People sometimes ask me if I find it problematic to use they/them as singular pronouns. You’re an English professor, they say. How can you embrace “grammatically incorrect” pronouns? The notion that nonbinary pronouns, such as the singular “they,” is a new phenomenon is wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary traces back the first written use of a singular they to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romantic poem “William and the Werewolf.” The singular they was used in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1386) and Shakespeare's Hamlet in 1599. It appears in 1813 in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Charles Dickens used they to anonymize gender in The Pickwick Papers (1836). So grammar nerds, nonbinary pronouns were good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens but not you?

One of the best ways to build trust, strengthen your team, and work through conflict is to have consistent, meaningful, and authentic conversations with your team. I’m Dr. Elisa Glick and I help leaders build trust in the workplace, one courageous conversation at a time. Welcome to my Courageous Conversation series! This month I’ll be posting tools and strategies for courageous conversations. I’ll share practical suggestions for how to prepare for and navigate tough talks with courage, curiosity, and compassion. To kick off the series, let's address a question that I’m often asked, which is “what is a courageous conversation?”

Does your language normalize violence? Weaponized, violent, and militaristic language is ubiquitous in professional contexts:

📍Bullet points 📍Hitting targets or benchmarks 📍Gun metaphors like “I’m shooting for” or “give it a shot”📍Military metaphors in health care, such as “fighting cancer” or “the war on Alzheimer’s”📍”Take a stab at it”📍”Killing it”📍”Meeting deadlines”

A world without beauty is a world without love. So during Pride month, please join me in embracing queer beauty as a vision of hope and resistance. Subverting notions of masculinity and machismo, installation artist Gabriel Dawe’s work captures the transcendent beauty that queer and trans people bring to the world. His almost-not-there rainbows materialize a vision of liberation and wholeness, offering a sense of hope during difficult times.

I have never denied the uniqueness of Jewish people's relationship to our ancient homeland. I take issue with two things: first, the colonial notion that this land is just for Jews and, second, the notion that Jewish self-determination must come at the expense of Palestinian self-determination. Under international human rights law, Jewish people AND Palestinian people have a collective right to political self-determination. All human beings have equal rights, dignity, and value.

Gender is important, gender is complicated, and gender is personal. This is true not only for trans and nonbinary folks but also for cisgender people…including my spouse and me. I find that in personal and professional settings, many people often “forget” the complexity of gender identity and expression when they ascribe gender to others based on visual appearance. This happens to me all the time. The next time you use terms that ascribe gender to others, I invite you to consider that you may be creating a feeling of dissonance for them that decreases their sense of belonging.

If you’re a leader feeling a sense of urgency, take a breath. Urgency isn’t an antidote to complacency. In fact, it reinforces white supremacy culture because it intensifies disconnection and increases implicit bias in decision-making. For inclusion efforts to be sustainable, it's crucial to step back and assess before launching into frantic fixes. As Tema Okun has famously argued, our “imposed sense of urgency serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice." Social acceleration is not social justice.

Why does authentic inclusion remain so elusive after so many of us have been working so long to achieve it? One answer to this question is that inclusion can't be achieved without meaningfully addressing difference, identity, and inequality. "Celebrating" difference requires transforming those systems that exclude marginalized and multiply marginalized people in the first place.

How does calling others out (or in) foster a culture of safety, trust, and inclusion? I think people call others out or in because they believe that if someone caused harm, that individual must be held accountable for their words and actions. Calling out others can be an important way for people who have been silenced or traumatized-- especially women and those from minoritized communities--to step into their power and advocate for justice. However, the public performance of call-outs (on social media, especially) is seldom grounded in reparative practices, because they seek more to police/punish than to educate. As a result, call outs often don’t foster meaningful accountability, connection, or trust.

