Diversity & Inclusion JessTalk

Well, let's say thank you to Grace. Now we start another. Diversity and inclusion. It's. It's. You could have heard corny. Sometimes you have to get uncomfortable. You have to be willing to look in the mirror, to have someone else show you. You have to be uncomfortable. In those first couple of minutes of this short speech, did you find that you were comfortable with the silence? Tell the truth. Were you uncomfortable with the silence? Yes. Yes. Yes. Were you uncomfortable with the silence? No. You were uncomfortable with the silence? Why? It's unusual. We were waiting. Nothing. Nothing yet. Everything. Nothing yet. Everything. We don't spend enough time when we're talking about diversity and food to get still and get quiet and go within. Right. We don't spend a lot of time with that. In the world we live in today, we spend a lot of time with a lot of minutiae and a lot of noise and a lot of traffic and a lot of incoming and not enough internal work. So I believe that the best way to enroll inclusion is to start with any. It's about engagement. Were you disengaged during those first couple of minutes or engaged? Some were disengaged. Some were engaged. The disengagement came from what? Silence. We were all just. I noticed everyone was just looking at you. It's like, in that silence, nobody was, like, looking around going, what the heck? We were all like, what? Where are you going with this? Think of it this way. After 31,000, 276 hours, give or take, of life coaching, corporate coaching, I noticed something. And after 21,000 of professional students, I noticed something about people. And they don't really get to the best level of growth until they get a little uncomfortable and they want to make a change. Does that make sense? That's when you'll do the work. So let's go back. Let's go back to the early days when I actually had a full head of hair, my gaffer all over. I don't miss it. I just figured I'd increase my character personality by every inch. Gaff rolled back, so it's fun to be around. But at the end of the day, back in the day, it started like this. There was a day called Martin Luther King Day. You know what happened on Martin Luther King Day, you cannot imagine on Martin Luther King Day. What happened was, it was at the Hilton conference, the Flamingo Hilton. I was a blackjack. I was in my early 20s at that time. And Martin Luther King Day was a day that our bosses named and coined for us. We got our own Holiday sounds good or do you know I'm going by the way I'm starting, you know I'm going. Wants to know, right? Because I didn't get anybody going. Yeah, that sounds good, right. MLK Day was the day that all people of color on the casino floor had off. It was happened to be a Monday. They either had Sunday Monday or Monday Tuesday. So Monday our boss's name, Martin Luther King day. Their relief from us. How's that? At that same property there was a gentleman. He spoke with tight, fittest. He had hair like a Brillo, had long. He was five foot one and he spoke with an accent. And he used to say things like we got to get those pillars fixed. And the pillars were pillars. And he would say things dicate, dicate. Look at this thing appropriating. The NAACP came down, hardened over those times. They wanted diversity, they wanted inclusion, they wanted diversity. And this brilliant president of our said to the naacp. Actually he said internally, he didn't say where am I supposed to find myself a smart nigger? So I stand down on a blackjack table and my boss comes to tell me this one here, knowing that I'm standing there with multiple college degrees, he said, you should go for it. How do you think that's what you did? Excited, ready to go for it. Then there was another man of German descent. Beautiful light baby blue shirt, white cuffs, white collar, Cornell graduate. He was my boss at the Sands, Senior vice president of operations. We had an event, had 1500 people at that event. He says, I want you to go and introduce me. I was the most junior person on the. I was a casino marketing coordinator at the. I mean. So I get up to the front to introduce the senior vice president. I say my name, I'm Jesse Farrell. And then I went into a language. I believe it was Klingon knees. You know Star Trek? Say yes if you know Star Trek. It went like Larry Lohan. So I got his name right and I got my name right. Everything else in the middle was Greek. I had no idea. So I was. Snake bit me that day. The snake that bit me was German Jew and very fierce. Trial by fire. So he slid his own back into the room and he says to me, whispers in my ear, You think? No words came out. I said something that changed for me. The whole world made change in your world. Never again, never again will one man or one woman decide the quality of my communication. At a breath like that. I didn't get a chance to practice. I didn't know anything about what was doing I was nervous, I was scared, I was unprepared. But none of that mattered. Would