We're holding space for you, let's change the world together.

How can we move bravely past our mistakes and build authentic community? By practicing courageous acts of vulnerability and developing the resiliency to see confrontation as gift.

helping you learn how to “hit pause” in difficult conversations

Our fear of making a mistake, or rather our fear of being called out for making a mistake, causes us to confuse feeling uncomfortable with feeling unsafe. If we are unwilling to tolerate mistakes we run the risk of maintaining the very barriers to inclusion we want so desperately to tear down. We need to learn to “hit pause” and bravely hold space at the table.

“Being a good person is not a state of being but a practice, requiring us to stay in touch with our imperfection.”

Jay Smooth

No one is perfect and no one is good all the time. We must practice being good. And when fail to live up to our standards, we must recommit every day to doing the best we can with what we have. Will that imperfection be acceptable to others? Maybe not. But that does not excuse us from getting back up on the horse even after we’ve been thrown across the yard.

latest articles

Hitting Pause on White Supremacy

Brian Shimamoto June 18, 2020 No Comments

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Three more names to be added to a long list of Black lives violently brought to an end. It’s been six years since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the birth of #BlackLiveMatter, yet so little progress has been made. In an Opinion piece by Spencer Bokat-Lindell published in the New York Times on May 28, the author included a graph that showed little to no change in the number of police killings each year since 2013 with the death count hovering around 1,200 annually. To be clear, I am not demonizing

identity cards

Our personal identity is comprised of a unique combination of social group affiliations and, like a card game, many of these identities are assigned to us randomly. In order to help workshop participants to visualize these affiliations, I have created a tool that allows them to imagine their personal identity as a “hand” in a card game. This allows them to explore how membership in certain social groups impacts “game play” or their capacity to be personally successful. Check out the short video below to see the identity cards in action.

who I am

Brian's Strengths

Brian has over 20 years of experience specializing in helping clients promote and support diversity through the development of multicultural competency, leadership development, and social justice education. He is a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and is able to provide valuable coaching, cross-cultural teambuilding, and program evaluation related to intercultural competency development. Well-versed in Strengths based leadership development, Brian strives to apply the discovery and development of an individual’s natural talents to empower participants to become catalysts for positive change in their organizations. His workshops are highly interactive as well as informative, encouraging participants to discover how their personal experiences contribute to the collective learning of the group: as he likes to say, “…the wisdom is centered in the room, not at the front of the room.”

advise

Need help navigating a tricky cultural interaction or wondering how to build a more inclusive community?

speak

Are you looking for a dynamic keynote that who can teach as well as entertain?

teach

Do you want effective and engaging instructor-led training for twenty or two hundred?

why choose me

If you’d like to learn more about how I can support your efforts to “hit pause” and stay engaged in dialogue, I’d be very happy to discuss how we can change the world together. Please complete this form and I’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Location

5527 Valentia Street
Denver, CO 80238, USA

Email

brian@hitting-pause.com

Phone

+1.303.717.1537