Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking on Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, and to improve yourself overall, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. My guest today, Micah Kessel, is the CEO of Empathable.
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a company that helps organizations gain empathy and shift culture to be more inclusive. He is also the emotions, empathy and bias researcher who advises in design for labs at Harvard and Northeastern University. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Micah to the show. Hello. Hi, Roberta. It's so, so nice to meet you and to be having this conversation with you.
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I'm so glad you're on our show today. Your topics are very interesting, much more scientific, so this is going to be very eye-opening and educational for us. But before we get into the deeper stuff, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, I'm someone who really believes that human flourishing is about gaining empathy and understanding our emotions better. I really love the topic of how to improve our life through
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the way that we interact with each other because we're not solo creatures, right? We exist in a realm of other people. And so, you know, today we can talk about how our interconnectedness, how our interactions and how engaging with other people can improve our own ways of engagement in their own life. I can tell you that I'm multicultural kid. So I grew up in New York in a very diverse part of New York and Queens, and then I grew up in a very homogenous white part of Connecticut.
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Then I lived in San Francisco, Amsterdam, The Hague, Ghent in the Netherlands, Hamburg, Germany over the course of my life. And so I've lived in most of those places for multiple years. You know, I've kind of been forced to learn many languages. I speak English, French, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, German by necessity of needing to adapt. I've always been someone who's needed to adapt to different cultures and it's given me a lot of understanding of what it's like to step inside of someone else's shoes.
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I used to sing opera. I started at the Metropolitan Opera as a child. Wow. A joke that I one day will stop making but still enjoy is I'm probably the only person who's ever been on stage with both Pavarotti and Nicki Minaj, but not at the same time. Oh, okay. So that, you know, my childhood was in a high culture performance world. And what it taught me was what it's like to step inside of these big immersive experiences, right? These opera...
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scenes and sets at the Metropolitan Opera are huge and you have these audiences that would get really engulfed in these emotional stories. People that chose to follow their emotions, sometimes for the better, sometimes against society, sometimes for the worst. So at a very early age my religion was these mythological lessons that were about the benefit and the perils of listening to our emotions.
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and the immersive spaces that create that. And so those two things have always really fascinated me and they led to being an experienced designer, which I've done for organizations like Google, Disney, Diabetes Fund, Microsoft. I've worked with governments on experienced design projects for the idea of how can we gain more empathy? Talking about emotions, we now hear more and more being taught to listen to our emotions, listen to your body.
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When somebody says something, check how you feel. When you're in a job you don't like, check how you feel. Has that always been taught and we were just not aware of it or is it a new concept? I think that we look at history in a linear way as if the knowledge that we've gained has accumulated over time. But I think emotional intelligence has always had deep pockets in certain places and certain environments. Certain countries have
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built religions and structures that have allowed for more emotional introspection. If we think about the Dutch, for example, and the Calvinist religion that created Dutch Protestant culture, the way that that society has been created on some hands allows for deep thinking and on the other hand asks for not deep thinking. The idea that, you know, not everyone goes to heaven and you're already pre-chosen, one's like, all right, well, I don't need to think about that. You know, whereas the Catholic Flemish might be more introspective because
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Catholics have to think a lot about shame. Certainly downsides to thinking a lot about shame, but there might also be upsides. So I think every little thing about our environment over time and even more granular looking at families and how families have interacted mean that emotional education has been deep in certain pockets. But the history of time does have improved education, right? Does have improved health and wellness. Also the exposure through internet, social media.
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There's just a lot of information circulating. That's right. We're sharing emotions on a more mass level than we ever had before. Absolutely. Now, when it comes to empathy, I've had several guests prior to this episode with everybody now is on digital empathy, digital empathy. What are your thoughts on that? Empathy is first of all, a term that is highly misunderstood and I think it's defined wrong in the dictionary.
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the dictionary, empathy is defined as the ability to understand what someone else is feeling. Yeah. And the truth is that from a scientific standpoint, we'll never understand what someone else is feeling. We barely understand what we're feeling ourselves. We, I think, are very much allowed to say that we are understanding our own feelings because of the way that political philosophy has created the idea of personal right to express.
