E32: Put The Oxygen Mask On Ourselves: How Do We Support Each Other?

Hello everyone, happy Friday! Uh, for those of you who are joining Inclusion Unscripted Live, welcome to our show. Uh, so today I want to just set this up so that we know what we're going to be talking about. As a person of color, can I get support from my own community? Can my community support me fully? Can my, my community empower me? Can my community help me become more than I am right now? And how will I know that I can trust you within my own community? Welcome to Inclusion Unscripted, where we're not just living diversity, we're not just building diversity, we are living it every day. Inclusion Unscripted is a brainchild of mine where I wanted to have open, honest discussions about diversity, equity, inclusion, uh, a lot of equity. We're talking equity lately, um, equality, belonging, thriving, um, building careers within spaces that we don't always occupy fully. And so today's session um, is one that's weighing on my heart. And so all of you that's listened to this podcast, livecast, in prior episodes, you know that when things weigh on my heart, I tend to show up in a whole different way to these live on Friday. So I want to take this event to take us out to the weekend, give us lots of thoughts to think about, um, and really focus in on who we are as people. It's super imp— it's, it's not even important, it's, it's imperative that as people of color we start looking in our own mirror, number one. It's imperative that we put the oxygen mask on ourselves first and we begin to understand how and why we must support each other. So this session is built around a simple premise: Can I get the support I need from the community that I'm a part of? Can I get the support at the level that I need it from the community that I identify with, or am I going to get a lackluster support within my own community? So when I wrote this, I wrote it in the following manner. Imagine for a second that you're standing, let's say New York City, and you're standing in front of a high-rise building. The building's 100 stories high, You are a person of color, a professional of color, standing on the concrete outside of the building. You have no access inside, you have no ability to get in there, but you are standing outside the building and you turn your eyes and you look up And as you look up that window, as you're going up the windows in that 150-story building, you see a man of color, a woman of color, and you see all these people of color in the window as you're going up. And you're looking way up until you can't see anyone anymore, but you know based on what's happened on the ground floor that there are people of color all the way up the ecosystem in that organization, and you want to join that organization, you want to be a part of it, and you're asking yourself, will the people that look like me support me to get in the door? And when I'm in the door, will the people who look like me support me to rise through all the levels of the organization? Will they fully create psychological— the safe environment for me? So I come full circle to this, and I'll tell you why I'm here. Because I think it's important. Margaret doesn't ever do one of these without having a reason. So for all of you that don't know who I am, my name is Margaret Spence. I am the founder of the Inclusion Learning Lab. We are a community built to support DE&I within organization. We offer learning and development to organizations. Next Wednesday, um, we have Third Wednesday where we're going to talk about ERGs. We have a course that we are finishing up on DE&I data storytelling, which we have all the basis for it. We're going to add the buy button when we are ready to go because we're not quite ready yet. We offer support to all the leaders out there who are doing the work of inclusion in the workplace. That is my background. How did I get here today? Why am I talking about Why professionals of color must support each other. So last week I was at a wonderful conference in Washington, DC, uh, Baltimore, and it was a great environment where lots and lots and lots of people of color came together. And in that room was an energy, an electric energy that it's hard to describe. There were 500 or 600 professionals of color in the insurance industry, and it was, I think, the first time that the event had been in person since the pandemic. And so we all got in these rooms, we hugged, we talked, there were lots of circles and huddles with each other, there were people who were supporting each other, there were those of us who we consider ourselves the almost elder statesmen of the industry, who went over to younger folks. There were some young kids who were at the event from Fisk University and from University of Illinois, and those of us elder statespeople— which I didn't think I'd ever be an elder statesperson, but here I am, what the hell— went over to these younger folks and started talking to them about a career in insurance. And why they needed to pick that as a career and why they needed to be intentional about how they come into the industry. And what I saw was a lot of people who