An Easy Trick To Help Model Success

So a thing I’m sure we’ve all heard a lot of is something along the lines of, “How do I support young people at my practice?”. You might have also heard the same idea talking about women/people of color/trans folks/etc. Essentially it’s, “How do I help people who don’t all look like the people here who are already on top?”. If you’ve never heard anything along those lines then either you have an amazingly diverse practice and are doing an absolutely stellar job already (about 5% of us), or the issue is there but people are either too afraid to bring it up or your practice is entirely 6’ white dudes in their late 20’s to early 40’s.

The issue is that most of the moves people use to address this are performative at best. They might take a disproportionate amount of photos of certain folks without giving them any sort of real partner, they might plaster the phrase “diversity” over everything while maintaining an DEI committee that’s 90% white people, they could respond to any amount of questioning by just saying “I support women”, or they might just keep having the same conversations over and over again without actually doing anything about it.

Instead of doing inclusion theatre, here’s something easy that I’ve seen make a real and immediate difference. It won’t in any way solve everything, but it’s a zero cost actionable step that you can take right now. I talk about it a bit in my book, but I freely admit that it’s something I straight up stole from one of Guy Windsor’s courses, every one of which I cannot recommend highly enough.

The move is this. For any population you’re trying to pull up, use someone from that group as your demo partner whenever you teach your classes.

“I want to support women in my club.” Great, get a woman to demo things with you.

“I don’t know why we can’t keep any young people around.” Cool, grab a college kid and have them be your demo partner.

The list goes on.

Now yes, make sure you get people’s consent before pulling them up on stage to demo with you. If they don’t like being in the spotlight, forcing them into that role is not going to effectively model success for anyone in the class. You also have to make sure people don’t feel like they’re just the diversity hire and are only being brought up on stage to make you look better. If at all possible, my recommendation is to try and figure out who your TA is going to be before you get to class and have a chat with them.

At the end of the day, talk is cheap. If you want people to succeed, get someone who looks like them and put that person up on stage where everyone can see.

If you would like to pick up a copy of my book, both print and digital editions are available for purchase at my website FoolOfSwords.com.