Maximizing human potential in a technology-obsessed world.
Be Human First
Reconnecting with Others Is a Practice, Not a Posture
There is a hunger surfacing for more humanity. Most people expressing it have never heard the phrase "Be Human First," even though the phrase is now used in a variety of spaces. Those of us who use it aren't coordinating. The language is reflecting a need that multiple people are observing and responding to.
What the majority of people have is the urgency of an unmet and sometimes unknown need, and it is getting louder. AI has arrived uninvited into every aspect of our lives, from work to internet searches, to music and art and into places it simply isn't needed or wanted. Resistance grows; human needs surge. The signs and signals are everywhere.
Our reaction to this intrusion is itself human, and that is worth noticing. The instinct pulling us to one another is intact. People are reaching for something they never lost and still cannot reach. Connection is both the antidote and the key.
I have been practicing this mindset and approach for over ten years. What follows is where it came from, how it became a methodology, how it works, and what it changes.
Where It Started
Once upon a time, I was proud that I could separate a person completely from what had to get done. Productivity over everything else. I thought it was a strength.
Then I took a Myers-Briggs assessment - hey, it was a whole thing in the early 2000s. Whatever you and I think of personality assessments, the value isn't often in what is measured; the value is in our reaction to the finding. And this one made me sick to my stomach. It labeled me as an ENTJ with the group header of "Field Marshal." I didn't like that, but I liked the description that followed less... someone who arrives, gets the job done, barks commands, and does not spend much time on the human pieces. That probably isn't what it said, but it was what I saw.
I knew one thing for certain - it was not who I wanted to be.
After the initial five-alarm fire, I calmed down and decided to run an experiment. I stopped trying to power through every target, goal, and objective with blinders on. I started paying attention to people and worked on reading the room. I listened more. I included people in how I was thinking rather than telling them what I had already decided.
It seems obvious now, but the outputs got better. The processes were better and we caught more problems proactively. The results were consistent. It was the first evidence I had that this was not only a kinder way to lead, but a more productive way to work.
Thirty Seconds
It all started in 2016 with a group of student assistants and a busy customer service desk.
The student assistants were struggling to care and appropriately serve their fellow students. Everyone who came up to the desk seemed to be frustrated and angry. And customer service is hard. We had examined processes and were working on systemic issues and root causes, but they needed solutions in the moment, not in six months.
We worked on customer service skills and techniques. Match the tone, match the volume, express empathy, stay calm, do not engage... check, check, check. For people who are just learning these skills, this checklist holds right up until someone is genuinely upset. I began to wonder how we could do better and change dynamics in the short term.
Starting with the idea of indirect learning through a mindset adjustment, I focused on recalibrating how they could better relate to the people they served. I looked for common ground and drew on my own experience in service and leadership. An experiment was born.
My teacher parents had demonstrated to me that sometimes people learn better when you don't announce the lesson. So I gave them one instruction, just one. Before you start the interaction, take fifteen or thirty seconds and remember that you are a human, and they are a human. Then see what happens.
That was the whole thing. Thirty seconds of reframing your relationship to the person in front of you.
It changed how they engaged, immediately and consistently. And the student assistant team reported being happier at work. They were more motivated and took greater initiative.
It was time to build with greater intention.
The Whiteboard
By then I had a team mantra, not just for the student assistants, but for the entire unit of more than thirty staff members: "We make magic happen every day." Tongue in cheek, usually with jazz hands. It kept the mood light when the work got hard, and the aspiration mattered most when everything seemed to be falling apart. The university had gone through some scandals, and I had to find a way to keep the work moving. Magic isn't needed when everything is going fine.
The culture was coming apart. People were angry, the stress was high even without the work, and my office had become the room people came to vent in. Day after day. It wasn't just the unit; it was people from other parts of the college and university. Then came a day when I had had enough; I was done with the blaming and finger-pointing. It was getting us nowhere.
Remembering the effectiveness of the simple student assistant experiment, I got out a dry-erase marker and wrote a message in big, bold capital letters on my whiteboard:
BE HUMAN FIRST
It was the only thing I could think to do.
When a conversation turned and stopped being productive, I pointed at the words. If you refused to consider that the people you were blaming were going through the same things and were also people, you had to leave my office and come back when you could. It didn't matter who you were.
People laughed. I got called a hippie and told I was naive. I did not and do not care. I was not going to hold space for anyone taking digs at someone who was not in the room.
The conversations changed. Not all of them, and not right away, but people started solving problems from a different place and came back to tell me the interactions afterward had gone differently. Then I found out that people I had worked with and trained were building it into their own onboarding. That was when I stopped treating it as a rule made to solve people problems and started treating it as a method.
The Human Cost of Othering
Othering is the act of boxing and packaging people. The word is being used as political ammunition these days, but that does not change what othering is or the damage it causes.
