Archive for the ‘Dummy’s Guide to Conversation’ Category
“Funny You Say That”
How to recognize an awake moment and what to do about it
I heard this again the other day. Clearly this points to a glitch in The Matrix.
I was talking with a friend from a company we both worked at a lifetime ago. I mentioned a client I had been working with and he said, “It’s funny you say that.” He had just had a conversation with someone at the company and the firm had been on his mind.
“Not so strange,” you counter. “You both worked at the same company, it’s likely you had similar work trajectories.” Agreed. That is likely.
But it happens often: you mention something you read or see or hear. Or someone you know or talked with. And the person you are talking with makes a connection with something they recently heard or thought, or with someone they recently talked with. There is a leap of awareness and understanding. And out of that emerges a way forward.
Maybe it is just like what Trinity said about déjà vu: it’s an indicator something is changing. That sounds reasonable to me. In this blog I’ve been tracking how our conversations affect us in the most unwitting and unexpected ways. I wonder if “it’s funny you say that” is something of an open door through which we actually indicate we are consider/reconsidering/rethinking something. Or that we’re open to any of the above. And there is the possibility something much larger is happening behind the language we so easily pick from the moving racks of words in our heads.
Something to think about.
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Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #9: Say it Out Loud To Get It
A pastor friend once wondered why the congregation didn’t know this certain fact he had mentioned in a sermon. My friend was under the notion that people listen closely to every word of a sermon. I am convinced people do listen—just not to every word.
I know this because I have taught college students and mistakenly thought that the wide-open eyes and direct eye contact meant they were listening. It took me until my first test to realize how mistaken I was. Direct eye contact is as much an act as appearing to type notes while facebooking friends. Students and all of us easily adopt the outward behaviors that allow us to escape miles away to play on the beach while the person in front persists in boring monologue.
But a conversation is a different environment than a lecture or sermon. Don’t let your conversation partner bore you with abstractions. Challenge them. Question. Ask. This is the very nature of conversation and it fits with how we understand anything: we need to try an idea on for size to sort out whether it fits us or the situation.
Trying an idea on for size looks like talking.
We must turn something over verbally to begin to understand it. It’s just how the will is connected to the brain—through the voicebox. Not exclusively, sometimes we get it without saying it or asking. And sometimes writing a note helps in understanding (that’s often how it works for me). But make peace that people need to respond in one way or another to truly begin to understand something.
This is part of the reason lectures can be so ineffective.
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Image Credit: BLU (street artist from Bologna Italy) via 2headedsnake
Livestream Ignite Minneapolis Tonight Starting at 7pm
I have an idea but just barely the guts to step on stage.
I’m doing it anyway. Watch Ignite Minneapolis here starting at 7pm today (24 May 21012).
I just hope the Mighty Wurlitzer doesn’t rise from the depths before I get to Side 20.
Philosophers don’t pack heat. Right?
On Preparing for Ignite Minneapolis
outcome not yet determined
The unrelenting movement—every 15 seconds a slide changes—makes speaking at Ignite Minneapolis more a verbal dance than a straight-out talk. I’ve compressed four voluminous thinkers (Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, JL Austin and Wayne Booth) into pairs of 10 second sound bites. If the audience includes philosophers packing heat, I may not make it out alive. Practice, practice, practice. And more practice. And then practice lots, lots more. It’s the only thing that begins to still the nerves.
I remind myself of the dream: to see if anyone will bite on my notion that ordinary conversations can be turned into insight-producing engines. All it takes is four steps to tune our thinking—but I’ll wait until after I present to spill the beans on “How to HACK a Conversation for Insight.” It’s the message I’m excited about presenting. Very, very swiftly.
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Image Credit: Zohar Lazar via 2headedsnake
Wait for It (And Resist Checking Your Phone)—Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #8
Anyone who writes for a living or who must regularly produce creative solutions knows the best ideas are typically not the first ideas.
