How to let go of being a "good" person (with Dolly Chugh) (Transcript)

Chris Duffy:
I’m your host Chris Duffy, and this is How to Be A Better Human. In today’s episode, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into the whole premise of this show. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ve probably heard me say that I am NOT the “better human” of the title. Very clearly, I am not. I’m just the guy talking to people who seem to have figured it out. So hopefully you and I learn together.

Over the course of so many episodes, I’ve heard about a plethora of ways that we can try to be better. And hopefully, some of the topics we've covered have resonated with your own efforts to be a little less terrible. But how do we know when we've achieved our target - how do we know when we are officially a “good person”? It seems like at some point, we’ve got to be done, right? At some point, we have to hit the finish line.

Well today’s guest, psychologist Dolly Chugh, she thinks that not only are we never done, she thinks that the goal of being a good person is actually something we shouldn’t be striving for at all. Here’s a clip from her TED talk where she talks all about it.

Dolly Chugh (Recording):
If you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class, or if you become a parent, we pick up a book and we read about it. We talk to experts. We learn from our mistakes. We update our knowledge. We just keep getting better.

But when it comes to being a good person, we think it's something we're just supposed to know. We're just supposed to do without the benefit of effort or growth. So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people. Just let it go. And instead set a higher standard: a higher standard of being a good-ish person.

Chris Duffy:
We’re going to hear a lot more about Dolly’s research (and how to avoid the trap of trying to be good) when we get back. But first, a quick break.

[MUSIC BREAK]

Chris Duffy:
And we are back! On today’s episode, we’re getting to the core of our show’s title, How to Be a Better Human. We are with a psychologist who studies exactly that.

Dolly Chugh:
Hi, my name's Dolly Chugh. I'm a professor at the business school at New York University where I'm a social psychologist. I teach courses in leadership and management and I write books like The Person You Mean to Be and A More Just Future.

Chris Duffy:
How did you get started studying the psychology of good people?

Dolly Chugh:
There's a saying that all research is me-search. I was raised in a family, I think like a lot of people were, where, you know, there was this emphasis on “be a good person and do good in the world.”

And,that all sort of made sense as a kid. But as I got more into adulthood, things seemed more, like, nuanced and complicated. And I would care about being a good person, but then find myself having these assumptions about someone I hadn't met that proved to be completely wrong because I had stereotyped them, or I would sort of seem to always look at situations that were ambiguous in ways that favored me instead of the other person. Like, or, if I'm late, there's always a good reason. But if other people are late, they're irresponsible and disrespectful. So the more you kind of start examining your own behavior, the more you start to realize, it's just not that cut and dry.

Chris Duffy:
So for you, this is your career. People must ask you this all the time, right? What, what does it actually mean to be good?

Dolly Chugh:
When I talk about studying the psychology of good people, I'm not trying to tell people what it means to be a good person. Like everybody has their own definition of that. And what the data says is that we all think we're good people. We all care about being seen as good people and feeling like good people, maybe not all, but the vast majority of us on average, what varies though is our definition of good person.

I'm not trying to challenge people with my definition of a “good person”. What I'm trying to do is say that whatever our definitions are, and for those of us where our definitions is “I want to not behave in a biased way. I want to not be discriminatory against people”, if that's your definition of good person, I'm trying to offer some insights into what's going to make that more challenging than it looks on the surface, where we're better off striving to be better than to be good in a very static, brittle way, which is why I love your title.

Chris Duffy:
It feels like, and maybe this is revealing too much of my own psychology, but I'm surprised that most people think like they're good as opposed to like, having some doubts of like, am I really good? Like am I putting up a charade? Like how do I actually be a good person?

Dolly Chugh:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's true too. So there's this dynamic nature and some of the work I've done, is about exactly that. Our identities, we care about whatever those identities are. In this case, in this example, our good person identity that there's times when we feel like really solid in that identity. And there's other times when it feels fragile or slippery and like, “Oh, maybe I'm not a good person.”

