An Inclusive Vision in an Excluded World
Closed Caption Transcript:
Hello, my name is Darlisa Diltz, and I'm the managing director and owner of the North Texas Entrepreneur Education and Training Center, where we focus on being a community triage for the entrepreneur community. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic called Inclusive Vision In Excluded World. Why would you pick that, you say? Well, I just want to, during our time together, give you a couple of words that I feel would resonate with you as you think more about inclusion and what that looks like for the world that we are in today. So first, I want to start off with a term or phrase, and it is playing in the sandbox. When you think about children, be it yourself as a child, your own children, nieces, nephews, cousins, children all across the world. When it is time for them to play, they don't care who is around. If there are other children in the room, they are ready to play. I would encourage us to think along those same lines when we are looking to connect and grow and to foster relationships, because the sad reality of it is there are a lot of exclusions in the world and many of us may not even experience them, but some of us do experience them and we experience them on a daily and hourly, sometimes a minute by minute case. However, that doesn't stop the fact that those individuals, they too, have vision. They too, have dreams. They do. They have goals that they are looking to achieve. Right. But if we are living in an excluded world, it makes it very, very challenging for them to do so. My goal is at the end of this session, you will at least think a little deeper about how we as a community, as a culture, as a nation, as individuals play within our own personal sandboxes and how we are helping to aid in the inclusive vision for the excluded world. The first word I want to talk about is impact. What type of impact are you making in your own personal community? Are you setting the pace for those that come behind you to have access? Are you setting the tone for those conversations to take place that, you know, wouldn't take place unless you were in that room? What impact are you making within your own personal community? I remember visiting a service and it was for someone who had passed on and the minister at that time gave the eulogy and he stated, we are given a date of birth and we are given a date of death. However, when we as onlookers read it, we see something in the middle and that is called a dash. My challenge or my question to you is, what will that dash indicate for you? And I'm going to correlate that directly to impact. When you are developing within your own personal community, are you doing it to make an impact? And what does that impact say? What does that impact look like? Will people be able to call your name and say, yes, I remember I was given an opportunity because I was connected to you. So think about that. So that word is impact. Next is legacy. Typically, when people think about legacy, they think about their family, their future, what is left, I'm going to tie that back to again, that dash. What legacy are you leaving with your work that you are doing? It is very, very, very typical for us to go into our own shells and for us to be very comfortable with in our own world. But sometimes what we don't realize is that our own worlds are very limited and our way of thinking is limited because we are only a product of our environment. And that environment could have been how you were raised, what you did as a profession, how you engage socially, you name it. So are we being inclusive in this excluded world? That's a question that I challenge you and myself to think about on a daily basis. It is very, very challenging. Sometimes to be blessed or gifted or "happenstanced" to have an inclusive vision when you have lots of different barriers or things that limit your activity. It could be a mental condition, a physical condition, a cultural condition, anything. So what is it that we are doing to make change? It all starts with us, so the next word I am going to say is you. It starts with you. What are you doing to impact that change? Are you allowing people a seat at the table? Or is it merely. Giving them a chair. Sometimes we need to move away from the idea of just providing a seat at the table and open up to giving an active voice in the conversation. Are we creating those conversations? Are we creating those opportunities? We say inclusion. But what do our actions say? The next word is me. What is it that I'm doing? How can I make an impact? What will it take for me to get to that next level? Then there becomes us. If you are doing it and I am doing it, that creates an US situation or a WE situation. And together we are able to conquer much more than we are individually. So I encourage you, as you are going through life, as you are going through events, as you are participating in whatever it is that you do on a daily basis. Think about the inclusive vision. Think about ways that you can not only provide a seat at the table, but you can give access and give voice within the conversation. All of us are here for a purpose. All of us are here for a reason. My goal, my quest, my ask, is that we can come together and provide bridges to those exclusions that exist. We can break down the barriers that are holding certain things back. That can be race. It could be age. It could be weight. It could be whatever it is. My charge to you is to think inclusively, truly inclusive. If you find within yourself that there are barriers, I encourage you to limit them, to tear them down, to take them away, because we all know that it starts with us. So today, I encourage you to foster the conversation of inclusive visions within this excluded world. Thank you so much for your time today. I do hope you enjoy. I'm Darlisa Diltz with the North Texas Entrepreneur Education and Training Center.