Universal Design In Life And Work

Universal Design In Life And Work

By Dr. Anthony GiannoumisEducationSelf-Improvement
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Universal Design In Life And Work episodes

  • Meaningful Mentors

    In my life, I’ve been lucky to have had some of the most amazing mentors who challenged me along my career path and who helped shape all of my experiences. Even my parents I would consider in some ways to be mentors because they were able to instill a strong work ethic and professional value system that eventually I was able to bring into my work and throughout my career.

    I’ve had leaders who I looked up to, who inspired me, who have taken their time to guide me, coach me, and help me along my career path. I think mentorship just becomes a natural extension of our work, but we ignore it sometimes. We dismiss it as just an extra part of our work. What I think we should be doing is leaning into mentorship even further and what that means is that we have to recognize explicitly that mentorship is a key responsibility that we have in our jobs and it’s a key output of our working lives.

    I think this is really important because mentorship doesn’t really show up on job descriptions very often or on performance reviews. Yet mentorship can be key to putting together a highly qualified, strong team that works well together. I’ve been really lucky in my life that I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people at the very early stages of their careers. I’ve taken them on more or less as a mentor, not always explicitly but sometimes explicitly saying “I’m your mentor let us connect and work together”.

    These relationships have enabled me to create different forms of reverse mentorship. They’ve given me a gift of reverse mentorship. They’ve given me insight into my own career. They’ve given me key guidance on decisions that I was trying to make. This might sound superficial or kind of blasé, but it’s really important to acknowledge that people who are at the beginning of their career can see you in a different way, in a different light, and their advice and input can be incredibly valuable for driving your career forward, for helping you avoid pitfalls, helping you avoid mistakes, and they can challenge you to rise to a better sense of self, rise to a better level of professional responsibility.

    Who has mentored you? Who has taken time out of their lives, out of their professional careers to guide you along life’s path? If they have done that without any request for support or exchange, then reach out to them and say, thank you. Say “thank you for taking the time to mentor me, to take me to help me along my career path”.

    Think about yourself. Who are you mentoring? Maybe not even explicitly, maybe there’s just an unwritten agreement between you and one of your colleagues that you’re going to help guide them and take care of them along their career path. Talk to them, communicate, and make sure that you’re connecting in a way that helps you both move along in your careers.