I’m struggling. World events are challenging, the impact on my family is challenging, and on top of that, yesterday something happened that made me feel excluded simply because I’m Jewish. If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I typically have something to say, but this is one of those times when it feels difficult to find the words. To my Jewish, Muslim, Arab and other siblings who are also struggling, I see you. To employers, teachers, managers, and leaders, how are you supporting directly and indirectly impacted communities?

School curricula, films, TV, and popular culture in the US have tended to universalize and sanitize Holocaust history, making our efforts to remember Jewish trauma also—at least to some extent—a way of forgetting it. On Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I invite you to consider that ubiquitous cultural images of the Holocaust--Anne Frank, barbed wire, railway cars, crematoriums, and piles of shoes--have probably taught you very little about a traumatic past whose full meaning eludes our comprehension.

How do we recognize rather than look away from the pain and suffering of others? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question as I’ve been preparing for Passover, which begins at sundown on Monday April 22. Passover is a celebration of freedom that commemorates the story of the Israelites’ departure from ancient Egypt. I keep coming back to Nelson Mandela’s words: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

I've spent my career facilitating difficult dialogues, but I've learned that when things heat up, conversations that you've carefully planned can go sideways quickly. That's why it helps to have go-to tools in your back pocket. One of my favorite tools is LARA, a bridging method used to communicate across difference. LARA, which stands for Listen, Affirm, Respond, and Add, is a simple and extremely effective method for building trust, increasing understanding, and engaging in conflict with compassion.

The reason I’m so passionate about the importance of speaking up is because I know the cost of surrendering a part of ourselves to silence. That’s why, as an educator, DEIB practitioner, and inclusive teaching specialist, I have spent my career empowering others to use their voices and creating spaces where people feel safe to speak up.

If we want to create equitable and inclusive environments, we must first recognize the humanity of people who are different from us. Did you know that the US is experiencing the highest number of anti-Muslim incidents recorded in 30 years? I want to invite leaders and managers to consider the issues faced by Muslim coworkers and neighbors in light of the huge surge in anti-Muslim hate since Oct. 7. Nearly half of last year’s incidents of backlash violence were reported after the Israel-Gaza war began.

If you don’t have to think about it, it’s a privilege. Cisgender people don’t have to think about our gender in the way that transgender, nonbinary and gender expansive people do. Whiteness means not having to think about racism and anti-blackness. In ways large and small, obvious and subtle, cisnormativity and whiteness are both systemically privileged. There are many different types of privilege that impact the complex ways we all move through the world. This means that people can be privileged in some ways and not privileged in others. But this doesn’t make privilege—or its unequal and discriminatory effects— any less real. We must be vigilant in checking our privilege precisely because it is often invisible to those of us who possess it.

On International Women’s Day, I want to express my solidarity with both Palestinian and Israeli women and girls. As a Jewish feminist, I am committed to listening to Muslim and Arab women and taking proactive steps to decenter whiteness and the colonial gaze in my work. During these difficult times, I'm working on cultivating a spirit of peace, compassion, and justice in myself so that I may manifest it in the world.

Leaders, if you aren’t visibly supporting the LGBTQIA2S+ community right now, you’re most likely causing harm. Non-trans folks, it’s time to stop acting as though the rights of transgender people have nothing or little to do with you. If you think these equity issues don’t impact you, I would like to gently suggest that you’re probably underestimating the number of people in your organization or institution who are gender expansive or who love someone who is gender expansive.

The antiracism framework of DEI isn't the cause of antisemitism. Antisemitism is known as "the longest hatred" because it's existed for thousands of years! It's simply ridiculous--and wildly ahistorical--to blame DEI for anti-Jewish hatred. We must strive to fight against the real harms of antisemitism while also calling out those who have turned it into a political football.

Judaism teaches that it's our human obligation to pursue justice and preserve the lives and dignity of all people. Whoever destroys a single life is considered to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. This is why, as an American Jew with family in Israel, I advocate for the security and equality of all human beings in the region. The belief that Jewish safety must come at the expense of the people of Palestine is a falsehood I reject.