Meet Liz Liz Nead is an adventure speaker, traveling the world and taking on challenges to find lessons of leadership, communication diversity, and inclusion. A diversity speaker and researcher for over a decade, she specializes common language and daily communication around race and cultural differences in the workplace. Liz uses a direct, humorous, and vivid style from the stage to create opportunities for communication around differences. She shares life with 7 kids and her husband of 21 years. How do you work the room with diversity and belonging in mind? It's funny that you asked that question because just like everyone else, I am in the middle of growth and change, and I deal with my own humanity and the humanity of others. Sometimes when I see these thought leaders that are like typically on Oprah super soul sessions, their vibe is very mellow. For me, the first thing about networking is to be authentic and the second thing about being authentic and networking is that you don't take it personally which is constantly a juggle. How do you do that in networking with diversity, stay authentic, but not take it personally. What are the questions to avoid? It's a tough one and the reason why it's tough is because life has changed so much and honestly what was acceptable, even two years ago, like let's just say pre-COVID is no longer acceptable. The kinds of questions which are very superficial like where are you from and what's your ethnicity and you have such an interesting look or what's your take on this? Someone might ask me what my take is on something related to this. diversity in the news, not because I'm a diversity speaker, but because I'm a person of color and some of those assumptions that people are okay with you jumping in right away into their personal life are just not okay anymore. I think the expectation has changed, we have an increased expectation that people will understand what is acceptable and what is not and we're not forgiving ignorance as much anymore. So rather than say, people are too sensitive, a better thing is what's your experience with this? What do you find important? If you had to choose between these two things what would you choose? So you're getting deeper into what someone's interests are, or perspectives rather than the superficial differences that we can see with the naked eye. What is the biggest thing you hope people take to heart in 2022? The thing that I love to teach as a trainer and a speaker, and I've niched myself into diversity for the first time in 15 years because I think that my country needs help in strategies to build confidence around differences. Our confidence is at an all-time low which is why you see so much conflict is because the only people who are left talking are the ones who don't care what you think. Everybody else has become a bit silent because they're afraid that people will be offended and they know that that's not what they want, but they're not sure how to say it. What I hope is that first of all people understand it's not about intent, it's about impact. We all mean well and nobody goes to a networking event to hurt some feelings or to make people feel discluded. That's just not why you go to a networking event. However, the things that you say may have the opposite impact on your intent and then that's where the work starts. If you didn't intend for it to be that way, it should be pretty easy to change what you're saying, because you want the impact to be a positive one. I think that one thing can change a lot of things. A lot of ways that people connect with each other. I think confidence can be built back up and then the second thing that I'm really hoping Is that people understand that you can have the same situation but experience it differently. So one, let's say there was a temperature in the house 69 degrees. One person is wearing sweaters and mittens, and the other one has actual sweat rolling down their cheek, because you can...