Your brain is an extraordinary organ, but it has implicit (hidden) biases and plays tricks on you. Some experts assert that our brains haven’t evolved as fast as the world around us. Our brains still function like they did when we were at risk of being dinner for a wild animal. That’s possible if you live or work in less urban areas, but even there, you’re probably not at significant risk of physical harm or death every time your amygdala is triggered. Often, that noise you hear is a rabbit, not a grizzly bear!
Keeping You Safe
Implicit biases can be effective when you are facing palpable threats. Imagine you are the only one riding in a subway car during early morning hours. The train stops, and one person enters. You try to be discreet, pretending to read email messages on your smartphone while carefully watching the person’s every move. Making mental notes about their physical features, in case you needed to identify them in a police line-up, you assess the risk. Do they seem fidgety? Are they high? Or drunk? What are they reaching for in that bag?
That is your brain at work, using implicit biases about perceived risks to keep you alive. The problem is that perceptions aren’t always accurate. Sometimes, they can be unfair.
Scrutinizing Your Panic Responses
Implicit biases feed our panic responses. Not all of them have to do with race or the risk of physical harm. Remember how your heart started racing when your boss asked to speak with you at the end of the day? Having an implicit bias about supervisors and such requests, your brain sent a panic response and immediately started looking for ways to protect you. Later, you discovered your boss merely wanted to talk about the work that needed to be done while you were on vacation.
Recognizing Your Implicit Biases
What if that person in that subway story chose the seat next to you? Would your panic response be more justified? What if she is a small woman versus a large man? Would apparent age make a difference? Would the color of her skin? Whether she had tattoos, piercings, or pink hair? What if she looked to you like a man wearing a dress?
What does any of this have to do with your safety in a subway car? Probably not what you think. Although stereotypes have some basis in truth, the connections are often quite thin.
You can and absolutely must question your brain’s biases, especially when you are dealing with human beings. We are beautifully diverse and very unpredictable.
Listening to Yourself
It’s not always fun, but when I work with clients to reveal their implicit biases, I have to explore my own. No matter how many times I remove one, it seems like another will appear, based on new information and experiences. This is a natural part of living for most humans. This is also why I ask you to make The Seven Choices before we start developing any action plans around diversity, equity, and inclusion:
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- Forgive yourself for having conflicts, including implicit biases
- Acknowledge yourself for taking any action to resolve any conflict arising out of an implicit bias
- Forgive the world for having and creating conflicts
- Free the emotions
- Clear your mind
- Assume you know nothing about anything
- Listen with your third ear, or your h-EAR-t
You’ve heard this before. You must understand yourself first. You have to make sure your brain isn’t unfairly assessing people as threats based on irrelevant factors. Only after then do I recommend engaging with someone else about the painful issues DEI programs reveal. If you do, you might cause more harm.