Summary
Highlights
Valerie Alexander begins by asking the audience to visualize three scenarios, then challenges their mental images, revealing how our brains create images based on what is familiar. She explains that encountering the unfamiliar triggers a stress response in the amygdala, a primal part of the brain, leading to cortisol release and a 'fight-or-flight' reaction. This instinctive response, while once crucial for survival, now causes stress in modern social situations when we encounter the unexpected.
Alexander shares an anecdote about a potential male investor who hesitated to use the phrase 'ping me' due to fear of misinterpretation in the current climate of inappropriate behavior towards women in tech. She highlights the irony of simultaneously being seen as a 'highly dangerous' female CEO and 'invisible' to other investors due to age. She stresses the importance of not attacking allies who are willing to examine their behavior and how unexamined behavior is a major stumbling block to true equality.
Alexander urges men to examine their behavior when working with female colleagues by asking themselves if they would act the same way with a male colleague. She also points out that women contribute to these issues by taking on tasks that are not their responsibility, often rationalizing it as 'easier.' This leads to burnout and a lack of women in leadership roles, as no one examines these patterns of behavior.
She illustrates the danger of unexamined behavior with an example from her early career as a securities lawyer, where female attorneys were implicitly expected to handle administrative tasks that male attorneys were not. This illustrates how people can believe they are treating everyone equally while, in reality, they are not. The human brain's primal amygdala reacts to the unexpected, flooding the system with stress hormones and leading to potentially biased decisions.
Alexander explains that while we cannot change our innate primal brain responses, we can consciously change what's 'outside our brains' to make the unexpected expected. She offers three strategies: visualizing situations and being open to different possibilities, having the courage to examine our own behavior when encountering the unexpected, and consciously exposing ourselves and others to what is currently unexpected but doesn't need to be. She emphasizes that normalizing diversity, for example, a black president, makes it expected, ultimately working towards greater equality.
She concludes with another visualization exercise, aiming to demonstrate how the audience's mental images might have shifted. She reveals that she uses these brain exercises in investor meetings to encourage self-examination before presenting her company, which features a black CFO, gay married founders, and a female CEO (herself), thereby intentionally making the 'unexpected' become 'expected'.