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And so I can say, this is how I feel, and I know that you will see that as valid. But really, I'm hardly understanding even how I'm feeling. I'm still working through that. So how am I supposed to understand how someone else is feeling? What I think empathy is truly is the ability to celebrate the validity of someone else's experiences. It's the ability to say that Roberta's experiences right now are as intricate and sophisticatedly different.
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and beautiful and confusing and joyous and sad and embracing as mine. And to take a moment to say you're having an equally valid experience in this moment as I am, that I think is what empathy is. So the question is, are we able to do that digitally? Because I certainly can't understand what someone is experiencing or what someone's experience is like in Jaipur at this moment in Singapore or in South Africa.
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But I certainly can realize that their experience is equally valid to mine, and that it's equally beautiful and intricate to mine. Equally valid. So it doesn't mean it has to be the same for you to understand, just acknowledge that it's equally valid. Or maybe even celebrate. Celebrate it. The reason I'm zooming in on that, have you realized how sometimes...
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especially here in the United States, there's always different groups, you have different races, you have different beliefs, political leanings, whatnot. You always have somebody saying, this is my experience. They're just saying, this is my experience. No judgment on it, nothing. They're just saying, this is what I've experienced. Then somebody else comes and says, oh, but I've had worse. Or somebody comes and says, oh, a lot of people go through worse. Why do you think...
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you, Micah's experience, why should that be classified higher or sit on a higher pedestal? Why don't I just say at this moment right now, Micah's experienced this and this is valid and that's okay. Yeah, because indeed life is not about a trauma competition. No one's trying to win the trauma award. Yeah, I agree. I think that we talk a lot about a sense of belonging when it comes to the way that they affect the isms.
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Right? The way that a sense of belonging is different if you're a different race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, if you're neurotypical or neurodiversion, right? All of these things affect our ability to feel a sense of belonging and affect the way that society allows us to belong. What I think we have a harder time talking about is emotional belonging. And that's because...
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there isn't one book written that explains what emotions are. We don't actually know as scientists. We can't explain it on a physical level. And they're not necessarily separate from thoughts or predictions. What our brain is doing is constantly predicting what's happening in the world around us. And for all of us, there are, in my opinion, are places where we do feel emotional belonging and places where we don't. And I don't mean places like in one person's home, I feel it, and in another person's home, I don't. Right? What I mean is in one part of myself,
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I feel it and in another part of myself, I may not. So I might have a lot of emotional belonging when it comes to the topic of, let's say, guilt. It's very easy for me to feel guilty about something, be in touch with those feelings, be able to process them and be able to move on and go eat lunch and go about the rest of my day. But maybe it's very hard for me to process anger, right? Maybe that's anger is something where I have very little emotional belonging.
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And it's because the environment around me where I grew up didn't allow me to have that emotional belonging for the emotion of anger. They didn't create a space for you to validate your anger and for you to express it in a safe environment and to be heard. So that's the emotional belonging you're talking about. Yeah. Here's a typical situation. You know, there's a political or social media conversation and one person is, for example, a person of color.
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let's say an Asian man, because that's what I am. And they also say something about belonging as an Asian man. And they're talking about belonging in the sense of race and in the sense of gender, but really the intersection of race and gender in this case. And then let's say that a white person talks about their sense of belonging, the hard things that they've gone through. They might not be talking about the emotional belonging that is or isn't there as a white person, right? But they might be talking about the emotional belonging that was not there. They weren't allowed to feel certain things.
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And that's a very valid thing to be upset about. It's a very valid thing to be traumatized over. Right. And so because this isn't a trauma competition in an ideal world, we'd all be able to celebrate the validity of these different types of belonging and not belonging, and therefore really listen to each other better, take the time to listen better. We get very lively when it comes to people that are posing very oppositional viewpoints. But if there's one thing that I believe...
