Unconscious biases are nothing to be ashamed of, yet how do we become better aware of our unconscious biases, manage ourselves in the moment, ensure we’re attuned to and respectful of clients yet still manage to be authentic in our coaching?
These were among questions explored on 17 June at the Roundtable for Race Equity in Coaching’s second webinar in its series: Moving Race Equity from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Hosted by Coaching at Work editor Liz Hall, the session on unconscious bias in coaching featured these panellists; Tia Moin, Roundtable core member, PhD student and lead in diversity equity and inclusion of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Coaching Psychology; Ashnee Naidoo, chair of the people culture and disciplinary committee within the Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA), and Jacques Myburgh, executive coach, deputy chair of COMENSA’s research committee and founder of SA Coaching News.
The Roundtable was set up in 2021 by Coaching at Work, gathering representatives from leading professional coaching bodies including: AC UK, AoCS, APECS, BPS DoCP, COMENSA, EMCC UK, ISCP and UK ICF.
Moin presented research (Moin et al, 2024) on tensions which can occur around listening. For example, we need to navigate holding an intention to be authentic with offering respect, safety, non-judgment and cultural sensitivity. Being authentic might mean being biased and risk rupturing the relationship, whereas regulating and masking might mean being inauthentic.
Moin said: “It’s really important to acknowledge that bias is inherent; it makes up the uniqueness of each of us. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, rather it’s something to be embraced within each of us…Once we’re aware of our biases, we can start to regulate them [such as through mindfulness].”
Fellow panellist Naidoo shared how she’d had a sheltered upbringing in apartheid South Africa in terms of racism, and when she went to university when South Africa was moving into a democratic diverse South Africa, she didn’t “have time to digest… what that meant for me as an Indian female.
“[at that time] you don’t want to see colour because you want South Africa to be a uniform rainbow nation. But being part of this Roundtable has made me realize that I’ve actually done myself an injustice, purely from the perspective of not seeing myself as separate…. I always saw everybody in the same light…[but] when you do that, you’re actually robbing that individual of their identity based on their race, based on their experience,” said Naidoo.
Fellow panellist Myburgh shared how he’d thought he didn’t have bias in his coaching but realised that “must be wrong, because it’s unconscious. We’re not even aware that it is there… And that is the worrying part.
“My family and almost everybody that I knew were racist which meant that while I was growing up, I was becoming a racist…over time, life brought me certain life events…so powerful in my own learning and growing up and things started to change for me…I knew I had to do my own inner work…I had to question everything about how I grew up and it’s still ongoing,” said Myburgh.
- Read a longer report on this session on the Coaching at Work website: https://bit.ly/4cAhuwd
Reference
- Moin, T., Weinstein, N., & Itzchakov, G. (2024). Listening: A Dialectical Theory of the Tensions between Mindset and Behavior. https://osf.io/ht2by/