I have to confess I still haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this time we’re in, where “everything everywhere all at once” feels particularly acute.

Even in our own lives, aside from the political chaos of the current moment, it can feel like everything is breaking.

Or that if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This may seem like a bit of a non-sequitur, given that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about diet culture and fatphobia on the blog or in our work… at least not extensively.

It’s something I’ve been on a personal journey with that isn’t entirely my story to tell, and so I am realizing it is something I have held back on.

This morning, though, I stumbled on a social media thread in a group I’m not very active in that reinforced just how deeply indoctrination into patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and fatphobia goes.

There is a phenomenon that I’ve been thinking about both in personal and professional contexts.

It’s when entitlement leads to a certain kind of helplessness, ignorance, incompetence or even misconduct.

For example, it’s when someone, usually a man, “doesn’t know how to cook” even though they would have been quite capable of learning if they’d ever had to, rather than lived their entire lives expecting and having others (women) to cook for them.

The support that other folks need that we don’t can feel unfair because that support is very visible, whereas the support that comes to us in our privileged identities is often invisible, especially when that advantage often comes in the form of a lack of obstacles and barriers.

One of the communication strategies we talk about in our DEI workshops with organizational clients is what we like to call the “tell me more” strategy - in other words, leaning into curiosity in order to de-escalate a situation and foster an environment and culture where difficult conversations across difference can take place.

While it is not always the right strategy, particularly if hearing more from someone is likely to only cause more harm (you actually have to genuinely be ready to hear more) it can even be a strategy for responding to aggressions, micro or otherwise.

Lately, we have been diving into the impacts of people pleasing, and there is a lot to unravel, especially when you consider that we have all been socialized into people pleasing a little bit differently, depending on our various and intersecting identities.

We’ve been having conversations with each other on our team at CCI as well as with our clients about our identity stories through the lens of people pleasing asking questions like:

How has people pleasing shown up over the course of your life? To what extent are you or are you not a people pleaser? Have you been around people pleasers? How does this show up now in your role at work?