Irshad Manji, a globally recognized author, educator, and advocate for moral courage, joins host Robert Glazer for a thought-provoking discussion on rethinking diversity. As the founder of the Moral Courage College, Irshad empowers individuals to engage in constructive dialogue across deep divides, fostering empathy and understanding in an often polarized world.
Her latest book, Don’t Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars, delves into the complexities of identity politics and offers practical steps for moving beyond divisive labels. With teaching experience at New York University and the University of Southern California, Irshad has earned accolades such as Oprah Winfrey’s “Chutzpah Award” and the National Leadership Award.
In this episode, Irshad shares her insights on navigating diversity and the culture wars, offering strategies to discuss these sensitive issues without escalating tensions. Tune in to explore how we can all contribute to a more inclusive and understanding world.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Irshad Manji, Author Of Don’t Label Me, On Rethinking Diversity And Culture Wars
Introduction To The Episode
Welcome to the show. Our quote for this episode is from John F. Kennedy, “What unites us is greater than what divides us.” My guest, Irshad Manji, is a globally recognized author, educator, and advocate for moral courage. She’s the Founder of the Moral Courage College, which empowers people to engage in constructive dialogue across deep divides, fostering a culture of empathy and understanding.
Her latest book, Don’t Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars, addresses the complexities of identity politics and offers a path to move beyond the labels that often divide us. Irshad taught at New York University and the University of Southern California and has been recognized with numerous accolades, including Oprah Winfrey’s Chutzpah Award and the National Leadership Award. Her thought leadership continues to shape discussions on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and the courage to challenge conventional thinking.
Irshad, thank you for joining us on the show.
I’m glad we could do this.
I’m very excited to have you join us and talk about how we can bridge some of the divides that are taking over multiple aspects of our personal and professional lives. You’ve shared your personal story a lot in your writing, but can you give us a quick 10,000-foot view of your background and growing up? I know that’s a hard task, but this is for those who are unfamiliar with you or your work.
It has been a non-linear life. Let’s put it that way. I grew up in Canada. I was born in East Africa. I was kicked out of East Africa by General Idi Amin, the Military dictator, because we were not Black enough for him. In the fever of post-colonialism, he declared Africa belongs to the Blacks. It was an early indication that racism was practiced by people all over the world regardless of their skin color.
We came to Canada as refugees. That’s where I grew up, attending both the public school and my Islamic religious school known as the Madrasa. I bring that up because what really catapulted me into the work that I do is that shortly after 9/11, I came out with the very first book written by a Muslim about the need for reform in my faith of Islam. You can imagine what vitriol I was on the receiving end of after it came out.
My big mistake was that I listened to a voice inside of me that said, “Remember. You are going to be attacked not by people who have read the book but by people who have not and will not read it yet still presumed to have an informed opinion about it.” T his voice said to me, “When you are punched verbally or otherwise, counterpunch even harder. Show them that you mean business and that you will not be intimidated.” That’s exactly what I did.
I had a tendency to turn what could have been healthy discussions into noxious debates over and over by taking this us-against-them approach. I dug myself in. I wound up in the emergency room at a hospital here in New York. I realized that I was only making my detractors more defensive by treating them not as my adversaries but as my enemies. Worse, I was making my supporters suspicious, like, “Is she in this to move the needle or is she in this to play gotcha?”
The point is, by taking a win-lose, us-against-them, either-or approach, nobody won. When I needed to figure out how I was going to reframe everything that I am about, I read a lot of neuroscience and cognitive psychology and realized that what I needed to do was listen to the voice, not of my ego, which is the threat-seeking voice of the brain.
It is very loud.
It’s very loud because it’s always afraid. Instead, listen to the voice of conscience, which tells me there’s no shame in accepting that people other than you have a slice of truth to share. Believe it or not, as I was coming to understand why the both-and approach to life is so much healthier for all concerned, I got this invitation from Al Jazeera. They wanted me to debate whether Islam really does need to reform. Since debate is what got me in this mess, I said, “Sure.”
