Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black. Have you ever found it tough to communicate with others of a different age, race, religion, gender, or job

function. Would you like to close this conversation gap between you and your boss,

co-workers, employees, or customers? Our guest on this episode, Alyssa Carpenter, has advice

on how to do just that. Alyssa is a workplace communications expert and the owner of

Everything's Not Okay, and That's Okay,

where she provides training, consulting, and speaking services to organizations. She's also the

author of How to Listen and Be Heard, Inclusive Conversations at Work. Alisa, thank you so

much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

Why did you decide to get into the field of workplace communications?

It's a fascinating area, but what sparked your interest in it?

Yeah, it's interesting.

My background is in higher education, and I worked in colleges and universities for about 12 to 13 years. And just during that time, I noticed so much kind of duplication of efforts and

frustration among the people I was working with, some members of my team and other

teams, and realizing this doesn't have to be, I don't want to say that bad, but sometimes

in workplace situations, people are frustrated and they don't have to be.

And there's just so much miscommunication.

So being able to work with companies and organizations and speaking and training

has been just a wonderful opportunity to bridge these barriers.

So we can actually create spaces where people want to be versus where they feel like they have to be and are just like, oh, I don't want to go to the office, you know, right now.

You did a TEDx talk about humanizing the workplace, which I thought was amazing. And I'm wondering why we should get to know our coworkers as friends rather than creating boundaries between the two.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because we do make

that distinction or we bring half of ourselves to work, right? You have this personal self and you have

...