And what a lot of research shows is that when we're not feeling solid and that identity, when it’s feeling, when it’s feeling slippery, we do things perhaps unconsciously to kind of solidify that identity. So if we do something where we feel we haven’t, we’ve, we've treated someone poorly, we might in the next action, even with a different person, treat that person a little extra better. That’s, that's like a moral compensation that we would take. And it, it kind of allows us to, to kind of, equalize that identity. We get back. “Okay, well, I did that one bad thing, but I did this good thing. So now I'm good.”

And, there's research that says that sometimes we license, like if we do something really good. then the next thing we do might be bad. So we can go the other way as well, because we've sort of licensed ourselves with our donation to then go take advantage of a situation if you see what I mean.

Your intuition is backed up by the data. It's not that we’re always feeling like, “Yeah, I got this as a good person.” It's that it’s something we care about. And sometimes we feel like we got it and, sometimes we feel like we don’t, and then our behavior kind of floats around whatever that identity is in the moment.

Chris Duffy:
Well, tell me about this idea that you've come up with of bounded ethicality.

Dolly Chugh:
Yeah. So that the idea of bounded ethicality, it's a spinoff of a Nobel prize-winning idea, bounded rationality, and bounded rationality says that we cannot assume that our brains have unlimited processing power and storage space and speed. There are bounds on it.

And what that means is that we will sometimes make mistakes as decision-makers. We won't make the most rational decision over what cereal to buy. We'll go with the one that's at eye level, even though we easily could have looked down or looked up. But, bounded rationality, you just process what's right in front of you.

We took that idea and said, “if there, there are these systematic constraints on how we make decisions, in general then wouldn't that also apply about decisions we make about people and issues that would have some ethical importance?” It's the same brain. It's not like I will go borrow a different brain when I make those decisions.

A cereal and people kind of is falling in the same mental processes. So we, Mahzarin Banaji, Max Bazerman and I, called it “bounded ethicality” instead of bounded rationality, that being the spinoff where we're trying to understand what are the systematic ways in which we may not always be fully ethical, just like we're not always fully rational.

Chris Duffy:
Thinking about bounded ethicality, obviously it makes sense to me, and I think to everyone that there are just so many choices you have to make every single day and every single moment. How is it possible to make the most, just the most ethical choice in every single second? You can’t right? It would just take too much research and processing.

You've kind of talked about, like when people do choose to pick a battle, if, for lack of a better word, to like pick a battle, to pick a hill and to say like, “This is where I'm going to be ethical.” When are those moments and what can we do to be more conscious and to be better about when we pick those moments?

Dolly Chugh:
So what we know is that in any given moment, like if I were to snap my fingers, in that moment, my brain processed 11 million thoughts. And that's hard to imagine. Except when you think about thoughts, it's like little T thoughts, like I can feel the fabric of my clothes on my skin. That's a thought, even though I'm not really consciously thinking about that tactile sensation. That volume of unconscious thoughts dwarfs how much conscious thinking we're doing. You know, the 40 thoughts that are in that moment coming out consciously in our minds.

So what doesn't work really well is to simply say, okay, I'm just going to let the forty overwhelm the 11 million. There's just not going to be enough instances where that's going to work in our favor in terms of trying to be fully ethical. So certainly we want, we can aspire for that. But the other thing we can do is think about what are the systems or processes that we can lean on, like kind of turn the steering wheel in our favor.

So an example might be that, um, I teach classes of 40, 50, 60 students. There's a lot of discussion in these classes. A lot of hands in the air at the same time. One day, my teaching assistant, I asked her, “I'm right-handed, I, I think I might be missing one side of the room. Like I keep turning to write on the board. I come back, I turn, and I think I'm missing a lot of hands. So could you just track that, my calling patterns?.”

And she came back and she said, “You know what? I actually think you did okay with them… I think you're so conscious of it. You're getting the full room. You didn't miss many hands.”