You accepted this after your reformation.
As I was reforming myself.
I want to double-click on one thing. You talked about how it impacted the people who supported you or were against you, but this was also killing you physically by carrying this much.
It was killing me physically because I was ingesting ten years of toxic energy that I was also feeding. That’s the rub. Perhaps against my better judgment, I accepted this invitation to do what got me in this mess in the first place, which was debate, but I promised myself that I would not treat it as a debate. I would treat it as a discussion.
After that event or that so-called debate on Al Jazeera about whether Islam really does need reform, I heard from a number of Muslim theologians. I thought, “They’re here to tear me apart.” As a matter of fact, they were there to tell me that they support a lot of what I’m advocating. I said to them, “Why now? I’ve been dying to hear this over the past decade.” They said, “That’s because tonight, you showed enough humility that we know we’re not going to be feeding your ego by telling you we support a lot of what you are teaching.”
The Power Of Listening
What I learned that night was that listening does not have to translate into losing. If you don’t treat any given issue as a win-lose event, then there’s nothing to lose because there’s nothing to win. Moral courage, I realized, needs to be something slightly more basic than to speak truth to power. If all it means is to speak truth to power, whose power? That suggests that you have no power. That’s why you need to speak it to the system, but that’s simply not true.
We, as individuals, have the power to tame our ego brains. We need to recognize that when you speak truth to power, it’s not just you who has the truth. Everybody has a version of truth that deserves to be heard if only so that you can lower their emotional defenses and help them clear the space in their heads to give a fair hearing to your truth. The bottom line is through this very jagged journey, I learned that moral courage means speaking truth to the power of your primal brain or your ego brain so that the truth you want to speak to the outside world, in fact, lands as it’s intended to.
Listening doesn’t mean losing. When we stop treating every discussion as a win-lose battle, we can create real understanding.
I want to set the stage for how we met because it’s a great background to this. We first met at a YPO event a few years ago. When I saw the topic on the agenda, I was a little worried because I thought,
“We’re going to sit through another diversity speech.” This was during peak DEI a few years ago. I was blown away by what you shared in your presentation and the pragmatic aspect of it. I want to tell everyone what happened a little bit because I thought it was fascinating.
You could be an actor because you played these vile characters and encouraged people to come up on stage and try to change your mind. They argued with you and fought with you. I thought one guy was going to punch you in character. He was in your face. You were playing stereotypical, vile, bigot roles. A third person came up on stage who I happened to know well. It was a friend of mine, Wombi. He encouraged you to sit down. He sat down on a couch with you and talked to you. It got to the root of a lot of the anger behind the avatar and disarmed. I’m sure you’ve done this a lot. I thought it was a powerful demonstration of what it looks like to try to listen and talk versus when you come in and fight, you’re going to get a fight.
What’s the question?
That was a 2 out 3 ratio. I would guess it’s more, maybe 90%. What happens when you do these generally? How many people come to that?
What your audience needs to understand is that it’s not enough simply to know about skills. You have to apply them in order to make an impact. It’s like playing a sport. You can know the rules of that sport, but that doesn’t mean you can play it impactfully. You’ve got to practice. These role plays that I do with audience members are all about revealing that even though your primal brain is telling you, “I came to Irshad Manji’s workshop. I got it,” you don’t.
In highly emotional moments, the knowledge will wash away and you will lurch for the lowest-hanging fruit in order to cope with the stress. Those are your habits. Our habits are often formed by our impulses. When you ask, “How often do people get to the point where they can talk you off the ledge when you play these characters?”
It was hard to out-argue you. You had every answer for these characters.
The answer for you is, “Not very often.” That’s why when your friend and mine, Wombi Rose, asked me, didn’t tell me, to sit down and he sat down with me, I began to engage respectfully, calmly, and slowly. You might remember that a part of what that meant was he asked me questions. They were not questions that fact-checked me but questions about how I felt. They were questions about my life and my personal experiences. That is what allowed me, the bigot in character, to chill and give him a fair hearing because what he showed by engaging me that way is that he cares about my backstory. He cares about how I got to conclude certain things about this world that he differs with.
