A colleague who works at a major hotel chain recently shared my TEDx talk on “Finding Your Voice in the Workplace℠” as part of a sales training he was leading. About halfway through, he hit the pause button and asked, “Who do you think this woman is?” He collected all kinds of answers, and then he hit play again. Once he got to the section where I detail my experiences with coming out as LGBTQ (more on that in a moment) and how my identity impacts my experience as a business owner, people were astonished. In just a few minutes, they had formed so many assumptions about me -- about my family, my work, what’s important to me -- and most of them were wrong.
All of us make assumptions based on what’s visible about someone, and then we fill in the blanks about the rest, often based on our own lens or