When you have a clear vision and a passion, and you are a leader of a team or many teams, you have to be realtionally savvy and build bridges across differences to reach the vision.
It's no easy feat.
When equity, diversity and inclusion are a centered part of that change, it can get even harder. Listen in to this brief thought piece on how to do this work when resistance rises to the changes you're trying to bring in, and what approaches you might explore as you lead this kind of change.
Even if you're not the appointed leader, there's something here for everyone.
I also want to hear from you. What are the challenges you face? What's a sticky situation you've been in that you could use support with? I'm collecting stories for follow-up episodes to support the all of us as we navigate the only constant we can be sure of... change.
When you have a clear vision and a passion, and you are a leader of a team or many teams, you have to be realtionally savvy and build bridges across differences to reach the vision.
It's no easy feat.
When equity, diversity and inclusion are a centered part of that change, it can get even harder. Listen in to this brief thought piece on how to do this work when resistance rises to the changes you're trying to bring in, and what approaches you might explore as you lead this kind of change.
Even if you're not the appointed leader, there's something here for everyone.
I also want to hear from you. What are the challenges you face? What's a sticky situation you've been in that you could use support with? I'm collecting stories for follow-up episodes to support the all of us as we navigate the only constant we can be sure of... change.
You're listening to the Inner Light with Ellen podcast. I'm your host, ellen Wyoming Deloy. I'm a coach in Portland, oregon, who works with people across the US and, occasionally, the world. I help people to transition from where they are to where they want to be, removing limiting beliefs, barriers and imposter syndrome along the way. On this show, I bring you conversations with leaders in wellness, spirituality, healing, mindfulness and more. We also dive into themes around intuition, equity, racial justice and what it means to be living here in the 21st century. I'm excited to bring you each episode. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five-star review so others can find us. If you want to learn more about my work and what I do, go to ellenwayomingdeloycom. Thanks, enjoy the episode. Welcome back to another episode.
Speaker 1:Today I am talking about leading in times of resistance. I wanted to set the stage a little bit through this thought piece. There are a couple of assumptions you should have in mind that I'm working with as I talk through the episode, one of them being that I understand that many places that people work do not have a broad diversity in their leadership. People may not be equally represented across all levels of an organization and recruitment and retention of diverse hires is really a challenge and really difficult. I want to have that be kind of a precept for the situation that I'm talking through. Also, the urgency for change and equity is real. We can only see it as deeply as we see the resistance in society to this work. Equity, diversity and inclusion is, at this point, an acronym of it could be lumped into the same political trials that critical race theory is enduring. There's an article in today's Washington Post about Texas A&M's diversity ban or their ban on EDI, mandatory EDI programming, which included just a one seminar series in their freshman orientation called diversity and belonging, or belonging and inclusion, something like that. They've had to take it out of the programming because of the laws being implemented in Texas. It is a culture war, it is a culture battle that is happening.
Speaker 1:I live in Oregon. It's definitely different than Texas, though I have to say I did go to the University of Texas at Austin. I lived in Texas for a number of years. I understand that there's this resistance to the mandate, this mandate to have to change because the way it isn't right. There are a lot of people who are resistant to that because they don't view themselves as bad people, they don't view themselves as racist, they don't view themselves as harmful or oppressive. There's also a difficulty because the lack of recognition of privilege when you have always been in a ruling elite, even if you don't believe you are a ruling elite, it's all right If you still have the privilege of not being discriminated against because of the color of your skin, even if you are impoverished and you have other forms of discrimination, but not from your whiteness, is still a privilege. That's really difficult to handle because it feels conflicting to a person's experience.
Speaker 1:Mandatory diversity, trainings which I agree are not all done well. I will own that I have probably not done all of my work always well in the 10 years that I've been doing work on equity, diversity and inclusion. I still believe in it. I still believe it to be important because we have to learn more about one another and be more open to broader views and perspectives about how things could be if we're to create any kind of I don't want to say uniformity, but any kind of moving forward together, even if we are not all the same an agreement to disagree but to be civil and to be respectful and to be supportive of another ways, of other ways of being in the world other religion, other ethnicity, other, other religious practice, other sexuality, other gender identification, anything to have space to be our full selves, and that Space does not yet exist. And so, as I listened back to this before you will listen, you will listen to it soon.