There’s an old saying, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” What that means is how much you care about them. The bottom line is this. If you want to get a fair hearing, yelling, screaming, finger-pointing, shaming, blaming, scorning, and making the other person defensive is the worst way to get a fair hearing. The best way is to first offer up a fair hearing.
Those are part of the toolbox that we offer to our students at Moral Courage College. We teach people how to turn heated issues into healthy conversations and ultimately into sustained relationships. You know as well as I do as an entrepreneur that nothing worthwhile is done alone. We need people to collaborate. In a culture like ours where instant gratification and impulsive behavior are all the rage, we need to be investing in the skills that our people can have to communicate in ways that heal themselves, their companies, which are our companies, and wider society.
You talked so much about the best practices in cognitive fields, psychology, and otherwise, and how people cannot listen when their threat defense is up, their ego is challenged, and all that stuff. This was a few years ago at the peak of a lot of unlicensed practitioners with supply and demand. I came up to you after and said, “I got to ask you. I’ve been hearing about a lot of these training and all this stuff and it seems it goes in the opposite direction, 180 degrees, of what you’re suggesting and what all these psychologists and all these people are suggesting. What is it that the people teaching this stuff say when these psychologists and whatever come out and say, “This is fundamentally wrong.” You said they try to cancel them or something like that.
Here’s the deal. Regardless of what the dogma is, if you are immersed in dogma, you can’t handle scrutiny. Dogma is brittle. It snaps under the spotlight of questions. Instead of engaging those questions or that skepticism, dogmatists will try to eliminate you and your observations from the landscape altogether. This doesn’t happen among so-called progressive DEI practitioners. It also happens among so-called conservative book banners. Dogma is dogma. The good news is that the vast majority of us in American society don’t want those extremes to define who we are and how we should live. We are pragmatists. We are practical, the vast majority of us.
In organizations, we’ve let those voices carry too much water and we are a little afraid of them.
I agree. That’s changing, though. I do see that there is a tide coming back to sanity and humanity. It’s slow but it is steady. This is what keeps us busy at Moral Courage College.
When we got on, I said, “Did you have a good long week? You said, “No, I’ve been very busy with colleges.” I’ve written a lot about the college fiasco. Particularly from the realm of leadership, I personally believe it has been a massive leadership failure if you look at any historical quality of leadership around consistency, communication, and otherwise.
There are people who had a behind-the-scenes look at this. All of us have gotten a front-and-center look since fall 2023. What’s your take on the problem? Have the leaders learned? Are the campuses making an adjustment that would get to more of a dialogue-oriented environment rather than a dogma environment?
Handling College Controversies
Yes. To address the second part of your question, you asked our institutes of higher learning that were coming around to understand that giving the extremes the microphone is not the way to unify and move forward. The answer is that after being hoisted on their own petard and after being knifed by their own actions, these institutes, colleges, and universities are finally realizing that what we need on university campuses are the skills and ultimately the habits of constructive dialogue rather than simply giving platforms to people who take this either-or approach. I want to give you and your audience a bit of an inside view of how this even happened.
We live in a society that has increasingly been telling its young people, “The world is extremely dangerous. You need to be protected.” Many kids “grow up”, get older, and believe that words will kill them. As a result, censorship is all over the place. They claim that they are harmed. They claim that violence comes in the form of what people say and how people say it rather than actual physical peril.
Here’s what I routinely hear from university administrators. Strap yourself in. They tell me, “If I tell these university undergrads that they’re capable of handling what they hear from other people, it’s like I’m turning my back on my own children.” I say to them, “You are infantilizing these young people by telling them and treating them as if they are children. They are not. They are now adults. Young adults, to be sure, but they’re adults. You need to give them the tools to adult in a very messy world.” Many of these administrators feel like they’re being callous if they do that and they allow undergrads to grow the heck up.
There was an old thing when I was a kid. It was, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
It is 180 degrees in reverse.