Those behaviors allow us to create distance between us and our fellow humans so we can justify acting outside of our values and morals. They allow us to dehumanize the other. If the other is less human, then it becomes acceptable, even just, to judge them, look down on them, be comfortable with their suffering, or even cause harm.
We have all experienced it in big and small ways. Where does your team or group define "us and them" in the organization? It's observable in our neighborhoods and at the PTA, in our governments, and everywhere in between. It has exploded with the distance we have allowed social media to create in the splintering of the self and of our communities.
What many don't realize is that it is less a moral failure than a wiring problem. Sorting is useful. It is how we make sense of rivers of information moving faster every year. It has helped our species survive. The trouble starts when we sort people the way we sort information and forget that they are us and we are them. It is compounded when our feelings get involved.
What I have watched, in small rooms and now at scale, is how quickly the language of difference becomes permission. He, she, they just are not like us. Watching what this does to people is physically painful. Dehumanizing someone gives us permission to stop caring, and caring hurts sometimes, so the permission is welcome.
The issue is that complex problems need range. We need people who can see into corners we cannot. There are some big, wicked problems we must address at every level and space of life right now. Some of them are existential for humankind. Strategically speaking, every box we put someone in removes a vantage point we need.
And the cost is HIGH. It isn't just collaboration and productivity, it is missed solutions, it is the loss of influence, it is the loss of necessary networks and relationships, it's cancel first and ask questions later. The costs come in many forms, but they do come, and some of them are permanent.
Two questions, then. Can you see it when you are the one doing it? And what do you do when it happens to you?
The Work We Avoid
This practice isn't about the other person, it isn't about me, it isn't even really about you. Be Human First is about what we all carry with us into our interactions and conversations before any of us says a word. It works because assumptions and preconceived notions serve no one, and setting them down disarms the defenses we build to protect ourselves in exactly the situations where we most need to be present with people.
But the work of training your mindset, over time, becomes yours to keep. It can change the way you think. It can make you more curious about people and situations. And it can help you stay calm and regulated when things are unclear, fraught, and hard. I've found little that keeps folks' feet on the ground more than being intentional about the things we share, and there is nothing more universal than our humanity.
When I sit down for those thirty seconds, the first thing I tell myself is that I have no place to judge. I have done things. I have hurt people. I've lived a colorful life and that has come with a whole mosaic of issues, stumbles, humiliations, and failures. I am in no position to decide I understand someone's intentions from the outside. But I can make the choice to do the work of seeing them better and understanding the why behind the things they do.
First, I notice how I am responding to them and what bias and judgment comes at first blush. Then I check what is actually in my way and consider why I am responding that way. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with them. Sometimes they have something I want, a background that is triggering for me, I've seen them do things I don't respect, or they are about to do a thing I wish I were doing. That is envy and judgment, and it has no business in the conversation I am about to have.
I name it, write it down, and set it to the side. Not resolved. Just set down, where it cannot steer. I give myself permission to come back to it later and also to ask questions with an open mind and genuine curiosity.
That is the practice. Not being nicer, nicer gets us nowhere. Repeating thirty-second cycles does engender compassion, which makes us all better listeners. It can create connection and help us find common ground. And that leads to better outcomes.
The work we avoid most is confronting our own failures when it comes to interacting with others. I'm not perfect. I falter, I fail, and I lose control of my emotions. It is in those moments that we have to hold ourselves accountable, but with the spirit that we will keep trying.
The temptation is to say that we need to override our wiring. I would argue that it is about the longer work of rewiring ourselves. Like anything we practice, it does get easier. It has become a part of who I am. And the people who know me now cannot even imagine the person I tell them I used to be. It is a choice. The hardest part is that we have to keep making it over and over again.
Why It Isn't Soft
I push back hard on the term soft skills, because all of this is just as hard and complicated as any technical skill. The label is from a different time when gender bias was an accepted norm and everyone thought relationship development, people management, and motivating people were either less important or things anyone could do. We know better now, so it is on us to do better.
For the way we work and live today, what was once considered soft is now essential. I like the term Essential Skills, but I've heard others use the term Power Skills... and I also like that a whole lot.
So, why do I bring that up here?
In business, we have a bad habit of writing off anything that puts humans at the center as unimportant, much like I did early in my career. We cut and diminish anything that falls into that "soft skills" category. I have heard diminishing statements so often, things like "that's no problem, it's just a soft skills issue." I have watched change management cut or pushed aside, and watched organizations decide that listening and teaching people to lead could wait. That tells the story by itself.
We cannot materially engage with this work when we don't believe in it. It's high time that we shake off the concept of soft as less valuable and start understanding that the real work at the human layer requires so much more of us than any piece of manufacturing line equipment or Excel spreadsheet ever has.
