Get your Belonging Bundle!
I am trying out a new way of sharing Belonging with all of you.
Included are:
Autographed copy of You Belong Here
You Belong Here enamel pin
You Belong Here sticker
Inner Work is Systems Work sticker
Link to order in the comments and profile.
Thank you for believing in Belonging to unite us all.
You Belong Here
#belonging #youbelonghere #deib #dei #innerwork #systemswork #identity #purpose #book #bookbundle
I‘ve been enjoying sharing about You Belong Here to audiences around the world. From Hong Kong to Dubai to Houston and San Francisco, this Belonging movement is thriving. Thank you to everyone that has brought me in to talk to your teams and organizations and believing in Belonging to unite us all.
BOOK LAUNCH DAY!!!
It’s finally here.
Today is the official release of my book You Belong Here.
It still hasn’t sunk in that I’m actually a published author. The journey here hasn’t always been easy, but I’m so proud of this book and I couldn’t have done it without so many people.
Thank you to Berrett-Koehler Publishers for believing in Belonging. Especially my editor Steve Piersanti who was a mentor, coach and all around amazing human during this two-year journey. I remember starting on a video call with Steve in a remote cabin in Iceland when the book was just an idea and now this past weekend, I celebrated the launch 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Finland (see pic below). It is truly a global effort.
To all of the changemakers who shared their stories in the book, Beca Velázquez-Publes, Shannon Cohen, Maggie De Pree, Yodit Mesfin Johnson, Ti Chang, Daniel Wordsworth, Bernad OJWANG, Kinga Pakucs and Alexandra Moldovan, I appreciate all you have done to bring Belonging into your lives and into our communities.
I am thankful for Steelcase and our CEO Sara Armbruster, our CHRO Donna K. Flynn and my leader Lizbeth O’Shaughnessy, who always championed me bringing this book and the topic into the world. They provided wisdom, carved out time for conversations, and sent notes of encouragement. I am honored to be a part of a company that is a champion of Belonging.
And to my family, I am because you are.
#belonging #youbelonghere #tobelonging #identity #purpose #booklaunch #author #deib #booklaunch #pubday
Stories hold tremendous power. But no story is more powerful than the one we tell ourselves.
While interviewing people for my upcoming book, You Belong Here, I dug in with people to discuss the stories they used to tell themselves that they’ve since retired because they weren’t serving them.
A conversation I had with @designerti resonated deeply with me. As the cofounder of @lovecrave and visionary in pleasure jewerly, throughout her education and career she was told that she was “too sensitive.” But as time passed, rather than accept the label, she began to question it.
“One of things that emerged through doing all this work is that being ‘too sensitive’ is my strength. It is one of my greatest powers. It is how I create beauty. It is what makes my #design good and what makes me care as a designer. I want to articulate that in some way to the next generation of designers because I think a lot of women — a lot of people — are very sensitive and they get lost in the shuffle as people bulldoze them and thinking they’re weak. But in reality, it’s where you can harness that care and make it into something beautiful.”
One of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves is to question the “I’m too…” and “I’m not…” stories we tell ourselves.
By doing the work to #belong to ourselves, we may find that what we internalized as a weaknesses due to social pressure are the very aspects of our #identity are our #superpowers.
You Belong Here.
Last month during the World Economic Forum in #Davos, @betterup and their co-founder, Alexi Robichaux hosted organizational psychologist and author @adamgrant for a talk about his new book, Hidden Potential. I have always admired his data-drive approach to topics around workplace #purpose and #culture so was excited to be able to learn more in our time together.
I asked Adam how he sees the role of #Belonging and purpose within organizations and so much of his response and the research he has gathered resonated deeply.
“So I think the biggest mistake in seeing organizations think on Belonging is thinking that everyone needs to be attached to the larger organization.
Belonging is local, not global.
That's as robust empirical finding as anything I've tracked over the last two decades. And what I mean by that is there's a limited number of people who will feel like ‘I identify with all the values of my company’ or ‘I am attached to the mission of my organization.’
