How to connect with Different people | Cornelia Choe | TEDxSwansea

[Music] when I was 10 years old my family moved from a town where I had spent my entire life and we traveled 6,000 miles to a place that my father called a land of great opportunity on my first day of school I recognized some girls that I had met earlier that morning and I approached them and slam their shoulders came together and they blocked me from speaking with them and the whole circle of girls closed up leaving me no place to enter I felt excluded and rejected and I missed my friends back home in Minnesota in the United States where I grew up I asked myself is there something wrong with me was I wearing the colors of our rival school is this how my new life in Soul South Korea will be I looked like the people around me so you might think that I'd find inclusion right away but it couldn't been further from the truth I didn't know how to be Korean I had grown up eating cheese and sandwiches and blueberry pie my friends and I we loved going swimming and skipping Stones during the summer and favorite pastime in our community in Minnesota was to go ice skating what was ironic is that I didn't look like the people around me I was the only non-white girl in my group of friends but I never questioned whether I belong I knew that I belong because I saw it in the instant Smiles of my friends and their parents and my teachers they had chosen to feel kidship with me my best friend Stacy was blonde my other friends were mostly blonde like I thought I was blonde until I moved to the bustling crowded city of Soul where I look like the people around me yet paradoxically my ideas for our classmates to go skipping Stone was flatly rejected because it was too exotic for them and too unrelatable especially coming from someone who look like them and that's when I realized that our diversity is defined on the inside it's defined by our experiences which are invisible to us when we first meet someone in my life having lived in three continents by the time I was 18 and seven countries in total today I bring together leaders from around the world who are at the top levels for example the CEO of an international tech company or the head of a global nonprofit organization or a senior governmental official and I bring them together into small circle of other leaders who are very different from them and they meet regularly and discuss their different viewpoints and together they're able to resolve enormous problems facing them in their work and in their lives personally having had to adjust to a new country each time I've had to find a way to get myself included and I'm familiar with the fear of the unknown that we have when we meet someone new it's like a noise that you hear at night and you're not sure what it is and yet your heart starts beating fast and you're are ready to instantly react our brains try to mitigate and manage this fear by attempting to determine immediately when we meet someone if they're a friend or Foe and what they're like but it's hard to know what someone's like when we meet them research from Princeton University shows that when we see a new face we form an opinion on that face in a tenth of a second but that these opinions are rarely accurate it's becoming more and more difficult to predict what people are like when we meet them today let's look at some reasons why over the last 50 years the level of international migration for people living abroad has more than tripled bringing together people from different cultures and climates and continents and a distance of over 100 times the distance that our Hunter and gatherer grains have become accustomed to and we add more complexity to this whereas traditionally we've had one career and one job or just a few today the average American worker has 12 different jobs during their lifetime and changes have become common place so as we shed our predictable standard lives and we adopt more customized unique lives our stereotypes have never been as unrepresentative as they are today and when we meet someone it's becoming hard to know who they are what their frame of reference is and how to connect with them so often we don't the fear of the unknown and other factors are deterring us from reaching out and including others especially if we feel that they're different when we first meet them the more diversity we have in a team the more unknowns and the more social distance we have between team members leading to more uncertainty and sometimes even fear making it hard for everyone to feel included and this is the Paradox of diversity we think that diversity and inclusion go hand in hand but actually diversity and inclusion are contradictory the more diversity we Infuse into a team the harder it is to get to inclusion and the more time and effort we need to devote to ensuring that everyone feels included so it's not diversity equity and inclusion it's not Dei it's D especially when we first bring people together when I first moved to soul and that group of girls who excluded me that day they weren't the Mean Girls they were the scared girls they themselves were afraid of being excluded and sometimes when we want inclusion we can end up excluding others and this can happen anywhere I try to pay attention to this because it's so easy to do so when we first bring people together our work only just begins and that's why programs designed to just bring people who are very different together are having a hard time with inclusion diversity doesn't create inclusion but inclusion enables diversity we want to benefit from the many ways of seeing thinking and doing that diversity can bring us but to get to an inclusion we need to cross the unknown and this journey is usually a personal one we need to personally decide to get to know understand and include others so just as diversity is defined on the inside inclusion is created on the inside inclusion happens from the inside out