I’m about to begin teaching a freelance copywriting class at Northwestern College and I’m guessing there will be some who will submit copy they’ve done at the last minute: something thrown together to meet the assignment requirements, but just barely.
don’t rush me
I hope college students don’t remember college as the place where they learned to do the least at the last minute to see how much they can get away with. This is not a great attitude to take into the workplace. And it is a fatal if you work on your own, because it leeches craftsmanship (and joy) from the work itself. And craftsmanship—care for the work itself—is one of two key elements in meaningful work. The other element is learning how to serve someone else’s needs and finally get over yourself.
When I brainstorm for an ad or a bit of copy I fill up pages and pages with pure dreck. Worthless stuff that only serves to get my keyboard moving. And then, at some point, one bit of dreck solidifies into a line that is sort of ok. Or a direction that makes sense. But that only comes after the pages of dreck. Occasionally it comes first, but I need the pages of dreck to help me realize any possible or potential brilliance.
How does that work in conversations? Same way. The first stuff we way say is obvious and not that interesting. The first conversations of a cross-country car trip have a vanilla flavor. But by the time you’ve arrived at New York to catch a flight to Europe, you know the deep hurts and high joys of everyone in your car, and you’ve somehow settled on a series of jokes about fast food restaurants or particular car types that leave you all gasping for air because they are so funny. It takes time and sustained attention to get to that place where the good stuff comes out. It’s almost like you invent the context for familiarity as you go.
This is the way for lots of satisfying things. And it is the way for ordinary conversations. I’m learning to dwell in a conversation. To not rush it. To give myself and other space to breathe so that they (and I) feel free to let come what may. And that can be uncomfortable because silence is awkward for us. Soap opera stars lock their eyes in those silences. In a cross-country car ride you look out the window. In a conversation, you just…look…and wait. But the silence works to lube thoughts. Resist the urge to move to the next thing. Resist the urge to pull out your phone. Wait for it. Because eventually something will come along that changes everything.
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Image Credit: Langdon Graves via thisisn’thappiness
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #6: Listen to Other People’s Stuff
please say more
Sometimes we have stuff to say and so we pack our conversation full of it. Maybe we’re deeply affected by an event in our lives: we failed a test (or aced a test), had an accident, got engaged. Got divorced. Stuff happens and we want to say it. Aloud.
So we do. At a family dinner we launch our stuff into the conversation. But someone else throws in their own bad test/good test/accident/engagement/divorce story. You and your stuff sought sympathy, would have settled for empathy, but instead your moment was hijacked by someone else’s stuff. And now you feel a raw edge to your emotion—after all, you did venture out on a limb to tell your story. Plus, you are disappointed because you hoped encouraging words would ascend from the sympathy/empathy to caress your forehead. Didn’t happen.
Disappointment is common to the human experience. Growth is the result. The key is not to wrest the conversation back so you and your stuff are in focus. Instead, let the conversation progress. Perhaps you can offer comfort to the conversation hijacker—this is the way of grace. Often our own hurt is a key ingredient we offer someone else to help them heal. Which is not to say we don’t need to be heard.
Over the Christmas holiday our family got talking about how rare it is to find people who truly listen. People who don’t rush to hijack the conversation, but instead probe and query. And ask. And pray. As we talked, we counted ourselves blessed with a great number of these people and agreed we are quite fortunate.
But to be that listening person—maybe that is worth a New Year’s resolution.
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Image Credit: kelly reemtsen/indiesart.com Via 2headedsnake
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #5: Sit With It
Go trolling with your decision.
Despite the passive image, it’s an active decision-making strategy powered by talk. And it has everything to do with the people you mix with every day.
Here’s how it works: You are vexed by some perplexing question. Some potential fork in the road. Let’s say the stakes are high so the choice is even harder. This question takes up residence in your mind. You don’t know what to do or which direction to take. With no decision forthcoming, you watch pieces of your life go on hold, each waiting for the choice.
