have gone in terms of that judgment, bias, or stereotype. Biases are preferences that are rooted in an experience with either a small or a large group of people that we then extrapolate to the whole group. It’s important to understand that this can happen with interaction with one person or with multiple people.
I grew up in a home where my dad was beating up on me when I was nine years old and telling me I was worthless and I’d never amount to anything and I’d never be successful. Unbeknownst to me, by the time I was thirteen, I had this bias at all men are mean. I took the behavior of one person and extrapolated to it the whole group. As an adolescent, when I interacted with men, I didn’t trust and like them. In my head, the narrative or story that I told myself was that they were out to get me. I would typically destroy the relationship because, in my head, they were going to destroy me.
I would not have very effective interactions with men, and the sad part is it didn’t matter if it was my brother, my uncle, my male teacher, or the guy who lived next door to me. As an adolescent with very little self-awareness and no critical thinking skills. I didn’t even have the ability to discern who was a good man and who was a bad man. In my head, they were all bad. It affected my interactions with men.
The question that we ask in this approach that I’m sharing with you is to do my biases, judgment, and stereotypes inhibit or enhance my ability to be in an authentic relationship. An authentic relationship is defined as getting to know you for who you are versus the story that I’m making up about you. In the story that I shared with you, my bias against men who are mean completely inhibited my ability to be in authentic relationships with men because I already had a preconceived idea about who they are, and I treated them that way.
I can’t tell you as a young boy or young adolescent, how many men were in my life that wanted to help me that I pushed away, didn’t trust, and didn’t give the time of day to. I tell you that story because that’s a story that I have about how I took the behavior of one person and create a bias against a whole group. The other part I will tell you is the origination point from the perspective of deconstructing our biases, judgments, and stereotypes is the place of healing and understanding.
Biases: The origination point from the perspective of deconstructing our biases, judgements, and stereotypes is the place of healing and understanding.
When I started doing this work personally when I was in my 20s and 30s to heal myself from that bias that all men are mean, I had to go back to that nine-year-old boy and feel all of those emotions, thoughts, and all of the things that I squished down and hoped would never surface again. It’s all this unresolved emotional energy.
Until I did that, I couldn’t heal myself. I couldn’t even understand what had happened, why it happened, and how much it affected me so much in my life. As you think about your own biases, think about a time between birth and adolescence when you might have had an experience or a message about a group of people that reflects the bias that you have as an adult.
As adults, when we are becoming more aware of our biases, it’s usually a large group. As I told you, I labeled my biased, men who were mean. As I realized that it wasn’t men, it was a man, I had to go back to that man and look at the behaviors he exhibited that created this bias for me. When I think about it from that perspective, I think about this idea that I lived in fear.
I never knew if the dad who was drinking would come home or the dad who wasn’t drinking would come home, or the dad who had a bad day would come home and then take it out on me. I was constantly in this state of fear, trauma, and unsurety about what to expect when I got home. I realized as I have been doing more of my work that men who were mean are how I saw my bias. That’s how it showed up. I have a bias against parents who don’t create a loving and safe space for their children. The origination point of that bias is growing up in a home where I didn’t feel loved and safe. I didn’t feel like it was a place of nurturing.
That’s an example of the correlation when you move from a group to the behaviors or the language of that group and then look at the connection growing up. For most of the people that I have worked with over the last several years, when they look at their biases through that lens, they usually find a narrative or an example between birth and late high school about their own bias.
Deconstructing Biases
It’s something that they experienced at some point that may have been completely unconscious to them. The work of deconstructing biases is about surfacing them, naming them, and then going to the origination point to see if you can heal yourself and then understand what happened. I understood that my dad was only one person and didn’t represent the whole group. I understand by seeing how my grandpa and his dad interacted with him and my uncles, that he was replicating the behavior that he got growing up. It helped me to understand and enabled me to go to the next step, which is to forgive because if I didn’t forgive, I wouldn’t be able to let go.
