Understanding Oppression and Bias_Final
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>> Do you feel like oppression affects your life?
Whether you do or you don't, I have a bold claim to make,
we're all oppressors, and we're all oppressed.
You might say, "But I'm a Health Coach.
I'm not an oppressor.
I treat everyone equally and with the dignity they deserve.
And, hey, I'm not oppressed,
I live a positive life of gratitude,
obstacles can't hold me down."
But stay with me here.
I trust that you all have great attitudes and intentions,
I would never doubt that.
But the point that I want to drive home today
is that oppression is the byproduct of bias.
Whether or not something is true about someone,
they're affected by the bias that they're labeled with
as a result of simply being who they are.
Since we all develop biases
as we learn about the world around us,
as children and teens, we all have a stake in this issue.
Whether we outspokenly express our biases
through hateful remarks or offensive jokes
or we hold them on a deep unconscious level
that subtly guides how we interact with people,
we're all labeling others while being labeled ourselves.
If we want to coach free of bias,
we need to understand how oppression works.
Bias occurs on the individual level
within groups and in our society and the media,
it's really important to have conversations about
and reflect upon this stuff
because if we leave it unchecked,
we perpetuate the system of oppression
that's embedded into our society.
The only way to create a shift is, for all of us,
to become aware of how we're affected
and how we affect others.
When we acknowledge the way we've been impacted by oppression
and the way that we as individuals and groups
have impacted others,
we can develop empathy and can start to relate to each other
more sensitively as humans.
When we do this as coaches,
we can grow as people and better serve our clients.
Let's say you're working with an overweight client Nancy,
and she wants to lose weight,
but she keeps coming back each week
and telling you the unhealthy food she's eaten.
You may get frustrated with Nancy and think,
"Uh, she's so lazy.
If only she stick to her plan, I know she'd get results. "
So this week you get a little firm with her
and challenge her willingness to change.
And next week, she doesn't come back.
Uh-oh, what happened?
You may have had the best intentions,
but what may have actually happened
is that you led with your bias
instead of putting yourself in Nancy's shoes.
And she felt her oppression as an overweight woman reinforced
instead of feeling understood.
So right now you may be saying, "What?" So I'll explain.
Nancy repeatedly didn't do the work,
so you concluded Nancy is lazy, where did this come from?
Well, let's say you hold the belief
that fat people are lazy.
If you haven't done the work to examine
who you hold biases about, this would go totally unchecked
and you may end up in a situation like this.
Instead of letting Nancy to lead,
you let your biased perspective lead,
so instead of meeting Nancy where she was at,
you tailored your intervention
to what you assumed she needed
and ended up losing her in the process.
What if instead you decided to come at Nancy
from a totally different angle, and instead you asked her
some bold high-mileage questions like...
"Do you feel like you're treated a certain way
by people in your life or by society because of your weight?
What does it feel like to be a full-figured woman
in a society driven by thinness?
How do you feel about yourself as a result of this?
What do you tell yourself about your weight?"
This could lead to a conversation
in which you connect with Nancy
over the pressure put on females to look a certain way,
and she ends up confiding in you
that she had an eating disorder when she was younger
because she felt like she didn't measure
up to society's standards.
And while she recovered from binging and purging,
she never really got the whole body acceptance thing
quite down.
It turns out Nancy really just wants
to get rid of the critical voice in her head
more than she wants to lose weight, she's not lazy,
she just feels doomed to fail after so many years of trying,
so she's given up.
Humans are resilient creatures,
we're all born into this world with infinite possibilities,
and we can overcome just about anything if we really try.
So, as a coach, we try to instill in your clients
that they're capable of achieving any goal
that they set their minds and hearts to.
Oppression in the form of discrimination and prejudice
can create real roadblocks in people's lives,
which can be heartbreaking and frustrating.
You can't be afraid to go there
and explore these delicate issues
if you really want to show up and create space.
It's important to always be a beacon of light for your clients,
to champion them and lift them up to see
that there's a world of possibility out there
for each and every one of them.
If you do this without acknowledging
how they've been affected by bias,
you're not truly empathetic
and you're not actually empowering them,
you're disempowering them.
Let me explain.
You can best serve your clients by delivering
a healthy balance of validation and encouragement.
It has to be both.
