by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Inclusive Conversations
Ever feel that having a conversation in a productive way when people have different perspectives is hard work? I’ve got news for you. You’re right!
This blog is the first in a series of 13 about inclusive conversations. With three introductory blogs and ten topical blogs, along with the e-book that will compile them all, I’m focusing on ten barriers to inclusive conversations and 10 skills that can help overcome them.
What is an inclusive conversation and why do inclusive conversations matter?
Here is a beginning definition of inclusive conversations.
I see an inclusive conversation as a conversation in which differences in perspectives are leveraged as opportunities instead of threats or being ignored.
Differences in perspectives are always grounded in differences in life experiences whether they are based on gender, race, ethnicity, culture, class, location, job rank, political outlook, allegiances, hair color, or whatever other life experiences play an important role in an individual human being’s life.
Here are a few opportunities for inclusive conversations:
- Generating strategies: Someone with different life experiences from the majority is invited to offer unique insights to understand the reaction of a wider audience;
- In-group perceptions of other people: People from one group have a conversation about a person or group with a different set of life experiences;
- Dissipating tension and staying engaged: Tensions build because of different perspectives, where the differences risk shutting down the conversation, e.g. agreeing to disagree;
- Getting feedback: Getting genuine feedback on your work from someone who you know will have different view.
Engaging differences as building blocks instead of walls takes overcoming internal and external barriers and exercising certain muscles.
In this blog series there will be 10 skills that will help you increase your capacity to have inclusive conversations. I will also tell you stories about how they I used them.
But before we get to skills, let’s check our assumptions. Why is inclusion important? Why should we care? That’s the topic of my next blog.
by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Inclusive Conversations
We live in a world where our experiences of individual and group differences are more expansive every day. As globalism, transportation, and communication make our world smaller, we gain contact with people of more different cultures, nationalities, sexual orientations, tribes, ethnic groups, professions, political outlooks, ideologies etc. etc. etc than prior generations.
In my family, my brother and I are the first generation not raised on a farm. For our parents, until they migrated to the United States, and many others in their small Italian village of 6,000, their lives revolved around the people they knew in a 7-mile radius. Very few acquaintances came from nearby towns, a few from the nearest two small cities, and in extreme circumstances, the largest nearby city. Even their most extensive networks were in a 50-mile radius. My grandparents rarely went to Naples (50 miles away) and had never been to Rome (151 miles away). My father tells me stories about how growing up, people from the river felt different from those from the hills or the villages. For us today, those differences feel minimal.
In our current world, while we are exposed to people from all around the world, in school, work, community or play, conversations are not easier.
While I know that exclusion can be intentional, in my work, I have found that “mainstream” often excludes “others” for the fear of not being able to “manage” the conflict that may surge given the differences among people in the conversation. I think there is some truth to those fears.
But before we get to skills, let’s check our assumptions. Why is inclusion important? Why should we care? Here are some reasons why.
- Effective strategies – Whether you are a business, a non-profit, an organizer, or a teacher, you probably don’t want to waste your time. When we are faced with new situations with diverse audiences, we often problem solve with friends or colleagues to help find the best solution to our woes. If, in preparation, you only talk to people who look like you, it’s very likely that your strategy will be ineffective once it hits a wider, more diverse audience. This doesn’t mean that the people who helped you were “wrong.” It simply means that you also need advice from people similar to your ultimate audience to come up with the right strategy. This can be especially tricky when the situation is raw or your thoughts about it are raw. Knowing how to talk with someone who doesn’t walk, talk, think, or look like you to get back genuine, insightful feedback is essential to your planning. It takes skill to get more than a cordial “it’s ok” so that when you act, you are more likely to hit gold.
- Creativity – Misunderstandings are quite easy in the presence of different mindsets, so building your ability to have a good conversation across differences means also building your capacity to be creative, flexible, original, genuine, and positive all at the same time. Needless to say, this deeper, richer way of thinking about human beings can help you in other areas of your life too.
- Support – Most of us could use more support. Sometimes we get so used to having minimal support that we stop looking for people who share our vision. Instead, we work harder. When we build our capacity to have inclusive conversations, we are also building our capacity to see the common threads between our own passions and that of others. We learn to build more effective partnerships and alliances that help reduce or eliminate our isolation. Our connections become more genuine and we discover more support than we thought possible.
- Happier society – Most people are struggling to be seen and heard. Many conflicts originate from people pushing to be heard or pulling away for fear of not being heard. When we build our inclusive conversation muscles, we can use those tensions to help people be seen and heard the way they want to be seen and heard. The result is often releasing of fear, anger, and shame and more compassion. I daresay, that when we exercise these muscles more as a society, we can be a whole lot lighter and a whole lot happier.