Many more people will say, ‘I feel a sense of belonging in my immediate team.’
There's research on what's called perceived organizational support, which is basically the idea that my company has my back and cares about my wellbeing and that's kind of the fountain of Belonging as we study it in my field.
The predictor of feeling supported by your organization and having that sense of belonging and #community that swamps everything else is feeling like your direct boss has your back and cares about you. And so I think this comes right back to the manager — managers who care about their individual people are probably moving the needle on belonging more than anybody else."
Belonging IS local. And the insights I share in my upcoming book, You Belong Here, provide a roadmap and framework to learn how to belong to ourselves before we can truly discover others and lead with a lens of belonging for our teams, organizations and communities.
You Belong Here.
Belonging is often viewed as a solution, but it’s not.
Belonging is a practice.
And that #practice is a must for each of us.
It is something that we have to revisit day after day, meeting after meeting, and conversation after conversation. It is something that we may feel amazing at one day and something that we may feel we need reminding of on others.
Did I show up as my authentic self?
Were my actions in-line with my aspirations?
If not, what was it about the environment and actions of others?
When we are able to have the clarity of how we see, hear, and value ourselves, we turn this into the #habits and #norms of our everyday lives.
You Belong Here.
#belonging #deib #rituals
For many of us, the systemic barriers to living #authentically— rooted in an #identity we love—are so high and so steep that we skip the exploration of what the barriers are and why they exist.
We accept the systems as truth and believe that this is the way things need to be.
“This is what a family looks like.”
“This is what a community values.”
“This is how I should dress at work.”
“This is what ‘professional’ is.”
“These are the things I should value.”
We let others tell us we don’t #belong, even if it isn’t with their words, it is through their #policies and #actions. We are surrounded by situations that tell us that story over and over in our lives.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
We need to question why things are the way they are. We need to examine what choices have been made for us, and which choices we are able to make for ourselves.
It is time to define how we want to be #seen, #heard, and #valued on our own terms. It is time we design and build a new table where we all belong.
It is time to fight. And this fight for #belonging starts with you.
You belong here.
What does the word “Belonging” mean to you?
I’ve started out interviews for my book, You Belong Here, with that question. As I was searching for #changemakers throughout the world that lead movements for social impact, I found Maggie De Pree , the co-founder of The League of @_intrapreneurs
“Belonging for me is ‘care’ and caring about the people around us. Are you able to show up in this environment without fear and apology? That is what belonging is about to me.”
Like many of us, when she began her career, she found herself working in an environment where she felt like the table she joined wasn’t designed for her and others like her. But it wasn’t only because of gender. It was about #care.
“There wasn’t space for me to be sick, to be tired, to be exhausted,” she told me during our time together. “I really didn’t feel like this was a place that I could show up as a human being.”
Since that time, Maggie has been on a quest to honor #humanity.
#Wellbeing is a critical component of Belonging, and when we honor ourselves, we can better show up for our teams, organizations and community. When we build that culture, care can thrive. When care can thrive, we can accelerate a movement that can change the world.
Today, League of Intrapreneurs has over 20,000 global members and their mission is supercharging employees to create positive change for #people and #planet from inside their organization.
Being in #Davos during the World Economic Forum had me reflecting on #impostersyndrome and what that means in relationship to hashtag#belonging.
A couple of years ago, a woman invited me to speak about #leadership to a group of #executives. But before the speech, she pulled me aside and shared that she was struggling to find her #identity at work. Like a lot of people, she told me she was suffering from imposter syndrome: a feeling like even though she had the job, she wasn’t qualified to have a seat at the table. She said she didn’t fit into the business world and that she wasn’t #professional enough.
I asked her to focus on the word “professional” and interrogate what it really means. After a long pause, she told me she’d never actually questioned that before. We examined how the term “professional” is viewed differently all around the world and how it changes from company to company and from border to border.
For some, “professional” means wearing a neatly pressed suit, not displaying emotions, and using formal language.