Validation alone takes control away from your clients
and lets them slip into the victim role
while encouragement alone sends the message
that up until now they just haven't been trying hard enough
and places a little too much responsibility on them
by devaluing their experiences.
People typically sign up for coaching
because they're experiencing some kind of internal conflict,
they're feeling stuck about something,
they want to make a shift in their own behaviors,
or up their game.
Generally, we're trained to look towards
what a person is doing or not doing
which can leave out important context.
Someone who's been discriminated against
or stereotyped as heard messages
about their flaws and inadequacies
maybe for their entire life.
Some people hear this stuff every day
from people in their lives, from the media, from strangers,
and what's so toxic isn't the messages themselves
but the fact that these messages become internalized,
and the person begins to oppress themselves.
When we become oppressed, we become our own oppressors
and create labels of our own.
We don't do this because we hate ourselves
or because we're all secretly masochists,
it's just how our brain works.
Oppression and bias become adapted
as our own limiting beliefs.
If you glaze over this stuff and only send the message
to your clients that they can choose to be happy
and that they're responsible for how they feel,
it just gives them one more thing to feel inadequate about.
You definitely want them to get to the place
where they can realize that they can choose happiness.
But first, you need to sit with them and let them know
that you understand that the struggle is real.
As a coach, this takes both patience and bravery.
It isn't easy and it's not done overnight.
It can bring up uncomfortable material
and sensitive language,
and it can make you feel labeled yourself.
Imagine you're a white coach
working with an African American client Antoine,
who struggles with his identity
because stereotypes and stories in the news
frame a young man like himself as dangerous.
His experience of his identity could be playing a major role
and what's going on with his personal relationships
and his feelings of self-worth.
Things he's been working with you on
but he might be hesitant to go there with you,
especially if you're white.
He may feel like life is unfair that he's disadvantaged,
he's angry, and maybe it all stems around this issue.
But if you don't open the door
to talking about these topics,
he may never go there with you.
You don't need to be an expert,
but you do need to be able to acknowledge
the system of oppression and privilege
and ask questions like,
"What's it been like for you living as a black man
in a white suburb?"
And furthermore,
you need to show him that you're sitting alongside him
which includes not getting offended
by what he shares with you
because let's say Antoine's only learned
defense against racism is reverse racism,
and he starts telling you everything he hates
about white people.
He, like many others, tries to free himself from oppression
by oppressing others and tries to break free of judgment
by judging others,
you might be offended by Antoine,
especially, as a white coach in this scenario,
and you might shut down.
But look, this might be his best attempt
at self-preservation.
Without acknowledging this,
it will breed defensiveness on both ends
and you won't be able to really hear or understand Antoine.
It's important for you, as the coach,
to fully hear out his beliefs and his experiences
even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.
It's your job, as a coach,
to know the mechanics of all this stuff,
but it's not your job to point it out.
The best thing you can do is
to just be totally present and receptive
and hold the space for him to have these judgments
and see how they're affecting his life.
This isn't about having a coachable moment
and it definitely should not be about
justifying the behavior of, in this case, white people,
it's about being there for him
when all of these people in his life haven't.
If you feel like you need to express to Antoine
that you're not racist
and that you would never do these things to him,
you're still sitting in your shoes not his.
This isn't about you,
it's about exploring how Antoine came to feel this way.
When these touchy subjects come up,
it's tempting to justify ourselves
to show that we're on the good side,
but really we do this to preserve our own images
and justify our own privilege.
If you are to respond to Antoine saying something like,
"Hey, that's not true, not all white people are bad. "
You'd be sending a message of invalidation
and imposing your own worldview,
instead stay with him by exploring his experiences
and attitudes further without bringing it back to yourself
or offering rebuttals.
You may be the least prejudiced person you know,
but in this scenario, as a white professional,
you're by default
part of the institutionalized level of oppression
which as a result of affording you safety and status in life
hold people like Antoine down.
Your experience becomes your reality.
If the world is repeatedly a cruel and cold place to you,
you're going to believe that the world is cruel and cold
and respond to as such and with good reason.
So it's problematic when you don't step into people's shoes
and challenge them by saying, "No, it's not.
The world is a loving happy place.
You just need to adjust your perspective. "
This is invalidating.
And when people's feelings and experiences are dismissed,
they just feel more misunderstood and more alone,
another experience of the world being cruel and cold.
