Welcome back! After a brief break, Bill sparks up conversation by telling stories about his personal life. Later in the podcast, Bill discusses the topic of enhancing personal skills and asks: What is your role? Enjoy this week’s podcast!
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The Origination Point Podcast Ep. #6 – Musing
It has been a while since I’ve put down another episode. It has been a pretty crazy time in my own life with transition, change, and things that are going on. I’m going to get into that a little bit in this episode. I’m going to connect to our own human condition in how we process through change and do things that impact our lives differently.
I want to start by thanking everybody who has tuned in to this show, shared it, and gotten something out of it. I will ask you to continue to do that. Our goal is to get a million subscribers in one year, and we’ll need your help to do that. If you find value in this and think that there’s something in here that you would want to share with another person, please ask them to subscribe. We will do our part by keeping our episodes coming.
The Origination Point
It would be great to hear your feedback, questions, or things that you would like us to address in some of our shows and topics. You can contact DeLaCruzSolutions.com which is our website. You can go there for more information. You can find the book Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World on that website. Our goal at the Origination Point is to spread peace and to create a more humane world, one person at a time. We’re doing that through our own personal process of change. Thank you to everyone out there. Please support us in sharing and helping us to get to a million subscribers in one year.
I’m going to jump into some topics around our humanity and human nature, and even around transitions. I’m going to do it by sharing a little bit more of my own story because I realize that I haven’t talked about how I came to do this work or what my own personal journey has been. It’s important not because I’m special but because I believe that all of the skills and attributes that I’ve learned that I talk about are accessible to any human being. We all can have the life of our dreams if we know how to access those dreams in an authentic way.
My first understanding, idea, and awareness that I even had goals, objectives, or dreams were when I was young. I grew up in a home where my dad was abusive. My dad was replicating behaviors that he learned from his dad because I knew my grandpa and I saw the way my uncles were raised. I saw how generationally, some of the behaviors that were done unto my father were done unto me.
It made me realize that it wasn’t that he didn’t love me or care about me, it was that he was doing the best that he could. It took a long time for me to even get to a point of being aware that’s what was happening versus he’s this horrible, angry, and mean person, and having a level of forgiveness. I realized that if I didn’t forgive him then it would forever be a place of bondage for me. It would continue to hold me back in being not only my authentic self, and also seeing others as their authentic self.
This childhood that I had wasn’t the childhood that my children had. Not because I’m a better parent than my dad but because I learned some lessons, did my best to change my behaviors, and also made some mistakes with my own children that replicated that behavior. Fortunately, I was aware enough that I was able to talk about it and realize it. My kids got to a point where they checked me on it and I couldn’t get away with those behaviors anymore. I either had to change or impact the relationships with my kids, so I chose to change.
As I went through my young life, another tragic thing happened at thirteen when my sister died suddenly from one day to the next. We were sitting out in our driveway and talking about getting together. I didn’t know her. I hadn’t engaged with her a lot because she was older than me and wanted to be out of the house because she was also the subject of some of those beatdowns. I realized that she was a very important person in my life. We were talking one day and the next morning her boyfriend called and she had died in her sleep from acute bronchial pneumonia.
I was thirteen years old and it was a challenging time in my life because my parents couldn’t talk about it. My dad got further disengaged. My mom pretty much shut down. The siblings were all scattered and we didn’t talk about it. We went through the process of the funeral and some level of grieving. It was a challenging time and it affected me to the point where I abused substances as my dad did. I almost got kicked out of school. I had a revolving door in the juvenile hall because of behavior I had while driving a car.
At seventeen and a half, a policeman stuck his finger in my face. He said, “I’ll see you when you’re eighteen.” I realized that the behavior that I was exhibiting was going to take me into the adult prison system if I didn’t stop, either that or death, strung out on alcohol or drugs, or some crazy thing that I knew I didn’t want. I didn’t know what else I wanted. I just knew that I didn’t want to be incarcerated.
That’s when I started doing this work of looking at myself and thinking about who am I and how do you make a change. I started going to workshops and reading books. They would say things like, “Do the work.” I would say, “I would love to do the work. I don’t know what it is though.” I don’t know how to become more self-aware. I don’t know the skills that one uses to own their stuff because my life up to that point had been the opposite. I was walking around the world as a triggered victim. I’m very much wrapped in my ego about what is it about me that is so important and what’s in it for me.