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It's that we can create radical change in our environments without needing to change the radicals, without actually needing to have those arguments. And it starts with two people in every room who are comfortable and inspired to speak up for the rights of others, who are immersed in each other's experiences enough to be motivated to stand up for their colleagues. And it's not necessarily gonna be the person that's being very oppositional and loud. They might be the most stressful, they might cause the most rage.
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But that's not how we're going to shift the environment better, though. Right. We will shift the environment of bias and people being unempathic around us better by focusing on those in our world who are more open and willing to learn about each other's experiences. If you think about all the Thanksgiving drama in most families here, you know, people say, you know, I'm going to go home. Somebody's going to come out. Somebody's going to say.
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I supported an opposing political party compared to what my family's always supported, or you're gonna go home and one of your uncles or somebody is gonna say something about black people. Are you saying that in those instances, you are more likely to get buy-in from your uncle? I love the example you gave, Roberta. Thank you so much for that. So in this perfect example, because it's something we can all experience so well,
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What I'm saying is that instead of focusing on what your uncle is saying that is driving you crazy, I want you to look around the table and find the person at the table who you know is more open and willing to take time to think about viewpoints, more able to hear and see and understand how you feel and adapt it, and try and help them become the second person in the room to speak up so that when you say to your uncle,
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listen, what you're saying to me right now, I find it offensive towards certain cultures. Instead of worrying about whether he's going to respond to that or not, you want to be able to get that second person in the room to say, you know what, that bothers me as well, uncle. We all love you, but I also think that that's offensive towards other cultures, because that creates a conversation partner. An example at my family dinner, I'll take you to a holiday dinner with my family, and you can imagine sitting around the table and my
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cousins and brothers, sisters-in-law are there. And at one point between the second and third chorus, right, someone says something unintentionally racist. And it gets quiet in the room and my brother, I see him open his mouth to almost say something. And then he sighs because he realizes that it's gonna be hard to change this person. And my mother steps in and brings, you know, the next chorus tries to change the conversation.
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It's like pages have been unfinished in an unresolved story that just pile onto the mountain of unresolved stories that make up our nation and our world. A second situation is one where one person speaks up and then we hear crickets chirping and no one says anything afterwards. That one person feels even if they're right, they're the ones who are going to feel like the jerk because no one backed them up. No belonging. They've ruined Thanksgiving dinner. Exactly. They're all alone in this corner. They've ruined Thanksgiving. So they're going to withdraw.
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Just to be safe. They're going to feel less psychological safety, exactly. Now I want to go to a third situation. Let's pretend that you and I are at the office and we're in a meeting and there's 10 minutes left. We're talking about project management and one person says something unintentionally sexist. And then you Roberta say, for example, hey, I'm sorry to interrupt the meeting, but actually what you said right now, I found it.
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And instead of crickets chirping, I want you to imagine that I speak up too. And I say, Hey, I know we only have 10 minutes left to the meeting, but actually I find that a really valid point. And I think this is important to talk about as a team because I also thought it was offensive to women. That is the team that starts a conversation. That is a team where you feel supported and belonging stays in the group. And actually the person who said it has a much higher chance of feeling whole and feeling belonging in the group too.
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because they will be engaged in a conversation where they can be brought back in. So instead of this one person opposing another, which will never create environmental changes and bias, having two people in every room that are motivated to speak up for each other's rights is how we're going to shift it. So even the most biased person over time will become less biased and you didn't even try and change their opinion directly, you found that second person in the room. Let's say that you know me at work, we're friends, we get along and you think, Mica,
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There are some things he doesn't understand about a woman's perspective that I wish that he did, but I know that he cares. Right? I know that he wants to understand. Is it better to invest your energy in the person that is loud-mouthed, that is totally sexist, that drives you crazy? Or is it better to invest your energy in me, who you know cares, but is missing a little bit of perspective and understanding? The energy that you spend to immerse me into your experience of what it's like to be a woman...
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will benefit you so much more in the big picture because I will become that second person in the room who's comfortable and motivated to speak up. And that's how we're gonna change the other person's viewpoint without worrying about the loud mouthed uncle at the meeting. Now let's talk about bias. Yeah, happy to. Yes, so what is implicit bias? Well, one of our labs, we like to talk about bias with a big B and with a small B. Actually, one of our lab directors, Dr. Barrett, talks about this.