So while it's true that the way we process and react to things is
what creates our feelings and our realities
it's also true that our experiences of the world
and how the world responds to us
varies greatly from person to person and culture to culture,
it can create legitimate obstacles for people.
It's really important to acknowledge this.
If you don't acknowledge
the bias that people are innocently subjected to
as a consequence of belonging to a certain race,
gender, sexual orientation, or whatever else,
you're contributing to the oppression
by upholding the system that weighs them down
and not seizing the opportunity
to show them a different experience.
If you see everyone is part of one race,
the human race, that's great.
But this ideology doesn't acknowledge that
while this would be ideal, it's not our current reality.
The reality is that people have been judged and oppressed
based on a number of factors their entire life.
And literally, no one escapes it, men, women, children,
the elderly, people of all races and ethnicities,
and people of all sexual orientations.
There are positive and negative biases for them all.
And you can't have bias without also having a counter-bias.
This means, for any given quality
if you're not part of the oppressed group,
you're part of the privileged
whether or not you choose to be.
With privilege comes the responsibility
to admit that the power of the way
you're regarded and treated in society
comes at the expense of the oppressed.
This doesn't mean you should beat yourself up
for who you are or renounce yourself,
but you should appreciate that your dominant status
in any category provides you an opportunity
and a responsibility to help and be allies
for those who live on the other side of that judgment.
Your clients who face discrimination or feel oppressed
by the way society treats them need to hear that you care.
They need to hear that you recognize
that life can be hard, and unfair, and messy,
and that it's not necessarily their fault.
The point is not to blame society for their hardships
but recognize that their struggle is a tough one.
Have you ever heard of the concept of learned helplessness?
This is a mental state that occurs
as the result of a persistent failure to succeed.
You try to achieve an outcome
and you're met with the same external obstacle
over and over and over again despite your best efforts.
After a while, you just stop trying
because your subconscious brain works to protect
and spare you from the repeated pain.
It gets the message, you cannot succeed, so response like,
"All right, all right, well, I'm done. I quit. "
And it shuts down.
So it doesn't even notice when the obstacle is removed.
This concept was documented in a famous experiment
back in the 1960s where dogs were placed into crates
that were divided in half with a low fence
that could easily be jumped over.
The side of the crate that the dogs were placed in
had electric floors
that could deliver a small shock to the dog
when the experimenter randomly triggered in.
When the dogs were shocked, they'd all quickly jump over
to the other side of the crate to try to escape the pain
but there was another group of dogs
who received some shocks prior to going in the crate,
they didn't hop over to the other side of the fence to escape it,
they actually lay down and took the pain
thinking they had no choice in the matter
assuming they'd still be shocked
on the other side of the fence.
They simply had given up trying
because the past had taught them that they can't succeed.
As humans, we'd respond to repeated adversity this way too.
Have you ever experienced this in your own life?
When you see your clients doing things
that seem contrary to their goals and just not trying at all,
try to have the sensitivity to look at
not just what they're doing to self-sabotage
but to see where society or the people in their lives
have kicked them when they were down.
You need to be able and willing to step into their shoes
so you can say,
"Wow, I totally understand why you feel like giving up. "
This is you meeting your clients where they are
and only from there can you start to encourage them
to explore how they can overcome the biases in their lives.
Now you have the solidarity and the trust established
to explore how the messages they've received
have become internalized as limiting beliefs.
Only from this place will they start to see
that they have a choice to change the way
that they feel about themselves
and to rise above the state of learned helplessness.
The main takeaway point from this lecture
is that oppression affects us all
both as the oppressors and the oppressed.
In order to put aside your biases
and step fully into your client's world,
you need to be able to recognize what your biases are.
By being bold enough to ask difficult questions
and having the empathy to listen as your clients go deep,
you can help your clients change
by demonstrating a balance of validation and encouragement.
This will help them recognize that they've internalized
the negative messages they've received about themselves.
And while they can't change how others treat them,
they have the power to change
how they feel about themselves.
This is a tough topic to embrace,
so I thank you all for showing up today.
I realize that it may be sensitive or triggering for some,
and I encourage you to apply this information
by doing the work
to understand how oppression exists in your life.
The worksheets in this module
will help you tap into these concepts,
so be sure to check them out.
Thank you for watching,
and we'll catch you in the next lecture.
Bye for now.