From that perspective, I didn’t care about other people. Due to the way I grew up and the home I grew up in, I didn’t learn the skills to care for other people or even have empathy. The journey has been a long one in terms of self-awareness and looking at the different ways that my judgments, my stereotypes, and my own biases have impacted the relationships that I have with others.
The Bias Work
The idea of the bias work is asking ourselves, “Do my biases inhibitors enhance my ability to be in an authentic relationship?” An authentic relationship is defined as getting to know you for who you are and not the story that I’m making up about you. I’m still a work in progress. There is no end game for me other than having a new day every day to practice my skills around deep listening, being empathetic, loving, and having compassion. The work is about practice. It’s not about perfection.
Personal Skills: An authentic relationship is defined as getting to know you for who you are and not the story that they’re making up about you.
This idea that you’re going to reach this state of being where you will never drop back into anything else, I haven’t experienced that. I’ve heard some people say that’s possible. That has not been my experience. My human experience has been that I get to these places where I’m intentional, conscious, and aware, and then I have days where I don’t give a darn. I don’t want to think about it. It’s too much. I have to be okay with both of those perspectives. I found that if I’m too hung up on an end game then there’s a lack of satisfaction with how I go through each day. Some days don’t lead me to that place of nirvana or finally get there in terms of awareness.
As I have been doing my work, I had to recognize a lot of things. The first thing was probably the hardest. My anger was driving a lot of my interactions. I hurt a lot of people unconsciously throughout the first half of my life. Being able to own that was hard. I’ve had to go back and apologize to people. I’ve had to own my behavior. There are some people I haven’t been able to face. I say to anyone that I’ve impacted negatively that it was not my intention and I’m sorry that it happened. I owned how I showed up. I was not fully conscious of all of the ways that my behavior impacted others, not like I am now.
As we move through change, it was important for me to accept that that’s my experience and that’s the experience of a lot of people. I couldn’t continue to beat myself up if I was going to grow. The process has been where I find all the benefits. It is going through each day and realizing, that I’m a human being. I’ll always have judgments. I’m socialized to stereotypes about people. It’s not going to stop. I’m a biased human being. I’ll be that way until I die.
My choices are I can choose to grow. I can choose to get to know myself, take those hard emotional roller coaster rides with my stuff, and stay on board. Before, I would’ve jumped off and said, “I’m out of here.” It was less painful to fall off the roller coaster when I started this work than it was to ride it and hold onto it. Believe me, I screamed a lot.
As you think about the work of change, it’s important to accept your humanity and realize that it’s a process for everyone. Everyone is going through it from their perspective and getting the lessons that they need. It was important for me to share this part with you because there’s a reason why I do this work. It was not even intentional for me to get into this work of human nature, change, self-awareness, and connecting it to education.
As you think about the work of change, it's important to accept your humanity and realize it's a process for everyone. Share on XIt was one of those things that over time I found myself in these places of conflict and communities that wanted to talk about challenging conversations. I kept stepping into them. That’s where a mediation background comes in because conflict is an inevitable part of the change process, whether it’s a personal change or a change in your organization or your family. Being comfortable with conflict is a big part of this. Also, being willing to own that I’m a part of creating that conflict.
As I said, I had 30-plus years of experience in doing this and living as a victim, creating conflict in people’s lives, and not taking any ownership of it. My commitment is to own my stuff, do no harm, and do my best every day. The transitions are continuous. Every day, something new is coming up, even in my own professional life. The district that I work in, Denver Public Schools, has gone through a big change and it’s transitioning now. I’m not sure if it would’ve affected my job because I decided to support my wife and we’re transitioning out to Oregon for a job that she got so she could pursue her career goals.
The transition of being somewhere for seven years and having friendships with colleagues and having to leave all that in a couple of weeks is a big transition. I’m moving away from my kids and from a place that I’ve been since 1979. I realize that through this transition, there are a lot of positive things that can come from it. I’m looking forward to a change, to doing more of my creative work, and to supporting people in different ways going through change.
As I wind up this piece, I want you to think about it from your perspective. What are those things in your own life that you need to own to be able to move forward? Who are the people that you need to touch, need to say I’m sorry to, and need to make a connection with? Especially, if they’re close to you. Create a plan to make that happen and think about what your role has been in the relationship.