Biases: The work of deconstructing biases is about naming them, surfacing them, and then going to the origin point to understand what happened and see if you can heal yourself.
That was a long process. It wasn’t easy to forgive somebody for that level of demeaning and dehumanizing behavior in treatment. I would have never treated my children that way because I knew how hurtful it could be. It’s important to understand that deconstructing biases is not about being an unbiased human being because there’s only one point in time will I will be unbiased, and that’s when I’m not breathing anymore. Between now and then, I will always have biases. I will always judge. I have stereotypes.
The difference between me and as a youngster is that now more self-aware. It’s a daily practice. I understand how biases, judgments, and stereotypes impact my interactions with other people. I’m quicker to recognize them in my brain and let them go to come back and be present. The normalizing of this conversation is an acceptance that this is something that we all do and we are all socialized to stereotypes about each other.
I have had many people in my groups who came in saying I don’t have any biases. I don’t know why I’m here. I had one gentleman who came in late. We had started a biased conversation and he said, “I’m not sure why I’m here because I don’t have any biases.” I said, “There’s a group over there. Go join them and then we will catch you up and let they are doing with the conversation.” He came back twenty minutes later and he said, “I have hundreds of biases.” Once he became aware of that, it enabled him to then start to think about the impacts of those biases.
This work isn’t about thinking about how am I a bad person because I have biases, or how am I a bad person because I have stereotypes and judgments. That’s a normal part of our humanity. Every living, breathing, human being on this planet, judges, stereotypes, and categorizes have biases. That’s how we create shortcuts for each other because we meet somebody new and we put them into all of these little boxes so that they make sense to us. It’s not even to stop doing that. It’s to check to make sure that the boxes that I put you in are who you are versus the story that I’m making up about you. Those are two different approaches to interacting and building a relationship.
Every living, breathing, human being on this planet, judges, stereotypes, categorizes, and has biases. Share on XIt’s an opportunity to think about what’s the impact of my biases, judgments, and stereotypes when I’m interacting with another human being. When we are in those places, it’s everything that we see and even things that we don’t see and things that we might perceive. These are things that we see, race, age, gender, how somebody dress, their body language, their behaviors, and their accent.
Authentic Relationships And Rehumanizing Each Other
Also, things that we don’t see, ideology, religion, and things that are unknown to us that we would only know if we knew that person. This idea of being more authentic is fully connected to my approach these days in everything that I do, which is how we rehumanize ourselves to each other. Think that we have been so divided, especially over the last few years with all of the social issues that are happening that we have almost been socialized to fear each other.
I don’t want to live in fear anymore. I don’t want to not get to know somebody because they are different from me, they have an ideology that’s different from mine, or they look different from me. I have decided that there’s something unique about everybody and everybody has a story. Part of the challenge with this inclusion and belonging approach is that we are not taking the time to listen to each other’s stories, and we need to start getting to know each other.
The challenge of creating inclusion is that we are not taking the time to listen to each other's stories. We need to start getting to know each other. Share on XMy approach is all about relationships and getting people to talk about who they are. It’s amazing to see a room that has so much diversity and 2 to 3 hours into our gathering, they are having such a great time realizing all these connections. I had two gentlemen that I worked with. They’d worked together for nine years and they were sitting right next to each other for our entire workshop.
At about 2:00 in the afternoon, we were going until about 3:34. One of them raised his hand and said, “I’m amazed because I have known this guy sitting next to me for nine years and I didn’t know any of this stuff about him that we talked about.” It was so exciting. You could see the excitement in both of them. This was a group of tradesmen, plumbers, pipefitters, electricians, and tradesmen who go to work and do their trade and they don’t often talk about their stories.
When these two gentlemen though started talking about their stories, they realized that even though they were racially different, age different, and probably ideologically different, they had so many connecting points that it was exciting for them. The idea of authentic relationships and rehumanizing is about getting to know each other for who we are.
