“Better than I Used to Be” was a country music song released by Sammy Kershaw in 2010. It tells the story of a broken man who is trying to rebuild himself into a better person. It was written by Ashley Gordon and Bryan Simpson. Little did they realize that Kershaw the singer and Gordon and Simpson the writers had created the national anthem for inclusion.
I Ain’t No Angel, I Still Got A Few More Dances with the Devil
When it comes to inclusion, we have all been shaped in imperfection and bias since we came out of our mother’s womb. We are indelibly stained with the ink of exclusion. It does not imply we are bad people. It means we are human beings broken by confirmation bias as we decide that those who do not look like, talk like or think like us are not welcome in our in-group.
Since we will never perfect inclusion, we must make peace with the fact that we will succumb from time to time to behavior that does not reflect the recognition and embracing of differences. Our aim should not be perfection when it comes to inclusion, but excellence as we retrain our brains to do something it is not naturally programmed to do.
I Am Cleaning Up My Act Little by Little
It is a long, hard slog when it comes to inclusion. We must put in hours of rehearsal to insulate our nervous system pathways to make inclusive practices more instinctive, intuitive and automatic. Since our brains are programmed toward certainty, developing new inclusive habits will induce the pleasure molecules like serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine and adrenaline in our brains that will encourage us to chase the good feelings of being inclusive.
I Ain’t As Good As I’m Going Get
We are constantly having to pin the demons of bias to the ground. We have all been out in the rain of exclusion and have developed some rust. We need to exude faith in each other that the person we are today is not the person of tomorrow. We are all diamonds covered by layers of dust. We just need some polishing around our rough edges. Not with the blast of a sledge hammer but with the touch of a surgical velvet cloth.
Who You Are Ain’t Who You Gotta Be
Even as we try to be inclusive, the temptation to be exclusive is always there. We all have experiences of bias that have littered our lifetimes in form of thoughts, words and actions that excluded someone’s story that did not mesh with our own. You don’t have to dig too deep to find the dirt of exclusion under our finger nails. It is an uphill climb but not an impossible journey. We are still working on ourselves. We have to the potential to be great when it comes to inclusion. We just need to pull it out of each other.
When it comes to inclusion, we are not as good as we once were, but we are better than we use to be.
