A listener asked how to help colleagues stop masking who they are. Yoshino rules out confronting people and instead describes building enough psychological safety that they choose to open up.
…thing to think, right? But I understand where she's coming from because I've seen these kinds of stereotypes myself of, oh, you must be a drug dealer. It's that that we want to contest. And I just want to note that the more we assimilate, the less that underlying demand is going to be contested.
This last question comes from a listener named Jane who writes, How do you help other people discover that they are covering and masking their true selves? I think this is actually a subtle and Difficult question, Kenji, especially given the course of the conversation we've had. What do you think?
I'm so glad that this question has come up because oftentimes people say, Well, do you want me to go color the nearest person in my life and say, you know, I don't think you're being truly authentic or really truthful about, you know, the way you're presenting yourself to the world? That I absolutely am not recommending that. So I want to disassociate myself from that, you know, approach as vehemently as I can. But the thing that we can do is something that I will borrow from the incredible Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who writes about psychological safety. And she defines psychological safety, you know, in the team context as a team climate marked by mutual respect and interpersonal trust in which people feel comfortable being themselves. So the way you get somebody to uncover, it's a little bit like asking a bird to eat from your hand. You know, you don't like force feed the bird, right? You just create the environment around the bird so that the bird feels safe enough to do something that might otherwise make it feel quite vulnerable. So it's really about creating the surround sound around individuals, which might actually include sharing your own story so…
Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of covering The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. And along with David Glasgow, he is co-author of How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me back.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love the ideas we explore on Hidden…