were willing to put their arms around each other to create space for growth. But at the same time, I became an observer, which is where I sit in a lot of instances. As an observer, you don't get involved in the weeds of things. You sit back and you watch how people move and mingle with each other and how they make others feel comfortable in the spaces. And have they made me feel comfortable in the space? Have, have they created a psychological safe space for me? And have they created psychologically safe space for others? And so in that vein, a lot of things happened. There were, there were moments in that vein where psychologically, psychological safety wasn't created for me personally. In that vein, there were areas where I didn't feel fully respected. Um, there were areas in that vein where I felt, um, that I couldn't be included. And this is not a voice thing, this is not a taking over thing, this is not any of that. This is just one-on-one interactions with people, not main interactions, but one-on-one interactions. The conference, amazing. So as I sat there and as I ran a session I did a mantra for the folks in that session, and the mantra when we opened was, you've earned the right to stand in the room. The organization that hired you hired you because you are the best at the best. You are contributing to the organization's bottom line. You are focused and you are highly regarded in this area. And so I went through this mantra with the group that I was moderating this panel. And in the end, I asked myself, how do we as professionals of color walk out of this amazing conference and continue to support each other at the lowest level possible? Whether it's I can pick the phone up and call you and say, I'm on the 100th floor and I'm about to jump. Or you call and say, I want to talk about compensation. I am applying for a new job and I need you to be honest with me about compensation. Or if you call and say, here's 3 possibilities I want to take in my career, can I go in these directions in my career? Um, can you support me beyond the superficial? Can you really support me at the lowest level that I need support? Can you make it about me and not about you when I ask for support? And are you so caught up in the corporate spin that you've forgotten that you're a Black person or a person of color. Oh, Margaret Spence. Yeah, that. Um, here's the big question: will I find the level of love that I need from my own people when I need to be loved? Hard ones, um, and can we as a people put down our grandstanding and our superficial BS and our need to dress the part and actually figure out how we can collectively pull ourselves up and demand more than just what we've been given. Those were the questions that I had as the fly on the wall. That was my question. And as— and I became an observer because one of the things that I do when I go into spaces and environments is I become an observer. I look at how people interact, I look at how people move among people, I look at how they gel with each other, and I ask the question, what are we doing here? Is the question that I ask. So today's topic is how do we as people of color support each other? And I'm going to have a hard hard discussion about this one. This is not going to be niceties on this episode of Inclusion Unscripted. Here's what I know. I ask myself a couple questions when it comes to support. The quest— the first one is, how will I know that I can trust you? That's the first question that I ask. When I encounter people. When I walk in a room, I don't go in the room as Margaret Spence, founder of Inclusion Learning Lab, XYZ, XYZ. I don't go in there as any of that because oftentimes nobody even knows me, and I love that because it's not important for you to know my name in this instance. When I walk in the door with my own people, the first thing I ask is, how will I know that I can trust you? And this is a question that as a person of color we ask about each other, and a question that we don't often want to talk about, because trust is the basis for us as people of color. We already live and exist in an environment where our white counterparts don't trust us. They don't pour into us often. They don't fill our cups up. So when we get together with our own people, the question that we must ask at the top of the level is, "How will I know that I can trust you?" And the question for those of us who are professionals of color, we need to be mindful that trust is the basis for the relationship and support that we need from each other. Is the trust that you're giving me a surface trust where you laugh in my face and say, Margaret, you're phenomenal, but then behind my back you stab me in the back, right? When I'm not listening and hearing, the dagger is out because our own internal insecurities come into play. As people of color, we cannot expect the, um, majority community that we live in to give us what we need. We must expect that our community is going to give us what we need, but we cannot give other people what we don't have. So if we are not emotionally evolved, if we haven't done the internal work on ourselves if we haven't done our own