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. Alyssa, 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.

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