The Perfect Excuse

I am so freaking pumped to do this video. I personally think the best part of wisdom is that it constantly grows. You're constantly adding to your understanding. It's like you're wearing glasses. And with each new lesson, it becomes clearer and clearer and easier to understand. And maybe that's the gift of age, I don't know. But recently, life proved me right about something I've believed for ages with a little tweak. And that's what I want to talk about today. So let's talk about it. Bonjour. Hi, everybody. It's Sandy Boucher here once again. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River first nation in Treaty 3 territory in Northern Ontario, Canada. And I dedicate every waking second to trying to bring this country together. And I'm not talking about, I guess, a wide variety of things. What I am talking about is Indigenous Canadian reconciliation, learning to work together respectfully for the first time. No more assimilation, no more mainstream demanding that it's done our way, but learning how to meet in the middle of the bridge. And that requires work on both sides. That requires healing on the part of Indigenous peoples, unpacking all that has been done to us. And on mainstream, not only is it a lot of education, but we gotta change some things, because the reality is you can't heal if the attacks don't stop. Let's get real here. I'm known for my bluntness, always respectful nodding to shame or guilt. But you can't fix a problem if you don't identify it and get real about it. So along the lines of working with first nations people in First Nation communities. I've been doing this work for 15 years. And in the beginning, I worked exclusively with Indigenous communities and peoples. And often the request would come in and I swear the wording always seemed to be the same. Sandy, can you help us? We want to create either a healthy work environment or a healthy community. And after years of doing that work, I started responding with, do you have healthy people? Because as you've heard me mention in other videos, I look at it like a beautiful feast, the kind you would have at, like, Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever the occasion is. And that feast is made up of amazing dishes, but each dish is made up of amazing ingredients. Your community and how healthy it is is made up of the people in that community. Your work environment is as healthy as the people in that work environment. And that is why I am so excited, because this week, not only did I introduce you to my expanded team but this week we held our first staff meeting with the entire team together and I could not be happier. But here's where the tweak comes in. One taking part in also observing the staff meeting and then reflecting on it afterwards really had me realize that I have a healthy work environment made up of healthier people. Not healthy, healthier. Now, what's the difference? What I now believe is when I was talking about a healthy work environment or a healthy community needs healthy people, that got dismissed right away. Because people realize that every single person is struggling with something, has their challenges, has their traumas that they may or may not have healed from. Healing is a long and difficult journey, but without it, life is a long and difficult journey. Just throwing that out there. And I think by saying a healthy work environment needs healthy people, it was the excuse people needed not to try. Well, we're never going to be able to do that, so why bother? We might as well just accept nice excuse. When I realized at my staff meeting is you don't need 100% healed people. You need people on a healing journey. You need people that are trying to be the best they can be. You need people open to learning and improving. The one thing that cannot happen, and I think probably happens in every unhealthy work environment or unhealthy community, is bullying and gossiping. I was thinking about it from an employer perspective and I can honestly say if I hired a new staff person and found out they were engaged in either bullying or gossiping, they would no longer be on my staff. Now, before HR people go freaky, I would either give them a six months probation period. So because you can let people go for whatever reason in the six months and bringing in that toxic ingredient ruins the whole dish back to the feast analogy. So that just would not be tolerated. Or I would employ people on contracts and you can end the contract. Maybe you have to wait to the end of the contract and then I do some healing work with the rest of the staff and probably apologize for ever having putting them in a situation where they'd have to endure someone like that. If to all the employers out there and managers and supervisors, if you are not acting on bullying and gossiping, you are complacent in creating an unhealthy work environment. Don't be surprised about the HR complaints, don't be surprised about the turnover in your staff. Don't be surprised if you have trouble attracting new staff. You created an unhealthy environment. Now it's a little more complicated or a little more different, difficult when we talk about a community, when you think of a First Nation community and trying to make it healthy, I've said for a long time, indigenous people are flowers trying to grow in soil, dosed in gasoline. We inherited a whole bunch of trauma, endured our own trauma, and sometimes it's really hard to find supports or time to heal when you're trying to survive and earn a living and feed your kids. But community doesn't have to be the entire First Nation. Your community could be your inner circle. Your community could be your circle of friends. You can decide that your circle of friends does not tolerate or engage in gossiping or bullying. Guess what that means? You might spend some time alone. I'm totally cool with that. I would rather be alone than be involved in that kind of bs. I have zero interest in being with someone or a group of someone's who spends all their time talking about the person that's not in the room unless they're saying great things. Then of course I want to be there. I have zero time for that because I am on my healing journey and those are the two things that are going to ruin this recipe. So is your community healthy? Is your work environment healthy? Instead of pointing fingers at someone else, is your cubicle healthy? Do you tolerate gossip and bullying in that cubicle? Do you gossip and bully? If there's one thing I've learned about lateral violence, we love to point out who's doing it, yet we never admit we've done it too. And until we can and we change those behaviors, nothing is going to change. And guess what? Blaming someone else or they did it first. Are we in kindergarten now? You're a grown ass adult and you get to decide how to behave. That so reminds me of my mom who at one point when I. I know I've told this story before, when I was like 14 and a cashier did the classic eye roll microaggression crap and I actually got mad at my mom and said to her like, why don't you tell those rude people what they can do? Why do you insist on just smiling and walking away without batting an eye? My mom looked at me and said, because that person is not going to decide the type of person that I am. So kind of person. Are you? Do you gossip? Do you bully? Are you going to be the seed that starts the creation of a healthy work environment and a healthy community? Or are you just joining the others in the muck? I cannot even describe to you how happy I was at that staff meeting. I am surrounded by amazing people doing amazing things for all the right reasons. None of them are out to get each other. And it's a team. And I've waited my entire life to work in that kind of team. And guess what? I was able to create it. So can you. Until tomorrow. I just had to share that with you. Breaking on my team, Isn't that way better than gossiping and bullying? You decide. Till tomorrow. I love you. No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. It's Friday. This is Friday's video. Until next week. I love you. Take care. Bye. Bye.