Are you feeling the need to have all the answers in this complex moment? To be saying all of the right things? Have you gone low risk on your communications for fear of saying the wrong thing? Or not enough of the right things? Are you stifling the energy and passion you feel about issues you’re facing because you’re not an expert in the space of equity, inclusion, and differences? I understand the human tendency toward low risk. Wanting to avoid discomfort is normal, and yet, a privilege to exercise. We all want to appear good, to show up on the right side of the issues we care about.
We are living in a time of some multiple truths. This is both a defining moment for your leadership and a time when you do not have to be perfect. If you are white, you do have to ask, listen, and learn in service of a commitment toward action - anticipatory and responsive - against racism in every form. You do have to commit to being a lifelong anti-racist and continue to explore what that means for you and for the company you keep—as a leader and as a human being.
“Truth, fallibility, the courage to be wrong, and the willingness to grow and learn and change—these mark a leader people trust and want to follow.”
Some part of all of us strives to be perfect, and yet we dislike and distrust it in others. Perfect is artificial and theatrical. This is not the time to hoard the “right words” or the “best answers.” To think oneself a newly minted expert in the space of inclusion, equity, and differences is ambitious, if not performative. Mostly, it’s impossible—and not useful to anyone. Truth, fallibility, the courage to be wrong, and the willingness to grow and learn and change—these mark a leader people trust and want to follow.
This is the moment for curiosity—the time to ask questions. Not just for asking’s sake and not just for learning’s sake, but toward action, dramatic self-improvement, and change. Action doesn't start with simply learning. Action starts with a desire to learn in service of change and must be accompanied by the will to lean into the discomfort of what’s new—and to continuously press forward to new levels of understanding and action.
This is your moment to commit to a life of exploration and improvement—of investigation and change. Racism is in all of us. It’s in our lived experience, in the air we breathe, and in the background and context of our interactions with the world. You have not escaped—neither have I. Action starts with curiosity—curiosity about yourself, the racism in you, your willingness and resistance to changing it, your courage to act and change.
Growing our curiosity is hard because it works against the natural force of our individual brain function. Our brains like to hold onto their own opinion, and it takes extra cognitive energy to let go of deeply hard-wired belief systems and ways of seeing the world. It takes effort for all of us to let go of our opinion and consider other perspectives and points of view. But once we start doing it, it gets easier for our brains to open up, to consider alternatives, to flex with agility and a bent toward growth.
These questions help us show up with curiosity, even when our brains are otherwise stuck.
What beliefs do we hold that might no longer be true? Where do these originate? In whose voice were they formed?
What assumptions have we made?
What other perspectives are out there?
What could a new perspective offer us that we don’t currently have?
What do we already know? What else do we need to know?
If we didn’t have this difficulty, what would we be doing instead?
How can we shake things loose?
What else is important to know?
If we were at the learning edge of this topic and preparing to press it to the next level, what would we be seeing? Doing?
Today, keep track of how many times you feel/hear yourself hanging on to an idea or way of seeing the world. What could be different for you, and for the people you lead, if you challenged your ideas and perspectives?
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