self-transformation, if we haven't dug deep in our own places, we as people of color create psychologically unsafe places for our fellow people of color. We do, and we do it with such happiness sometimes that it peeves me off. So again, the first question is, can I trust you? And can I trust you fully, or is the trust that, that, that I'm asking for transactional? Let's talk about that. As I said to you all, I don't write a script for this. When I come to this podcast, Inclusion Unscripted, don't write a script. I write a couple bullet points. I write 10 questions I want to go through. Everything else comes from me and how I felt, how I feel, how I think we need to impact each other. I'm often being asked why don't I have guests. I do have guests and I will have guests, but God knows I have almost 40 years of stuff pent up that this is going to work out. So here's the question: is the support that I'm gonna get from my own community transactional, or is it supportive? Are you only important— are you only interested in helping me if I can transact a business with you, or are you sincerely trying to help me and support me and uplift me and build me because this is the right thing to do from one person of color to another? That's the question. The next question is, what will you do to support me? If a person comes to you and says, here's the burden I'm carrying, here's what's going on with me, here is the stressor I'm under, How do you, as another person of color, listen to that individual and give them the space to trust you enough to share their heart space with you? How do you do that? Because if we do not share our heart space fully with each other, we are having superficial experiences with each other, superficial experiences. And those superficial experiences leave the individuals feeling like they have a hole in their heart. This is it. We have to support each other at the lowest level. We have to say, what do you need from me and how can I give it to you? Because if we learn how to give to our own self, then we don't need to depend on the majority community to give us what we need. We as people of color must be willing to give ourselves what we need as people of color. As professionals of color, we have to create our pods and our community and our envelope around each other to help us rise and help us survive within the communities that we're in. If I can't count on my own community to support me, how can I expect the other community to support me? So then let's talk about how we divide ourselves. As Black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, Native people, we tend to divide ourselves down into these categories, and we divide ourselves down to the point where we can't fully trust each other to embrace each other and say it's the good of the entire group that we are after. And so what happens is we create these subgroups within ourselves, and the subgroups get entrenched, and the subgroups fight against each other, or the subgroups don't support each other adequately. But here's what I know, um, Accenture did a thing that said, when, when, when she rises, we all rise. When one of us rises we all rise, and it's imperative that we don't allow ourselves to be refractured within our sub-communities. So for example, you all have heard me say I'm Caribbean, I'm Jamaican, but I'm Black. So do I then subgroup off into my smaller community and forget about the main community that I'm a part of? We can't do that, right? Because if one rises, we all rise. There was a phenomenal event at the end of the conference about Black women in executive spaces in the insurance industry. I wish that event had been recorded, put onto platform, and replayed so that those powerful women that were on that stage could talk about the things that they've gone through, how they've positioned themselves, how they've moved how they've supported each other so that everyone could hear what support looks like among women of color. Because when we're talking about support, right, we have to ask one question: can I trust you to have my back? Can I trust you to share data with me that you know in confidence and trust me that I'm going to have that information, keep it to myself, and use it to help me grow. One of the big questions that we had was equity. If I don't know how much is I'm supposed to ask for, for pay, and there's no one telling me how I'm going to get there, and all they're giving me is superficial stuff, then I am getting no support. I'm really getting no support, right? I'm getting no support. So we have to demand more of each other in terms of the support we need as professionals of color from our own community. We have got to demand more. We have to say to ourselves as people of color, How do I learn to love my brothers and sisters more? That's, that's the first question. How do I need to learn to support my brothers and sisters more? How do I need to learn how to build trusting relationships of substance that's not social, that's substance? That supports my fellow person of color. The question that we have to ask ourselves as people of color, as professionals of color, how do I make my fellow person of color