Speaker 1:I was, I was thinking about what I was saying and how it was landing, and I I I'm talking about it from a perspective of living in Oregon and where this work is happening in institutions, and institutions are Getting it wrong and, in some ways, getting it right, and there has to be Conversation and a willingness to participate in the discomfort of growth in order for it to take place. And the way that my colleague, nathan Baptiste and I work together when we are engaged as a team with institutions to support their, their implementation of equity, diversity and inclusion, is from a foundation of slowing down and of Mindfulness, so that we are aware of our own reactions and responses Prior to even doing the work, so we can start to identify within ourselves what is alive and what is going on. And what are we resisting? We all have resistances, I don't care where you're from. There are things that will activate in us that say, oh, this is going against what I believe about myself. I'm now in resistance to it and, as opposed to shutting that down, we encourage people to question it, because it may be a protective mechanism that has been sent there to or place there or inborn in us to be preservation. But to preserve what? Is it to preserve power? Is it to preserve identity? Is that even real? And so the way that we work is very slow and it's still faster than we want to work, sometimes because we do have to meet deadlines or we do have they. There is a timeline that the institution or organization wants to work within, and that is fine, but we don't work in a typical fashion to To do this. It's not a typical training. We don't engage with institutions that just want to tick a box, because we don't deliver that kind of equity work. We deliver work that builds relationships, because that's the only way this is going to get done.
Speaker 1:And so, as I talked today, this is from Private consulting that I'm doing with a one-on-one executive client who is leading this kind of change and meeting and meeting resistance in their work and Wanting to understand how to better navigate their leadership so that they can be planting seeds and creating partnership around these opportunities, as opposed to meeting the resistance that they meet when they start to bring up ideas Around. What does it look like for us to alter our hiring practices? How can we shift and actually follow through on the goals of our organization if half the team members are in resistance to it? So there's the policy that can be set, but the real work comes from the implementation and change work. No matter what kind of change is really hard, because you will meet resistance. So this episode today is talking about some of the tools to navigate the resistance inside of the context of equity, diversity and inclusion, but it could be applied broadly to anything you're trying to develop change around, and so I just wanted to give you that heads up for this conversation. It is an ongoing conversation as well, and I hope that you enjoy the episode. Thank you so much, hi.
Speaker 1:I wanted to bring to you today a couple points and conversations around executive coaching that I've been having, and in this context, I'm working with leaders and organizations who are working to advance change particularly centered around equity, diversity and inclusion, which is everywhere these days, but it's also not easily done everywhere, and so I wanted to talk about it. When you are a leader who has the vision, who has the experience, who has the understanding of the why, but the how is really challenging because, as we know that people are everywhere on their journey to understand how to be more inclusive, more welcoming, creating stronger senses of belonging in workplaces and also centering services around everyone, not just those who have benefited from privilege for such a long time. This is particularly important and for where I work, I see being done the most in public sector institutions. So we're looking at government and educational, or at least public educational places, and I can't speak so much to the experience in more private institutions, corporations, large businesses, what those initiatives are. So I'll just be frank and tell you who I'm working with.
Speaker 1:It's primarily public, government or education, and so, yeah, it can be hard, everyone is in their own space for it, but I think it's important to note that these are public spheres because the public is the public. People will look like me I'm Asian, american. People will look like your neighbors, will look like just everyone. Right, we're all there, and leadership may not always reflect the public Leadership, and even the workers, maybe the administrators, may not always reflect the public that they serve and the awareness around centering the needs of those, particularly those who have been historically oppressed and marginalized throughout history. So largely people of color can be women, can be people from different ability groups, gender, sexuality.
Speaker 1:If you're not fitting into a dominant culture, white, heteronormative culture, it can be hard to know how to center the needs, and so I'm working with an executive right now who is working to implement change and running up against a lot of roadblocks, resistance and interference, and I think that strategies for how to help bring people in is what's the biggest challenge for my client. He does work in a place where people care, where people are motivated. They do want to do the right thing, but they have a hard time at times seeing how they are unconsciously complicit in a system that oppresses people and when they become aware of it, the personal mortification of it is so great that it sort of stops them in their tracks and impedes them to be moving forward and how to be a part of something positive, because they're reconciling so much tension around their own failing and some people can call this white fragility. What I really think this is is a shame block. Their shame rises so much that they feel targeted themselves and they can't move forward despite wanting to do the right thing. And so I'm not talking about the workplace where people are overtly racist. I'm talking about the workplace where people are overtly wanting to do the right thing but then struggling with how to deconstruct the internalized systems within themselves that they know to be able to open and learn how to do things differently.