In your mindset, it’s important to understand something you vehemently disagree with. How do they believe they are helping? I read Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy. It’s a very interesting look at how with the most intervention ever, we have the worst outcomes. As a business person, you would say, “Maybe we should take a look at how we’re doing this.” What are the outcomes that they are seeking with that viewpoint?
To be honest, I don’t think they know. It comes back to our culture of instant gratification. They’re looking to protect themselves, first and foremost, from backlash and accusations of, “You don’t care about us.” Who is us? The loudest voices. The loudest voices presume to speak on behalf of everybody who looks like them. For those who disagree with them, the people who disagree are too scared to say that they disagree because they think, “ I’m going to be an outcast. I’m going to be excommunicated from my tribe. Now what?” If in any case any of your audience thinks, “That’s crazy,” it’s not crazy.
I have seen that.
Not only have you seen that, but remember. It goes back to that primal brain of ours. When our ancestors many years ago were hunter-gatherers, any little rustle in the bush could have meant true danger for them.
If you were left by your group, you were dead.
You were somebody’s dinner. That’s exactly right. Even though our values have evolved, that primal brain or that ego brain has not. That’s why this is the long game that we need to play and that we need to be teaching not just a new generation but even our coworkers how to tame that ego brain so that you are not swimming in hyper-emotionalism. You’re thinking as well as feeling. When you’re thinking, you can size up what’s going on around you. Something that feels like a catastrophe often isn’t.
We’ve taught people that their feelings are reality. Jonathan Haidt says your feelings are not reality. I like one of his examples. There’s a phone number on the subway in New York that says, “If you suspect something, call.” 1 out of every 100,000 is an issue. The other 99% of people that were feeling threatened, it wasn’t a threat. I thought that was a very pragmatic example of somehow, feelings became reality along the way, which makes things hard.
Neurobiologically, it is true that our primal brains or our ego brains make us feel things that then we accept as true. This had nothing to do with what universities and institutions have taught us. It is neurobiologically the case, but what the institutions have done is validate this manipulation by our primal brains. That’s where they have gone wrong.
It would seem the point of university is to be intellectually curious, challenge one’s assumptions, seek new information, and not try to reinforce our biases. It seems like the opposite is happening. I’m curious. I know you’ve talked to probably a lot of business leaders and CEOs. I know a lot of people who felt bullied into jumping into politics and other things that they didn’t agree with and they’re trying to get out of it.
There was a stat I thought was really interesting. I wrote an article. It was an article on what Gen Z wanted in the workplace. One of the things was, “I want to work somewhere where the company agrees with all my opinions and stuff on things.” I was thinking, “That’s horrible. That is antithetical to even the concept of inclusion. You want to work with people that share your values. If you’re trying to find a company where the company expresses opinions all the time but agrees with everything you say, that sounds very not diversified ideologically.
Let me throw a wrench into a couple of things that you said because we need to understand that this is not simple, this conundrum that we have created for ourselves. One is that according to a neuroscientist by the name of Todd Rose, who’s a good friend of Moral Courage and does not do public opinion but private opinion, this generation, so-called Gen Z, will go on record to say that they want to work for companies that share only their values. When you give them the truth serum and ask this for purely private consumption, they will say that they want to have coworkers who have diverse opinions. Why won’t they say that for public record? It’s because they’re afraid of not belonging and not fitting in if that’s what other people know they believe.
At work, do they join the virtue-signaling things that you’re saying they don’t agree with?
That’s exactly right.
That’s got to not make you feel good inside.
You’re at war with yourself then.
That’s cognitive dissonance at its best.
You can understand why the mental health crisis is as deep as it is. The anxiety doesn’t come from being told that you are constantly in danger. It also comes from recognizing, “If I’m surrounded by people who agree with me all the time, I’m not growing, but I don’t know how to get out of that. If I try, I’m going to be canceled, doxxed, or, in some other way, reputationally threatened.” You can see what an ugly vortex or what a miasma of misery this becomes.