Be Kind To Yourself
Be kind to yourself. Do this out of self-judgment, self-blame, and self-shame because we stop ourselves as soon as we label ourselves bad or, “I’m wrong. How could I have done something like that?” versus a level of acceptance that gives you the clarity to see, “This is what happened. This is my role. This is what I need to do to clean it up.”
We’re talking about topics around change and our role in change. I want to appreciate everybody out there. Our goal is to get a million subscribers in one year. If you find this content of value, share it, and ask people to subscribe. You can contact us at Contact@DeLaCruzSolutions.com. We would love to hear ideas for shows, topics, and questions that you might have as we grow our community of Bias Busters.
I talked a lot about myself and a lot about the change process that I’ve gone through and the fact that I believe these skills are accessible to anyone willing to do the work. I want to shift now to talk a little bit about leadership and change. The reason is a lot of what I do is working with leaders in education across the country in terms of how we disrupt this system that’s not meeting the needs of all of our children. How do we disrupt organizational cultures that can talk about being inclusive and yet, in people’s experiences, are quite exclusive?
How do we impact professional work cultures that are designed from the perspective of “I can’t be vulnerable at work. I can’t share my personal self,” and realize that without relationships, none of what we’re talking about in terms of making the world a more humane place, being more equitable, and being more inclusive is possible? Relationships are what drive the changes in systems. Systems are made up of individuals.
A lot of the way that we approach even leadership development and the development of people, in general, in the workplace is very programmatic and behaviorally focused. We want to have a behavior that we want people to do and yet we don’t do anything about the mindset, the thinking, or the stereotypes that we have towards each other.
This idea of leadership development has brought me to these skills, “Are they just for leaders?” The conclusion I’ve come to is they’re not. Being self-aware and self-reflective are skills that are important for all human beings. Skills around empathy and social-emotional learning are big words right now in education and a lot of organizational cultures, “Let’s be more socially and emotionally aware.” That means things like having more empathy, expressing empathy, using deep listening, having the ability to articulate myself, and being able to speak on a level with my peers in terms of things that I don’t agree with or aren’t on board yet with, as well as to my supervisor.
Being self-aware and self-reflective are skills that are important for all human beings. Share on XWe Operate In A Hierarchy
I don’t think a lot of our organizational cultures are there yet because we operate in a hierarchy. In a hierarchy, there’s somebody always above you that has control or power over what you do. Most school districts are designed with a strict hierarchy. In a strict hierarchy, everything goes from the top down. Privilege is what allows you to the top. There’s a small group of people who have access to that from a perspective of a hierarchy.
The way you break down hierarchies is you have to flatten the whole organizational culture. Why is that important? What does it have to do with this human nature talk? The reality of flattening a hierarchy means that people at the top have to give up power. That’s why this is so important because if I’m very ego-driven and think that I’m defined by the power that I have, then I’m going to be very reluctant to give that up. It’s a challenging structure when that’s embedded in our whole cultural way that we do business and professionalism.
This connection to education is an important one to think about because those structures are in our schools as well. What’s happening in our schools is through this hierarchy, the people who are in front of our children or your children don’t have the ability to make the decisions and be more fluid and flexible in what they do to meet the needs of diverse students.
A lot of the work that we do around equity and inclusion in schools is not having the impact that we want. Even districts that have been doing this work for a long time, in terms of equity work, inclusion work, courageous conversations, or whatever it’s called are still seeing large gaps in academic performance and social-emotional growth. We’re doing a lot to say, “How do we support our kids?” When the bigger question is how do we support our adults to be able to have time to build relationships?
Most of the school districts in this country are driven by test scores and assessments. Those are more important than relationships. The reality is that relationships drive all of the interactions that we have in our schools, and yet our adults don’t get time to have those relationships. When I talk to teachers across the country and I ask them in the last month, “How much time have you had to build relationships with each other?” I clarified it by saying, “Relationship means you’re not talking about curriculum, content, or standards. You’re just getting to know each other.” The answer is typically 0 to 30 minutes. We’re asking teachers to do with students what we don’t allow them to do with each other. We’re asking that of all the adults in the building.
Relationships drive all the interactions that we have in our schools, but our adults don't get time to have those relationships. Share on XThe idea of understanding the connection to everything we’re talking about is realizing that teachers are leaders and they’re not able to use their leadership. The adults in the building in front of your children are leaders. They can’t always use what they have to offer because when it gets pushed up the hierarchy, somebody at the top could not agree with it and push it back down and say, “That’s not what we want,” without a clear idea of what we do want.