So you force a choice. You make your best guess, but you leave time—if possible—to rethink your choice. You shoulder the mantle of owning the decision and taking it with you out into your work and your relationships and even into the casual acquaintances that pop up. And you just watch and see how it feels. This is how you sit with a decision.
Sit with it and watch. You are making a choice and trying it on for size. This is not done in isolation. It happens in conversation. With our words we explain what we’ve chosen to do. Amazingly, it is as we form words and explain what we’ve chosen that we come to grips with the full dimensions of this choice. People respond: “Yes. That’s perfect for you.” Or “Hmmm. That doesn’t seem like you.” Casual acquaintances hear the slimmest snippet of the choice in story form and ask a question that reinforces the decision. Or not.
It’s as if we need to listen to our own words to see how we feel about something. Sitting with a decision means hearing yourself form and reform the story in ways unique to each audience you encounter.
This strategy works for all sorts of things—not just decisions. Relationships. New ways of looking at things. Learning. Sitting with a notion is a way of collecting wisdom from others as you make life choices.
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Image Credit: leonid tishkov via 2headedsnake
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #4: Define Stuff
Definition is a dance.
There is a story of a young man and a young woman. They had dated for some time and things were moving along comfortably. Together they decided to move to a new city, where they each took new jobs and explored the area. All while they continued their relationship.
One day, after a weekend lunch together at the young man’s apartment, the young woman said, “Where do you see our relationship going?”
A simple question. Directional. Easy to answer. Innocuous!
But the young man had not tracked along that line of thought.
The question swung like a searchlight through the great, dark, yawning chasm of circumstances and trajectories he had not begun to consider. The question spun like a mad top through his brain, touching area after area that needed direction, uncorking whirling speculation and emotion and fears and opportunity. Yes, where was this going?
“I have to sit down for a moment,” he said.
“I guess that’s my answer,” she said.
Definition can work powerfully in a life. Definition can suddenly show how one person’s thinking is so very, very different from another’s. We often say definition “gets people on the same page,” which is a way of saying we’ve come to an understanding. And that understanding lets us move forward. Or not.
In class our text read “Definitions explain terms or concepts that are specialized and may be unfamiliar to people who don’t have expertise in a particular field.” (Gurak and Lannon, 2010) But the more we talked about it, the more we realized that definition of “definition” did not take into account the powerful leveling ability definition can serve with those who think they already know something—those who feel too familiar with the topic at hand.
Whether in relationships, business meetings, board meetings or a casual encounter in the street, defining what you are talking about is a powerful conversational tool.
Postscript: The young man did eventually begin to define things, area by area. The young woman stuck around. They married and a quarter of a century later they still work together on defining the circumstances and trajectories of life.
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Image Credit: Via thisisnthappiness
Dialogue is a place
Dialogue is a place. It’s a playground where humans come to teeter and totter, to swing and slide. It’s a geography—a verbal top-of-the-Foshay—where we suddenly see for miles though still sitting in a coffee shop talking with an old friend. Our best conversations become spots on the map we revisit for the rest of our lives.
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Photo credit: Minnemom
Who shows up in your conversations?
show up for a few of your conversations today
There’s you. And your conversation partner. And since your discussion stumbled into talking about money, your Grandad showed up who always said “Save your money.” If you talk politics, some talking head from Fox shows up, or some voice from NPR joins in. You didn’t invite them. But you really did, because you heard them speak and absorbed their words as truth—at least until you repeat them aloud. Then you start to wonder.
Maybe you went to a funeral over the weekend and the widow shows up in your conversation, with what she said about her husband, your friend. And then your daughter shows up, because of the tiny gravestone she put over the mole you buried in the back yard ten years ago: “Here lies one dead mole.”
And sometimes even you don’t show up to your own conversations. And neither does your conversation partner. Because you’re both on autopilot and talking past one another as you walk past one other down the long hallway toward the coffee machine.
A good conversation is part mystery, part shining beauty, part toilsome information exchange—and frequently all three. But you need to show up.
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Image Credit: Jay Fleck
conversation is an engine 