- Wisdom – One of our greatest myths about people who are on the margins of an experience, such as the dropouts, the naysayers, and the skeptics, is that they do not understand what we we are doing and are critiquing from a place of ignorance. Rarely do people admit that folks disengage precisely because they do understand, they do see things, dynamics that people in charge sometimes do not. They see the limitations of what is being done, think it will fail, don’t see space for their critical input and bail. Inclusive conversations help us engage with the margins of our practice to help us see our blindspots before they tear apart our whole vision.
Ok. You think you can just talk to people? You don’t think having inclusive conversation requires building a skillset? Check out my next blog….
by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Inclusive Conversations
Once we’ve decided that having inclusive conversations is important and worth our time, why is it important to build our ability to do so? Can’t we just talk? What is there to learn? After all, aren’t we just people?
Yes, we are all just people and we all have culture. Because our worlds are often separate, except for specific moments of contact, each group has a history, a set of beliefs, habits, and norms about and for itself, and a set of perceptions of other groups. Communication is extra-tricky too. In ambiguous situations body language and tone of voice are what we use to interpret meaning. Each culture is subject to its own interpretation. Even if we assumed that everyone had only the purest, best interests at heart in delivering a verbal message (which is not always the case), how that individual communicates that message determines whether the conversation is productive or not. The words we choose, the tone of voice, how we stand, and what we do when we are talking, all play a part in how our message is received. And as the theatrical genius Augusto Boal said, ”The word spoken is rarely the word heard.”
Further, where communicating about different sensitive topics that are often taboo, such as the social construct of race, victimization, microaggressions, privilege (social inequality), etc., there is a high risk of the conversation getting tense and people being either victimized or victimizing others via misleading, miscommunication, or mislistening (in case you’re wondering, yes, I just made that word up). Violent outbreaks can also occur after multiple dissatisfying, victimizing interactions; the victim can become the aggressor.
This is why exercising muscles to converse across differences is crucial. Misunderstandings are not to be avoided. They are an integral part of communicating. We can avoid shutting down the conversation when a misunderstanding occurs so that it strengthens the relationship.
The next ten blogs and the e-book that will contain all ten posts, will focus on ten barriers to conversations across differences and skills that can help overcome them. Each barrier falls under one of five moments of building relationships with people or groups: opening the door, self-care/discernment, deepening the relationships, taking a stand, and fostering a group’s process.
Here are the individual skills and barriers that will be addressed in this series:
- Opening the door: Resistance to someone else’s view
- Opening the door: Different Political Stances
- Self-care/Discernment: Burnout
- Self-care/Discernment: Being attacked
- Deepening relationships: Tensions rising
- Deepening relationships: Putting people off – Beating them down with knowledge
- Taking a stand: Flawed Process
- Fostering group process: Jeopardizing trust
- Fostering group process: Trying to control the result
- Fostering group process: Different comfort zones
Building muscles for genuine conversation is critical for this time.
We cannot learn all there is to learn, and solve the problems of our world, without communicating. Our world is changing quickly. Conversation is the most creative tool of our human selves, it enables us to think on our feet and get out of mental ruts. When we “agree to disagree”, we are in fact, shutting down the conversation for the fear of saying the wrong thing or letting it get out of hand. When we do this, we simply strengthen our wrong perceptions behind walls of silence and indifference.
It’s important that we stay open and learn to communicate even through the tough moments.
The health and survival of our world depend on it.
In the next blog, I’ll give an example of how to overcome someone’s resistance to an inclusive conversation.
by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Inclusive Conversations
Tip #1. Open the door mindfully.
How a conversation begins is everything. It’s like not knowing what’s behind a door, so we have to be careful of how we open it. I’ve learned that to have an inclusive conversation, I have to be mindful of how I open the door to the conversation. I pay attention to what I say and the impact of my words and actions.
(Happy Halloween, folks!)
I used to just run people down with my knowledge to stay true to myself. I believed in calling people out, by any means necessary. The result? Many dinner parties became arguments and I went home feeling hurt, alone, and isolated. I was hurting myself and I was missing great opportunities for learning. My closest friends stopped talking to me about race. When Obama was elected, the group of friends that knew me from this phase of my life never talked with me about the elections. I’ve changed a lot over the years, but many haven’t noticed.
While calling out is still a value for me, I can now see that there are different ways to do it. There is power in opening a door without knowing what’s on the other side. The way you start a conversation can open it up, shut it down, or make it explode. I now strategize to maximize the impact and decide ahead of time how much I’m willing to expose myself. I decide how important it is for me to call out this particular circumstance and how safe I feel or not.
Many times my intention is to plant seeds for questions and reflection. It’s to start a conversation, not end it. It isn’t always easy or effective. Here’s an example of a time that worked particularly well.
It was early this spring; I was camping with 2-3 friends and a larger group of people I had just met. I was up on a hill, sitting under a tree, waiting for folks to get and finish their ice cream. I’m lactose intolerant. It is hard to watch others eat and resist the temptation, but the sun was bright on a cloudless day and the sun is a blessing.
