Curiousity and why there is such an emotional cost of not discussing issues around Equality and Diversity.

The viel of the Politically correct!

Politically correct or not, these questions reflect natural and honest human curiosity about the lives and experiences of other people. Today’s politically correct culture often stifles our natural curiosity about people who are different from ourselves and keeps us from asking the questions that are really on our mind. As a trainer and speaker, we need to give people effective tools, real-life examples, and maybe even a web space that will help us better relate and respond to, as well as respect the differences that make up the many cultures of the United Kingdom. We have shown participants how to get real about asking and answering questions, and learning about themselves and each other. The result is a greater understanding and appreciation of differences as well as the tools to tackle sensitive subjects in the future.

The “What, Why, Do” Solution

The world in the 21st century is more connected, yet more diverse than ever before.

This presents a significant challenge, especially in the workforce where unified teamwork is a critical part of organisational structures. We all understand that men, women, race/ethnicity, gay, straight, disabled person, the young and the older person, bring a variety of different experiences to the work place. Many of these groups may differ in their values, attitudes, behaviours and the manner in which they perceive situations and solve problems, but our challenge is to learn from this. Learn how to communicate using cultural competency. Learn how to remove barriers so that we can enhance understanding and appreciation and establish a sense of unification in our jobs and in our lives.

What ambition has the organisation got so the vision of equality and diversity can be fulfilled?

How has your organisation’s action done this?

What achievement has the organisation done around equality and diversity?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

ASK, LEARN and APPRECIATE each other and our differences.

How do we do this when we talk about Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?

Equality is not a matter of ‘political correctness’ it is a foundation that we need so we can build successful working relationships with those people we interact with and who we seek to help.
What hidden handbrake stops us as people from moving forward in Equality and Diversity and Inclusion (yes, everybody’s got one).

How we can release it and start moving forward effortlessly?

What are the unwritten values that make people cling onto patterns they don’t actually want, and how can you get it to work for you rather that against you?

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for me is about Life, chance and opportunity.

The level of opportunity may influence the level of life quality.

Thompson (1997) proposes a model to understand the different levels on which discrimination operates, known as PCS model. The letter 'P' refers to the personal level, that of thoughts and feelings. This level interacts with and is influenced by the others. 'C' level is culture, which operates within structure of society, the 'S' level. Each level is interlinked and interacts. This is a useful model to examine how discrimination against disabled people occurs not simply at a personal level, but that discrimination is institutionalised within our society.

1. How is my behaviour affecting the behaviour of the other people involved?
2. How is their behaviour affecting me?
3. How are the behaviours of others affecting each other?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

What habit patterns have got around Equality and Diversity?

Every person who has had even a slight opportunity to observe children will have noticed the one great fact about the pattern of habit. The thousand things that you do during a single day, from the time you dress yourself to the time you brush your teeth at night, are mostly acts of habit. If each act were not customary, it would require so much thought and attention that you could hardly do much more than get past your breakfast and make it through to bedtime. Habits enable us to do the necessary everyday things without conscious effort, thus leaving the mind free to do the new things, to attend to the really interesting things, to solve the new problems that constantly arise.

A great thinker has said that habit is nine-tenths of life. Whatever the exact proportion may be, the importance of habit is so great that we cannot afford to neglect the habits that our children and we as adult are acquiring. Let’s be thankful for how far the habits of ourselves shape our children. Most of the habits that we have learned to deal with everyday things become fixed in childhood. When children get to the school age, they acquire new sets of habits as a result of their thinking about life and character. That is, they develop ideals and try to live up to them. It is therefore the first duty of the parent, to see that their young child acquires the fundamental habits that are necessary for his/her welfare and for his/her happy association with others. The parent’s next duty is to see to it that as the child approaches teenage years, he or she has the opportunity and motivation to acquire lofty ideals.

Can you think of other habit patterns that you have formed within your daily life of activities?

Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form. That's because the behavioural behavioural patterns we repeat most often are literally etched in our brains pathways.

The good news is that through repetition, it's possible to form new habits.

So what habit patterns have we picked up about Equality and Diversity and what behaviours are associated with them?