    4 min
  • Attention to Advocacy
    I consider myself an advocate. And this doesn't mean that I'm some kind of hero or saint or anything like that. All that means is that I've taken the time throughout my life to pay attention to people whose experiences might differ from my I've taken the time to try to listen to what their experiences are and not judge those experiences from my perspective, but really try to understand and relate to how their experiences might have affected their lives. 
    In specifically to focus in on what sort of challenges that they have to. Face that I never had to face. What sort of barriers do they experience when it came to basic parts of participating in society whether that's education work or just spending your leisure time. So, I think being an advocate means more than just championing a cause. 
    That's part of it. That's absolutely part of it. But the first step is it really starts with listening with paying attention to someone else's perspective trying to understand and relate and in most importantly trying to empathize. With their experience. So when we've done that first step when we've completed that first step of relating to someone else really trying to work with them and understand their perspectives online. 
    Then we can start that process of trying to find solutions really trying to identify the ways in which their problems can be solved. And this is not something that any advocate should ever do on their own. It's not my place to tell others what their solutions should be but it's my place to work with those other people. 
    Anyone who might experience a barrier or challenge in life to work with them to try to understand their perspectives and go produce co-create a solution together. Now, this is not without risk. Anytime you put yourself out there to try to relate to someone you you're undergoing some risk of being of not making that connection of not quite getting what it is that that person might be experiencing. 
    And so we just have to give ourselves time and be patient with ourselves. In order to understand more fully what that, Experience might be we may not get it right away. It may take three four, five six 10 15 20 encounters over the course of years. I still reflect on things that people have told me decades ago, and I'm still only now trying to understand and trying to relate to what they wanted what they meant what they needed in their lives. 
    So really advocacy comes down to a simple fact that we must listen to each other. We must take that time to empathize and relate. And in doing so it's really possible. To find our purpose in the world.
    4 min
  • Influence of Integrity
    I've been thinking about integrity quite a bit lately. I've been thinking about the integrity of the people that I interact with. I've been thinking about the integrity of our leaders or political leaders, but also our kind of social leaders the people who lead our kind of social lives. And I think for integrity it's it's just a tricky tricky way of approaching our perspective of other people. 
    Often we think about integrity and we think of authority in the same way because we're often assessing the integrity of any figure of Authority So when we think about our political leaders, we're looking at them through that lens of kind of what is their sense of integrity? And it can kind of go down to a very basic level of honesty. 
    So do we view this person as being honest? Do they are they telling us the truth? And this is part of it. This is the baseline of integrity. Are we viewing someone as being honest? But beyond that it comes down to someone's moral compass. So in their minds they have kind of a separation of right and wrong good and bad. 
    And, Whether that's a dichotomy or some big spectrum of rightness and wrongness what what it comes down to is that all the decisions that individual makes. Whether we can consider them being honest or not the decisions, they make are embedded with that moral fiber that moral fabric. The moral compass that helps guide them in the decision-making in their decision-making. 
    So when we look to others and we see these authorities figures, we see others in our lives, we're trying to understand how honest they're being we try to understand their level of integrity. As a person It's important for us to also look a little bit deeper and kind of identify what are their value systems that are guiding their decision-making? 
    Now, these are not explicit value systems. Nobody sits down and makes a decision and says, oh all of these things in my life, I think are right or wrong and therefore I will make this decision. No, those value systems are kind of subconscious they lie at kind of a very subterranean level of our psyche and so when we're making those decisions. 
    Those value systems what we think is right or wrong. Though that moral compass, that's got. Ten us through that decision-making effects the outcome of that decision-making. And so when we start talking about things like ethics and ethical decision-making what that really means is what is the morality behind that decision-making? 
    What is our value system behind that decision making? And do we see that value system as lending someone integrity or kind of disingenuousness? Dishonesty. Now a Voltaire has this famous saying about morality says I have. No morals, but yet I am a very moral person and what that comes down to is that morality isn't a specific kind of set of criteria. 
    This is my interpretation that he was a very vague and ambiguous statement. So, my interpretation is a value systems are not something we set out to as criteria for decision making. What they are is something that lies beneath our decision making and influences our decision making. And so if you need no morals, it's because your character. 
    Is such that you will make the decision that is best for others in your life. I want to leave this all off with one aspect of integrity. I think is most important. You can judge or I judge a person's integrity by the decisions, they make that affect other people. 
    So people in positions authority are often asked to make decisions that affect others but don't affect them. So when we look at the integrity of someone when I look at the integrity of a leader, I'm often trying to assess. And what ways would they make decisions that affect others? 