that have left you feeling uncomfortable? The thing is, what would you have done about it? Practice. Practice. That's exactly what I said. I began to practice to the degree that 24 years later, I open up a professional speaking life coaching and corporate coaching company. Because of the quality of the way I speak, I owe him a lot of gratitude. The gratitude was he made me uncomfortable. He made me reach inside and go get what was already there. I decided I'm going to be able to speak to the degree that everyone can understand me in full knowledge. And I owe him that gratitude. Today, as challenging as that was, it was a blessing. So you in this room have responsibility. You have what I call reach. It's really, really huge. The REACH stands for responsibility, Engagement, Accountability, Connection. The H is how you, you can do that. You can do that at the base level. Let's simplify this whole thing called inclusion and break it down to small circle start. So I wrote a book called, my first book called how youw Do. Very excited about this book. It's done quite well in terms of sales. By the way. I want to mention now I want you to go to my website. You've got the information there. I want you to know right on the first page of the website, you'll be able to download the ebook. You'll be able to request have me download the ebook to all of you for free if you're interested in reading it. So I wrote this book, the High Elite Feeling. What it is. It's the eighth part. We're going backwards. The H part of that whole REACH campaign is the High Elite feeling how you go through life affecting the lives of others and your own. Most of us in the room were taught that golden rule. The golden rule is treat others how they wouldn't want you to cheat. Exactly. Treat others how you want them to. But what if you're a little goofy? What if you so goofy you'll start off the speech with two minutes of silence. Not everyone wants to be treated that way. So this book talks about the platinum. Treat people how they want to be treated and they will tell you. Don't people tell us how they want to be treated all the time? You agree? Do you live that? Do you live in a world where people tell us how they want to be treated all the time? Sometimes we have to look a little deeper. So when I go for this bar and put it out there to the world for the world to get this, I sent it out to some of my favorite people. And that president of mine was one of those favorites. After about 15 days on the market, I looked on Amazon. There was a book for sale. How can a book be for sale when the distribution is here? There's no other. I've got to buy that book. So I bought the book and I'm holding the book. This book that I'm holding has an inscription to my former president that I wrote it to. He sold my book. That was a gift to him. Within 15 days I was released. I bought it back to see who would do that. So when I say to you and do you think about the hardships we go through? I don't have a process, America, that I'm the only one who goes to hardship. Different religions do, different races have challenges. Women have challenges. Other minorities have challenges. Asians, American Indians, Eastern Indians. We all have our own process to bear. So this thing called inclusion, it's about all of us. There's a thing called a culture, racial stress. That's when you seek to make a migration into governing body of society. You don't look like, sound like or feel like anybody else in that governing body. The Indians felt it probably first for us. So what I say to you is let's use the Reach campaign from a leadership perspective. Be responsible. Make the people around you that can help you move this forward, this fall. Employee engagement. Engage and connect and make a difference by just talking to people. Use accountability for yourself and have an accountability part of you. Make sure that you hit the benchmark that you say you want and definitely get connected by all means and use that how you leave the feeling concept, that platinum level that helps you reach people at the level where they're at. Does that make sense to you? Say yes if that makes sense. Yes. Will you do this? Yes. When will you do this? When? Now. You promise? Because I know where you live. I'm going to be watching. You want to do this now? We don't have all the time in the world. It took me 52 years a few years ago to learn that my thing called perfectionism, recovery perfectionist was not something that was based on. It was based on shame and blame. It was based on not goody hand like Rene Brown says. It's a 20 ton shield that you think protects you, but it's the very thing that keeps you from taking place. So you have to do this now. We don't have the time we think we have. Time passes. Older we get, the faster it passes. So I want you to consider today what would you do? What one thing would you do to help this inclusion piece? Really take grassroots level and know that you don't have all the time in the world.