Is it positive or negative around equality and diversity?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Equality Body Language and Social Background

Does your body language tell people your social status around equality ? Well according to this piece I came across from the Association for Psychological Science it does.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is determined by a number of factors such as wealth, occupation and schools attended. Socioeconomic status (SES) influences the food we eat, hobbies we participate in and can even have an impact on our health. People with an upper socioeconomic status (SES) background can often be accused of flaunting their status, for example, the types of cars they drive or how many pairs of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Bruno Magli, they have in their closet. It is easy to guess someone's Socioeconomic status (SES) based on their clothing and the size of their home, but what about more subtle clues?

Psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley wanted to see if non-verbal cues (that is, body language) can indicate our socioeconomic status (SES).

To test this idea, the researchers videotaped participants as they got to know one another in one-on-one interview sessions. During these taped sessions, the researchers looked for two types of behaviours: disengagement behaviours (including fidgeting with personal objects and doodling) and engagement behaviours (including head nodding, laughing and eye contact).

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that nonverbal cues can give away a person's socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviours compared to participants from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants' socioeconomic status (SES) background, based on their body language.

The researchers note that this is the first study to show a relation between SES and social engagement behaviour. They surmise that people from upper socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds that are wealthy and have access to prestigious institutions tend to be less dependent on others. "This lack of dependence among upper socioeconomic status (SES) people is displayed in their nonverbal behaviours during social interactions," the psychologists conclude.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Equality Body Language

Equality Body Language is also known as Nonverbal Communication, even though that's technically not correct, it gives you a lot of extra information beyond the spoken words that you can use to recognise people's emotions, and discover their real intentions.

Have you ever been speaking with someone and had a gut feeling or hunch, that they are not telling the truth?

What you are actually taking notice of in both situations is the body language, assuming they’ve not actually expressed it.

Is what people are saying (i.e. the words they speak) and what they are really saying, their intentions, emotions and hidden agendas, very different?

• Some people lie.
• Some people unconsciously oppose what they say
• Some people pretend to be what they're not
• Some people don't talk at all but their body speaks volumes!

What hidden body language have we got around equality and diversity? What are the unconscious gestures that we don’t want to show, and how can we get it to work for you rather than against you?

When we’re children we’re taught to be Polite! Decoded in everyday speak means tell a nice sounding lie.

Equality body language is so obvious most people just don’t see it, especially around Equality and Diversity.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Building Character

The trending of water so to speak of social mobility has been caused by bad parenting in working-class families, where the adults fail to instil self-discipline in their children, a study has found.

The research by Demos, the left-leaning think tank, finds that the richest in society are nearly three times as likely as the poorest to foster the character traits necessary for a person to get on in life.

The study reveals the gulf has widened because of the absence of “tough love” upbringing in too many working-class households.

This has been made worse by the collapse of marriage among the poorest families, the children of married parents are twice as likely as those from single parents to have the most important characteristics for success.

The Demos report, called Building Character, finds that social mobility, children doing better economically than their parents relative to the rest of society, rose from the second world war to the 1970s and then trend water, although it might have improved a little since 2000.

In families where parents are disengaged, children are three times more likely to develop negative characteristics. In the most extreme cases, the researchers found children could become emotionally insensitive or “callous”.

The report states: “Callous children grow up lacking a sense of empathy and guilt, and learn to see others in a purely instrumental way. There is a level of disengagement in a small minority of parents that would be considered neglectful.”

The researchers found that children in low-income families where their parents adopted a “tough love” parenting style were just as likely to develop positive characteristics as those in richer families.

Is it as easy as that for all our woe’s to place’s this at the core of social mobility and life chances.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

How Discriminative Are We?

Are we more discriminative than we realise or would like to admit?

We don’t necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people.

How is it, that we can remain comfortable whilst knowing we continue to gain from the suffering of another?

It gets deeper, when we ask, ‘can anyone truly be human under the forces of such oppression, when they are condemned to a life where injustice is at the core, where their free will is exhausted and they are too eager to obey, because it is a precondition for survival?’ If this is true then why do we accept it? Perhaps it is because we really are subhuman.

