Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. Like to join me in the future? Then please do drop me a line to Joe Lockwood at m dot co UK that's seechangehappen co UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 84 with the title Unlocking Inclusive Communications. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Suzanne Worthheim.

Suzanne describes herself as a linguistic anthropologist, and when I asked Suzanne to describe her superpower, she said that she sees patterns that other people don't see. Hello, Suzanne. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne. It is genuinely a pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Likewise. We've had a great chat and agreement already, so I'm really, really excited about this. So, Suzanne, tell me. Unlocking communications. Tell me about that.

So I said my superpower was seeing patterns that other people can't see. And this is the superpower of almost everybody who is a linguist or a linguistic anthropologist. And so I am here to talk to people here, generally in the world, and here on this podcast, about how can we be more inclusive in our communications. And inclusive communication, in some respects, is as simple as just Bites modern etiquette. It is 21st century etiquette. But if you want to be more pattern based and more behaviour based, I like to talk about inclusive language and inclusive communication as a way of communicating in a set of behaviours. A lot of people will talk about it as a list of words. Here are bad words and here are good words.

But I like to go beyond that and have a very behavioural focus. What are people doing with their language? So when we communicate inclusively, people feel seen and heard and valued. People feel like they are taken into consideration and like they matter. By contrast, when we use what I call problematic language, and there are lots of words that people will use that maybe end with IST or ism, but I like to just call it problematic language. Problematic language comes in many forms and has really negative outcomes. It can damage relationships, it lowers trust, it drives people away and it harms all kinds of relationships. And by relationships, I mean personal relationships. So between family members, friends, colleagues, romantic partners.

But I also mean business relationships could be still interpersonal between a recruiter and a client, a recruiter and a candidate. But it could also be a marketing message and an audience or customer experience, software interfaces and clients who become so irritated that they stop using your product. So that's what I mean by patterns. The patterns that I talk about for inclusive communication can be both one on one and media and planned communications that go out and affect many people, sometimes millions of people.

You're speaking my language. You're speaking my language. One thing that people always come to me and say is they're so afraid of getting it wrong. And that creates this kind of lean back approach to people, because I've never had a conversation with someone who is black, I've never had some conversation with someone who's transgender or has a disability or what if I say the wrong thing? That's the biggest fear people say, is the fear of getting it wrong.