Summer is my favorite season, even in NYC where it can (and increasingly so it seems) be blazingly and uncomfortably hot and humid.

Ok, I don’t love that part.

But the spirit of summer holds so much appeal to me.

Summer for me is a time for self-reflection, curiosity and integration.

It’s also a time for dreaming.

As you may have heard us speak about before, every year CCI takes the month of August as a pause from external client meetings, facilitation and coaching for our own strategic planning, professional development and self-care.

This year my intention is to not have to do any work at all for my two week vacation at the end of August.

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.

Something that has been particularly striking to me recently in our work is how white people often have a hard time understanding what they have to gain from dismantling white supremacy.

There’s a certain approach to DEI that is about white people recognizing their privilege and that they need to give it up in order to “do the right thing.”

Often white folks have no idea what they themselves have given up or how they have been harmed in aligning with whiteness.

Something that often happens when leaders, white leaders in particular, “recognize their privilege” is that they react by concluding that what they need to do instead is step back, be quiet, listen to others, and let other lead.

While well-intentioned, the impact of this approach can also be harmful. When those who align with systemic and institutional power fail to use it, it leaves those who are less aligned with that power to do the work, often while feeling tokenized, unsupported, and under-resourced.

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?