Systems Have To Change
Systems have to change. Systems are made up of individuals. Going back to where I started, if individuals start to change their thinking, then the systems that they operate in will start to change. I’ve always had this thought. Everyone says that race is a social construct, which I agree with. It was created by the Census Bureau in the 1730s to figure out a way to count all of us. Mostly it was based on race. Now, it’s based on both race and ethnicity. It’s even more confusing.
If race is a social construct that was created in the 1730s as a way for the government to count us for taxes in the military, then when I think about it now, a social construct only stays alive if the people who are part of that believe it. If race is a social construct and we were not to see each other from a racial perspective, then we would disrupt that social construct.
Personal Skills: A social construct only stays alive if the people who are part of it believe it.
I want to be clear that what I’m not saying is that we don’t see race. We see race because everyone is different colors. That’s how we see each other through the lens of our eyes. What I’m saying is I don’t see you racially and then connect all of the judgments, stereotypes, and biases that I’ve heard about you to you as a member of that group. It’s something to think about in terms of race as a social construct.
When you think about it right now, race is very much an active part of how we see each other. It’s perpetuated at the highest levels of leadership in our country where people are disparaged for their race. They are called names, talked about poorly, and called racist. Watch the news on any given day and you can see it. It’s not that one party is better than the other. Everybody is treating each other the same way. The level of accountability in America has also shrunk.
If you believe like me that leadership sets the standard, then what I’m seeing in America now is a standard of leadership that has fully permeated our schools, organizational cultures, workplaces, and community groups. The ability to have an authentic conversation, agree, and disagree in a respectful way without disparaging and dehumanizing each other is in some places non-existent.
It’s easy to think about what someone else is doing versus what is my role in this. One of the things that I’ve had to ask myself over and over again from my own personal perspective and from mediating conflict is, “What is your role in this?” As much as I want to think that I was a triggered victim, I played a role in every interaction that I had. I have to own that. I can’t say, “I wasn’t aware of it. It was a blind spot,” and that gives me a pass. If it is a blind spot and something I’m not aware of, then I have a responsibility to make it something conscious.
What’s happening in our schools and our organizations is race plays a role and we don’t have the ability to talk about it. Me saying something to you like, “You’re quite a racist. Can we talk?” The conversation’s already over because I judged you. You’re going to go to defend. “No, I’m not.” I’m going to go to justify. “Yes, you are. Here’s why,” and we’re going to have what I call a lose-lose conversation. It isn’t going to further our points of view and our relationship with each other.
Education Is Critical
As you think about this work, we have to think about each individual’s responsibility and role in the change process. Education is critical right now because school districts across this country are doing work that’s relational in an assessment-driven culture. In an assessment-driven culture, teaching kids to take a test will always overrule teaching kids to be critical thinkers, problem-solvers, decision-makers, and conflict-solvers so that we can prepare them to pass any test.
That is our challenge in our schools, organizations, and communities. It is thinking about, “How do we turn this around?” We’re at a precipice, crossroads, or whatever you want to call it, where we can go down this path of disparaging and dehumanizing each other with very little accountability for how we treat each other and the outcomes, or we can go down a path of awareness, understanding, and empathy. Also, think about how we create a planet where your children can thrive, and they’re not fighting these same battles 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years from now. Those are our choices from my perspective. This is what drives me to do this work.
Personal Skills: In an assessment-driven culture, teaching kids to take a test will always be more important than teaching kids to be problem-solvers, critical thinkers, and conflict-solvers, so they can pass any test. That is our challenge.
This episode was a lot of food for thought. I have a lot of opportunities to interact with a variety of different people. These are things that are personal to me and these are issues and conversations that I have with people almost on a daily basis in my role facilitating this type of work. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can contact us at Contact@DeLaCruzSolutions.com. You can also my book, Finding the Origination Point: Understanding Our Biases to Create a More Peaceful World on that website.
We’re looking for one million subscribers in one year. Gandhi said, “Be the change that you wish to see.” Who is it that you want to be? Who is the self that you want to step into? Who is that authentic human being that you strive to be every day that you get up? I can’t wait to hear from you. Have a blessed day. Thank you for tuning in.