And I was like, “Oh great.” You know, I was ready to celebrate. And she said, “Wait, I just want to share something else with you. I noticed you call on men disproportionately more than women. And when you do call on women, you tend to cut them off before they're finished speaking. And you don't do that as much with the men you call on.”
Whoa, like that was not what I thought I was doing. That was not what I ever aspired to do. It definitely goes against my sort of consciously or explicitly held beliefs. But I believe the data, and so I could say, “Okay, I'm just not going to do that anymore.”

But I'm up in front of 60 people, a million things are going through my head in that moment. Am I really every single time going to be able to slow myself down enough to implement that? Or, could I try a different system solution? And the system solution might be I will never call on three men in a row, period. I just will always make sure I break it up. And by doing that, that in of itself, it doesn't require me to sort of constantly be monitoring my biases as much as just implementing a system that, that part of my brain that just wants to do the bounded quick stuff, it can do that.

Chris Duffy:
It's interesting. I feel like this hits on one of the, the issues that arises when people are in the real world, when people are like, I'm a good person, or I'm an ally, or I'm a feminist, or any of these labels that people can put on themselves is that when it's challenged, it can be the kind of thing where instead of it being information that people act on, it is a threat to identity.

Dolly Chugh:
Yes. That's so beautifully said. That's why I'm trying to get us to let go of that identity of being a good person, because it's not serving us. What the research on growth and fixed mindset says is that, when you're in a growth mindset, meaning you have a belief that you'll keep getting better at something, you’re not stuck in one place, versus a fixed person, a fixed mindset, where if I believe I'm a good person, I just believe I'm a good person. I was born a good person. I was raised a good person. I'm a good person, that static brittle one. When I'm in that growth mindset, when a mistake is pointed out to me, like brain scanners, show that my put up, up, up, up, up, up, there's all this activity.

Paying attention to the mistake so that I can figure out what I did and not do it again. And that when, when I'm in a fixed mindset, when I was like, I just, I, it is what it is. We actually see brain activity fall because what's the point of paying attention to a mistake if it's not going to be utilized in any way? We're making it hard on ourselves. It's something we care a lot about, but we're making it hard to do it well. Like, the teaching assistant gives me that data, I honestly, I want to do a bunch of things.

I want to tell her she counted wrong. I want to tell her that, “Oh, this was just a one-off class.” It was because so-and-so was talking for too long. I want to get defensive and sort of explain myself and all the ways in which I have supported women in my life, you know, and I am a woman and I am a feminist and raising feminists. Like all those responses are the ones that take over, those are all fixed mindset responses. That growth mindset is the one that like, allows me to go, “Wow, I didn't know I was doing that. I guess I'm going to work on it”, and like go into a space of actually being able to address it and feel, feel good about addressing it, not mortified by what I've done.

Chris Duffy:
Yeah. A big part of your first book, The Person You Mean to Be, it, it really looks at how being open to the idea that we all need to improve and that none of us are fixed in our abilities or moral status, and you’ve already been touching on this, but can you talk more about like how being in a growth mindset can bring us closer to the idea of, of actually achieving goodness?

Dolly Chugh:
A lot of what it means to be a good person is, is not just the values we hold. It's the skills we have. So I talk about going from being a believer, which is, believing in certain values, to being a builder. When you're a builder, you're actually building the skills, the knowledge, the courage to act on those values. To build the kinds of teams and communities and organizations and families where those values come to life in a dynamic way, in a changing world where we're constantly, I mean, things are topsy turvy. We're constantly having to sort of challenge our assumptions of the world around us.

And, the key thing is thinking of this, not just as values, but values and skills. One example of a skill might be me learning to update my vocabulary on a regular basis. And sort of understanding that words have histories and meanings that I may not be aware of. Or a skill might be me asking a question that makes me uncomfortable to challenge what's happening in a meeting at work where I feel like something's not aligned with my values. Or a skill might be apologizing, like I've been called out on something I've done harm, now how do I apologize for it with, not the “I'm sorry, if you were offended” apology, which is just like handing it back to the other person, but the “I'm sorry. Period. Apology. I'm sorry for the harm. I did, period. I'm sorry. and I need to do better and we'll, we'll take ownership of, of doing so. Period.”