feel when they encounter me? How do I make you feel when you encounter me? How does that work? Do I feel safe? Do I feel that I'm in a trusted relationship? Do I feel that you respect me fully? Do I feel that you're going to embrace me as a whole person? Do I get it that if I'm not wearing red bottoms, I can belong in the group? Because we tend to be superficial as people of color. We think the handbags and the shoes and the clothes is what makes us. That is the trappings. That is not success. Success is when we recognize that in order for us to rise, all of us as people of color must put our collective arms around each other and help us rise one by one by one. We have to do that as women. We have to subset down. But here's what we have to do as women. I was listening to— at the same conference, I was listening to Dr. Nunnery, Dr. Lee as we call him affectionately, talk about a study that is being done around African Americans in the insurance industry. And he said that less men responded and more women did. So sisters of color, let me talk to you. Let's have a discussion, sisters of color. For eons, our brothers have been double marginalized within this world that we live in. They have been incarcerated, they have been pushed down in schools, they have been trampled on. Their manhood has been taken from them at the very beginning of time. From the beginning of slavery. And as women, we have figured out a way to rise, but we cannot leave our brothers of color behind. We must bring our brothers of color to the table with us. There are more women rising. We've got to get our men to rise as well. What is the support that our men of color need to be fully engaged in their development as leaders, as professionals? As women, we need to support that. We need to sit with them and say, how do I help you rise? How do I support you? How do I open my network so you can walk in it. How do I do that? How do I make that happen? So we cannot, as professionals of color— and I'm not just talking about Black, I'm talking about Hispanic, Asian, Native, Black people, I'm talking about all of us as professionals of color. You can have multiple subgroups under that. You can be a professional of color who is LGBTQ. Got it, you're in the list. You can be a professional of color and you may claim a specific nationality, but at the end of the day, when you walk in the room, nobody says, are you LGBTQ? Are you from the Caribbean? Are you from here? They see you as a Black woman, Black man, Hispanic man, Hispanic woman, Asian woman, Asian man, Native man, Native woman. That's where they see you. So if we as professionals cannot create psychological safety for ourselves, we cannot expect our white counterparts to create it for us. If we cannot create the circle to empower ourselves within ourselves, we cannot expect our white counterparts to do it for us. If we cannot create substantive relationships within our groups, then we cannot expect anyone to do it for us. We can't. If we do not have each other's back, no one will have our back. Because here's the thing: people watch how we treat each other. People watch how we treat each other, and they say in their mind, if Margaret is treating her fellow Black person or woman this way, what is she expecting from me? And we're going to do a program. I'm trying to get the guest on. We're going to do a program on when people of color are in positions to help vendors, what do we expect from you? Because here's what I know, as people of color, we don't know how to fully support each other. We've never been taught it. We haven't been given a course on how do we support our fellow person of color? What does that look like? How do we become introspective in our own selves? How do we do transformation within our own selves so we don't see each other as competition? See, there's a method of competing that many of us think we are competing with the planet. I'm 23 years into this game of self-employment. I'm not competing with nobody. Margaret is an island on the island by herself. Because what we have to understand is there's enough room for all of us at the top. But if we allow a scarcity mindset to engulf us, if we allow scarcity to engulf us as people of color we will never learn how to support each other. If we bring in jealousy, scarcity, it— what's mine is mine, um, I should rise and I should not help you rise, and if you rise it is a problem for me— if we think that way in a small mind mentality, then we miss an opportunity to support and empower each other. And that is the issue. That is the issue. And yes, that is the issue. We have to learn how to help each other rise. We have to learn how to, how to show substance. So here's an example, and I'm going to give examples now. And I want to thank all of you. Um, Hernán, thank you for joining. Um, Leslie, thank you for joining. It was so amazing seeing you as well. Um, amazing experience, Max. Oh my God, Max, great to see you too, Max. Um, thank you, um, again. Um, you know, the power is in the numbers. Um, thank you, Tony, for putting in your comment. Um, so Thank you for saying that. When you make it, send the elevator back down.

Yes.

