Creating Inclusive Cultures Part 1: Use Emergenetics to Enhance Self-Reflection
How is your school progressing with its diversity and inclusion efforts?
As our classrooms continue to grow more diverse and vibrant, many educators are committing to building an environment that welcomes, honors and celebrates the brilliances that come from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. Whether you are making early strides or have well-established programs, critical self-reflection is one enduring element of most successful inclusion initiatives.
Through critical self-reflection, you and your staff have an opportunity to:
- Analyze your mindsets and attitudes
- Gain clarity on assumptions and biases
- Develop self-awareness
- Identify multiple aspects of your identity
The practice of looking inward is an ongoing methodology that empowers you to better know yourself and recognize where your perspectives come from, which is essential to supporting diversity in schools. After all, how can you honor others for who they are if you don’t first explore the elements and experiences that make up your identity?
By engaging in critical self-reflection, you can build the foundation for a more inclusive school culture.
How Can Emergenetics® Support Critical Self-Reflection?
I recently facilitated a discussion where I asked the group: What are your identities?
For several moments, there was total silence and a bit of a “deer in the headlights” look, as the participants considered their answers. Slowly, they started to describe their culture, ethnicity, gender or personality traits, leaning on the language of Emergenetics.
Being able to articulate your identity is an essential part of the critical self-reflection process. It can also be challenging to express your identity if you have not spent time building up your self-awareness or found the verbiage to describe the aspects that make you you.
What Emergenetics offers is a framework and language to facilitate greater self-understanding. Through the Emergenetics Profile, individuals gain awareness into:
- The ways they prefer to think and behave
- The type of activities that they get or lose energy from
- How their preferences impact the ways they interact with and experience others
While it is not the only element of your identity, your Emergenetics Profile provides insights to understand yourself, articulate aspects of who you are and explain where your perspectives come from, which can help you to feel seen. Having clarity into your thinking and behavioral patterns can also help illuminate other pieces of you that are integral to your identity.
Seven Questions to Use Emergenetics to Explore Your Identity
As part of your self-reflection process, I invite you to revisit your Profile and Narrative Report. Both are available to all Profile holders through our Emergenetics+ mobile app. Then, take about 30 minutes to consider the following questions:
- How does your Emergenetics Profile connect with your other identities (e.g., cultural, ethnic, gender, family roles, etc.)?
- How does your Profile influence your role as a school leader with your students, staff and community?
- What connections can you make between your Profile and how you show up with others?
- What are the assets that your Profile brings to your team or school community?
- How do your Thinking and Behavioral preferences impact your mindset and attitudes?
- How might your Emergenetics Profile impact assumptions you make in your school?
- What would you want to investigate further about your Profile and its relationship to your identities?
The objective of the activity is to help you clarify how your Thinking and Behavioral preferences impact your attitudes, how you see yourself and how you work with others. With greater self-knowledge and a common vernacular, it is much easier to confidently express the many aspects of your identity that make you unique.
You can also recognize how your preferences affect your mental models and how you interact with others. That in turn can help you to understand differences in thinking and behaving so that you can experience others without judgement, which allows you to honor what each person brings to the table even – or especially – when they are distinct from you.
If you would like to learn more about how Emergenetics can help you appreciate differences in others, I invite you to read my next blog post in our inclusion series!
Discover how the Emergenetics Profile can enhance your self-awareness or fill out the form below to speak with our team today.
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