For others, it means donning a black T-shirt and Vans, speaking in soundbites, and communicating through memes.
We talked about the need to define which aspects of "professional" are meaningful to us individually and the aspects that bring out your own unique talents so that you can #thrive.
A few months after that event, she told me how much of a difference that shift had made for her. Rather than trying to mold or shape-shift to the environment around her, she took a new job and now brings her full self to work, which has created space for others to do the same.
Whether we realize it, over time, the experiences of people not fully seeing our strengths, allowing our voices to be heard, or valuing our contributions shape the stories we tell ourselves about our own worth.
We give away our power.
And our power is rooted in our own identity as we define it.
When others start to strip it from our core, the choices we have in life change.
This is why we all need to ask the hard questions because if we don’t, we are unintentionally putting our sense of #belonging into the hands of others and end up giving away our power.
“Othering is any practice that denies someone’s humanity.” — @profjohnapowell
#Belonging, on the other hand, is any practice that honors someone’s #humanity. And this begins with honoring ourselves and doing the #innerwork to define how we want to be seen, heard, and valued on our own terms.
To learn more about gaining the skills to #belongtoyourself and create #safespaces for others to do the same, the @otheringandbelonging institute (where Powell serves as the director) is hosting a conference that runs from April 25th through the 27th in Oakland, California.
I recently attended their gathering in Berlin and the O&B team has brought together a diverse community of change-makers from #artists and #advocates to #youth leaders and #philanthropists to “share cutting-edge ideas, illuminate powerful stories, utilize the power of arts and culture, and embody Beloved Community— all to build more #fair and #inclusive societies.”
We all feel like #outsiders at some point in our lives.
Maybe you walked into the office, you looked around, and thought to yourself, “I don’t belong here.” Or maybe, you can’t shake the feelings of exclusion in team meetings because past experiences have led you to feel like you have to suppress your voice.
As a Korean-born, American-adoptee living in Munich, sometimes it's everyday moments like taking the subway. Some days I’m met with a smiling toddler. Other times I am told by random strangers to get out of “their” country. And yes, this happens more than you may imagine. It’s a roll of the dice.
Research has show us that feelings of #exclusion share the same neural pathways as physical pain. So yes, these experiences hurt. We all need a way to ensure our personal wellbeing. And a journey To Belonging is a way forward.
To belong to ourselves, we must root ourselves in our own unique #identity — one that we love — and not let others define that for us, no matter how hard they try. It may be systems or social cues that try to bend that narrative, but what helps me to find belonging is that I know that I am equal, and it is the power of my differences that unite us all.
Whenever I am confronted with these feelings of exclusion, I go back to my mantra — You Belong Here.
What is your #mantra? Share your own in the comments below.
While doing interviews for my book, You Belong Here, I spent time Beca Velázquez-Publes who is a #leadership coach and founder of The Liberated Leader. https://lnkd.in/daRBwDSH
While diving into the topic of #belonging, she brought forward an experience that I heard over and over in my research. She repeatedly found herself sitting at tables that weren’t set for her voice to be heard and valued. She was invited to so many places just so organizations could say they invited her, but they weren’t honoring her lived, learned and loved #identity or experiences.
It was #transactional.
To combat this and stand strong in her own Loved Identity, before sitting at someone else’s table, Beca created a leadership norm to ensure that it is a safe space for herself and others. She accomplishes this through the #ritual of asking herself three specific questions before deciding to participate:
What power do I have when I sit down?
How is my voice being used?
Can I bring somebody with me?
These three questions move participation from transactional to transformational for Beca and others. It gives space to ensure that people are seen, heard, and valued on their own terms.
When you give yourself permission to question the table, the setting, and who is invited, you start to see the possibilities for a more #equitable path forward that is rooted in belonging. And if that table isn’t set for that, it is time to build a new one.
What tools do you use when you find yourself seated at a table that wasn’t built for you? I’d love to learn more about your experience in the comments below.
