How to Talk About Race: A Panel Discussion

When Your "Jokes" Get You in Trouble

Everybody loves a good laugh. We feel better when we hear something funny and our anxiety or pain is eased because humor has come as a balm in a tense day. Laughter is beneficial to our emotional and physical health. Well-placed humor works easily in a lot of ways when we are telling stories, but can also come at a huge cost. If we joke about a topic that is sensitive to many, and we do it in a public forum where our intent can be misconstrued by the audience, then we can create a firestorm of frustration for ourselves and them. A recent example of a humor faux pas involves rapper T.I. and his comments regarding how he checks for his daughter's virginity. He claimed in a podcast that when his 18-year-old daughter goes to the gynecologist, he tells the doctor to check her hymen to make sure it's still intact--an indication that she is still a virgin. Though this is not an accurate test of virginity, T.I. says...

How to Stop Interruptions in Conversations

So you're sitting in a meeting, and you begin to answer a question that has been directed toward you by your boss. You get through about half of your response when a colleague jumps in and offers his take and essentially silences you. There is evidence that if you are a woman, this will happen to you more often than if you are a man, and it's likely to happen to you by both genders. Interruptions in communications like this happen all the time whether you're in a group offering your opinion or one-on-one sharing a story. Regardless of the setting, we all find it annoying and rude. These disruptions of dialogue hamper thought processes, contribute to misunderstandings, and devalue people's input. So what do we do when they keep happening to us? A few worthy suggestions can be found in Kathryn Vasel's article, "Next time someone interrupts you in a meeting, try this" . But what...

Talk Ain't Cheap

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