Biases: The idea of authentic relationships and rehumanizing is about getting to know each other for who we are.
When I facilitate, I ask a lot more questions because there’s not any one answer for how we are going to get through this time. When people say there is an answer, I’m skeptical because there’s a lot of gray area in this conversation of perspective. When people say this is the truth, I could probably agree that it’s the truth based on your perspective, just as what I’m sharing with you is my perspective and my perspective is biased. I truly believe everything we do is inherently biased.
Even my presentation, my show, and the things that I’m sharing with you are biased because what I’m sharing with you is rooted in my perspective, my ideology, and my results, and that’s what biases are. Even this show is biased. Understanding that, it’s important to critically think about what resonates and what doesn’t resonate with you. What resonates with you, take it, and run with it. What doesn’t resonate with you, just let it go and don’t bother using it.
I’m sharing a perspective that has worked for me and a process that I created that has supported lots of people in creating a higher sense of self-awareness and understanding about why they think the way they do about each other. To me, that’s what rehumanizing is about. It’s not about trying to figure out which is the right word or how we talk to each other in a way that won’t offend each other because we would be wordsmithing our brain to the point of paralyzation if we continue to do that.
I know that any time I say something, someone might be offended or take it in a way that I didn’t intend. The best that I can do is to create an environment where they can come to me and say, “I heard you say something and it didn’t strike me in a way that was effective or that I liked. Can I talk to you about it?”
We then can have a conversation because I know that I’m not going to always be perfect. I have blind spots. That’s a different conversation than coming up labeling me, judging me, or telling me how stupid I am, and then expecting me to have a conversation with you. That’s not working and it hasn’t worked for a long time.
When a person makes a mistake, labeling them, judging them, or telling them how stupid they are will not work. It hasn’t worked for a long time. Share on XI have a lot of hope, and the reason I have a lot of hope is that I’m very fortunate in traveling all across the country working with people from all professions and all levels of identity. What I find is that even if they come in a little divided, when they leave, they recognize that there is so much more that connects us.
I’m going to implore us to start to think about and talk about what are the connections that we have with people in our groups, workplace, families, homes, and communities and capitalize on those. Start to talk about them and think about what it means to rehumanize ourselves to each other. Think about what it means to let go of some of the fear that we have been socialized to.
Over the next few episodes of this show, I will be going into more detail about the socialization process from the perspective of the media. I will be going deeper into sharing real stories about how people have made connecting points from their bias to their childhood and created healing opportunities. I will share with you some strategies that work for me that are part of my daily practice. The last piece I will say is that if there’s anything you want to change, whether it’s a narrative or a behavior, think about it from the perspective of a daily practice. Daily practice is something that you do for a short amount of time with hyperawareness.
If you want to become more aware of your judgments or stereotypes, tell yourself, “I’m going to go out. For the first two hours of my day, everywhere I drive, and with everyone I interact with, I’m going to be conscious of whether I’m stereotyping or judging them in my interaction,” and see what comes up. Write it down. Start to understand the root of some of your stereotypes and judgments because if you can do that, then you can connect it to a bias or an experience that you had.
Think about the change in small steps through this lens of daily practice. Think about what it means to rehumanize and what your role is in this dehumanization of our country and of our world because we are all dependent upon each other and we live in a society that is struggling to find acceptance. It’s upon each one of us to figure out what that looks like.
I appreciate you reading. If this show resonates with you, please subscribe. I’m trying to get 1 million subscribers in the next few years. Share it with your friends, your families, and your colleagues. If it resonates with you, talk to someone else about it. Talk to somebody else about what they think it means to rehumanize.
All I know is that we have to shift this conversation. For me, this is the way to do it. Start to talk about something else than what is in our socialization. Rehumanization, relationships, relying on each other, and understanding that the power is within each one of you to create that life that you want, that you want for your families, your children, your friends, and your colleagues. I appreciate the opportunity to share this with you and be a part of your journey. I appreciate your time and your energy. Until next time.