Chris Duffy:
I think the idea of thinking of them as skills, that really speaks to me. I will just admit for myself a lot of the, the moments where I feel like I have made progress towards being a better person have also been somewhat painful. And like, in the moment, I think I did not handle it very well at all, right? There are maybe a few times that I can think of where someone pointed something out to me, and I very like, calmly and rationally was like, “Oh, thank you. I won't make that change.” But most of the time I did have the, this thing you're describing of, like, “I'm defensive, you're wrong. You just caught it in a bad moment. You don't understand all the context.”

And then I looked back and I was mortified and I was really embarrassed and I felt like, I felt angry. And then it took me a while to process all of it. And then I thought like, “You know what? Unfortunately, the worst-case scenario is true. They were right.” Then I do change or I try to. I always feel like it's interesting to think about like, those moments where you realize how not good you are and how you can like see that. And I rarely think it's a positive thing, which makes sense as to why people… positive thing in the sense that it doesn't feel good, which is, I get why people are hesitant to be in that growth mindset. ‘Cause it, it takes a lot of work.

Dolly Chugh:
I do think though, and I bet I bet this has happened based off of what you just described, of like, how you get to that point of insight that with practice, we get better at it and get more comfortable with it. And I want to be clear, I don't mean comfortable with doing harm to others. I mean, comfortable with accepting that that's what we've done and just getting, getting past that to the action part. My personal experience has been that I just now kind of expect that I'm going to mess things up. And when I do the key is to just sort of move into learning mode.

Chris Duffy:
Ok we’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Dolly talks to us about what skills we need to pick up to really get into that learning mode.

[MUSIC]

Chris Duffy:
And we are back. Even though it can be painful or mortifying, getting called out on a mistake and having to confront this notion of ourselves as good people can actually turn into a positive experience, with an impact beyond our own self-image. Here’s another clip from Dolly’s talk:

Dolly Chugh (Recording):
So most of the time nobody's challenging our good person identity. And so we're not thinking too much about the ethical implications of our decisions and our model shows that we're then spiraling towards less and less ethical behavior. Most of the time. On the other hand, somebody might challenge our identity or upon reflection, we may be challenging it ourselves. So the ethical implications of our decisions become really salient. And in those cases, we spiral towards more and more good person behavior, or to be more precise, towards more and more behavior that makes us feel like a good person, which isn't always the same of course.

Chris Duffy:
This might be an obvious question. So when it's something like cooking a dish, right? Like if I make it an omelet, and the omelet is bad and someone tells me, “Oh yeah, you, you didn't whisk the eggs right,” It doesn't feel that bad. I just think like, “Okay, I'll do it differently next time.” But when someone says, “Oh, what you did is biased or sexist or racist, or, you make other people feel bad in this, in this way, that's interpersonal”, and that kind of hits on something that is a little more charged, it feels so much worse than finding out that you're, sawing a piece of wood wrong. Not that I've ever done that correctly either. I don't know why that was my example, but, but why is it that it's so much harder when it's these interpersonal dynamics?

Dolly Chugh:
It's a brilliant question because it gets to the heart of the matter, which is identity. In the examples you gave so presumably how you make an omelet or saw a piece of wood is not central to your identity. Now we can imagine that there there's a, a different world where, Chris’sability to make an omelet matters a lot to Chris. Like that, that is like, somebody coming at you about that does evoke rage in you, okay?

Chris Duffy:
That’s a lot easier to imagine than the carpentry world. I will say the omelet world is a lot closer to this world. The carpentry world is a distance… that’s, so many things had to change in our universe for carpentry to be important to me.

So if this idea of that, we're all clinging so tightly to the idea that we're a good person and that, that can actually prevent us from making positive growth and changing in a way that would be better for the world, what does it take to be a good person? And, and can you explain your idea of what it means to be good-ish?

