When I first moved to New York City over a decade ago, I didn’t know anything about unconscious bias. This lack of awareness meant that my own prejudices were hidden from me. For example, I would get upset when people mistook me for another nationality, not Dominican. My reaction was, “Of course not!” This triggered stereotypical images of that group in my mind, and I wanted nothing to do with them because I wasn’t one of them.

I’m glad I learned about unconscious bias—why we have them, how they work, and most importantly, how awareness of our own biases can be the key to changing and retraining our minds. This awareness helps us show more compassion, empathy, and kindness to others.

The most important thing to know about unconscious bias is that we all have them. Yes, I still do. Awareness doesn’t automatically make them disappear; however, the first step toward ending our prejudices is to recognize them. Once we do, we can begin the learning process to unlearn biases that took years to develop.

According to Merriam-Webster, the unconscious is defined as “the part of mental life that does not ordinarily enter the individual’s awareness yet may influence behavior and perception or be revealed (as in slips of the tongue or in dreams).” Bias is defined as “to give a settled and often prejudiced outlook to something.”

Based on these definitions, unconscious bias can be understood as the beliefs, positions, and reactions we have about others that are shaped by our past experiences or learned knowledge from parents, teachers, or our environment. These biases occur automatically in our brains, leading us to make judgments without further examination.

How to Combat Unconscious Bias

When I discuss unconscious bias, I often see people’s faces and hear questions about the seemingly impossible task of identifying what happens unconsciously in our brains. After all, if we’re unaware of these biases, how can we be blamed? And how can we stop something that happens automatically? If you’ve been asking these questions, you’re not alone. But I’m here to tell you that you can stop being biased. It won’t happen overnight, but you can be confident in your ability to change.

Since unconscious bias is rooted in information stored in your brain for years, overcoming it starts with retraining your brain with new, accurate information. For example, if you were taught that “women are housewives and men work outside the home” but have become a high-paying professional, you might struggle with the idea of letting your husband run the house while you work. You need to question the information you grew up with and compare it to what you’ve learned from your own experience as a professional woman. Make it a point to challenge those outdated beliefs.

This exercise might seem too simple to counteract years of ingrained stereotypes, but it is effective if practiced consistently. Although the brain is an organ, research shows that in many ways it behaves like a muscle, capable of being trained and improved through repetition. The more you reinforce new information, the more your brain will transform its response when needed.

Once you understand unconscious bias, you might wonder what to do next. The next step is to identify the specific biases you hold so you can start addressing them. A good starting point is taking the test developed by psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington to identify hidden biases.

This test, part of Project Implicit, is an international collaboration among researchers interested in implicit social cognition. The goal is to educate the public about hidden biases and provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data online. They offer more than a dozen tests on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, age, and weight, among others.

Beyond tools like these, we can always pause when our instincts lead us to make snap judgments about someone or something. Taking a moment to reflect on our attitude and response, or revisiting an event or situation to honestly assess why we think a certain way, will help us change our mindset.

There’s no silver bullet for eliminating unconscious bias. However, if we want to improve our interactions, equip ourselves for a global society, and raise our children to be more understanding and less prone to stereotyping, we must do the work to retrain our brains with the right information.

Have you identified your biases? I’d love to know what you do to combat them!