Category Archives: personal growth

Here’s How We Can All Help

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How do we stick with something when it’s hard? 

I queried my Facebook friends this weekend.  My favorite answers:

“Doing it with friends/family.  People you like spending time with.”

“The alternative of not doing it is worse… and how it helps in the long run.  Knowing it helps me feel better about my life.  …Also, hope matters a lot.  Gotta have hope or else it’s hell.  Finally, helps a lot if you love the subject matter or the work, even if it’s hard.  Or you care about the person for whom you’re doing it, if it’s not for you.”

Most people thought about exercise and other personal habits.  But I’m thinking about those hard conversations about racism, bias, and prejudice.  It’s a whole other ball game, and yet similar principles of practice, persistence, and resilience apply.

This week I had a heartfelt and enlightening conversation with fellow physician leaders about addressing racism and bias at work.  It was the first prolonged, frank conversation most of us had had on the topic with colleagues.  I came away feeling connected and also frustrated, with three conclusions:  1) We all see the problem and we all care; 2) Too often we don’t know what to do or how to help; we feel like deer in headlights—because it’s hard—so we stay silent; and 3) What I want most is for us all to keep trying anyway, even though it’s hard and we don’t feel totally competent—yet.

I see parallels to counseling I do for patients about lifestyle habits.  So many people tell me that they don’t bother trying small habit changes because they never stick.  They believe they are ‘all or nothing’ folks—full on angels or devils of habit—no incremental change possible.  Psychology research tells us that this is not an intrinsic or immutable trait; we can overcome it.  But it’s hard.  We forget that learning, competence, and mastery take practice, time, and persistence.  Sounds a lot like communication skills, no?  In lifestyle counseling, we take a very concrete approach to habit change.  After work, I often overeat in a fit of stress and desire for reward/relief.  I always regret it.  I can delay and diminish my mindless vacuum eating, however, by changing small things in my home arrival routine, like bypassing the kitchen and going upstairs, drinking some water, and breathing deeply, to re-center for a mindful dinner.  I can take small steps—not all or nothing, rather all or something. 

Obviously, addressing bias and racism at work is different from managing eating habits. But we can still take small steps to build confidence and competence. A lot depends on the culture at work—are hard conversations even safe to have? We must also consider relationships and context—sometimes it’s better one on one, other times you can talk about it as a group. There is no substitute for active awareness practice—attunement to self, others, and environment. Moments of potential connection and understanding can be fleeting. How can we develop an effective skillset, one that builds confidence and agility so we may recognize, seize, and capitalize on those moments? Repetition is key for entraining any skill, and it’s our small daily practices that can cumulatively improve the psychological safety of our work cultures, and make the hard conversations easier. Below is a list of small steps we can all take. With regular exercise and training, we can strengthen our upstander and allyship muscles. If we find workout buddies (like my physician leader forum group) and support one another by sharing challenges and iterative victories, just like at the gym, it’s easier and more successful for us all.

How are you already holding up marginalized people in your world?  How do you stick with it when it’s hard?  What and who holds you up?

* * * * *

Learn and Use People’s Correct Names

My first name is spelled with a C, and my last name has an E and ends with a G.  It matters to me.  Allison goes by Ally.  ‘Chien’ could be pronounced with a ‘ch’ sound or a ‘j’ sound at the beginning, depending on where someone is from.  It’s okay to ask someone how to pronounce their name.  It shows that we care to connect and acknowledge their identity and whole personhood.  Hear or read this short article on how this simple practice can make a world of difference in how we include one another in the workplace, and for tips on how to do it effectively and easily. 

Don’t Laugh at Racist (or Sexist, or Any ‘Othering’) Jokes

And for sure don’t make them.  Psychologists call this disparagement humor:  “any attempt to amuse through the denigration of a social group or its representatives… (It is) paradoxical:  It simultaneously communicates two conflicting messages.  One is an explicit hostile or prejudiced message.  But delivered alongside is a second implicit message that ‘it doesn’t count as hostility or prejudice because I didn’t mean it—it’s just a joke.’”  Such expressions perpetuate a social norm that marginalized people and groups should ‘just lighten up’ as others devalue and dehumanize them.  Read how it affected one East Asian woman when she internalized her own white friends’ ridicule, and how she overcame it.  If you see a marginalized person participate in denigration of their own group, ask yourself how that came to be; then recognize and consider the complexities of assimilation and survival.

https://www.diversitybestpractices.com/sites/diversitybestpractices.com/files/attachments/2020/06/upstanding_against_racism_-_a_practical_guide_final.pdf

Upstand When You Witness Aggression of Any Kind

What will you do the next time someone makes a racist, sexist, or otherwise denigrating joke or comment?  Or when someone starts abusing another person on the bus?  How can you help?  You don’t have to be a hero or put yourself in harm’s way.  And you can still respectfully and firmly disrupt aggression, and signal your support to a targeted person.

