Episode 12: On the Bumpy Road to Allyship
Welcome to "Weirdos in the Workplace," the podcast where we celebrate authenticity, passion and purpose and all of the beautiful humans who bring diversity into our professional lives. I'm your host, and self-proclaimed weirdo, Erin Patchell. Today, we delve into a personal journey of self-discovery, embracing vulnerability, and learning how to become an ally in the workplace.
Stay tuned.
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Transcript >
Welcome to Weirdos in the Workplace, the podcast where we celebrate authenticity, passion and purpose, and all of the beautiful humans who bring diversity into our professional lives.
I'm your host and self-proclaimed weirdo, Erin Patchell. Today we delve into a personal journey of self-discovery, embracing vulnerability and learning how to become an ally in the workplace.
Stay tuned.
Picture and office filled with clearly extraordinary and unique people. In an office where we live and breathe personal and professional growth, I am one of their senior leaders, having gone through years of obsessing training and, getting outside my comfort zone, changing my habits.
Being confident that I had it all figured out, all I had to do was learn. Little did I know I was unwittingly committing microaggressions, leaving a trail of unintended consequences in my wake. But this is a story of growth and learning to hack my brain out of these harmful habits.
Even being constantly bombarded with inspirational quotes, knowing the three theoretical frameworks, sometimes teaching them and understanding the best practices, old biases still bubbled up. More than that, you probably can't tell from the podcast, but I'm actually a funny person, and I would make harmful jokes if I thought I was funny to them.
I learned to be a fantastic ally when it was expected of me, but as soon as I was in a room with my old friends or the right audience, I would laugh at the racist jokes, and I would walk right to the edge of what was appropriate and often take a step on the other side. You see, I've always been a shock jockey, and honestly, for most people, that's been a part of my charm.
Being independent-minded and frankly a little bit of an anarchist, I secretly hated that society or the men would tell me what to say or not to say. Things didn’t change dramatically until my son came home from school one day, and he was about seven or eight at the time. One of the kids he knew had been called the R-word on the bus, and he was upset about it. I was like, what's the R-word? You know, I thought I knew all the bad words. And, you know, we can guess now what the R-word is. I'm not going to say it, but it was a bit surprising to me because, until that point, I think it didn't strike m that even this word was really an issue. Of course, I would try not to say things publicly but secretly inside. You know, I didn't really care.
So, my 8-year-old son had way more empathy than I did for the person who had been called this word, and he knew it was wrong, and I didn't know what was wrong. I didn't intrinsically know it was wrong.
I logically knew that it was wrong.
We’ve been told it's wrong for years, right?
I've been called that before, too, so that's an inherent part of bias. If I was called that, then everyone should be called. I don't know. I’m not trying to justify it, but that was the day that things started to change for me.
The next hurdle I had to overcome was a privilege because, like many people, life has been a struggle. We have yet to all be born with wealth, and I certainly wasn't. Everything I have gotten has partly been out of an extraordinary amount of luck.
Everything I've gotten has also been through a lot of hard work and getting outside my comfort zone to an incredible degree.
Recognizing my privilege as a white person in today's society was a bit difficult for me.
That doesn't mean that I haven't struggled, but it does mean that I do have an inherent level of privilege that there are that many, many people don't have in terms of my physical body. I don't have the strongest physical body in the world. I have been through many health issues, but the fact that I am able to walk, and I am able to, you know, function almost completely normally. I might not be an athlete, but I can function.
Almost completely normal as a person, and that's a privilege.
The way that I want everyone to see privilege, it's not about having more than somebody else. It's not about it, it is about the starting place, but people need to see their privilege and appreciate it. They want. I want people to see it with gratitude, right?
Because it's gratitude.
Our privilege helps us and gives us empathy when we see someone who does not have that same privilege as us, and that's a crucial step in becoming an ally. Because when once you gain that true empathy, you actually want to lift people, right being an ally is about raising people, and that's it.
It's about breaking down barriers and lifting people, and it's very active. It's not passive. My journey to allyship, and I'm not professing to do this perfectly. By the way, I am not perfect, so I am just trying to improve every day. Like I hope that you are but my journey to allyship.
Did break down. Most of the rest of my defences and breaking down all of your defences creates a very uncomfortable identity shift because you realize that you're looking at everything you've done in the past. All the situations in the past, and you're looking at them through a new lens. A lens where, you know, things that were completely normal to you before and completely right are now.
Extremely problematic, and that creates a very profound discomfort in your own body. And when that happens, the only tool that we have is forgiveness.
We need to forgive ourselves and allow others to forgive us as well. If you have caused harm, if when I have caused harm, even if it was something that, you know, I realized happened something that happened in the past. I will apologize for it.
Even if it happened ten years ago, I would talk to the person, I'll say, hey, this thing I recalled this situation, and I said blah blah blah, and now I know better, and I wanted to apologize for that. Maya Angelou said. Do the best you can until you know better, and then when you know better, do better.
I have to say that throughout recording this, I have had to stop occasionally and recompose myself because this is a much more sensitive topic for me than I had thought, and that tells me that I'm obviously dealing still dealing with feelings of guilt and shame for some of my previous behaviours.
I do not think that that is unhealthy. It’s really important that we feel those feelings and then walk in them in order to get past them. As we all know, June is Pride Month. During Pride Month, it's even more important to be talking about these subjects. And so, if anything that I've said today has resonated with you either because you are noticing some of these behaviours in yourself or because you're at the same place that I am, and you're feeling that shame and guilt for some previous behaviours talk about it. Feel free to reach out to me. I'm always happy to talk about it. This is a really important conversation because it's such a challenging process, but it's important to remember that we aren't born knowing better. Very few people know better once they walk this journey, so we can't expect perfection from other people.
I can only help teach them, and that means teaching them publicly and that means teaching them privately. What happens behind closed doors if you're seeing problematic behaviours? You do need to address them. You can address them kindly, but you need to address them.
This quote by Desmond Tutu nails it. If you're neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the oppressor’s side.
This quote tells us that we have two things to do, we must be active in situations of injustice. We need to increase our sensitivity to what it means to have an injustice.
What is injustice?
Because we all have different definitions based on our inherent experiences, backgrounds, and biases, I encourage you to broaden your definition of injustice. Use your empathy and look at situations from other’s perspectives.
Because why not?
We don't have to be afraid of anybody. There is enough to go around for everyone in this world. This is a world of so much abundance, and the better we do, the better we all do.
That's all for today. I hope you liked the twelfth episode of Weirdos in the Workplace.
Remember that Albert Einstein said the measure of intelligence is the ability to change, and we can all change for the better.
That’s all for today. Thanks for listening!
If you like this episode, I'd love to connect with you on https://www.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell/ or https://www.positivist.ca/. I’m your host Erin Patchell, and never forget, don't stay out of trouble.
