Transcript:

Welcome to the 7 Forms of Respect: Individual Edition.

I’m Julie Pham, the Founder of the 7 Forms of Respect and the CEO of CuriosityBased, an organizational development firm that is dedicated to fostering curiosity in the world, starting in the workplace, because that is where we spend most of our waking hours. And this is my team at CuriosityBased.

I’m looking forward to taking you through the 7 Forms of Respect workshop which will help you transform your communication and relationships.

A lot of people think that the 7 Forms of Respect will teach you how to be respectful or how to get respect from others. I believe you already know how to be respectful and I believe those around you probably think they’re respecting you. What’s happening is you might have different ideas of what respect looks like. 

The 7 Forms of Respect is based on my 15 years of experience of facilitating collaboration among people from diverse backgrounds. I noticed they had different expectations for how they wanted to be treated. A few years ago, I started to conduct formal focus groups and workshops. What started as “how do you like to be treated at work?” evolved into “respect” as I kept hearing the word “respect” over and over again. Then I started to ask, “What does respect look like to you?” And what became clear in our workshops was that respect takes on many different forms. What one person might interpret as respectful, another person might interpret as disrespectful. That was a huge aha for people in our workshops and focus groups as well as in our research interviews and questionnaires. 

The 7 Forms of Respect is designed to help people understand their own perspective as well as to see others. I’ve been doing that all my life. I’m a Cambridge-trained social scientist, a journalist, and a community builder. Also, personally, I’m as a Vietnamese-born refugee who grew up in the US, I lived in England, France, Germany, and Vietnam, places where respect can look really different than in the US. I experienced firsthand how respect can be relative and cultural. I’m so excited for us to begin our journey on this 7 Forms of Respect individual version.