Learn and Share—Find and Be Peer Support

I’m so grateful for friends and colleagues who have committed to this work.  We validate one another’s experiences, fears, triumphs, and learnings.  We exchange resources like everything linked in this post.  I keep articles in my Pocket app, so I may share them readily and widely.  We acknowledge that the work will not finish in our lifetimes.  And yet we persist, because we believe we can contribute.  We work to leave the world better for our children, and to lead them by example so they may carry the torches after us.  We hold one another up in hope.  Please, join us.

How to Support Your Asian Colleagues at Work Right Now:  1. Reach out in support if it’s appropriate to your relationship.  2. Consider your intent—is it really to help them, or are you just making yourself feel better?  3. Don’t invalidate or diminish their feelings.  4. Listen to understand, not to fix.  5.  Just don’t stay silent.

InclusionLabs Fellowship Program:  For a deep dive of inner work in service of effective action, check out this program to connect to others who have also made the commitment. 

#TalkAsianHate

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YouTube: Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys

When someone is unfriendly to you, how often do you attribute it to your race? How often does the possibility cross your mind?

Since I was a kid this has always been in the background, and it was worst in elementary school.  Second and third grade stand out:  Kids would pull the sides of their eyes up and down, chanting, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees,” or make fun of my name: “Ching-Chong-Cheng.”  In high school one boy in particular referred to me as “Cheng,” and always said it with a sneer.  It could have been innocent—I found him generally sarcastic and antagonistic in the most annoying way.  When I told him how it made me feel uncomfortable his demeanor changed immediately; he apologized and never did it again.  Looking back, he and his friends referred to one another by their last names, and often in that competitive, confrontational, adolescent male way.  So maybe that was actually his way of including me?  I think he harbored no specific malice, but his impact strayed far from any benign (ignorant?) intention, I think based on my own past experience.  I remember the encounter vividly, and to this day appreciate both my own courage to bring it up, and his willingness to accept the feedback and change.

I think my family and I experienced minimal direct racism as I grew up. But I have always felt self-conscious whenever bad news comes from China, like when babies were dying from melamine-tainted formula, and when thousands of dead pigs floated down a river in Shanghai. I hesitate to even mention these stories here, for fear of negative stereotypes they may incite or confirm in readers’ minds about Chinese people. We humans generalize about and denigrate groups we perceive as different from ourselves, often based on minimal information (and these days, more and more disinformation). When these events occurred I asked my friends, and they reassured me that the news was inconsequential.

Not so with coronavirus.  A close family member was verbally assaulted in the mall a year ago, by a white adolescent girl.  She just walked right up to him, two generations her senior, and started yelling, “This is all your fault!”  How entitled, how arrogant, and how brazen—to think you can just attack an elder stranger like that with no fear of consequence.  That is the privilege of membership in the dominant culture.  Hard for me not to feel defensive and alert to threat, not to mention rageful, after that. 

For the past several years, and especially the past year and the last two weeks, acute awareness of what makes me visibly different, and thus a potential target of prejudice and racism, occupies increasing space in the front of my mind.  Our family just road-tripped to Colorado and back.  Driving through the rural Midwest, I found myself thankful that Husband wore his university hospital, orthopaedic surgery logo jacket into the gas station stores.  I spent as little time inside as possible, made sure to be friendly, and felt noticeable relief every time someone smiled and treated me with kindness, or even just common courtesy. 

This hesitation–the vague and disconcerting paranoia I feel–is justified. It’s not debilitating, but I’m frustrated, annoyed, and angry about it.

* * * * *

How important is it to you that all people, including people of color, women, LGBTQ, indigenous and other marginalized groups, feel accepted and welcome, and treated with respect and dignity, everywhere they go?  How can you help?  Below are my suggestions.  I’m tired, friends.  Whatever you can do in your spheres of influence is much appreciated.

Educate yourself.  See links below to multiple articles and a very well-done video (I recommend the video most) to familiarize yourself with current and historical aspects of the Asian-American experience(s).  Talk to your Asian-American friends, if you have that kind of relationship.  But understand that they may not want to rehash their experiences just for your benefit.  Look for published stories to foster your empathy.  Then, if you can muster it, find ways to tell your friends and any other marginalized folks, “I see you.”

Seek diverse perspectives.  Asian-Americans are not a monolith.  Despite some overlapping aspects of culture, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, and all other groups have divergent histories in and out of the United States, and each individual in any group manifests their own unique experiences.  If you’ve met one of us, you’ve met one of us.  Resist the urge to oversimplify and overgeneralize.

Look at your own biases with self-compassion and accountability.  Biases are human.  We all have them.  It does the oppressed no more good for you to self-flagellate over yours, than if you ignored them altogether.  What matter are your awareness and self-management of your biases, and then your ability to help others do the same. 

Commit to doing the work.  This does not mean expecting perfect words and actions from yourself all the time.  We will all open mouth and insert foot; we will all fall into old habits of thought and assumption.  But we must persist; abandoning the work helps no one.  Every failure teaches us, if we let it, and this helps everybody.

