“We have lost the art of conversation,” says Sidney Frye, the second guest speaker of RCTC’s Yellowjacket Diversity Series.
On Tuesday, February 18th, Sidney Frye spoke about how to have courageous conversations with people across a wide variety of cultures. Sidney is a mental health and racial equity speaker; he shared numerous tips with students on how to move forward and embrace difficult conversations.
Sidney shared that, “in order to increase your understanding of others, you have to increase your understanding of yourself first.” This may sound odd or scary for some, but Sidney makes the important point that the only way to grow in a skill is to see where your comfort zone is and then move out of it.
Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t simply mean having a single conversation with someone from a different culture and then reaching a mythical point of “enlightenment,” as Sidney jokes.
In his talk, he explained that developing communication competence is sort of a circular process, in which you have to realize and examine the potential biases you have, based on your own cultural values and norms or upbringing. Making assumptions about another person is something that everyone does, but it’s how you handle these thought processes that makes a difference.
An important takeaway from Tuesday’s session: finding the way into our “courage zone” is the best way to become more open to intercultural communication. Sidney defines a few “zones,” beginning with the zone that we prefer to stay in, which is our “comfort zone.” On the other end of the spectrum falls our “critical zone,” which is where you either become confrontational or disassociate from a conversation altogether.
The happy middle of these three zones is the “courage zone.” This is where you acknowledge where you are at in cultural communication and where you want to be. This is not meant to be a place of self-judgment, but rather a place of self-reflection. Instead of being afraid of offending someone with what you say, it is better to start a conversation with the recognition that you do not know everything, but that you want to learn more.
Ultimately, Sidney reminds students that it is important to “peel onions” in intercultural communication, which essentially means peeling back the layers of someone’s personality and culture in order to understand them better. Instead of “minimizing,” which is trying to find only commonalities between ourselves and others, we should practice having conversations about the differences. This is an active practice of courage.
Sidney’s final analogy was about a table. He noted that some people feel apprehensive about having intercultural conversations because they wonder, “What do I bring to the table? I don’t have any culture…” Sidney demonstrated that everyone has culture, and therefore everyone has something to bring to the table, as long as that thing isn’t preconceived notions. He prompted us to ask ourselves, “What can I bring to the table and what should I leave behind?”
If you want to hear another inspiring talk, please join us next week on February 25th, when we listen to Dr. Jorgenson discuss safe space training, which will be a two-hour session.
This series runs from February 11th to March 4th and is a part of the campus’s strategic academic plan for the next few years. One specific goal of the plan is to cultivate inclusivity and collaboration across the campus, which will aid in professional and academic growth. Thus, by attending at least three of the four speaker sessions, students (who have signed up) can earn a certificate of completion to add to their resumes. Besides this, the sessions are a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about different cultural, gendered, and professional experiences and ask questions directly of those speaking about these topics.
by Theresa Charron