Speaker 1:Because I mean myself included I was born in the 80s and I went to like a whole bunch of educational institutions. None of this was ever talked about until really deeply, until I was in my 30s, right so 10 years ago. And it is a. It is a hard thing to deconstruct yourself as an adult and realize that the intention and the heart and the passion of how you did something for a long time is not always the most helpful or can be, can be construed as harmful. Talk about panic to know that you have harmed unintentionally right, and I'll share a brief story about this right.
Speaker 1:So my mom is an immigrant and I very strongly identify with understanding an immigrant's journey and the hardships that they go through and the miscommunication or the judgment or the racism that that person can experience. And when I was young, I was in my 20s, I was teaching students as a bilingual educator, so I can speak Spanish and English, and I worked as an environmental science teacher working with largely a Latino population, latinx population, and later on I taught ESL English as a second language at high school and I was so rooted at that time right, this would have been the early 2000s for me, at that time of assimilation, of bringing everyone in to know how to operate as an American, how to be here and be successful, and my learning journey was so much through assimilation because it's what I was taught when I was growing up. My mom did not teach me Korean because she wanted me to be American and she my dad is white, my dad is Polish American, and so when, before the year 2000, on the census you had only the option to take one race, and I remember filling out school forms and you check that you are white because your dad is white, you are an American. And it was so confusing to me because I was so clearly Asian to most people and to myself and the family I grew up with as well was my, my mom's, asian family. They had also immigrated and so I spent a lot of time with my Korean relatives. Though I couldn't speak Korean, I could understand like a little bit, and it was really interesting to me in the 2000s.
Speaker 1:I felt so passionate and I wanted people to fit in the way I had learned to fit in, but my fitting in meant dismissing a good part of myself so I could fit into a white dominant culture, even though I was always that as different. And people would ask me all the way until probably about 2010, when it stopped being more appropriate, I guess, to say where are you from, what is your heritage, what's your culture? And then I would often get is usually someone maybe 10 or 15 years older than me, and then they would tell me a story about the Korean War or Vietnam, or they knew a lady from a place at some point in time. I lived in majority white cities for most of my life and so that was very common for me and I was just used to it. I was like, well, I've assimilated, they're talking to me like I live here, but I'm a little different, and it was a point of pride.
Speaker 1:And then there was a point in my life where I got deconstructed and I realized how much of myself that I had hidden or put away to fit in, and I now bring that into my work. I guess getting into this work was sort of the beginning of my deconstructing and then re-evolving right to be a fuller version of myself, and at some point I'll have a podcast on what it means to be mixed race in America and in her 40s I don't know. I feel like that would be a good conversation. Haven't had enough of them, but for the work with this person that I'm working with right now, these people that I'm working with right now, it's really about how do we bring people into the conversation so that the people that they serve don't have to assimilate to be accepted, but they can be accepted as they are and how they are and not have someone trying to bend them toward a centering narrative or principle that we're all the same. The way in the 80s my mom and the best of her intentions knew that if I assimilated I would be more successful, right, and I could see the discrepancy between me having a white dad and some of my cousins having two Korean immigrant parents and how our paths and our access to things were different. And I noticed that my whole life growing up and I never really thought about it or deconstructed it until I was older, but kind of moving back into the now.
Speaker 1:Regardless of who you are, when you are working to implement this kind of change, you have to do it in a way that is approachable, and I know that there is a lot of impatience, especially on behalf of communities who are still not being served well to get it over with and done already, so we can be included as equitable partners in the conversation. But when the leaders and the administrators and those in charge not yet have that switched and have not hired enough people to be representative in those institutions, we have to proceed in a way that allows that participating group of people to also change and to do it not through force, which, over my 10 years of doing equity work, doesn't work. You can't force somebody into it, you can't cancel them into it, you can't shame them into it. You have to invite them into it and you have to invite them into it in slow ways. And so the person I'm working with is a person of color, a leader of color. He has an incredible background and history and story and is powerful. If I could say one word about them, they lead with vigor, they have a lot of ideas and visions for how things can be, but I know that their vision is 10 to 15 years ahead of present time. Even if we accelerated it, it's still five years out to be able to have a group rallied behind it, because they're working within a system that is struggling to get everybody to agree that this is even important.
