BEFORE YOU HOLD SPACE: A Bias & Self Awareness Guide for Communities & Orgs

Before You Hold Space

A Bias, Projection & Self-Awareness Check-In for Community Leaders, Organizations, & Practitioners

The spaces we create are shaped by more than our intentions.

As community leaders, facilitators, organizers, practitioners, and people entrusted with others’ stories, our beliefs, experiences, biases, and assumptions inevitably influence how we listen, respond, lead, and make decisions.

Before You Hold Space invites you to pause and examine the lens you bring into community.

This is not about becoming perfectly unbiased. It is about becoming more aware of what may be operating beneath the surface—so we can create spaces rooted in greater integrity, accountability, safety, and collective care.

Inside, You’ll Explore:

• How personal experiences and beliefs can shape the way we lead and serve

• The difference between intention and impact

• Bias, projection, assumptions, and the stories we create about others

• How power, position, and authority influence community dynamics

• The ways individual bias can become collective culture

• How our responses to conflict, difference, and discomfort reveal our own conditioning

• The importance of self-awareness in ethical community leadership

• Reflection prompts to help you examine what you may be bringing into the spaces you hold

Created For:

Community leaders • Facilitators • Organizers • Wellness practitioners • Educators • Coaches • Healers • Group leaders • Founders • Advocates • Anyone responsible for creating or stewarding spaces for others

Before You Hold Space is an invitation to look inward before asking others to feel seen, heard, supported, or safe.

Because the work of creating healthier communities does not begin with changing everyone else.

It begins with checking the lens through which we see them.