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Bias with a Small B is having a preference of mint chocolate chip ice cream over hazelnut. Almond, my favourite, yes. We can also sit and talk about ice cream flavours, that's a great topic too. For sure. Bias with a Small B is, you know, liking dogs or cats and having a preference there. There's no harm from it and it's something that we do all the time and we have to do. Our brain is constantly predicting what's going on around us and we need to be able to check some boxes.
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to be able to say, you know what, I like cats over dogs, that's just how I feel, I don't need to overthink it, it's not harming anyone for me to feel this way, it's fine, right, that's bias with a small B. Bias with a large B is when we have preferences that create a lack of equity and a lack of inclusion and belonging for other people. And so implicit bias is when we haven't been able to bring the awareness of those preferences to a place where we can take time to think about them.
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and be conscious of them. That's what is challenging is that bias is historical and bias is environmental and that's why it's so hard to be able to see the bias around us. We don't live in a vacuum. Bias is like a wave in a stadium. If you're in the 80th row of a football stadium and someone stands up to do the wave and the wave is moving towards you as scientists. You're going to stand up. Right. You're going to stand up because of people around you that are standing up. We don't know if you're going to stand up based on your personality as scientists.
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We don't know if you're going to stand up based on the amount of sleep you got. That's very hard to predict, but it's very easy to say you're going to stand up because of the people standing up around you. And that's why the environment around you will predict your behavior in many, many ways. And that's why implicit bias is so hard to see. Because if you don't live in an environment where you have been able to immerse yourself in other people's experiences, then how can you possibly take their perspectives? How can you be that second person in the room? Right. Are you suggesting that sometimes if we have
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a strong bias towards something we sometimes need to check with it comes from what might have fed that into us looking at different, especially if somebody challenges us on what we strongly feel about a certain issue. If somebody challenges me on that, should I then take the time to just check and analyze where those strong feelings about that thing came from?
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Just like there's not one book of how the brain works or how emotions work, there's certainly also not one book of therapy or one book of how we work with our emotions. But I'm personally of the belief that if we're having a really strong emotion about a situation, that strong emotion might not only be about that situation, right, it might also be about- There's something behind that, right? There might be something behind it, right? There might be parts of us that need time to process. And so I would say-
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most of the time if we're feeling a very strong emotion around something and no one's in danger, no one's in actual physical danger, then yes it can be absolutely great to take a step back and really consider what's going on and process. We call this in science intellectual humility, or you can even just call it humility. The more we know about a topic, the harder it is to for us to be humble about it. If we think we know everything about knitting and crocheting,
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then if someone comes in and says, oh, but have you tried the stitch? It might be really hard for us to say, oh yeah, well, no, I know that stitch, right? But if it's something that we don't know a lot about, we're usually more open-minded to hear it. So that's the tricky thing. If we think we understand how race works or how gender works or how, you know, what women are like or men are like or what non-binary people are like, if we already have big assumptions about that, we think we're an expert on it, it becomes harder to take that step back and say, I'm having really big emotions right now.
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They probably don't have to do with the situation. So why don't I take time to process what's happening? Right, and that's where empathy can be so powerful. Instead of saying, you know, I understand or I don't understand, what if we just say, understanding isn't really the thing in question here, because we'll never understand. What we can do is celebrate how we feel as different and valid, because feeling differently about things is only good. We forget this, right? But we need to feel different ways about things. It helps us thrive. It helps us solve.
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problems better, it helps us innovate as organizations to have different viewpoints and to have different ways of looking at life. What is it that creates a fear in us so much of something being different? Of a different person, different nationality, different gender, different race, different language? Is there a scientific explanation for why we fear difference? Because I mean, some people you realize that, oh my goodness.
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If we all spoke the same language, looked the same, they'll be so comfortable, you know, living in this world. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We have a limited amount of energy that we can use every day before we need to go to sleep or overuse it, we might get sick. And 20% of our body's energy is going to our brain all the time. Thinking is very expensive, biologically speaking. So what we have been taught to think about is going to be easier to think about and what we haven't been taught to think about is going to be harder to think about.