    What are the what is the moral compass guiding those decisions? Is it? One of compassion or is it one of selfishness? So I think integrity is something we're really not paying close enough and to tension to.
    5 min
  • Creating Confidence
    Confidence is something that most people admire a lot. It's something that we have as a value system where we look up to people with confidence and we're feel secure and we feel reassured if somebody displays confidence. We talk a lot about how we can gain confidence in our work and kind of reassure ourselves that what we're doing matters and we're good at it.
    So confidence kind of relates to your purpose your identity as a human being in the world. And so it's important when we think about confidence that It's about standing in your own truth. So whatever your worldview is, whatever your perspective on life is confidence is a sense of reassurance that where you stand is a valid and interesting and engaging point of view.
    So I think if you struggle with having confidence or you feel tentative or like that, you need reassurance. Remember that you are the expert in your own life. You are the best candidate to advocate for what your, Point of view is. And so confidence is that realization of that feeling that again standing in your own truth and it really helps to kind of have someone who can back you up who can give you some reassurance and someone who is your cheerleader that could be a mentor that could be a teacher a parent a sibling.
    Anyone in your life who's really there to positively affect a positively influence you. So someone who you know, you can come to with a weird strange or kind of bizarre idea and they'll say, Yes and they will give you that confidence that reassurance that what you're doing, it might not be perfect, but it's an interesting and useful idea that you can take forward.
    But there's no substitute for simply putting yourself out there for having that feeling of insecurity where what you've done isn't quite ready yet and I get this feeling every podcast I release that I'm not quite sure if this is actually doing what I wanted to do or I'm saying what I wanted to say, but putting something out there and letting people feed back into that.
    Can be incredibly reassuring and that can help build your confidence because everything we do there's going to be things that work and things that can be improved.
    3 min
  • Friends that Forge
    I'm really lucky because I've had a lot of success in my life coming up with new ideas new innovations and putting them into practice actually being able to translate the the values. I have the beliefs that I have into reality into tangible products and services or tangible outputs and terms of new content new ways of putting those ideas into practice. 
    I think this means that I've had a unique opportunity to forge a path for myself and those that I care about those that matter to me in those that are important to me and this is such a privilege to to privilege role to have because I understand that it can be incredibly difficult to not only craft an individual identity to be able to be secure and who you are but then to also find ways of relating to others. 
    Such that you don't become a conformist but actually find ways of taking advantage of your and you're in the collective sum of individual identities and so that becomes very complicated and high level and very kind of meta but what I want to talk about today is is forging new paths as an individual and how we can kind of construct our own identities while at the same time relating to others in a way that's healthy. 
    And the way that takes advantage of all of our individualities and takes advantage of our kind of collective identities as a group one of the things I work with in innovation and work with especially in diverse teams is finding ways of having a collective belief system without losing individual identities. 
    I think in these environments it can become extremely easy to kind of everybody just defaults to the least common denominator and nobody kind of stands out nobody is able to kind of stand strong in their own. Belief systems in their own ideas in their own identities and this is absolutely critical for the successor failure of that team because good being able to forge a path forward is not constructed of bland vanilla kind of nothing average ideas or solutions forging a path beforeward means creating something that has vision and that has kind of purpose and we can't get there if we're all just trying to find a middle ground that we can do work together and that's not to say that this is an important and other aspects of life and things like, Government and other areas it's really important to find that kind of middle road but when it comes to working in teams when it comes to coming up with creating new ideas with forging a new path forward, we really have to kind of work against our own need to conform our own desires to conform with our own what makes us unique what makes us individuals. 
    And in any kind of collaborative atmosphere. I think this is going to come up and you'll have oftentimes this feeling of peer pressure from the other members of your team or the other benefits of your group to just kind of adhere or conform to whatever the vision the prevailing vision is at hand but I think that's a critical juncture to voice your own individual individuality to voice your concerns to voice your own perspective and ideas and to find ways of integrating those ideas and those perspectives not to. 
    Kind of start watering everything down but to make your solutions more poignant more purposeive so I think would it comes down to is we have to stop thinking about our group selves as somehow a filtered version of our individual cells but start thinking of our group identities as made up of a thousand different points of light or however many different members are part of your team. 
    I guess a thousand would probably be. Too many but say five points of light if you have five people on your team five individuals each with strengths and weaknesses that differ from the other members of your team and taking advantage of those strengths trying to find new opportunities taking those perspectives and creating value from those perspectives that's I think is a mark of a good team that is a mark of a team that can create a success.
