What you can do to be readier to welcome top talent onto your team – people who happen not to have been born here.

Stop policing what other adults choose to do from one meeting to the next. Don’t do them, do you. If you want to be on camera, do it. If you don’t want to be on camera, do that. If you’d like to ask your colleagues when you can see their face, go ahead. Don’t assume. Don’t judge. And don’t read into everyone else’s on and off camera behavior.

I’ve got very good news – you do not have to suffer through meeting after meeting with no room to breathe, eat, or pee. Back-to-back meetings are so stupid. There are diminishing returns almost immediately. Good news, we can bring sense back to our work calendars, our work teams, and our work cultures.

My grievance: garbage check-ins.The alternative: check-ins that are actually useful.

At the top of a meeting, retreat, or event, someone makes a half-hearted attempt at a get-to-know-you question. The question is often unplanned, and stumbles into some inane wondering about “favorites.”

My grievance, my annoyance, my ick regarding these low caliber questions are that while you may be getting snippets of insight, you are more often than not actually performing a middle school-esque sorting of who likes “cool” stuff and who does not.

There are way better ways to check in, especially across meaningful lines of difference like race, religion, and gender.

Dress codes in U.S. workplaces continue to be a hot topic. Why? Because bodies continue to be a hot topic. Clothes, face, hair. Here in the U.S., we’re having a helluva time releasing our desire for control of other people’s bodies.

Years ago, particularly in white progressive circles, you may have noticed land acknowledgements making their way into community space.

The material practice of acknowledging stolen land and broken treaties is one thing. Then what? What happens after we name what is true?

Who lives here and who works here matters. A handful of numbers that I find meaningful at the moment:

· The U.S. will return to being majority POC by 2045

· Children of color already make up the majority of kids in many states

· Current U.S. colonies are majority People of Color

· There are currently 574 Federally Recognized Tribes inside the U.S.

My resilience strategies do not remain static; they can't. The world, and my world, continue to shift, change, and evolve. I am an adult who wants to be able to interact with hard truths without crumbling. I don't want to be numb. I also don't want to be so overcome that I can't function. So what do I try? I learned to increase the charge without fritzing out.

All four generations currently in the modern day workforce feel deeply disrespected and misunderstood by the other three.

Ouch. And, in my lived experience - that tracks. We treat one another as generational caricatures - tropes of the lowest side of what our particular generation is known for - and made fun of.

In my experience learning requires humility. I have gotten increasingly comfortable with self-identifying as a smart and capable person who mostly doesn’t know things. That dissonance no longer bothers me. My wish for you, is that we each commit, one nugget at a time, to our own re-education.

As a professional coach and facilitator, with a front row seat to more than 200 organizations’ cultures since 2017, American workers are most certainly in a heightened arousal state.

People are pissed at their bosses. Pissed at their co-workers. Pissed at their companies. And pissed at the economy overall.

December 10th, 1980 - As I approach my 43rd birthday, reflecting on the heavy yet hopeful times of my birth era, I'm embarking on a new adventure - a self-imposed essay project. Join me every Thursday for 52 weeks as I delve deep into topics of race, gender, and the American workplace. Let's navigate these important conversations together.