NOT Sympathy Empathy is the ability to identify and understand another person’s situation without judgment, the full acceptance of their story. You have not lived their situation to be able to relate to it. Sympathy, by contrast, is projecting a feeling of less...
Taking on the perspective of others is a critical DEI skill. Rather than pretending to be someone else, try instead to find out what perspective they might have, and is most important when it is different from your perspective. Perspective taking is defined as trying...
Barriers that cause withdrawal from the DEI conversation As humans, we fear what we don’t understand. This fear can feel very real for people. There are three main categories of fear leading parents, caregivers, and educators to withdraw from the DEI conversation. The...
Address Your Unconscious Bias to Foster DEI We all are a product of our lived experiences. This means that our early childhood moments, moments in adolescence, coming of age times, and our adulthood experiences paint a canvas of our normalized behaviors, our...
Sharing pronouns signals to all people that they belong I learned about pronouns in third grade. I remember my English teacher sharing that a proper noun is capitalized and refers to a specific person, place, or thing. A pronoun refers to an individual and therefore...
Inclusive leadership is about knowing when to speak vs. listen One of the clear hallmarks of inclusive leadership is knowing when someone truly needs direction versus when they need a sounding board. These two leadership strategies look very different in practice. For...