Be Human First started in 2016. The capacity to run it well took much longer. Over twenty years of deliberate work on how I listen, what I notice, and what I am carrying into a room. It started with that Myers-Briggs assessment and it is still, especially at this moment in human history, something that I am working to both understand and incorporate into how I live and work. My hope is that what took me twenty years to build can be learned in far less.
Fake it 'til you make it won't get you very far here. It is a great way to take the first step, but instead of performative pseudo-confidence, I have found it works best when you mean it. You have to do the work on yourself, and that work does not finish. In my experience, including others in what you are doing makes it better. It also makes it less comfortable and more vulnerable. Maybe that is the common ground that ties it all together. I have never known anyone who is immune to either. It is a matter of whether we refuse to acknowledge our own responses or accept them and try to understand what they are trying to tell us.
It would be a lie of omission not to acknowledge my own neurodivergence. People are hard for me sometimes. Reading a room was not something that came naturally. Everything I know about this, I built on purpose, which is part of why I can describe how it works. I have also been studying people my entire life, and it allows me to see things differently than most.
If any of this were soft or something just anyone could do without the right mindset, ingredients, and skills, it would not have taken two decades for me to get to this level, and it would not still require attention every single day. It's simple. That is not the same as being easy.
Where We Go from Here
I have started to see the phrase in other places. Not often, and not widely, but enough that it is no longer only mine. Mostly I am glad about that.
What usually goes missing is the mechanism. Be Human First gets offered as a value, something to agree with and then move past. It was never a value. It is an instruction: a specific length of time, a specific thing to do inside it, before a specific kind of conversation that continually evolves into something more.
The accountability half goes missing too. That is the half that does the work, and the only half that costs anything.
There is a reason this matters more now rather than less. Look around.
Headcount reduction is not a side effect anyone is hiding. It has been announced from stages as the point. Meanwhile the people living with the results are finding that the tools cost more than the staff they replaced and return less, and that conversation is happening more often, not less. The people who built these systems have described the training data as the largest act of labor theft in history, and the people whose work was taken have noticed. Courts are now surfacing what the social platforms understood about what they were doing to us while they were doing it. None of this is subtle and none of it is new. What is new is the volume.
Underneath all of it is the same move. A person becomes a line item, a data source, a cost to remove, or an engagement metric. That is othering with a budget attached, and it is the same mechanism this page has been describing, running at a scale no hallway conversation ever had to survive.
So, when people push back on the technology, they are not being nostalgic, and they are not simply afraid of change. They are reacting to being handled as inputs. The lashing out is at the dehumanization. The machine is just what is standing there this time.
There are a lot of reasons why this happens, especially in business. But not being seen or valued, constant change, overstimulation, threats both real and perceived, and the fatigue they cause make us want to withdraw into ourselves, and othering is what withdrawing looks like from the inside. That isn't the path forward, at least not a good one.
People are on the bottom of Maslow's Pyramid and clinging. We don't feel that we have the luxury of thinking in context, of slowing down, and of creating a bridge between our experience and that of others. When safety is in question, community and connection are not what anyone reaches for even though they are the most efficient way out. That is the cruel part of this moment. Being buried and frazzled blocks the very thing that would make any of it more bearable. We have access to what could help us and most of us don't know how to find our way back.
Then there is how the technology arrived. I spent years running change management, so I will say it plainly: when something is pushed on people without explanation, without a say, and without any account of what it costs them, resistance is not a surprise. It is the predictable result. Most of what people are reacting to right now is not necessarily the technology itself. It is being handed something and told to be grateful for it.
That reaction is human. It is expected. People are reaching for the thing that they are being denied - human creation and connection. The survival impulse is intact.
Which brings me back to the question. What do you do when it happens to you, when you are the one who has been boxed and packaged and decided about? The answer is individual. Our life experience shapes so much about how we engage with one another and the world. There is no one clean reason why each of us does the things we do.
The reality is that you need to train yourself a little at a time. Take the thirty seconds, or even ten. Take a big breath and step back from yourself, if only just a little. Get still and observe. Let yourself see the costs. Keep a record. Look for patterns. I have rarely been able to change what someone had already concluded about me. What I can change is whether I choose to do the same thing to them on the way out. That part always belongs to us.
Thirty seconds is cheap. It takes no budget, no program, and nobody's permission. You can start in your next conversation, and no one ever has to know.
But if you do, and you start to notice changes in your relationships, conversations, and even your team's performance, reflect on your experience. Work to understand why.
Then, I challenge you to share what you have learned with anyone who will listen.
I've been asked more than once, "What's your secret?" My answer always has something to do with humans because over these many years, I have learned that is what I care about most. And that is the kind of change I hope to see in more of us.