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Hey there, Maureen China here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, neuro coach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and other people's emotions, change behaviors, flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you today as we look into how to discover and change unconscious biases and mental blind spots. So without wasting any time, grab your cup of coffee, water, tea, whatever it is, put your feet up and listening. Let's start with this quote by James Baldwin that says, A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will do with what you find or what you find will do to you. Implicit bias is a kind of distorting lens that arises as a product of our brain's experiences and the disparities in our society. We all have ideas about inequality, fairness, race, even the most open-minded amongst us have this. Those ideas have the power to form or even bias our perception, our attention, our memory, and our actions. All despite our conscious awareness or deliberate intentions, our ideas about race are shaped by the stereotypes to which we are exposed on a daily basis. People all over the world have experienced an unprecedented mixture of intense emotions resulting from months of uncertainty caused by COVID-19, the feeling of isolation, remote working, job and business losses, and a lot more. Then the amounts of death and the unclarity of why the black and minority groups in the UK and the US especially were disproportionately affected. As if this was not enough, then comes the senseless killing of George Floyd at a time when the BAME community were already feeling sore, then brought back to the surface the general social injustice that they feel that they constantly face. The world had already united in fighting COVID-19, so that unity with the intense emotion ignited to cause the unprecedented extreme social disruption that we are witnessing. I suppose the emotion from the whole incidence was like putting fuel to fire. And there's so many other biases apart from race. Bias is not limited to just race. It's not limited to one profession, one race, or even one country. It's also not limited to one stereotypical association. People can hold biases based on all sorts of characteristics, skin color, age, weight, ethnic origin, tribe, accents, disability, height, or even gender. Confronting bias requires us to look in the mirror. To understand the influence of implicit racial bias requires us to stare into our own eyes. To identify how readily stereotypes and unconscious associations can shape our own reality. This will help us move one step closer to clearly seeing the social harms, the devastation that bias can leave in its wake. By the time babies are three months old, their brains react more strongly to faces of their own race than to faces of people that are not like them. That race-selective response only grows stronger as children move into adolescence, which suggests that it's driven in part by the circumstances of our lives. We learn what's important, the faces we see every day. And over time, our brain builds a preference to those faces at the expense of skills needed to recognize other people's faces, and other people's faces become less relevant. Scientists see the other race effect, which is the other biases, as a sign that our perceptive powers are shaped by what we see. That cringeworthy expression, they all look alike, is actually a function of biology and exposure. Our brains are better at processing faces that evoke a sense of familiarity. Our experiences in the world seep into our brain over time, and without our awareness, they conspire to reshape the workings of our mind. Categorization of our brain can impede our efforts to embrace and understand people who are deemed not like us by tuning us out of the faces of people who don't look like us and dampening our sensitivity to them. And this is a very important reason why non-ethnic minorities need to really take time to understand your own biases to be able to build up that sensitivity to how blacks in particular feel. Blind spots are those unconscious biases, implicit associations, memory traps, and thinking errors that affect our behavior and decision-making abilities. We all have them even though most people don't think they do. Sadly, the police force are not the only institutions in need of deep reform. Racism affects many organizations and educational institutions that so powerfully influence the values and opportunities bestowed on current and future generations. Yet, our schools, colleges, and universities are dehumanizing pipelines to complacency rather than being catalysts for intellectual, social, and civic growth. This is why I'm so passionate about equipping and empowering educators with the right skills to give their learners a balanced view of life and address the hidden blind spots in their own minds. A lot of views and beliefs that people have that are really subconscious needs to start being examined to be able to get us to a place where we all appreciate each other's culture, each other's views, and most importantly, appreciate each other as human beings. So, how do we check biases? To ensure that the right and meaningful message is given at this time with our current crisis and to ensure that leaders do the same, it's crucial to first check your own unconscious bias. Neuroscientists have shown that a sense of unfairness activates networks in the brain similar to physical pain or disgust. Many people are experiencing a strong sense of wrongful emotion in the four main brain domains: condition, certainty, control, and ability to connect. If people already feeling like they are at a lower status and also experiencing uncertainty and experiencing a reduced sense of control over events, also feeling like others don't care about them and feeling intense unfairness, then they have hit all these five domains, each of which on their own creates a strong distress response in the brain. This is why great leadership is very critical now. In organizations as well as in the public realm. It's important that every leader makes a difference whether you lead an organization, a team, a community, or your family. Now, here's what science teaches us to do. The first is awareness. This time calls for all of us to be very self-aware of our thoughts, our biases, and our blind spots. This is not to shame anyone, but using it for educational purposes to shed light on your own deeper beliefs. Secondly, listen intently. Ensure that people feel heard because feeling heard releases strong positive neurochemicals into the brain, activating reward networks which can potentially calm an activated stress response. Every leader and manager has to learn to truly listen. You need to strengthen your ability to hear what is important to others. This can be achieved by creating psychological safe environments for people to confidently have open discussions, ask questions, and explain their own experiences. Stephen Covey rightly said, listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply. Active listening, followed by asking follow-up questions, ensures that you really understand the other person's perceptions or experiences. Thirdly, foster a community. When people have a common goal, their brains processes things favorably and allows them to own it. When you see the goals of others as different or competing with your goals, you block out their ideas, you may not experience much empathy for their pain and in extreme cases might even want them to fail. When you classify someone or a group of people as foes, that creates a disconnect in your brain, which then allows you to treat them as you would never treat a friend. Finding similarities with others, whether in your organization or in society, is the best way for the world to move forward. We know from research that when people experience a sense of unfairness and inequality, everyone suffers, not just the afflicted. It's time for country leaders and organizational leaders and managers to bring everyone together around shared goals. It's time to focus on our similarities rather than our differences. I've watched how our children, our youth, and adults are all struggling to make sense of what is going on. Deep emotions are rising up, so leaders need to find ways to unite people. And finally, it's important to look inwards and take bold actions. Moving the emotions from outrage to solution is the best way forward. CEOs and leaders now have to use their power and commit to making diversity a strategic imperative. Deeply examining your organizational systems visible and invisible for opportunities to increase fairness and role model what's right, not what's easy. It's important to identify inequalities in your organization's policies and systems and make real change. Business and community leaders can also collaborate on initiatives to support racial equality and ensure that whatever you do now is sustainable, backed by action and commitment moving forward. What can your organization do to support positive changes going forward? This is a question for you to think about and answer. We all need to engage in having difficult conversations and accept discomfort as a necessary part of change. We need to all be open to diverse perspectives about the actions we should take. Empathy will definitely go a long way. Put yourself in the shoes of those directly affected by the suffering. Don't shy away from it, don't ignore it, don't feel attacked yourself, but recognize that big change requires big ideas to succeed. For leaders everywhere, it's time to actively listen, connect, and act boldly. It's time to walk your talk. It's time to lead. Thank you again for tuning in. And remember that you are in control of your brain. So you have a choice to control your thoughts and your emotions. You can help your people manage their own thoughts and emotions as well. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. And I really want to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway from this episode today? And a few things before we finish. Have you subscribed to this podcast? If you haven't, please make sure that you click on that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast. Because once you subscribe, you will not miss an episode. And I'm so pleased to announce a challenge that I've got for you for the next fortnight. I'm going to pick a lucky person that has left a review and give a one-to-one session with. So that just might be you. So please don't forget to leave a review. Finally, remember to stay alert, stay safe, and keep well. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.