    6 min
  • Continuous Care
    Self-care is a really popular idea at least recently or maybe it's been popular for a while and I've only just now been exposed to it. But self-care really comes down to taking care of oneself doing the things that are important to you that make you happy that give you some feeling of contentment or even purpose. 
    And I think self-care can come in a variety of different forms, it can be hobbies, it can be sports or just leisure activities that you do just for the sake of enjoyment or pleasure. But I think the the recent kind of look at or the recent fixation with self-care is really come down to ways of coping with stress in your life. 
    So self-care then becomes the kind of antidote for dealing and coping with stress. So it's important for us to reflect on and think about how we identify the our need for self-care, what are the triggers that we can have we can observe in our daily life that showed that we need to exercise. 
    Care. For me, it's always kind of a reaction or interaction. I have with other people when I start to realize that I need to take some time for myself either. I'll be impatient or just there'll be some misunderstandings that kind of emerged for no reason other than my kind of confusion or it'll just be a matter of feeling overwhelmed or feeling kind of like you're not able to deal with whatever the situations are that you're having to deal with. 
    So that for me is kind of my trigger for knowing that self-care needs to be a priority. I need to put this into practice and please don't get me wrong here. I have I'm not a master of self-care. I'm actually woefully terrible at the exercising self-care but I'm getting better and I'm trying to find ways every day of putting my need for self-care and to practice and even just identifying little shortcuts in order to feel a little bit more whole before. 
    I kind of re-enter the fray of daily life. One of the things That I find really important when trying to exercise self-care is having a way of dealing with feelings of guilt. So there's always this sense or I always have the sense of well. I'm exercising self-care what am I taking away? 
    So now I can't work as much or maybe I can't do the thing other things in my life that are also important. I can't fulfill other responsibilities in my life dealing with that feeling of guilt is really important otherwise any self-care activities you engage with are really gonna be futile, they're gonna be worthless. 
    Because when you're trying to enjoy yourself, if you've got if you're harboring feelings of guilt, it can become really really kind of counterproductive to even bother trying to exercise any feelings of or any self-care activities. So in order to kind of avoid those guilty feelings I tried to just reserve judgment. 
    I would try to reserve myself judgment because what guilt really comes down to is just you're judging yourself for choosing to give yourself the care that you need over and kind of taking care of your or doing fulfilling your responsibilities. And I don't think people should necessarily feel guilty about that. 
    I think you should that comes about because of that those feelings of self-judgment or those ideas thoughts of self-judgment. So if we can reserve those thoughts engage in self. -care practices and an after we finished caring for ourselves, we'll probably it's what I usually find is that the activity the responsibilities that I need to fulfill either weren't as critical as I thought they were or I'm able to fulfill those responsibilities in a much more efficient way. 
    So self-care becomes kind of a life hack for working more productively. I and I I want to caution or I want to at least point out that self-care doesn't have to take hours and hours and hours out of your life. I often exercise self-care in a matter of five ten fifteen minutes. 
    If I have a meeting that ends earlier or another meeting that is is delayed or cancelled I take care of myself in that time.
    5 min
  • Need to Know
    I had the honor of having dinner with one of my dear friends and colleagues a couple of weeks ago and we had a wonderful conversation this friend of mine is one of the most generous and amazing human beings. I think I've ever met in my entire life and he's confronted on a daily basis with a lot of other people's needs and that's both in his family is professional life in the immense amount of volunteer work that he does. 
    And so I was always inspired by his ability to meet those other individuals needs other people's needs in his life and so I asked them just point blank like how do you cope with all of the need that you have to fulfill on a daily basis and he had a very simple and easy response he just said you have to focus on the solutions he said there are always going to be problems he said but it's very important that we acknowledge the problems but don't dwell on them, he really emphasized the need to focus single minded. 
    Ly on the solutions that are available to us that there will always be problems that are distracting and they're always be problems that we cannot solve but he said it's important to focus on the solutions it's a it's about moving forward and what that means is that if we focus on the solutions and we're not just static we're not just fixating on the problems in front of us, but we can see those problems and move beyond that and take the next step and move into solving those problems and it was really interesting because we kind of, Came up with a really nice little three part model in order to move forward you have to acknowledge the problems with focus on the solutions if you want to stay static just stay focused on the problems and if you want a new move back you can start ignoring the problems so I think moving forwards the best approach here and I guess in my life when I think about the different challenges that I meet on a daily basis and whether or not I'm looking at the problem or trying to identify a solution, it can be from anything as minor as sending an email to his majors. 