Dolly Chugh:
Yeah. So I think what we want to do is take that research that the growth mindset, fixed mindset, research that Carol Dweck and other brilliant scholars have done and just apply it here.

How to get better at the skills of being a good person. First, begin with the belief that these are skills that we can get better at. That we need to get better at. Now that isn't the same as saying that we can just undo unconscious biases that you know, that we're not proud of. Unfortunately, the research shows it's not as easy as just wanting to undo them.

But a lot of these other things, like, for example, becoming better at noticing ways in which we impact others, getting better at tracking data that will show us what's happening in our organization, diversifying the content that our children are exposed to and consuming. Those are all skills that we can absolutely get better at.

And that's what the good-ish part means is that, once we decide we're going to actively work on getting better, as opposed to just protecting what we sort of hold so dearly as a good person, then, then we will actually just start unlocking some of the learning processes that, that are built into our minds.

Chris Duffy:
Your new book is called A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with our Past and Driving Social Change. So it seems like there's kind of on the micro-level, there’s, we have to be honest with ourselves about where we fall short so that we can change. But then, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like this book is opening that up to a bigger macro level of “Okay. And if we don't all acknowledge the facts and the realities of our history, then as a society, we also can't change and get better.” So, what are some of the psychological tools that you've read about that can affect both the macro and the micro here?

Dolly Chugh:
Well, the premise of the book is it's that I start the book with a story about, you know, there's a lot of things I don't do well as a parent, but the one thing I was super proud of is that I read to my kids every night until they were about 10 years old.

Like that was our thing. We read so many books together and sometimes we would even go on vacations together based off of those books. So I read the whole Little House on the Prairie series to them, and then my husband and I took our kids to Walnut Grove. We took them to South Dakota and Minnesota, and we drove around where the Ingalls used to live.

Chris Duffy:
That sounds amazing.

Dolly Chugh:
I know, right? So, like, pat on the back for the parenting. And it was only sort of later that it dawned on me that “Wait, I love these books. I love the Ingalls family. I think they have so many wonderful things that we can sort of offer our children in their values and their hard work. But whose land was that little house sitting on? That was Native American land that was taken from them.” There's some like, very like racist things that are said in the book. When we were there visiting, there was an opportunity to kind of contextualize what this history was, that it wasn't simply this idealic Prairie narrative. And I never go to it. And my kids were old enough.They could have handled it.
And I just wanted to sort of soak in the nostalgia, in my own mind. And I wanted to dig into why was it so difficult for me. Forget my kids, just me, to sort of unpack the reality of those stories and that American history and unlearn the, the nostalgia version that I had been taught.

So that, that story opens the book and, opens up the possibility that I've done my children a real disservice. Because they've come to believe a very narrow perspective of history, a whitewashed version of history that doesn't help them understand the world they live in now and why we see so many racial disparities. And why we see so many—on every outcome possible, health education, wealth, go on and on—you see massive disparities by race in our country.

How are they meant to understand that without the historical underpinnings that help explain it? And so, what I wanted to explore is are there ways we can recommend with our history, with the shame, the guilt, the denial that I am feeling that made it hard for me to reckon with it that allow us to unlearn some things that were partially true or maybe completely untrue? And learn the fuller history. And right now we of course, the 1619 project and other important work has come out from historians and journalists that are making it intellectually easy to do. But emotionally it's still really hard. And so some of the tools I'm offering are research on, for example, paradox. Like it is true that the Ingalls family was incredible. It is also true that the Ingles family was living on stolen land.

Both of those things can be true at the same time. and so research on paradox helps us understand how, if we can, if we can adopt a paradox mindset, we can actually hold both of those things at the same time I also share some work on rejecting fables. Like this fable is kind of like sitting at the kids' table. You know, like you're hearing a very infantilized version of the story, as opposed to the fuller story, and we're adults, we can handle the fuller story. So what does it mean to detect a fable and reject a fable? So those are just some of the tools that I am trying to use myself and offer others.

