Dr. Tee Williams is an incredible influencer and wonderful teacher who has dedicated his life to bridging the huge gap between social justice education and coaching. Dr. Tee believes that 9 times out of 10, the coach-client relationship involves critical social context and identities. By increasing your self-awareness you can start to think about and understand your blind spots so that you can compensate for them.
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Dr. Tee shares some of the tools to understand the difference between diversity, inclusion, and liberation of social justice, grasping how power and privilege are institutionalized, and discussing inequality. By becoming aware of metacognition, your internalized dominance, and subordination, you can learn active listening and perspective taking, which can lead to radical inclusivity.
It is incredibly important to learn how to negotiate our multiple identities and the intersection of those identities, and how those intersections create new and unique forms of oppression that are situated within our social context. By examining how this fits into socially constructed oppression, you can better construct your own worldview.
By spending the time to build your version of the world and the relationships that you need, you can enact liberation on a day to day basis in the way that you live your life. The way we enact liberation is in alignment with the vision of liberation that we create for ourselves and can help you to understand the past, present, and future for different groups of people.
Of course, our usual topics of fitness and diet are important, but you must understand the social context in which health and fitness exist in to best understand how to relate to your clients and help them improve. When the way you understand the world changes, the way you understand yourself and who you are in the world also changes.
What did you find most inspiring or challenging about today’s episode? Let us know in the comments.
Foundations of Social Justice Course
Webinar: Teaching Consent to Children & Youth
Follow Dr. Tee on Instagram
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
“Whether you are doing fitness and nutrition or life coaching or coaching of any kind, it is essential that you understand how both social identity, social context, power, and inequality, affect human beings. And therefore how they affect your clients.” (9:10)
“It is never as powerful to fight against something as it is to fight for something… when you are fighting for something and you are doing it with awareness right, with critical liberatory consciousness, it allows you to to be of the oppression and not in the oppression.” (27:29)
“Until you learn the skills that are necessary to interact with people who are different than you, in ways that do not damage them and do not play into this existing system, you are again operating within this huge blindspot.” (34:05)
“Here’s what you need to know about the past and the present, and here’s what a vision of the future looks like. Here’s what I’m doing and here’s what I’m learning and here are the resources and people that I am learning from” (40:04)
“I guarantee you that whatever you or your clients are dealing with, when you begin to trace the roots of it and really dig deep to figure out what’s going on, it will in some way be connected to one or more social identities. Period. (50:41)
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2 Responses
Hello Steph,
I have been a follower of your work for a long time and I’ve always admire and enjoyed your work.
I am happy to say I have been an spectator of your growth as a professional and obviously as a human being. I have seen as time passes that you are more open to explore the true meaning of being harder to kill, by introspective work that you are willing to share with the rest of us, teaching by example and exposure.
I have to tell you, this episode…holly crappoli!!!!! just a pure mind blowing knock-out! Dr. Tee is impressive. I was hearing the episode while getting ready in the morning and on my way to the gym, and suddenly I found myself in the gym parking lot, listening to Dr. Tee’s wise words, eyes filled with unshed tears while his message pealed layers of my own experiences, filled with hurt and fears.
What else is to say but THANK YOU for your work, for being able to COMMUNICATE and let us be vulnerable while growing by your side.
Thank you SO much for sharing your thoughts and perspective on this epsiode, Elena. Dr Tee has a great FB group that you might like being part of. It’s called Everyday Action <3