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know, if I've been taught to think about what different races, you know, consider on a topic, that will be easier for me. It'll be less expensive to expend that energy because I've already created that pattern. Shortcut. Sort of like a shortcut. Yeah. If I haven't been taught to think about it, but instead let's say that that shortcut goes from thinking about races is connected to being afraid, right? So every single time someone has talked about race in my environment, they haven't
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their body tense up, or you've seen their eyes dart around, their voice get higher. And so what that has taught me, the emotional education that I've received is thinking about race is a scary thing. Trying to help that person be not afraid of it, one of the things that needs to be in that beautiful concoction is having their fear have a sense of belonging. So someone who feels comfortable with fear will therefore have an easier time looking at the other side of that shortcut and saying,
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Okay, I can be comfortable with my fear, so maybe I'm more comfortable talking about race. Someone who has been taught that fear is bad and that it doesn't belong will have a harder time thinking about it, which is again why we will have much less stress as individuals in our world if we stop trying to change the people that we think are never going to change. The truth is, it's not that they're never going to change, it's that they're not going to change by us reaching them directly as well.
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as taking that same amount of energy in our bodies and going to the person that we know feels more belonging in fear and therefore talking with them about race or talking with them about what it's like from my perspective. When you do your research in the labs, how does that pan out? Well that's really interesting because the research in the lab is research in a lab, right? You're researching emotions, I mean you don't have rats and feeding them a medicine to test a drug, you know, the physical stuff. So if it's emotional...
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What does that look like for somebody who's not in those spaces? Yeah. So we take the research in the lab and we bring it into the world. That's actually where my work at Impathible, our organization, comes into play. Because what Impathible is doing is helping people walk in each other's shoes as much as we can, right? We'll never be able to truly, just like we'll never be able to understand, but it's helping people celebrate the validity of each other's experiences by immersing them in learning.
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Right? Inmersing them in someone else's realities. So we see things through their eyes, we speak the words that they would normally say, and all of a sudden we understand more deeply what's happening. And we created this digital experience to be able to give people an understanding of what's happening in someone else's life, but also to be able to study what happens when we give people a more valid understanding of someone else's experience. And so that's how we bring the research to life. That's how we say, OK, we think.
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that giving people little doses every day of someone else's immersive experience will be more effective at creating empathy and making teams, and team could be a family or a company, right? But making teams strong, then, you know, an hour long keynotes about race or gender or sexual orientation. Coming in and doing that for a school or an organization once every three months is not gonna have the impact we believe.
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that doing a little bit every day will. That's how we win a marathon, right? So, you know, we take the research from the lab. We know from the lab that really small doses can change habits faster than one big giant dose. We know from the lab that the cure to the isms, we don't talk about it in a way that we can cure it, but if we can, the cure to the isms is contact with people who are different from us. So let's give people really small doses every day of contact with people that are different from us and help them see their perspectives by making that
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contact immersive, making that learning immersive. And then let's see how that impacts their viewpoints over the course of days and weeks and months. And we believe that this research and this method can be very, very powerful in taking away biases, biases with a big B, if you have greater regular contact with someone from a different perspective. Have you received any feedback on doing these immersive experiences with people? Yeah, we've shared this experience with over 10,000 people.
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Maybe even double that by now. And from just purely qualitative emotional feedback, people feel really grateful and hopeful after going through this experience, because we're never needing to tell people that they're wrong, and we're never needing to tell people what they think. We live in a world where everyone's telling everybody else what they should think. That's why it's not working. That's why it's not working, right? But what if instead we just show each other's perspectives?
