When you are five – people are just people you love in different shades. Since I was raised in a restaurant kitchen, my everyday normal from birth was to be surrounded by people of color. I became a women’s rights advocate, determined to be a female professional. I listened to Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers and Gloria Steinem. No 24 hour news cycle or social media to document the horrors.īeing a young child at that time in history shaped my thinking. But things did improve, not enough, but believe me they were worse than now because so much of what happened was hidden under the rug. (My first sit in was to protest this – I was in the 7 th grade). Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. That was about it unless you weren’t white – then you could be a maid or work on a farm. Women were “allowed” by society to be teachers, waitresses, nurses, secretaries, or housewives. The lady wore a light blue dress with a “Jackie Kennedy” pillbox hat. I can still see them sitting in the dining room rather than getting takeout at the back door. I remember Jim Crow and the first black couple who came to eat in our restaurant. I am also from the South (which by the way has its own attached implicit bias). I was in junior high when schools were integrated. People of color I know well were shot in the race riots during that time. I was a young child in the 60’s and have seen and lived through social disruption (and 3 pandemics). There are no “all’ statements when it comes to humans. It is only by retraining our “lazy” brain to not accept the false truths we have developed and examining them for accuracy can we stop defaulting to lies. A commonplace example of this is seen in studies showing that white people will frequently associate criminality with black people without even realizing they’re doing it”. If you are unfamiliar with the term Implicit Bias, we use the term to describe when we have “attitudes towards people or associate stereotypes with them without our conscious knowledge.
Incorrect implicit bias sorting got us here. Our country is in a time of civil unrest. Everybody has implicit biases based on the culture we were raised in.
But we must always be aware of what our brain is doing and if this ‘rapid judgement’ default is correct or simply something we picked up as kids from those around us who were wrong thinking. To have to consciously think about all these would be overwhelming and paralyzing. It is a natural human brain function to “sort” things because our mind is bombarded by hundreds and thousands of stimuli, images, smells and textures a day. We create stereotypes and profiles in our mind and never revisit them to examine them for truth. Once again, our “lazy” brain is looking for shortcuts. It does the same to clients as many have noticed.īut habit can also lead to implicit bias. This creates a lot of mental stress and discomfort. COVID-19 forced all of us to break out of our habit and disrupt our routine. Our mind is left to work out more complex issues and habit manages the routine stuff.
Work habits are what we develop when we know our job and can perform the task without conscience effort. Habits conserve energy which is important if you are a caveman and do not know when your next meal will be available. Habits can be good – like brushing your teeth every morning, or they can be bad – like smoking. It is for that reason we create habits more technically known as neuropathways. Our mind is an intentional “energy hog” using about 20% of all the energy we consume and produce in our body. Change happened FAST.Ĭhange is always stressful. Veterinary teams responded by creating parking lot protocols, dividing staff into teams to avoid shutting down in case a team member became sick and many forward thinkers added new technology like telehealth to their toolbox. So have most veterinary hospitals, as people sheltered in place and decided to add a pet to their quarantine or spent lots of time with the ones they had and discovered lumps and limps they had been to busy to notice. Some businesses, like Amazon and grocery stores have thrived. Over the last few weeks businesses have been forced into more changes that they could have imagined. I began my career as a speaker and trainer teaching change implementation.
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