    Existential crises about what I'm gonna do with my life so I think in these moments of reflection it's critically important that we acknowledge what the problem is, you know, what are the chat what is the challenge that we're having are we just distracted with other issues in our lives are we stressed out are we just tired or is it something within the challenge that we're facing that we really struggling with and once we acknowledge that okay, so how can we move beyond that what is the solution that's kind of wrapped up in that problem and Then to focus only on that solution kind of have that sense of purpose and single-mindedness, so we're not becoming distracted by the multiple other problems that surround any given issue. 
    That way we can move forward I often catch myself though still focusing on that problem. I don't really have good advice here in order to not or in order to at least try to and start inventing solutions but I I catch myself doing this on occasion and I think it's important as a reminder that we don't fixate on the problems that we move beyond the problems into what the solution might be and above all never ignore the problem ignoring the problem will never make it a go away and whether that's a social problem that you're just kind of constantly exposed. 
    To in your life, whether that's a specific issue that you're facing right now ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away it will fixate and it will become even more challenging.
    4 min
  • Time to Trust
    Trust is a very tricky topic because on one hand we have a sense of trust with the world around us especially with the people that we interact with we have to trust them because we're dependent on them and many many different aspects of life and what this dependence really just comes down to is I have needs and I'm hoping you can fulfill those needs and you have need and you're hoping that I can fulfill those needs and we rely on one another to fulfill each other's needs now. 
    I'm very lucky because I get to work with a lot of very. Trustworthy people they're not always experienced and that is often kind of put together packed up with trust somebody's experience and you can trust that they know what they're talking about or they know what they're doing or they have something they can build off of but often I've worked with you very young professionals who may have not had the kinds of experience that a mid-level or a senior level professional might have and so I trust that in the process of our collaboration that they're gonna gain the necessary skills, they're gonna gain the necessary ability. 
    These to actually contribute in a significant way to the needs of our mission to the needs of our work now. I also do a lot of teaching and there's a huge amount of trust that's built into the teaching process and I think we it goes unrecognized so I trust that my students are putting forth their best effort that if they come to me and they're asking me questions or if they need support or they need help then they've given it their best shot and that when they come to me, it's because I trust that they're actually have a need that that they're expressed. 
    That I can fulfill. And of course my students trust me a great deal, they trust me to evaluate their assignments fairly they trust me to give them information that is credible that has been validated that is based on research and so this kind of bilateral this two-way flow of trust between people between an individual and groups or between groups of people is really really important to the way our society is run and now the last issue of trust that I think is really critical for us to kind of think about is how. 
    Trust operates and teams now in one sense if you have a team that's relatively homogenous that's made up of people from very similar backgrounds, very similar life experiences, it can be really easy to establish trust it can be really easy to establish rapport with each other because you're all working off of a very similar playbook now the challenge with this is that oftentimes homogenous teams teams that have people from more or less similar backgrounds can't really produce innovative ideas because they're not drawn. 
    From the broadest possible menu of options when it comes to life experience. So then you have your left with this issue of diversity in teams So now we have a team highly diverse the people within the team are from very very different backgrounds, and they come from very very different life experiences. 
    And being able to establish trust and rapport in these teams as absolutely critical because this is what communication is really founded upon. And so, I have to be able to trust the other members of my team even though I don't know their life experience even though I may not be familiar with their background and that way in that way. 
    I need. To make sure that I'm not looking at their contributions as somehow being invalid or not as legitimate as my contributions. We have to look at each other's contributions as being equally valuable. And so establishing trust in these teams can be challenging but it's a challenge that's well worth tackling because once you've established that feeling of interdependence that collective identity within a team that makes you unstoppable when it comes to achieving your goals. 
    So as you're working within a different groups of people as you're putting together teams remember the importance of trust.
    5 min
  • Meaning Making
    I. Mean is one of these. Ideas that can be really difficult to put into concrete terms what's something means what the meaning of life is is really tough to kind of operationalize and it becomes one of these philosophical and abstract discussions about morality and ethics and all of these things that are really important in our lives but kind of escape our ability to kind of point to it and say this is this is meaning this is a this is the way we understand. 
    Things this is the way we attribute value and operationalize things. I I think about meaning and meaning making quite a bit because in my work a lot of a lot of science and a lot of knowledge I needs a framework it needs framing in order for us to understand what that new knowledge means and this is not about definitions this is not about defining something because defining something can be relatively easy, you can just look at different sources of definitions and then you can say well this definition is more. 