These are great words. I haven’t heard of some of these in a while. We had David Heinemeier Hansson on the show. I don’t know if you know the story of Basecamp a few years ago where they said, “We’re done. No politics.” He was very honest. He wasn’t sure they were going to survive. This was when Twitter was not owned by Elon Musk and was being used in campaigns. They lost 30% of their employees. He was like, “We’re not sure we’re going to survive this,” and they’ve gone on to more than thrive. He was like, “I didn’t want to work at a place like this.” How would you encourage a leader to think from that moral courage of the type of company that they want to build and have it be inclusive? If they don’t want to be in politics or they don’t want to be in these, how do they say that?
First and foremost, let me point out something that you said, which is really important for people to reflect on. Basecamp, rather than go down the identity politics rabbit hole, cleaned house and they are thriving. What that tells you exactly comes back to that observation about private opinion research. Most people, even when they say that they don’t want to be disagreed with, appreciate having diverse viewpoints around them. Your company will thrive when you define diversity as including divergent viewpoints not merely different demographics.
Diversity isn’t about division, it’s about embracing different viewpoints. That’s where true innovation happens.
In a way, what I teach business leaders to do, and this comes from that both-and approach that I learned early on, is to embrace diversity and define it in a way that will make some dogmatists uncomfortable. Namely, that part and parcel of what diversity means in this company is different viewpoints, not merely different labels of skin color, religion, and gender.
Watch everybody go, “You mean I’m not going to have it all my way.” You are going to ensure that when you stick to the diversity of viewpoint promise, everybody is safe to express what they fully believe. That doesn’t mean they won’t be challenged. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be questioned. What it means is that innovation finally has a fighting chance because different viewpoints make for innovation. You can’t have orthodoxy and innovation at the same time.
The idea is that diversity has been lost in a lot of the diversity discussions. You can have group-think and a whole bunch of things a different way. Originally, a lot of the point of some of making progress on diversity was because without the different perspectives, how can you have different viewpoints? It was a lot about getting to that more than it was the identity, like, “We’re marketing to the minority women in our company and we don’t have any. How do we know what we’re talking about?”
You make a really good point that originally, the assumption, and it was an assumption made by the Supreme Court no less, was that if we have different demographics and different groups in an institution, we will have different viewpoints. What they fail to take into account is precisely group-think. One of the big mistakes that DEI has made and continues to make is treating people as avatars or mascots of groups rather than as individuals. I happen to be Muslim. Does that mean I speak on behalf of every other Muslim? Heck no. Not at all.
Your first book made that clear.
That’s exactly right. Similarly, those who disagree with me and are Muslim don’t speak on my behalf. Why should they? We all have our own backstories. Those backstories will shape our points of view, and that’s as it should be. Bring intelligent, articulate, ambitious people to the table and let them figure out how to synchronize and synthesize different points of view so that 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 5 rather than 3.
I’m going to go back to one of your words. I’m a leader and I have two dogmatists on my team. They are in their respective dog houses. It’s not that they’re in trouble, but they are in their ideological dog houses. I really want a company that is based on the Moral Courage Foundation. Do I encourage them to figure out how to have that discussion and listen to each other? Do I encourage them to do it in front of a larger team so we can all learn from it? How would I approach that situation?
Merely encouraging will never be enough because most people don’t know how.
They need a facilitator.
Not necessarily a facilitator, but what they do need is the skills. This is exactly what Moral Courage College teaches, the skills of healthy communication. These are very simple skills such as taking that deep breath before you enter into a conversation that could go sideways because when you take that deep breath, you’re giving your brain the oxygen that it needs to go from a hyper-emotional, anxious state to a state in which both thinking and feeling can coexist, creating common ground proactively rather than merely finding or seeking it, listening to learn, not just to understand, and asking a sincere question before blurting out what your opinion is.