We as individuals have a habit of using ignorance to construct our world, based around concepts that make us feel good about ourselves. This of course impacts on how we perceive an ‘ism’. It should therefore come as no surprise that many people shut down when they are confronted with the word ‘racist’ ‘sexist’, ‘disablist’ or ‘ageist’.

Sometimes this is due to fear of other people’s reactions. On the flip side it may also be the case that for those who are affected by the ‘ism’, that they feel too vulnerable and too disempowered to address it.

Prejudice or Discrimination?

In simplistic terms, discrimination refers to a persistent inequality where individuals in a society inherit an inferior social status on the basis of ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender,’ ‘age’ ‘disability’ and/or ‘transgender’. The results can manifest themselves in many forms but in essence it is the exclusion of people from full and equal participation in a lifestyle we all collectively perceive as being valuable, important, personally worthwhile and socially desirable.

Discrimination and prejudice are so easily intertwined that many people confuse the terms. This can lead to the erroneous assumption that overt ‘ism’ no longer exists.

Discrimination cuts both ways.

Many who have experienced oppression inherit prejudices borne from their experiences. These prejudices can be represented as a form of hatred or intense dislike towards all those who are thought to be part of the collective group that responsible for their social disadvantages.
To identify the act of an ‘ism’ in all of its subtle and persistent forms can be extremely challenging. However, it is important not to forget the history of ‘ism’. We are wired to like people that are similar to us. It is this history of ‘ism’ that cannot be dealt with immediately.

What do you think?

Does it matter?

Thinking and Feeling our relationship on Equality, Diversity and Human Rights

Developing our understanding of equality, diversity and human rights and the important part they play in our lives through conversation an age-old tradition bridging and bonding within our communities. The conversation could cover a wide range of issues around cooperation and competition and co existing demonstrating the meaning of this in a personal way.

They are a devastating impact and their is evidence that in Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett book The Spirit level: Why more Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better are not upheld or are violated. The gap of persist inequalities are growing it is very important that we uphold the principles of Equality, Diversity and Human rights to secure our social economic and personal wellbeing within society or the crumbling fabric of societies will mass destruct on its self. A powerful argument within the book.

Equality, Diversity and Human rights are the cornerstone of a fair society. Everybody should have the right to live with dignity and respect, and everyone should be treated fairness, regardless of ethnicity, disability, age, religion, wealth, nationality and sexual orientation and other personal characteristic their may uphold. Equality, Diversity and Human rights affect every human being on earth, and in order to ensure our lives are not blighted by injustice, every human being on earth should be aware of their own and of other’s relationship of what do we mean by respect and dignity.

What is it to you?

What do you think?

Does it matter?

The emotional fall out of Equality and Diversity belief

To describe a belief on our training course we use the metaphor of R.S.I. Not as repetitive strain injury, but as Repetitive statement injury. It is a statement or a series of statements which can have a detrimental effect on you and your life. It can stop you from achieving your potential and decreases your performance.

These beliefs play big roles throughout childhood and into our adult lives, so realizing how much they affect us can lead to an even bigger opportunity to change them.

An example of this could be a parent who does not want their child to be disappointed and therefore protects them by telling them not to do something. It could also be a teacher telling you that you are not good enough or you can’t draw or sing etc. There are many more of these RSI’s, and they live with us forever and become part of who we are and form the values that we live by. This, in turn, forms part of the map we live with.

This can affect anyone, as we are all part of equality strands, for example, a woman in the work place. Her R.S.I’s may be stopping her fulfilling her own potential, but the interactions of others reinforce her own lowered self esteem. It’s like a viscous circle.

We are not always rational beings; we are often under the influence of others. Our R.S.I’s work because of this, and so our actions come about because of our beliefs and our experiences.

What our purpose is, is decided by how helpful are our beliefs are. Do there hinder us in our interactions with people or not? This is a core principle of community cohesion and the bridging and the bonding of communities. It is also a big influence on Equality and Diversity beliefs.
There is an old Chinese adage, that is half threat, half prophecy, “May you live in interesting times’’.

What do you think?

Does it matter?