So here's, here's the description. Here's what I want you all to do, because I can't just talk and not give you a thing to do. What I would like all of us to do as people of color is look in our own mirror and ask ourselves, where are my insecurities that stop me from supporting my brother and sister effectively? That's the first question. When I am creating an environment for people, what is the environment that I want to create for my fellow person of color? I want us to look back pretty firmly. I want us to look back and I want us to think about a time when we weren't a trustworthy partner for another person. I want you to think about the possible ways that you made that person feel when they walked away. And I want you to figure out within yourself how you could have done that better, and then I want you to tell me a time when you've been the best advocate for another person of color coming from a brother or sister of color. When have I been the best advocate? Is there anything that I could go back and change about my role as an advocate? Here's the other thing, we all need to learn as people of color how to be allies for each other. Let me say that again, as people of color we need to learn how to be effective allies for each other. If you see something, say something. We, we say to our DE&I processes, if you see something, say something. If it feels bad, say something. What ends up happening is when we are not genuine in our outreach to our fellow brothers and sisters, they walk away with holes in their heart. That adds to the already big hole in their heart that's been sitting there, and then we create an even bigger hole for them because they expected diff— something different from us and we didn't provide it. So the question I always ask is, when we are at our best as professionals of color Who do we want to be for our fellow professionals of color? Who do we want to be? Who do we want to be as professionals of color for our fellow professionals of color? When we are at our best, when we are at our best support, when we are reaching out, reaching back, reaching forward, Who do we want to be? You know, I was in a small conversation about 2, 3 months ago with an influential individual, and another person came up to them and said, I've just started in the role and I want your help. And the individual said, I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. That's too much. I don't have time for that. I don't have time to do that. So if we don't make time to do it, who do we expect is going to make the time? If a young person walks into your organization right now and you are already in that company, how do you make 5 or 10 minutes to reach to that person to say Welcome aboard. Here's the rules that you need to really be honoring. Here's how I can help you. I'm going to check on you for the next several weeks to make sure that you stay here. See, we always want the organization to do a retention strategy for people of color, but the reality is we've got to put the love handles around the people that are in the room that get in the room. We have to put our arms around them. We have to support our fellow employees of color. I heard one of the ladies on the panel at the NAYA conference say— one of the ladies on the Black Women, Black Executives in Insurance, Black Women Executives in Insurance— and she said, when somebody new starts, I try to get on their schedule and I try to go in and make an appointment to talk to them. I don't wait for them to come to me. I make an appointment, I try to talk to them, I try to tell them, and I try to say, hey, you know, there's 99 of us here, but here's 3 people I think you should connect with. This is what we need to do. We need to say, number one, I'm gonna be here to support you as another person of color. I'm gonna be here to support you. What do you need from me? And when the person lays their burden down on you, I need you to not try to deflect it, not try to question it, not try to give your opinion, not try to make it something else. I need you all to say, okay, I got it, I hear you. Because as people of color, we are often not heard. So when another person of color comes to you and says, I have a burden that I need to put down, Listen to them. Acknowledge the burden they've landed on you. Acknowledge it. Give them the space so that they could feel that they can trust you, and then say, how can I help you? And be genuine about the help you want to give. Don't burn yourself out trying to help the planet, but be genuine about the help you want to give. Right? Ask yourself, how can I help you rise out of this? What can I do to support you? What help do you need? What can I do as a stakeholder in this process to help you? That's what we have to do as people of color, right? Because there's not enough of us out there to support all of us. But we must, from now onward, create small groups within ourselves that are only there to support each other, that are there to say, we're gonna meet Thursday at 2 o'clock, here's a Zoom link. If you can make it, great. If you can't, great. If one person shows up, talk to that one person, because we— you don't know what burdens people are carrying. There are so many of us professionals out there carrying these heavy padded loads. I remember as a child we used to have donkeys back then. I'm aging myself now. And the donkey would have two big padding on the side of it, and he'd be loaded up with stuff, and we'd be riding down the street with the donkey, right? I remember seeing this, and as we're riding down the road with the donkey, the donkey would be like, oh, I'm heavy, I'm heavy. We as human beings, Black people of color, brown people of color, we are carrying sacks of weight on us, and we cannot release those sacks of weight if our own people don't