When do you require unconscious bias training as a programme in your organisation? This sounds like a trick question. It is not. It simply brings to the forefront that sometimes it is easy to overlook what is critical to our growth and development simply because we don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. That’s the beauty of unconscious bias training. There is a wealth of new information to be uncovered. Plus, it goes beyond interesting to extremely useful.
Many people think that it is impossible to know the unconscious. Mystery still shrouds the unconscious mind’s potential and workings to some extent. But there is a lot we do know scientifically and psychologically. Findings from research studies on the unconscious hold key insights to unlocking our understanding of ourselves and others, thereby offering the opportunity to have more influence on how it shapes us.
Getting the whole picture
We can think of the conscious mind as everything we are aware of now. Everything else is classified as unconscious. The important bit in unconscious bias awareness training is that not only is the unconscious mind a storage bank, but it is also a guardian at the gate of our conscious mind filtering incoming and outgoing information. Its functioning allows us to make sense and assign meaning to the world within an instant. It turns chaos into order and provides consistent feedback for the conscious mind to utilise both analytically and emotionally.
Unconscious bias training teaches us to recognise the many faces of the phenomenon. There is no right or wrong unconscious mind. There is no ethical judgment on what it has to offer as it is an accumulation of us. It is never something to distance ourselves from because it may because it creates favouritism towards or prejudices against people of a particular ethnicity, gender, or social group that influences one’s actions or perceptions.
Understanding cause and effect is that bit that sets us free in unconscious bias awareness training. So, if we desire liberation and a greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us, it is a good time to expand our appreciation through unconscious bias training.
Setting the record straight
Unconscious bias has a bad reputation amongst those who don’t understand it fully. Unconscious bias training sets the record straight that it is never intentionally harmful. When we acknowledge Joe Gammal’s statement that by most accounts “the unconscious mind carries 90-99% of our thinking activity or ability, with our conscious mind delivering the balance”, this is a profound comprehension. It alerts us to the fact that we cannot eradicate this factor.
Diversity training unconscious bias, therefore, illuminates that the only way forward is to harness the magnificence of the unconscious mind in service to the conscious mind. The interaction of the two hence becomes everything in creating and determining our optimal performance and ways of being in the world.
It is only through increased awareness of how the conscious and unconscious collaborate to create our reality that we can master the exchange between these two dynamic realms effectively. There is therefore no time to waste in securing unconscious bias training if not undertaken previously. Like any athlete that must hit their peak during a performance, unconscious bias awareness training focuses us consciously to trigger the unconscious to do the processing that will deliver better and better results.
Unconscious bias training holds the potential to enable us to function at more sophisticated levels of interaction within ourselves and with others. This is an opportunity never to be squandered because it is an experience that affirms the wonders of human beings rather than the negative connotations that sometimes surround this kind of training. There is no time like the present to marvel at our untapped possibilities that pursue them with even greater vigour.