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in a way that says, you don't have to think this, but I want you to celebrate the validity that this is the experience that I've had. My experience. A great example, one time we were sharing the experience for a very small town in the South. And the particular experience we were immersing people in was one where you were walking the shoes of a black queer woman. And she was talking about how nobody moves out of the way for her on the street. And
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her friend, you know, walked in the middle of two people because she was tired of people not moving out of the way for her. And this woman from the South who saw this said, I just think her friend was rude. We all have a fair chance. I don't get this at all. And we said, thank you so much for sharing your experience, right? Very counterintuitive because in the moment, what I was feeling is you're wrong. The science says you're wrong. I've talked to hundreds of black women who have said, this is my experience. I know this is true, right?
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Or I experienced it to be true, I should say. But instead of telling her that she was wrong, I said, thank you for sharing your experience. I really appreciate it. And one week- So validate hers as well, no matter what your belief system about her experience is. Right, just thank her for sharing it. We talked about what is implicit bias, right? Sharing your experience is the first step to being able to examine it. So one week later we came back and we had a follow-up and we said-
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you know, how have you been and what's been going on? And she said, you know, I thought a lot about that scene that you shared with us in the immersive experience during Impathable. And I still think it was rude what she did, but I noticed that I'd been moving down the street differently. Oh. And we said, oh, wow, thanks so much for sharing that. We didn't say, oh, you're a better person now and you were better. No judgment. In both cases, it's not a judgment. Right, the anger is creating judgment and the judgment is creating defensiveness and pushback.
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And as a result, we as a country and as a world are not dissolving our biases as fast or as well as we can. We have to stop telling people that they're wrong. We have to stop telling people what they should be thinking. And instead, show them, bring them into our perspectives, invite them to see our perspectives. And again, you don't need to invite the people into your perspectives that are driving you crazy and that... Into one extreme, yeah. That's not going to solve anything. Look for the almost allies.
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and bring them into your experience. Do a cooking class with them. Go to a cooking class on how to do a braai, right? A South African barbecue. Yeah, so braai. Oh, you really know your Dutch. Yeah, let's do a braai. Braai. Yeah, let's have the braai be taught by a South African man or woman, right? Or non-binary person. That's great. That's giving me exposure to culture through food. It's giving me more time with someone who's teaching me something fun, right? That's contact.
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That is an anti-racist act, a powerful way to dissolve our biases. Take a language class. How about instead of having the feather in our cap of saying, oh now I speak German or now I speak Swahili, how about we take 20 language lessons in one year, but we only take the first lesson of each one? First lesson of each of the 20 languages? Yeah, yeah. So are you going to remember anything, Michael? No, you won't remember anything at all. But what will happen is you've had 20 points of contact,
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20 people from that country, from that language, and it has increased your contact and understanding with different cultures. What is the more valuable lesson? Maybe the one will be better on your resume, but the other might be better for the resume of your soul, if you will, right? It might be better for the culture, the world that we live in. You might have more empathy and more understanding. And I would argue that deeper empathy will have a more positive impact on your life and the lives of others than you speaking German.
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Me speaking German isn't going to benefit Roberta that much, but me speaking 20 languages over the course of a year, not learning one of them, but having 20 new different perspectives, will definitely... Your empathy levels towards others who are different. Yeah. And speaking of, so I was in South Korea teaching English for the past decade. I'm half Korean, by the way. Oh yeah? Really? Which part of Korea do you know where your parents are from? My mother is from a small town outside of Seoul. What's it called? Because I lived in different parts.
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You know, I don't know because like many Asian women, the way that she talks about her past now that she's immigrated is as abundant as... Oh, she does? Oh, okay. Yeah. Maybe she's even more curious. Yeah. Thank you. Jinju, Seoul, Pachon, Sokcho, I lived everywhere. Wow. But what I found was our biases are usually fed by what we see in the media and whatever conclusions you come to based on that. But when you actually go and immerse yourself in a different culture...
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and you get to know people for who they are, not what the media tells you, it's a completely different life-changing experience. And therefore afterwards, no one else can tell you about that culture because you've experienced it yourself. I even had Korean parents, if you teach in the private ones where they pay a lot of money for the English lessons, after school lessons, I had parents who based on the way I look, they would think, this is not the product I ordered.