The point here is not only do people need a toolbox, but what’s also perhaps even more important is that people need the opportunities and therefore the time to practice with these tools so that the skills become habits. For better and for worse, habits are no-brainers. Habits are how you roll. We need to ensure that instead of lapsing into bad habits in highly emotional moments, we’ve replaced those lousy habits with better ones because that’s what we’re going to be lapsing into when we’re trying to cope with the stress of being disagreed with.
The habits are critical. I think of intellectual curiosity. Let’s pretend I’m the purple party and you’re in the orange political party to keep it tame. I want to crush you in the election. I’d want to sit down and understand selfishly not just the policies, but why you believe what you believe and where it came from. You’d want to understand these things.
I ’ve always said a simple example is you can understand someone who’s very against entitlements, but if they talk to someone who only got by on food stamps, they might understand that. On the reverse side, someone who’s distrustful of the government because their town got shut down by the government and they took over things, you might understand. You don’t have to agree with them.
That’s the key. When many people hear something like what you’ve said, they automatically assume, “You want me to compromise what I believe. You want me to agree with someone who’s flat-out wrong.” The beauty of taming your ego brain, which is the definition of moral courage, is that you can stand your ground and at the same time create common ground. That sounds like a contradiction, but all it is is a delicious paradox.
Standing your ground is about what you believe, and that’s part of your integrity. No one’s asking you to give that up. Creating common ground is about how you express what you believe so that if you can leave your so-called other feeling not agreed with, but heard, you have motivated them to give you a fair hearing in turn.
If they do that and are really honest with you, I find it hard to believe that your viewpoint would not evolve. It doesn’t mean that it has changed, but it would have evolved. This is one of the most amazing things that you’ve been involved with and you showed. Can you talk about your involvement in this effort to change the Mississippi State flag in 2020? Everything we talked about comes together in that example. We can then tell people where to go and watch the snippet because it’s incredibly powerful.
We are soon, Moral Courage, coming out publicly with a 30-minute Oscar-shortlisted documentary called Mississippi Turning. It follows two young people, Genesis and Louis. Genesis is a hip-hop artist and Black woman, and Louis is a young White guy working class. Both were born in Biloxi, Mississippi. They vaguely knew each other in grade school, but it’s 25 years later and they haven’t shared 2 words with 1 another, so they don’t know each other as adults.
Mississippi Turning: Changing The State
Genesis launches an incendiary protest against the Confederate battle flag from a stage during a music concert. She lowers a noose around her neck to make the point. People take photos. The photos go viral and bigotry starts pouring into her social media feeds. What Genesis realizes is, “Nothing is going to change if all I’m doing is playing to outrage. People are going to become more entrenched in their positions.”
As she’s scrolling through her feeds, she happens across a message that Louis has posted. Respectfully, he says to her, “Genesis, I respect your freedom of speech, but I must tell you that the flag is my heritage and I disagree with wanting to get rid of it.” He says, “I respect your freedom of speech.” That’s all Genesis needs to hear in order to know, “If I invite him to my backyard, he’s not going to kill me.” She invites him to her backyard and they sit down and hash this through.
Genesis does something very important as her starting point in the conversation, and it goes back to the skills of moral courage. Rather than tell Louis why she believes what she believes, namely, “We should get rid of the Confederate battle emblem in our Mississippi State flag,” instead, she asks him a very simple question, which is, “How does that flag make you feel, Louis?” He answers, “It makes me feel at home.” He then reciprocates, “How about you?” She says, “It makes me feel unwelcome even though I am at home.” Why did Louis ask her how it makes her feel? It’s because she respected him enough to care what he was feeling.
How did you get connected to it?
Genesis was a mentee of mine when I taught at NYU. She happened to be one of my students when I was a professor of leadership at NYU. We kept in touch ever since. She called me out of the blue a few years after leaving the university to say, “Professor, I’ve got a bit of a dilemma here.”
She was like, “I invited this guy to my house.”
