Labels That Stick

Written by Cindy Leavitt

Each morning my leadership team does a quick standup meeting to coordinate and connect. At the end of each week we also share one thing that we are grateful for or learned during that week. A video shared during last Friday's meeting got me thinking about the labels we give ourselves and others.

Senior Relationship Manager Will Mills shared this short video as a primer for a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice workshop we were participating in later that day about our identities and explicit bias.  

One of the workshop activities was to list adjectives we use to describe ourselves, then pick out the characteristics that we dwell on the most and the least. Many people in the workshop found that the labels they thought about most were the ones that they were most self-conscious about. If a person felt judged by others for a piece of their identity, they focused on that piece the most.  

The video and my experience in the workshop showed me that judging ourselves and others can be entirely unspoken, but highly impactful. We are constantly receiving (and assigning) labels. What if we focused on the positive instead of the negative? 

As we head into Thanksgiving, I am reminded of a saying that sits over my friend’s door that is so important, especially in how we talk to ourselves: 

“Be Kinder Than Necessary”

It is true that every person is both amazing and flawed. Do you focus on the amazing or flawed parts when you interact with yourself and others?