One of the guys came back from getting ice cream quite irritated and vented.
“This woman in front of me was so rude. She was deaf and she was trying out all these flavors, then letting the person she was with try them too, they were both deaf, and it took forever. She’d ask the woman and the woman wouldn’t understand, then the woman would answer and she wouldn’t understand. There weren’t that many people in line, but she just took forever. Plus…they’re everywhere today. What is it, a deaf convention or something? Not that I have a problem with deaf people…she was just so rude. I mean, If you have a communication challenge, try one flavor, not five.”
There was a dense pause. I was holding back.
Then one woman said, “I disagree.”
“I do too,” I quickly supported her.
“I mean, it just took forever, come on!!!….” The guy continued, ignoring our disagreement.
Neither of us pressed to give our opinion.
After a few minutes of him venting again, another person spoke up. “It sounded like someone else had another opinion, I wonder what that was about….”
The dude started talking again. No one answered. But then, he stopped himself. He got curious.
“You disagree? I’m curious to hear your perspective.”
“Well, just because someone is deaf, that doesn’t mean they should hold back from trying ice cream. It’s bad enough to be deaf, why give up on other pleasures too?” said the other woman.
“And,” I added, “there may be a different perception of time in deaf culture, or simply in the experience of being deaf. It may be a slower-paced culture. So from her perspective, it is your impatience that is rude.”
“I never thought about that,” he said.
We all kept talking and there was an openness to interrogate that wasn’t there before. This conversation was no doubt a group effort. Here are the things I think worked well:
- Disagreement was initially voiced concisely, without an argument, creating curiosity.
- Two people supported each other in their dissent, one person was not alone.
- One person gave the stage to the disagreeing party.
- The disagreers did not force the conversation nor try to “win” the argument, they simply voiced their dissent.
- The main person got curious about another perspective on the issue.
- The person in question had a chance to vent, before he welcomed another perspective.
Together, the above team scored a touchdown in the camp of overcoming resistance and helping the conversation move to place of exploration and openness. It’s worth mentioning, that the above interaction wasn’t planned, yet I would not have experienced it with my old strategy of running down the enemy with all my knowledge.
by Rita Fierro | Oct 18, 2019 | Internalized Oppression
There once was a little girl named Folasi; she was lively and loved to sing, dance, run and breathe. She built a home for herself in the forest. It was a cardboard box with cut-out windows decorated with colorful paint and leaves. To her, it was a mansion. On the days in which a soft breeze would come through, she could sit in her home and feel protected.
Folasi invited her friends one by one, to see her home in the forest.
When Sata came, they sang magical melodies that imitated the birds. The birds gathered around them to teach them new melodies.
When Dan came, they danced to imitate the leaves and the tall trees began to sway with them.
When Peta came, they painted from morning to nightfall. The colors of the forest became vivid: the misty brown of the ground, and the deep dark brown of the tree trunks, the yellow-green of new leaves and deeper green of older ones, the light blue of the afternoon sky and the yellow, red, and purple shades of the sunset.
When Rara came, they ran from one edge of the forest to the other and squirrels and rabbits would follow them. Rara ran fast ahead of Folasi and it was hard for her to keep up. They would lie in the grass and explode in laughter as their chests rose and fell, out of precious breath.
When Bibi came, they sat still in the middle of a circle of trees and breathed in deeply the clean air. They would turn one at a time in the direction of each tree to see and feel the uniqueness of each one. In the silence, the trees whispered in their ears. “Come play when it rains,” Mr. Maple would say. “Never stop playing,” Mrs. Sequoia would say.
After all her friends had visited, Folasi decided to go back to her home in the forest alone to plan a way to keep her happiness forever. She went back to the forest for five days.
On the first day, she fell asleep and had a dream. A huge brown goat came and wiped out her home in the forest. She woke up crying and relieved; it was just a dream. Then Folasi realized that Sata’s skin was brown like the goat and she decided it must have been a sign. Sata was no longer welcome to her home in the forest.
On the second day, Folasi was scared to have another bad dream, but she was bored with no one to sing, dance, play, run, or breathe with. So she closed all the windows and doors to feel safe and fell fast asleep. This time she dreamt that a strong wind swirled in circles and lifted up the home in the direction of the setting sun. She chased the home trying to catch it, but it flew faster than she could run and the sun was blinding her. Folasi woke up frightened, but relieved that her home was still safe. However, she then realized that the wind in her dream blew her house in the same direction that Rara ran the day they played and she could not keep up. It must be a sign. Rara would not be welcomed back.
And so it was the following three days as well. Day after day, Folasi had a bad dream about her home being destroyed. She saw similarities between each threat and each friend and one by one, she decided she would not let them come back.
