Bringing Your Most Authentic Self to Work 🏳️🌈 | Pride Summit Recap
I’m excited to share a recap from the General Assembly Pride Summit partnership event with ADPList. Panel discussion with mentors: Andrew Macdonald, Alister Lee, Soren Hamby, Stephy Hogan, and Ying Yao
“Pride gatherings are rooted in the arduous history of minority groups who have struggled for decades to overcome prejudice and be accepted for who they are.”
❤️🧡💛 Here is the Recap 💚💙💜
What does authentic self mean to you?
Andrew: Authentic self is where you bring all elements of both your experience, your persona, and your intent in equilibrium into the space that you’re currently in. So it is a balanced self, and it’s a respectful self. That’s the key.
Stephy: Being the authentic self means bringing up aspects of yourself. Like you take every experience that you’ve ever experienced, whether it’s good or bad. It makes you feel who you are, influences how you design, and problem-solves. It also will make you a better employee, a better coworker, and a friend.
Soren: They will put a lot of emphasis on academic experiences and all these other experiences. Because they believe that being the authentic self is just being able to use all of those lenses and bring those to work and say as somebody part of the LGBTQIA+ community. So this is how they see the world.
Alister: He thinks it’s also a mindset because you have to be unapologetic yourself. It’s your life and work experience combined into one, and there’s just something so powerful when you keep being your true self.
When you are your true self, you start finding the people in the same frequency as you. That is how you can start connecting with people, telling your story, and speaking to develop that safe space.
“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves; we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimize humiliation & prejudice.” — Alexander Leon
The massive task of our adult lives is to unpack which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts were created to protect us. That’s exactly how I feel all the time.
4 ways to be a better ally ✨
Stephy: A good ally stands beside and behind anyone who is feeling marginalized or aggressed against who offers an ear to listen. Just be present when they need your help, when you can, whether the people you are an ally for are there or not.
Soren: One of the biggest things that allies can do is comfort with discomfort because sometimes it isn’t very comfortable to stand up for someone.
It’s also definitely not comfortable to stand up for yourself. Many people don’t realize how uncomfortable it can be to say things like, “Hey, please don’t use those pronouns for me; please use them.” It’s very hard to do that or to know if that’s a safe person to correct.
Sometimes, it’s a lot easier to know that somebody else is doing that for you or standing up for you.
Andrew: It’s our job to be an ally, to carry their message into the spaces they can’t go. So a good ally is someone who speaks for those who can’t be spoken for when they are not present.
Alister: Being in the LGBTQIA+ family, we still have to be allied with each other. There are many misconceptions about pop culture or how the media has created it. Specifically, in the workplace, we tend to say no human eyes to everyone in the community. That’s important where we need to support each other to create a safe space.
Experience of boundaries in the workplace 🧐
Soren: Their manager and colleagues didn’t get how to call them and wouldn’t refuse to change their pronoun from them to be her instead.
It’s been very hard sometimes to get people to respect even just that simple boundary of asserting the pronouns they use. It’s easy just to ask, but they couldn’t do it for some reason.
Alister: He is openly gay at the workplace — which is the very symbol of the inclusive nature of the workplace that he is in. Due to his being gay, he is assigned many gay-related tasks. However, he finds it tiring, that he is the only one tasked with those gay-related matters. He thinks that others, too, can participate in doing the gay-related duties. Everyone can be everything and anyone can be anything.
💚💙💜 Key Takeaways ❤️🧡💛
- Be your true self.
- Good ally needs to support and stands beside for each other.
- If you don’t know their pronoun, just ask them.
So, we believe fully in self-determination, freedom and LGBTQIA+ has as much right to be treated with respect and understanding. Please stop the discrimination and violence.