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It's defective. My kids English teachers should look a certain way. But to this day, I have on Facebook, those who are old enough, obviously, because I taught middle school and like that, they are old enough to say, teacher, I miss you. My English got better after you became my teacher. I went on to learn English in college, university. I'm gonna be an English teacher. So their moms did not deter them from liking me or from deciding to get to know me.
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on their own, no matter what the mom thought. That one Korean kid decided, I don't care what my mom thinks about black people, my teacher is supposed to be, I've met her, I've experienced her. And the parents, did they have that ability to do that because they have more belonging of different races because of other races that they grew up around? Or is it because they have more belonging of emotions because the families that they grew up around allowed them to feel certain emotions more?
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so that they were able to accept and acknowledge difference as something to be celebrated and not something to be feared? Very good question, because usually how we describe Korean culture is very homogeneous, the history, everybody looked the same, so everything is different. And whatever they thought would make a sort of a perfect English teacher for them is somebody who looked a certain way based on their race, of course. I don't think a lot of them have experienced either side or either culture or either race, but it's just...
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this I was made to believe. Yeah, as Brene Brown says, what is the story that we're telling ourselves? Right? Yeah. Whatever Korean kid I taught, whoever as they grow up tells them something about my race and people who look like me, they're gonna think twice, because they've met me in person. Absolutely. And Roberta, you asked before what implicit bias is, and I just realized that might be a really good definition that's really simple is,
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we like to ask ourselves sometimes what is the story that I'm telling myself about something implicit bias is what is the story I'm not telling myself what is the story that I have in my head yeah I don't realize that's the story that I have right what is the story about Korean people that I actually think and feel but I I don't tell them myself that story I don't tell myself which means I haven't examined it right I don't even know that that's the story that I have
34:15
That's an interesting one. The story I tell myself about dogs, this isn't true because I love dogs, but the story I tell myself about dogs is that once upon a time when I was a child, I got bit by a dog and now I'm scared of dogs. That's the story I tell myself. The story I wouldn't tell myself is when I was a child, I got bit by a dog, but I actually don't remember it. And so now I'm afraid of dogs, but that's because dogs are bad and stupid and mean, right? That's what implicit bias is. It's not realizing that you have a story that you tell yourself.
34:45
That's what implicit bias is. The story you haven't realized you already have, you were just not telling yourself yet. That's a great way to put it, yeah. Boom, light bulb moment right there. Yeah, the last thing I'll say about that is that's why sharing stories with each other, immersing ourselves in each other's experiences is a great way to open up the casket of the stories in our lives that might be sleeping.
35:13
And then the story that we tell ourselves about other people becomes deeper, becomes something we have more time to think about. And by thinking about it more, we dissolve our biases, most likely. Right. Which basically is the goal. At the end of the day, if you examine our biases half the time, we even wonder if you worked in someone else's shoes, what really made me think that about other people? Yeah. Last words of wisdom, Mike? No, it's been a pleasure being with you, Roberta.
35:43
I've enjoyed being with you today. Yeah. My last words of wisdom are this idea of two in the room is a key that you can hold in your own hands that can open up the door to really the conversations that need partners, again, the perspectives that need followers and the ideas that need to be discussed. This is how we create radical change without needing to change the radicals around us.
36:10
look around the table in any room, anywhere you are, and instead of focusing on the person that you have a hard time with because you think they're not going to change, focus on the person that you think is willing to change and is willing to see your perspective, and then share stories with them. Share experiences. Go volunteer for a group of people that are different from how you are. These are acts that can dissolve our biases. Two in the room is how we do it, and it's a key that you can hold and you can open that door anytime you want.
36:40
What's of wisdom from Micah Kessel, the CEO of Empathable. Thank you so much for being on our show today. This was an amazing conversation. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Roberta. And before you go, where do we find you on the socials? On the socials, I think the best way to reach out to us is impathable.com. So you can reach out to us that way. Because we work mostly with organizations, I would encourage you to reach out to us on LinkedIn, actually, and look for Empathable on LinkedIn, or you can...
37:09
Follow me, Micah Kessel on LinkedIn. That's the best way to get in touch. Excellent. Thank you so much, Micah. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review.