On the seventh day, Folasi came back to the forest. She was confident with her plan to protect her happiness. She was satisfied and thanked the trees for their guidance. She slept again.
Now that she felt safe, Folasi had beautiful dreams. She dreamt of long days singing in her home and fun days painting. She dreamt of dancing with the trees and breathing in their love. She slept several days and nights.
Then she woke to a cold shiver. She reached for a blanket, but there was none.
She groggily opened her eyes and was terrified by what she saw. The colors of the forest were all gone. The leaves had disappeared and the branches were bare. A cold freezing breeze came through. A layer of snow covered the ground. Suddenly she was cold, frightened, and alone. She couldn’t run because the strong wind would blow her home away, and she was too sad to dance. Her paints had dried up and her voice was hoarse.
All she could do, Folasi decided, was to sit and breathe.
“Maybe Mr. Maple can tell me what is going on,” she thought.
It was hard to sit and breathe. The wind was cold, bitterness in her nostrils. Breathing was all she could do. Determined, Folasi sat. She took three breaths and asked Mr. Maple for guidance.
“Mr. Maple! Mr. Maple! Can you help me? I had all these signs and I followed them to protect my home. But then I woke up and all the leaves are gone. And one small breath of this strong cold wind will destroy my home. What shall I do?”
Mr. Maple did not reply.
She breathed ten more breaths. Deeper, deeper still, ten more, twenty more.
Finally Mr. Maple began to talk as if awoken from a deep dream.
“My-ch-ild. It is not time for questions. It is time for sleep. Go to your home outside of the forest until the season of the winds ceases.”
Folasi cried, and cried, and cried. She thought her happiness in the forest was gone forever.
She started walking in the snow towards her brick home, shivering and crying. It began to snow and she got colder and colder. She decided to seek refuge in Mrs. Sequoia’s hollow trunk.
“Hello Mrs. Sequoia! Can I come inside of your trunk? It’s cold!” she asked.
She heard no answer, but stepped inside anyway.
Slowly, the shelter helped. The trunk was wide enough for her to sit. The sides of the trunk hugged her softly. She decided to breathe deeper. The snow outside blew stronger as a storm rose. She felt warmer and safe.
At a strong gust of wind, the trunk swayed gently. Folasi heard a loud yawn.
“Ahhhhh! Hello little one! What are you doing here?” said Mrs. Sequoia. Her voice was groggy, but soft, strong, and tender.
“Hello Mrs. Sequoia! I came inside because it’s too cold. Can I stay please?”
“What happened to you little one?” said Mrs. Sequoia.
Folasi told Mrs. Sequoia about her box and her futile attempts of protecting it. The unexpected cold winds came and sabotaged her home anyway. She explained how Mr. Maple told her to leave. Folasi thought her fun times in the forest were lost forever.
“Oh! That cranky old buzzard!” said Mrs. Sequoia. “He certainly could have explained some things to you! When he is sleeping he cares about no one but himself! Of course you can stay, my child, and there is no need to cry. The cold, the ‘season of the winds,’ as Mr. Maple called it, only lasts a few months. Then, you see, the spring will come again, and before you know it, all the things you loved about the forest will be back. The birds, the warm sun, the leaves, the heat of the ground, it will all be back in no time! Nothing is lost; it is simply hidden to the eye.”
Folasi perked her head for the first time in hours. “You mean I will be able to play in the forest again?”
“Of course my sweetie!” Mrs. Sequoia laughed a deep belly laugh. The whole tree swayed with the contagious chuckle. Folasi laughed too.
“Well, what shall I do now?” Folasi asked.
“As soon as the storm settles, go to your home outside the forest,” said Mrs. Sequoia, “and go back to your friends. They are not enemies. If you had kept your friends, you would have been safer in the forest. Instead, by pushing them away, you are now caught in the storm…alone. You see my dear, with friends and loved ones near, you can weather any storm: the storms you expect and the ones that surprise you in the night. Love is the greatest gift of life. It keeps you safe.”
“But don’t I have to protect the things I love?”
“Awwww….many make this mistake, you see, my dear, protection is like the river’s water. Water must flow freely to keep its quality. If you trap it, it becomes stagnant. When water doesn’t flow, it becomes a swamp and breeds disease…with those nasty mosquitoes that bite you! Love must flow freely. It is the paradox of life: you lost your home when you tried to protect it!
Love and stay open through the storms and you will always be protected. When you love, you may be hurt, but no real harm can come to you. One may betray you, but ten more will honor you. As the flow of the river that changes course, some drops stay in the original path, while others join the new adventure.
For now, rest my child. I will wake you when it is safe for you to walk home.”
Folasi slept a warm sleep, protected by her friend, Mrs. Sequoia. The following spring, she and her friends came back to the forest and built a home of sticks and logs to prepare for the winter. That year, they played in the forest even in the snow.
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