Find a supportive community to hold you up and accountable in the work–friends, tribe members who love you through your struggles to reckon with yourself.  These will most often be people who have committed to doing the same work themselves.  Hold them up in return.  This is a group project; we all depend on one another to succeed.

The One and the Many

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How do you change your words or message depending on your audience?

Weeks ago I read an article sharply criticizing public health messaging throughout the pandemic, and took a hard look at my own communication over the past year.  A year ago I wrote a series of posts on COVID, which were generally well received.  I have consistently taken a very conservative approach to mitigation, admonishing people to avoid gatherings and travel, mask up, and be patient.  In my public messaging, I have not directly addressed the mental, emotional, economic, and social costs of all of these measures. 

But what about in my private conversations?  How are they/am I different?

I thought of two groups with whom I interact:  Those whom I know personally, who trust me, and who think similarly to me, and those whom I don’t know, who may not trust me, and who think/believe differently from how I do.  Okay so six groups, not two—and they can overlap—I have patients who trust me and think very differently—but I think my messaging generally takes one of two approaches depending on my audience.  And in the end, I think it comes down to trust.

The One

When speaking to one person whom I know, or someone who agrees with me, two assumptions are at play: 1) they trust me, and 2) I trust that they trust me.  It sounds semantic, but I think it matters.

In this situation, I’m probably much more willing to admit uncertainty, and to ‘negotiate’ my position because I trust that my counterpart understands and respects my concerns.  So I’m willing to show vulnerability in my expertise because I trust that they know I will incorporate new information and update my recommendations.  I also trust them to know that it’s not because I’m stupid or gullible or on some kind of power trip—we’re all just learning and trying to balance everything that matters in a rock vs hard place situation.  When engaging in mutually trusting conversation, even in disagreement, openness, curiosity, and ambivalence can be taken as humility and seeking truth rather than weakness and lack of conviction, and both parties may be more likely to walk away with broader, more nuanced perspectives.  And best of all, the relationship can be strengthened, allowing for continued engagement, learning, and growth.

The Many

Posting to the blog or on Facebook, I think I run a much higher risk of being misunderstood.  I am responsible for providing clear and concise context for any expression or opinion.  My audience is diverse, and depending on any reader’s mood or context themselves, my words may be interpreted very differently one day or one moment to the next—and I have no control over that.  Do they trust me?  Can I trust them to assume my humility and good intentions?  Unclear.

In this space, depending on my mood, perhaps, I may feel defensive, and/or a deep desire to prove myself right.  I may be much less willing to admit to gaps in my knowledge or flaws in my reasoning, for fear that my expertise will be wholly discounted if one aspect of my interpretations or recommendations is imperfect.  If I assume my audience does not trust me, then I’m less likely to trust them to receive my intended message, to take my advice, and achieve my primary goals.  I get preachy, narrowing my perspective and failing to see more than my own point of view.  I ask fewer questions—that is always a red flag.  I make more assumptions, defensiveness increases, and my mind closes further.  It’s an emotional hijack of sorts, resulting in further disconnect and polarization.  Yikes.

Or maybe, just because I don’t know how my message will be perceived, I qualify and hedge, and lob ideas much more passively, inadvertently conveying that I don’t really believe what I’m saying, that I’m actually not trustworthy, just wishy-washy. 

So what should I do?

I think one solution is mindful attunement and differentiation.  As a communicator in relationship of any kind, but especially when I’m the expert, it is my responsibility to manage this dynamic polarity intentionally.  Face to face, I can make sure the other person feels seen and heard, by asking more questions, paraphrasing, reflecting their values and goals back to them.  When writing for an audience I cannot see or hear, I can respectfully acknowledge opposing opinions and their validity, before presenting my own arguments.  Above all, I can hold a larger space for everyone’s values, concerns, and objectives.  I see you.  Please see me.  What do we both care about?  What trade-offs are we willing and not willing to make to achieve our shared goals?

Results from my Think Again quiz, March, 2021

Adam Grant’s new book, Think Again, will be my personal and professional bible for a while, I think.  Its central tenets are intellectual humility and cognitive flexibility.  I may speak and write like a preacher about things that matter deeply to me.  But I will strive to think more like a scientist, seeking truth and connection above winning arguments and/or proving other people wrong.

In the end, as I practice myself, I will observe and apply these principles in other arenas.  Can we keep attunement and differentiation in mind when we hear leaders and politicians speak?  When a constituency is diverse, and an issue complex, can/should we expect a public figure/expression to convey nuance in generalized statements?  I say yes, absolutely.  I think we should hold leaders, as ourselves, to a much higher standard for acknowledging complexity and uncertainty.  Oversimplified sound bites divide and incite, and we should all reject them, strongly.  We can address complexity and uncertainty without inciting mass panic if our statements also clearly convey conviction to core values, and what we are for more than what we are against. 

We can all/each elevate the quality of both private and public discourse if we help one another feel connected throughout.  That means earning trust, and there is no substitute for the work it takes to do this.