Welcome to day 2 of Mastering the Game of Allyship! Today we're going to expand on what it means to be an effective ally and why that's different from being a good ally.
Remember from yesterday: effective allyship is applied friendship. When you earn trust and rapport, being an ally is as easy as helping folks you already care about. So how do we end up with people who are struggling with that?
The reason people don’t show up as effective allies is because they are preoccupied with “being good” instead of being effective. Effectiveness in friendship is hella easy: it's measured as a function of keeping the friendship. But when you try to ally with people that you don't already have a relationship with, you instead start to measure your effectiveness based on goodness: but this goodness shifts into a measure of collective good. What that really is is a measure of collective health.
Simple recap: when you're friends, effectiveness is keeping the friendship. If you don’t have a relationship with someone and you try to be an ally, effectiveness morphs into goodness which morphs into collective goodness which morphs into collective health. What’s so bad about that?
Well generally that’s not bad, but many of us get suckered. Instead of chasing what is healthy we tend to chase that which seems healthy. That lets us stay a part of the group. Obviously we all want to be part of community, so when we’re allying to a community instead of people we are in relationship with, our underlying motive, our measure of effectiveness, is staying in the group. That gives us BIG incentive to do what looks good instead of what is effective, makes change, and improves the collective health.
We also end up punishing individuals who aren’t ACTING good. If the community doesn’t do it, you probably do it yourself (stop that). And once again we’ve found ourselves at the guilt/shame/avoidance spiral (we’ll probably be here a lot. Most of us hang out here). That spiral is not just boring, it also ends up getting a lot of people to simply stop showing up. If you desperately don’t want to do bad, it’s better not to show up at all right? Get out of the way and you can’t screw up.
What’s particularly tough here is that community change requires the community to die. Change = death to certain cultures and so the change makers are labeled as “not good” when asking the community to be different. So you get punished. And that’s scary.
Shifting from caring about being good to actually being effective at transforming the lives of others means that you’ll have to give up needing to seem a certain way to others in order to actually make a difference.
People will be threatened by your power, because power is the capacity to make change.
Effectiveness is the ability to take that power and actualize it.
Power used to seem good is ultimately a waste because it won’t result in meaningful change. If you want to know how to find your power and regularly show up and use it to make change, keep checking back on the blog because that’s what we’re going to be exploring for the next month or so. You’ll also find that info in the Mastering the Game of Allyship book, so keep your eyes out for the Kickstarter on March 1!
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