and when we're able to include others we're finally able to enhance our lives and to enrich ourselves with a variety of ideas and perspectives that diversity can unlock in the people around us I see this all the time in my work bringing together leaders into small circles these leaders come from five different continents from North America South America Europe Africa and Asia and within our Circles of leaders we have many different types of diversity like different types of neurodiversity or multiple genders so our leaders are very different but what keeps them so closely knit is who they are on the inside and the speed and the efficiency with which they're able to help each other astounds me and this is how they do it these are the three steps to inclusion the first step is the humanization of the unknown when we first meet people our fight ORF flight reflex kicks in but if we're able to feel safety it's easier for us to use our curiosity to get past our vulnerability and get the courage to know the other person to hear their stories and to share ours in our Circles of leaders the first day they get together and for the first few minutes it's silent no one talks everyone sits alone in the circle of one and then when I invite them to introduce themselves with what has nothing to do with their jobs they have the courage to share their vulnerabilities and their stories and every time with a first break it's an explosion of talking and connecting to the point where they're locked into their own joint worlds and they're hearing about perspectives they wish they' known about a long time ago the second step to inclusion is to enjoy our commonalities as we hear people's stories we find surprising similarities in coincidences such as places we love to go or a cobby that we share in common and as we get to know each other and feel familiarity and connect research has shown that our brains our hearts and even our breathing align in similar patterns bringing us together and this can happen in a group of people watching a movie or in a group of people watching a TED talk together the third step conclusion is to celebrate the individual as we get to know people we start to see what makes them unique what are their lives like what are their hopes what are their dreams and as we come together in an environment of safety empathy and curiosity we're able to make amazing outcomes in our groups of leaders they're able to resolve intractable problems that have to do with the world around them with the people around them with their own paths and with total company restructuring and a complexity that we couldn't have solved on our own or in an Echo chain differance and you can have these amazing outcomes too it's like a muscle the more you go through these three steps the easier it becomes so the more you go through humanizing the unknown enjoying our commonalities and to cele celebrating the individual the more you grow your social adaptability or your ability to connect and create partnership with a wide variety of people and connect with people because connection is one of our greatest gifts in life so you can use these powerful Tools in your workplace or in your everyday lives I saw this several years after moving to Soul when I moved again this time to Spain in a town outside of Madrid it was my first day of summer camp and I was one of the first ones there walking down an empty hallway that smelled like floor cleaner and hearing the echo of my own footsteps I was rehearsing the few lines I can see in Spanish that were actually comprehensible and then suddenly I see three other campers arrive and they're all bigger and older than me and they walk towards me and form a circle around me and they look at this Korean girl I stopped dead in my tracks and I said hola I'm Cornelia Coria they said I've been living in North America and in Asia and now I'll be moving to Barcelona after this Camp deck they were flabbergasted and whilst we didn't understand everything one thing was clear that we shared the same sense of humor and we stood there shoulder Tosh shoulder enjoying each other's company for a long time you know sometimes how you walk into a networking event and everyone's busy talking to their circles yet you don't know anyone and then someone walks up to you with a kind smile that's how I felt safe and understood and I didn't know it then but I had just met three friends for life Julio Maria and ector and when I got married over a decade later each of them said I don't know when and where you're getting married it doesn't matter I'll be there what would it be like if all of our unknowns if all of our apprehensions and all of our barriers disappeared and all of us were able to overcome the Paradox of diversity each country country that I've lived in is now a part of me I'm grateful to have friends in so many parts of the world including in Soul it's taken a lot of Courage I'm no longer the Blissful blond girl in Minnesota today when I travel to Boston I miss Spanish ketas and when I go to Barcelona I miss kimchi and when I go to S I miss a good homemade blueberry pie and don't forget the vanilla ice cream you may have felt these feelings of homesickness yourself but when we have the courage to reach across the unknown past be ey and to create connection and inclusion we get the reward of finding a feeling of familiarity and comfort wherever we go with each new person we meet and this is my hope for you humanize enjoy and celebrate and grow your social adaptability we can overcome the Paradox of diversity you just have to be able to see people from the inside out and to include others and that inclusion comes from inside of you thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,003,920

Keywords: Connection, Diversity, English, Friendship, Humanity, Life, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:54499]

Id: HyRGCco0his

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024