    Valid than this one or it's more generally accepted than that one but meaning is much more interpretive and it's much more subjective so trying to put meaning behind what is often very complex ideas complex issues, complex phenomena anything that you're exposed to in your daily life is almost by definition complex, there are no simple and easy ways of understanding things. 
    So meaning becomes an interpretation the the kind of some interpretation of all of our lives and experiences all the things that we do all of the people who we know so many becomes very interpretive and so what we understand what we understand as any given thing even is something that might be very very empirically founded so we could talk about the temperature of a room what it means to us is very very different it may be the same temperature for everyone in that room, but what it means can from person to person. 
    Can really change dramatically so we might be in the same temperature room and let's say it's 22 degrees Celsius I and for me that that would be very comfortable but for someone else it might be a little bit too warm for another person, it might be a little bit too cold so what the temperature of that room means to someone is as a very different thing than what it's what it's defined as how we define it we define it as a specific measurement of heat of temperature and what it means to an individual can be a very different thing, so this is just a basic. 
    Our argument that we have to think a little bit differently about what how we're how we're interpreting the world around us and understand that everyone's going to interpret things slightly different because they're frame of reference is slightly different there are interpretations of things are going to be slightly different and that doesn't mean that there aren't issues that we we have to have resolve and that we have to. 
    Kind of see in black and white terms but there are multitude of other issues that we really have to understand more about perspective and we have to really take a critical lens not only to our own view of that that reality of that meaning but to the view of others and take even an empathetic lens to the view of others, it's really important that we stop thinking just in terms of what this means to me, but what does it mean to us what does it mean to our society or the world that we live in?
    4 min
  • Clear Communication
    Communication is one of these power skills that people talk about quite a bit especially when it comes to employment or even when it comes to education and the learning process I kind of boiled down at communication to to kind of components. One is about understanding it's just about information and exchanging information and the others about persuasion so trying to influence another person's thoughts behaviors and and that sort of thing. 
    And I don't think persuasion in this context is kind. Of a bad word. I think a lot of the communication we do in life is meant to be persuasive. We try to persuade children to act a certain way. I try to persuade my students to do certain things. We try to persuade each other as you know, partners and friends and coworkers to think different ways or to act in different ways. 
    And I think persuasion is a very important method or important way of communicating. But I want to point out that there are some really ineffective. I guess law. Term ineffective ways of communicating They may be commute maybe effective in the short term, but then long term to kind of influence another person's behavior they tend to be very ineffective. 
    So things like withdrawal and that's really the kind of the illumination of the possibility to communicate. So if you're withdrawing from a conversation, if you're withdrawing from a dialogue that can really influence another person's behavior can cause them to try to okay, well what needs do you have that? 
    I can meet but it tends to be only temporary until that with the draw. It without withdrawal is no longer there until the person reenters a conversation then the behavior tends to revert to what it was. Aggression is the same sort of thing so you can be very aggressive in your communication and that might influence somebody for a very short period of time, but then once that aggressiveness kind of dies down then people tend to go back and they revert to their other behaviors and then the last one is just guilt. 
    So giving people guilt trips can be really effective in the short term and long-term it can be really really ineffective. So we're talking about communication and trying to effectively exchange knowledge and persuade people to change their ways change their behaviors or change their ways of thinking. One of the ways of communication that I've most recently been both experimenting with and exposed to things to one of my dear friends and colleagues is a form of communication called non-violent communication. 
    And it's really just a framework more or less a structure for how we communicate to each other in a way that is not aggressive not. Trying to withdraw into yourself and not trying to make another person feel guilty. It's a form of communication that provokes and instills empathy which is one of the key drivers for understanding each other's perspectives in the world and for engaging a person in what kinds of activities we want them to to be involved in order to want them to do. 
    I want them to act upon. So the non-American communication framework not my idea. It's a great book if you just Google non-violent communication fantastic book. It'll give you a really good structure for it or really good way of understanding it. But the short version here is just to start with an expression an observation of what you see or what you observe in a way that's non-judgmental so it's telling another person well. 
    I see you've done this or I understand what you've done here. I try to express very concretely what it is that you've done from a very. Objective point of view without making a subjective judgment about what they've done. Then move from the observation into an expression of your feelings.
    6 min

About Universal Design In Life And Work

From the publisher's feed

The life and work of Dr. Anthony Giannoumis