No, this was before she invited him. I said to her, “If you’re pretty sure he doesn’t want to kill you, invite him to your backyard and sit down and talk it out.” I suggested, “Remember your moral courage skills, taming that ego brain. Start with a sincere question,” which is precisely what she did. I will share with you that I asked Louis after the camera switched off, “Why did you have such a productive conversation with Genesis around all of this?” He said, “I’ve never experienced so much respect from someone on the other side.” I asked him, “What do you mean by respect?” He said, “She cared about my story. She wanted to know where I was coming from.”
Without realizing it, Louis perfectly defined what respect is. Respect comes from the Latin word re-spectate. Spectate means to look. Re means again. When we respect someone, we’re willing to look again rather than being distracted by the baggage that goes with whatever labels they’ve taken for themselves or our ego brains in their impulsivity have put on them.
Respect comes from being willing to look again at someone’s story. True empathy starts with curiosity.
Bringing back a bunch of the things we talked about, it seems there’s that intellectual curiosity. Adam Grant called it task conflict versus role conflict. You can disagree with ideas and not disagree with the person.
Also, disagree with the humanity of the person or the very existence of that person. These are nuances that most of us don’t bother learning because we think, “It’s too complicated.” It’s not. Once you habituate these distinctions like, “I can listen without having to agree. I can do diversity without division because my diversity incorporates different viewpoints, not merely different demographic labels,” and they become part of your personal culture, you realize how simple it is to deal with conflict in healthy and productive ways. It won’t avoid conflict. It’s a myth that conflict avoidance is avoiding conflict. Conflict avoidance makes conflict worse.
If we avoid conflict, we’re only building it up. Engage with moral courage and make those tough conversations productive.
It’s delaying conflict.
That’s exactly right.
In a work situation, have you ever put off a difficult conversation that has never gotten easier?
Exactly. Why not learn how to engage those conflicts in ways that are win-win rather than win-lose?
The empathy and the story are really important, but sometimes, it really is an outlier. It’s a 1 out of 100 thing and it would make a bad policy. Let’s dumb this down. If I talk to you and I heard about how someone in your family got struck by lightning but you were advocating that no building should have any outdoor space anywhere, how do we address that? Sometimes, the cure is worse than the problem.
Where does that come from, the cure being worse than the problem? I would say it comes from being reactive rather than responsive. That’s a nuance worth internalizing. If we act on impulse, then all we’re doing is feeling. We are hyper-emotional. If we take that deep breath, ask some sincere questions, and become curious enough to want to know more, what we do is not only give ourselves and others around us a lot more context, but we also slow ourselves down enough to think, not merely feel. That’s responsive.
If that person or group felt heard about what had happened, then maybe they wouldn’t advocate for an overcompensated policy change or response, right?
Yeah. Even if they did advocate for an overcompensating reactive fix, we have ways of engaging them that still audibly recognize their humanity. We can disagree with their ideas, but we still validate that we’ve got something to learn from them. That’s the beauty of listening to learn rather than to merely understand. I really need to emphasize this point about the distinction between learning and understanding. It has become pro forma. We say, “I hear you.”
It sounds dismissive in itself.
Exactly. We do that too often, waving our hands and wanting to get to our own answer. Don’t strive merely to understand. Strive to learn. The way you can show the other that you are learning from them is by saying, “Thank you because,” and then fill in the blank and be as specific as you can. It’s like, “Thank you because that interpretation of events would’ve never occurred to me. I got to think about that more. Thanks for opening up my eyes to how you see it. Since I don’t live in your skin and you don’t live in mine, I would’ve never come to that myself.”
All of this in person, which is missing delicate conversations that need to happen more, can anything good come out of social media? Is there anything to do on social media other than not attacking people? It almost seems the best thing to do is to not even try to have a conversation there.
It is worthwhile trying to have a conversation. Here’s the thing though. There are only 24 hours in the day, and there always have been only 24 hours in the day. Some of us need our beauty sleep. You can’t do this with everyone about everything. The question you have to ask yourself is, “What am I in this for?” if you try and have a conversation on social media. Namely, “Am I in this to move the needle or am I in this to feel superior?” Be honest with yourself about that. If it’s the latter, you’re going to give as good as you get. Frankly, I wouldn’t waste my time or energy.