Chris Duffy:
Now that you've done the, some of the emotional work or at least made the choice that you want to complicate these stories, how do you find the stories that are told by communities that have been impacted by history rather than just the dominant narrative?

Dolly Chugh:
I mean, first of all, in the age of the internet, it's super easy to literally Google. But there's also now just a lot of great work coming out in the form of films, of podcasts. Even some books that are being used in classrooms are offering multiple perspectives that, rely often on first-person perspectives from different groups that were alive at the time of an event. So you can hear or read not just the perspective of whatever the dominant voice was, or whoever was writing the textbooks, that, that sort of carried forward generation after generation.

So, so it's actually become easy to access the stuff. It’s just, I think hard to, and we're seeing it in the sort of divisive conversations around how we teach history in this country. There's this assumption that if it's difficult to hear, and it causes shame and guilt, that we should not then go there.There's ways to deal with shame and guilt that allow us to go there and not, not be stuck in the shame or guilt.

Chris Duffy:
I mean, I certainly think that before this conversation, if you'd asked me our shame and guilt, good feelings, positive feelings, I would have said, “No, those are negative feelings.” But it sounds like one thing that I'm getting from you is that they're actually really necessary and we need to kind of seek them out when appropriate and sit in them so that we learn the lessons from them.

Dolly Chugh:
I think somewhat, and shame is different than guilt. Shame is where I feel that I'm a bad person going back to our earlier discussion. Like it's about me as a whole. Whereas guilt is like, “I did a bad thing. It's not necessarily me as a whole and bad. It's like the thing I did is bad.”
And it turns out that when we feel shame, we shut down, we withdraw. We don't fix the thing that needs to be fixed. When we feel guilt, we actually get into action mode. We do more to fix the thing that needs to be fixed. And there's some research that says that the, basically, that's the key is just, do we see a way to do better than activates shame and guilt?

And I think that's where we can really offer our children a lot. There are things we can do, beginning with, as children, they can just begin by learning the facts. And then as adults, there's many things they're going to be able to do to enact change. If we're not offering them that and offering ourselves that, we’re leaving everyone feeling kind of impotent on issues that we care deeply about. Again, our good person identity makes us want to see the world aligned with that. And the world is not aligned with a lot of the values we hold. And that leaves us just with nowhere to go.

Chris Duffy:
So for me as a, a white person, I often. I have these moments as I read more nuanced history, or I read books that were written by groups that have kind of been shut out of the narrative. I often am shocked, and I recognize that that is very much, a reaction that is a product of who I am and my background and my privileges, right? Is that a lot of people would not be surprised by these things that I'm surprised by?

But I, I learned things and I go, “I cannot believe that that's unbelievable. That's so bad. That's not what I learned about at all. Thanksgiving was that?” That’s the most obvious one, but what are some steps that people can take that I can take that listeners can take to identify what our privileges are and where our blind spots are? Because there are so many types, right? It's not just race, it's gender, sexuality, physical ability, financial, otherwise. What are the things that we can do to learn where we are missing pieces?

Dolly Chugh:
Well, one of the things I like to do is ask people to say, okay, real quick, what are all the identities you hold just real quick, just jot them down? And people jot down and I, I will model it and say, well, “I'm, I'm a professor, I'm a woman, I'm a mother. I’m an author. I'm Indian American.” So I get a couple out, they get a couple out. And then I say, “Okay, now let's pause. What identities didn't I share about myself that I hold? They just didn't come to mind when I was quickly thinking. And one thing I didn't say is that I was straight.” Honestly it didn't come to mind cause I don't have to think about it. I almost never think about being straight. The reason I don't have to think about it being straight is because I have tailwinds in my favor. I don't have to navigate a world that makes it hard to be straight.

The idea of headwinds and tailwinds comes from Debbie Irving's writings and it's really shaped my thinking. It's a wonderful metaphor. It actually was the way I came to understand what it means for something to be systemic. When someone says something as systemic, what does that mean?

