by Jason Dukes

October 10, 2016

3 Cultural Stigmas to Overcome as Black Business Leaders

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African Americans have strong, rich culture. Unlike many other nationalities, it’s more difficult for us to link our culture back to its origin, beyond past years of oppression. With so many advances in our society and the advancement of our people, some of the origins of our culture have been ignored. So, there are a number of things that we go around doing and thinking on a daily basis, which actually originates from our past history of oppression.

This became super clear to me when I first heard about concepts brought up by Dr. Joy DeGruy, in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. I started to distinguish many of the traits of successful entrepreneurs and visionaries, and I was seeing how they aligned to many of my cultural norms. I soon found that many of the stories and norms that I carried were getting in the way of my ability to dream bigger and create more powerful visions. Some of these stories and norms were even holding me back from achieving my set goals in multiple ways.

Here are three of the many places where you can identify your own stories. Apply this advice to your life, to help distinguish some of the cultural stigmas or beliefs that may have served a purpose in the past, but are now holding you back in your entrepreneurial pursuits:

1. Stories You Have About Yourself   

When first distinguishing this, I realized a myriad of stories that I had about myself. These stories included ideas about how much money I could or should make, how successful I could or should be, and what I should or shouldn’t be doing, and so on.

I had lived most of my life in denial of the stories that I had. Meanwhile, they were working against me in the background, creating ceilings. It is essential that you distinguish your own stories and allow this awareness to help propel you forward. The worst thing that anyone can do is deny these stories and pretend they don’t exist, which actually empowers them.

2. Stories About Advancing When Others Are Not 

This one is huge and can cause many arguments, both internally and externally.  As a business leader and visionary, you are in the mindset of advancement. This creates the possibility of a weird relationship with your friends and cohorts that don’t have advancement on their mind. There’s nothing wrong with them, they just aren’t entrepreneurs and have different values. As African Americans, we’ve picked up a story that “being better than others” is a bad thing and should be resisted, but this type of thinking gets in the way of entrepreneurs from our community time and time again.

3. Stories About Those You Bear Similarity to When Your Project Succeeds 

If your project succeeds, you are likely to become one of  “those people.” So, it’s super important to determine and get out all of your stories about who those people are.  If not, it’s possible that, though consciously you are working toward your goals, unconsciously you are actually working against these goals, which prevents you from becoming one of “those people.”