We were lucky to catch up with Dr. Zabina Bhasin recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Dr. Zabina , so excited to talk about all sorts of important topics with you today. The first one we want to jump into is about being the only one in the room – for some that’s being the only person of color or the only non-native English speaker or the only non-MBA, etc Can you talk to us about how you have managed to be successful even when you were the only one in the room that looked like you?
Being the only one in the room that looks like me has been a consistent scenario in my life. As a child and teen, it was very difficult to wrap around my brain as to why I was teased and bullied until I found sports. It was in Basketball that I truly felt like I could be myself and let my character and skill speak for who I am. In this, I was able to incorporate that into my daily life and I began to learn that the people that are meant for you will be for you, and those who are bullying me in most scenarios were projecting their insecurities and/or spewing the rhetoric they were learning from their life at home. I learned it takes courage to be who you are unapologetically and while you may not become friends with everyone people respect you for being “real.” I believe my success has come from taking on difficult situations and being unwavering in my ability to get to the end objective. Basketball played a huge role in this as well as my mother who was an educator and believed everyone had more in common than we believed which led me to meet people where they were at and in many instances with love.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
My name is Dr. Zabina Bhasin, but I go by the name Dr. Zee. I am a South Asian American Child Psychiatrist, Cornell-educated diversity and inclusion (DEI) expert, and mental health expert. I am the founder of In KidZ, an ed-tech company centered around educating children and families on other cultures and celebrations. My goal is to make inclusion a normal and daily part of family life. I am mom of two amazing children on a mission to educate our children, celebrate diversity, and to change the world through play. My expertise and the work to use games, toys, and fun to teach serious topics like diversity, inclusion, belonging, and more have landed me on Good Morning America, Entrepreneur Magazine, Vogue Magazine & most recently celebrated as FORBES NEXT 1000 ENTREPRENEURS. I consider myself a dynamic speaker, entrepreneur, and children’s book author, and I have recently become the only South Asian woman on the Toy Association Board of Directors; I am also a member of the Concordia board. As a South Asian woman-owned company, I am one of the first to ever gain a licensing partnership deal with Sesame Street. I live by the motto, from my mother, “We are more similar than we are different. Our differences make us unique, but they do not separate us.” Her past experiences with childhood
bullying and her current observation of a lack of cultural understanding of children sparked
her global work. At In KidZ, creating toys and products designed to celebrate diversity is just the beginning. The
company is expanding to broaden its reach through books, television programming, classrooms,
and businesses around the country. And we’re doing it all with a single goal in mind – to make diversity no longer an issue and the cultural norm.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
As someone with a learning disability, I am dyslexic, schooling specifically never came easy to me and even going through medical school I struggled significantly as my academic value and success played a huge role in my self-esteem. However, as I matured and learned life lessons there are three skills I believe made a huge difference in my life. First is tenacity, understanding that no matter how difficult something was going to be I was going to continue doing it until I got it. I attribute this again to Basketball as well but it plays a huge role in my successes. The second is compassion, not only for myself but for others. When we lead with compassion we truly can change the world I believe that having compassion for yourself is a form of self-love and you can come at situations with people from different positions in a non-judgmental manner when you lead with it. The third would have to be becoming a psychiatrist led me to truly understand people to their core and understand that in a world with millions of people, everyone is trying their best, and while some are “better” and handling things than others it does not mean people are not struggling in their lives. This has allowed me to recognize that a lot of conflicts in life whether major or minor in many situations are a reflection of the individual and not truly yourself. Now there are instances where we must hold ourselves accountable for situations because no one is perfect, but understanding the human psyche allows for you to just let things go.
My advice for people whether starting now are restarting their journey is to be patient, have compassion for yourself, and allow yourself to feel your emotions when they arise but remember who you are and why you are working toward the goal Understand your ‘why” plays a major role in how we handle situations. Be tenacious in your pursuit, have compassion for yourself, and remember everyone else is trying their best so don’t make up stories based on why you think people do what they do.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
Being a DEI Expert in an environment where we are having attacks on DEI both in the corporate world and in Education life has been very interesting lately. We saw the attacks on Affirmative Action in the Supreme Court Rulings that ultimately occurred. Subsequently, we are seeing attacks on DEI at all levels and this is affecting our children significantly. As a child expert, one of the main situations I see is bullying and as DEI continues to be attacked we see books being banned, bullying, and prejudice at an all-time high and it is a challenge I am facing in trying to be the voice for the voiceless as well as guiding parents in this new era of parenting. Children have their voices and many of them can contextualize how they are feeling yet we as adults tend to brush them because they are “kids.” However, I want to push back and say our children can teach us a lot more than we think. Some people may wonder what the correlation between DEI and our children is and I will say that when you block children from learning or experiencing different people cultures, traditions, and history it leads to an increase in bullying and prejudice.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.inkidzco.com/pages/dr-zee
- Instagram: @drzee_md
- Facebook: Zabina Bhasin
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drzeemd/