Dolly Chugh:
And the headwinds and tailwinds metaphor made that clear for me. Privilege is just an example of something systemic. And it's funny that people resist it so much. ‘Cause if anything, when something systemic. you can sort of legitimately say you weren't the one who caused it, you know. It's systemic.

When someone says we have privilege, we have something systemically in our favor, we have a tailwind, because all it's saying is that we've benefited for something. We didn't cause it. One of the things we can do is think about where we have those tailwinds, the identities we think about least, and those are probably the perspectives we're least aware of. The people who don't have that identity. So people who are not straight are probably thinking about that identity more than me.

And I probably am unaware of their history. I'm probably unaware of their perspectives. I'm probably unaware of how the present connects to things that have happened in the past.

Chris Duffy:
And how do you integrate that on an organizational level so that it's not just individual work to be done?

Dolly Chugh:
Absolutely. Well, I think in organizations, it's actually where it's particularly powerful. I've written about ordinary privilege, and that, that’s when you're in an organization and you have the tailwind. The research says you're going to have more influence than somebody who has the headwind in those moments. The concrete example would be if I'm in an organization and there's a policy that makes it, difficult for a disabled person to participate fully in the workforce, if a disabled person says something, the studies say that they will not be taken as seriously as if a non-disabled person were to speak up about that policy.

So the idea is in here to speak up instead of, or, centering ourselves over the people directly affected, but it's to use our ordinary privilege, the identities we think about least where we have tailwinds, to use that as a sort of superhero influence in that moment,

Chris Duffy:
As you look back on how you have grown and opened your own mind throughout the years, how has all of this stuff that we've been talking about, how has that played out in your life?

Dolly Chugh:
If I just sort of stick to my life as a professor, it shows up in… I will bring in a guest speaker who will speak about law enforcement, someone from law enforcement as a guest speaker. And they'll talk about stop and frisk without acknowledging the civil rights implications of stop and frisk. And I won't bring it up in class. I won't balance that discussion. I will in-class credit people who volunteered to help out with something like little extra outside of class that benefits all the students, I’ll thank all the male students. And I'll forget to thank the female student who, who offered her time.

So time and time again, I'm doing these things. And I think for me, the growth has been, when it happens, I go, “Okay. Let's work on that.” As opposed to “That can't possibly be true. There's no way I did that. I have to cover it up immediately.” Like I've just become better at talking about it and making my learning visible to others. And this is something I've been trying to, when I do talk in organizations is encourage leaders to do is make their learning visible to send everyone off to diversity training and then not yourself as the leader.

Dolly Chugh:
Make yourself a learner when you're asking everyone else to become a learner, that's just never going to work, right? no one else is going to make themselves vulnerable in such a charged space. If the person with all the power isn't making themselves vulnerable in that charge space. So one of the things I've been trying to do is model what it means to make your learning visible to others and talk about it.

Chris Duffy:
Normally we end every interview by asking what's one thing that you're doing to try and be a better human, but you've answered that question more perfectly than, than it ever could have been answered if I just asked it. So, you're the dream guest for this show. Oh, well thank you so much for being here and for making time to talk with us, I really, really appreciate it.

Dolly Chugh:
Well, I thank you so much for doing this show.

Chris Duffy: That’s our show for today! Thanks so much for listening to How to Be a Better Human. I’m your host Chris Duffy. A big thank you to our guest Dolly Chugh. Her books are called The Person You Mean to Be and her new book is called A More Just Future.

From TED, our show is brought to you by solidly goodish Sammy Case, Anna Phelan, and Erica Yuen.

From Transmitter Media, we’re brought to you by Gretta Cohn, Farrah Desgranges, and Leyla Doss, who are somehow better every time I check in with them.

And from PRX, two humans who I’d honestly believe teleported in from A More Just version of the Future, it’s Jocelyn Gonzales and Patrick Grant.

Thanks as always to you, our listeners, for supporting the show and for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend, help us spread the word, and we’ll be back with more for your next week.