support us to unpack the weights that we are living with. All of you, every single one of you that has a circle that has a group of friends, make a standing Zoom link once a month that says, we got unlimited time, nobody's gonna stop this Zoom link, come to this event, talk, we're gonna hear you, we're gonna give people time. Don't let any one person monopolize the time, but let people unpack even the tiniest thing that's going on with them. Give us space. I tell everybody, I'm a caregiver, I'm a business owner, um, I'm running a bunch of things, and there are days when I'm overwhelmed and overburdened to the point where I've had people call me for coaching. Right now I have a couple people who've reached out for coaching, and I've said I can't, I can't talk to anybody because I'm overburdened. I need a phone call. You know, during the pandemic, a lot of us created circles And for some reason, we don't think those are necessary now. Our psychological well-being is no different today than it was when we were locked up in rooms, right? But we have to start somewhere. We have to start somewhere. And if we cannot effectively support each other, by golly, don't ask them to support us. We can demand from our white counterparts support and empowerment and all this stuff, but we've got to give it to ourselves. So the topic today: put the oxygen mask on ourselves as people and professionals of color. Learn how to support us first. Learn how to unburden us first before We ask other people to unburden us because nobody understands what we're going through except us. No one can relate to what we're going through except us. So it is imperative that we create the psychologically safe cocoon for our own and provide our own support to our people. Do not depend on anybody else to support us. We've got to do it for ourselves. So starting today, put the oxygen mask on yourself first as people of color. Build trust, support, love, psychological safety, have each other's back, help each other rise, create substance, not flash and show. Help me feel that as a person of color, I have a board of directors who I can come to and talk honestly, who will not talk behind my back, who will be genuine support systems for each other. No cliques, no, um, conglomerates that we want to create, no superficial BS. The way we dress doesn't mean that our heart isn't aching. We could put on fabulous clothes and we are burdened inside and ready to end our own lives. We've got to move beyond superficial to substance as people of color because the next generation is depending on us to not be so superficial and to be substantive. I tell people when I walk in the room, you know nothing about me. If I look a certain way, you know nothing about me. I'll give you a little story. I bought a really super expensive car and it broke down, and I had a 2006 Toyota Matrix. It's an old beater, and I started driving my little old Toyota Matrix around town. And as I drive my little Toyota Matrix around town, I love when I pull up next to people, right? I pull up next to people in my little Toyota Matrix and I get out and I walk around and I look plain Jane because I'm not a fancy dresser, right? I could tell everybody I don't own a red bottom, ain't buying one. It's not a part of who I am, right? Not doing it. Okay, that's just Margaret. Margaret is a plain Janer, right? So I walk out and I get these stares, especially from my own people. They look at me like, look at that little raggedy car she's driving. But you don't know anything about me. I'm choosing to drive the raggedy car. But that's how we treat each other. That's how we treat each other. We want the trappings to be perfectly aligned before we help the person. But we were all big fat lump of coals that somebody polished off to become a diamond. Diamonds come from coal. So we cannot look at what— how we appear. We have to look at the substance that the person brings to the table. And can I make them better? Can I leave them better than the way I found them? And that's the key. And a lot of you are hiding pain under clothing. A lot of you are shopping yourself to get rid of the pain that you are holding inside, and you can't find another fellow person to help you unpack it. We cannot put our own lipstick on our emotional pigs. Right? Lipstick on a pig. We cannot put lipstick and clothing on the pain and hurt and psychological issues that we are having. We've got to find circles to talk it through. We've got to make sure we have right support systems, and we've got to be able to create psychological safety for our own people so that we can unburden. Because a lot of us are carrying God knows what, and we're walking around with it, with a Gucci bag and a fashion dress and a fashion suit, and we're aching and paining inside because we don't have a circle to share what's going on with us. So that is today's show. I want to thank you, um, Dr. Vel. Thank you for showing up. Leslie, I appreciate you. Um, Ron, I appreciate you. Um, all of you that showed up today, um, thank you so much for showing up for Inclusion Unscripted. We're gonna talk next week, um, about purpose, finding your purpose in the organization that you work for. That's what we're going to talk about next week, is finding your purpose. Thank you, thank you all for today. We'll see you next Friday. Have an amazing weekend. Um, remember what I said, we've got to put the oxygen mask on ourselves and support ourselves first. Thank you guys, see you next week.

Me safe and sound. And when I fall, you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day. I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken wings, but now I shine with your reflection on me. I'm getting back up on my feet. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you everyone. Have a great weekend.