forrestlittle
The Force is Strong With This One
I was thinking about this topic today and saw this post while perusing the forum.
Briefly about my perspective. I'm currently venturing into coaching or coaching adjacent work at 35 after graduating with a BA from Evergreen back in 2011 that focused on philosophy and psychology with a 10 month multicultural counseling and social justice intensive as my senior capstone, in preparation for counseling masters or other psych phd program.
I did not attend grad school for a number of reasons, I didnt have all the tools to be well and I sincerely believed I should step aside professionally and let opportunities go to other people due to my identity. It was a grey area, because clearly I wasnt rip rearing ready to go prepared to succeed in grad school, but it cannot be ignored that I had limiting beliefs about myself that I internalized during my training under the supervision of a clinical psychologist who was expecting us to identify and adequately attone for our biases, under the framework of social justice, in order to complete the program.
So eventually I did gain the tools I needed to be well and to succeed professionally, training in 5 different healing modalities and learning about diet, grounding, other health tools, and yet as someone with my particular identity, I've been leery of venturing forward because I've observed instances during those trainings and in my local community in which reverse bias is still very much at play, that people feel free to point out my categories as evidence of my shortcomings, and there's not a lot I can do about it other than to avoid those people.
If I had gone to grad school I would have been a quarter mil in debt, in an institution that has a priority to categorically limit the opportunities I'd have for employment and promotion. And even if I could have kept my head down and played the game at the risk of damaging my spirit, I would now be facing the break down of the institution of counseling psych in favor of online platforms like better help and the rapid growth of the coaching movement.
So here I am now, and I'm wondering how to appropriately get into the market and avoid the pitfalls of incuring reverse bias, and I'm studying neuro linguistic programming and coaching in an online certificate program.
I'm sensing the possibility that coaching in this way of communicating effectively by understanding whats going on for other people internally with nlp tools will be a possible vector of healing the cultural divide, so that we can get to some more ideal social reality that allows freedom of association and allows every group to be well.
At this point I don't care whether institutions or companies have diversity quotas or not, or whether individuals who might otherwise want to work with me choose not to because of my identity.
If it so happens that I only find success by aiming my marketing efforts at like minded people, perhaps even people who look like me, to me its a natural outcome of choices made by individuals, en masse, to get on board with sources of confidence that are outside of themselves instead of being able to look within and manage their own minds.
It really brightens up I think, when we realize how being kept from certain opportunities is ultimately protective of our gifts until the time is right to share them.
If we encounter reverse discrimination toward ourselves personally, its only a lesson to toughen us up to be real about who we'd like to choose to associate with instead.
And their arguments why it's racist are incredibly racist 