Have you ever had a dream that was so spectacular that you could remember every minute of it? Sometimes it is a bad dream where darkness surrounds you, shadows encircle you, fear invades your total being as your heart skips a beat and your blood pressure skyrockets. Beads of sweat began dripping from your forehead, your body temperature reaches a fevered pitch, your muscles stiffen, your joints tighten, your mouth feels dry as cotton as you suddenly awaken to the fact that you had a nightmare.
Your bad dreams may involve waking up to a tear soaked pillow from dreaming your own death, dreaming of the death of a loved one, dreaming of getting lost, dreaming of being abandoned or dreaming of getting sick. I am sure we have all had such dreams that serve as unhappy chapters of our lives that we just soon forget.
I had such a dream recently. This experience recalled for me an ugly incident in my life when I was not inclusive. It caused something to rise in me that shook me to my very core. It saddened me for days as I struggled to understand what this part of my emotional brain was trying to tell me. As a diversity and inclusion practitioner, I thought I had put this embarrassing episode behind me.
Weeks later after thumbing through some sermons and reflections I had written in the 1980’s, the meaning of my dream broke through like the morning sun burning off a deep morning fog. My schema-the blueprint of how I had lived my past life polluted by experiences, traditions and behaviors of seeing people and things different from me as my out group, was reminding me that the path to inclusive workplaces are built by walking through our rooms of life called remember.
My inclusion angel was reminding me that our inclusion struggles of the past are never truly forgotten. I was given a hard lesson that if we do not own our past sins of exclusion, we will not stay grounded in our present toils to be more accepting of people and things that do not look like, talk like and act like us.
The enduring lesson that I took away from my awful nightmare and the subsequent inventory I took of my exclusive past, is that the good news of inclusion is bad news first. We have all come short of the perfection inclusion calls us toward.
My task as I strive to be a good role model for inclusion is to not forget my embarrassing legacy of exclusion fueled by negativity bias. My job is to own my past struggles with inclusion so I can claim the promise of inclusion in the present and the future.
Our inclusion calling is to never forget where we have come from, for if we do, how can we know where we are going.
We can get to this promised land by entering our rooms called remember. As we lift our bias laden bodies out of the desolate deserts of exclusion and transplant our broken selves into the high rent district of inclusion.
And when we come to the end of our life long pursuits of inclusion and we stand before our peers and ask them how we have done with this inclusion thing, they will say to us “Well done, you good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. Enter this room called inclusion."