Don’t start a Twitter war. It seems like rule 101.
Building Moral Courage In Leadership
Get off Twitter altogether because that’s a cesspool. If you are in this to move the needle because you believe so passionately in this issue, then remember. The way you engage is at least as important as what you are trying to say because your how will indelibly impact whether your what is going to be heard. Get out of your own way and learn how to engage with moral courage.
I’ll say this last piece. Moral courage doesn’t mean speaking truth to power. It means speaking truth to the power of your own ego brain. That truth is, “Ego, I love and respect you. I know you exist to keep me alive in life and death moments, but here’s the deal, ego. This is not a life-and-death moment. All that’s happening is I’m going to be disagreed with. Ego, step aside. I got this.” Tame your ego brain. Whenever there’s an us against them situation that is not rife with immediate danger, your most formidable foe will not be the other side. It won’t be out there. It’ll be in your head.
For my last question, I usually ask people a personal or a professional mistake that they’ve learned the most from. I’d love to hear within the context of where your ego brain did a huge disservice to you.
I shared a little bit about my own advocacy around reform in my religion and how I repeatedly made the mistake of turning what could have been discussions into debates. I’ll go a step further. We all have family members, and as a result, there’s always going to be tension. For the longest time, I misunderstood my own mother. I treated her like a victim and then lectured her about how to get stronger.
The reality is she wasn’t a victim. She didn’t see herself that way. I saw her that way and assumed that that was how she was behaving. That’s because we don’t see others as they are. We see others as we are. It was only when I began taking my own advice, the advice that I was giving to her. Namely, by listening to her rather than trying to fix her. Believe it or not, very shortly after I started listening and not fixing, that’s when she began taking the advice that I had been giving her for years, and she did that because for once and finally, she did not feel judged.
I’m sure there are many people reading who might find some value in that story. Thank you for sharing.
S ince different people are of different ages and therefore in different chapters of their lives, we teach this work at Moral Courage in various ways. We’re developing mobile games for teenagers and university undergrads. We are coming out with a YouTube series called The Dilemma in which we’re asking people, “Are you ready to exchange or trade the instant dopamine hit of finger-pointing for the slower but more enduring rewards of educating your own emotions?”
We’re coming out with that YouTube series this fall 2024. You also know about the documentary, Mississippi Turning. For anybody who’s interested in the various ways that they can introduce this work, whether it’s to their employees, their students, their kids, their spouses, or themselves, please do come to MoralCourage.com and learn about the different avenues into the both-and space.
That’s perfect. I was going to ask you to share that. You did it. They can find out about your books there too or I assume to look on Amazon.com.
That’s right. Don’t Label Me is the latest one.
Thank you for joining us. I’m glad we finally got to have this conversation. You’re a vital voice in one of the most important topics of our time. I appreciate your time.
Back at you. Thanks for having me.
To our audience, thanks for tuning in to the show. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d appreciate it if you could leave us a review as that’s what helps new users discover the show. Thank you again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Irshad Manji
- Moral Courage College
- Don’t Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars
- David Heinemeier Hansson Returns To Discuss Going Against The Grain, Mental Health And More
- Bad Therapy
- Amazon.com
About Irshad Manji
Irshad Manji is founder and chief executive of the Moral Courage Network, which comprises our business and nonprofit foundation. A prize-winning leadership professor at New York University for many years, she now teaches with the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights.
The recipient of Oprah’s “Chutzpah Award” for boldness, Irshad is also a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is Don’t Label Me: How to Do Diversity Without Inflaming the Culture Wars. (Fun fact: Chris Rock, the entertainer, calls her book “genius.” We don’t yet know what Will Smith thinks of it.)
Prof. Manji sits on the board of Intend Health Strategies, which brings relational leadership to the medical profession. She also serves as a formal advisor to several companies.Her mail comes to New York City, yet she’s most “at home” when teaching — and learning from — people with ideas or experiences that differ from her own.