Speaker 1:And so, in working with him, I'm talking about strategies to connect more deeply and to build relationships and, fundamentally, to slow down, because if you're leading this kind of change, I know we would love to grab the bull by its horns and just drag it through and break everything down and rebuild it, and maybe some places you can do that, but government and long-standing educational institutions won't withstand that and they will probably crush that kind of leadership. And so what you need to do is plant seeds, and this is what we largely talked about today was the approach of going slow, to go fast and building trust and relationships. Before you present all of the dogma that you have, all of the information that you have, all of the truth that you carry to a person who yet does not yet have a container that's capable of receiving it, you have to cultivate those containers that can receive this information and knowledge and wisdom, and then also create a conversation that helps both parties learn how to adapt and change together. And we talked about that through questioning today, because an approach that works is listening honestly and it's asking people at the outset what brings you here, why are you here, what are your challenges, what do you wonder about? And building a relationship with these people that you need to cultivate allyship with, who will hopefully one day walk the work with you. They need space to be brought up to speed, not through just a mandatory training or a workshop that they go to, but through key relationships and trust building with the people who are leading the charge.
Speaker 1:And those leaders often very visionary, very able to go fast and go hard need to slow down and start to learn more from the other party of what they are working with, what they have to offer. It's almost like if you were a teacher and you went into a classroom and were like here's what we're gonna do, and like 13 students have really different backgrounds and go. We don't do things that way. You would wanna slow down and get to know the students, to meet them where they're at, and then start to work to bring people together under a common framework, and the same is with the kind of leadership of an institution you wanna start to understand who you're working with, and not just because it's their job to go with the plan, because people will come up with all kinds of resistance to defer the plan if it goes against who they believe they are.
Speaker 1:Like I'm not racist. Why do I need to do things this way? I already do things just fine. It doesn't apply to me. I'm in finance. How do you even think that this could apply to me? I don't know why I have to be at this conversation and what it really is is going.
Speaker 1:What brings you here? Why are you here? And often in government, right, public servants, education like service to education. It's a service role. We're providing something for the betterment of society or the functioning of cities and we want to do well for everyone. And so understanding their individual motivations and then having the ability to build that relationship and cultivate the conversation that you can then share some of the ideas.
Speaker 1:Have you know what I've noticed? This group of people we aren't reaching very well. What if you noticed your challenges are with them. Let's talk about it and just listening and then hearing the ideas, or this hiring process. This is what keeps happening to us, and we're not able to bring in members of the community who represent this area in a way that would better our thinking and the broadness of how we see and approach problems. What can we do about that? It's learning what other people's ideas are, getting their voices at the table through conversation, rather than them having to be at the receiving end of a training to really help stimulate mutual ownership of the work, beginning to evolve. And then patience Patience for the mistakes that will happen, for the transgressions that will occur, and starting to build into place ways of how to make repair from those.
Speaker 1:So I'm talking really broadly and briefly over something that could be talked about over a sequence of multiple weeks, and so I think my question here is I would really love to know what do you struggle with If you are a leader in an organization, or even not a leader in an organization, and you want to see more change, advancing the goals of inclusion, belonging, equity, diversity, social justice? Send me your questions or actually send me your scenarios. What are the specific things that are really hard for you? That you see, and I can start to kind of build maybe a few episodes around answering what some of those things are and think through with you what would be an approach. I don't claim to be the expert with all the answers, but I do have expertise in communication and around helping bring people in to be more adaptable to the changes that are constantly happening. We would like things to become stable and static, and I wouldn't say static, we'd like to things to become more stable and steady, but if there's anything about the world that we live in, it's constantly shifting, and so finding ways that we can do it without being thrown off is always my goal, and it is where I have experience and expertise to support people through that, through an equity lens.
Speaker 1:So send your comments, share your thoughts, send me your challenges, and I would love to just, yeah, talk things through with you to help out, as usual. Also, you can always go to my website, ellanwayomingdoloicom, to schedule a free one-to-one consultation if you are interested in diving in deeper, for work together, and you can learn more about my work there as well. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for tuning in today and listening to the show. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and, if you love the show, leave a five star review so others can find us To learn more about my work and what I do. Go to ellanwayomingdoloicom. Thanks, see you next time. I'll see you next time.