How Could this Book be More Interesting?
I’m about to go fishing with my Listentalk book proposal (via www.ChristianManuscriptSubmissions.com). How could I make the summary (below) more interesting? Be honest. People respond to these posts by email, on Facebook and occasionally right here at “Engage.” Vent your spleen. I’m listening.
Listentalk: How Simple Conversation Changes Your Life Every Day
Why does one conversation make you scan the room for escape while the next sends you breathless to register to run a marathon—though you hate exercise? Listentalk: How Simple Conversation Changes Your Life Every Day shows how humble, mundane conversations have the power to turn our life direction every single day, by:
- Reminding us of the pivotal conversations that have shaped and sculpted our own lives. Like the chance comment to your 18-year-old-self from an acquaintance about a “school you should check out,” which sent you a direction that ended in law school, marriage and being appointed as a judge (true story).
- Showing how God purposefully composed the human condition so that while we are limited, we are limited together. Conversation has a way of bumping out our human limitations in extraordinary ways, so that my lack of understanding leads to a discussion that sheds light on a key topic but also opens an opportunity to pursue the work I love.
- Exposing the component parts of listening and talking so we can better understand how God speaks to and through us
- Providing practical insights into how we can listen and speak for powerful good every single day—including wise use of social media
Today’s incendiary and vitriolic talk leaves people feeling weary and soiled. Listentalk refreshes Christian adults, Sunday School classes, small groups and college students by reminding them of the wonder, curiosity and serendipity that have been part of the deep verbal connections that have shaped their lives. These deep connections have often sprung from the unlikeliest of mundane conversations.
Listentalk tells stories of conversations that both suggest and model an extraordinary set of expectations and outcomes for ordinary talk. Listentalk helps people see verbal, visual and other-sensory conversational episodes as the powerful shaping tools they are—and provides suggestions for making them even more powerful. Unlike possibility-thinking, self-help books, Listentalk is grounded in the nature and actions of the conversing God of the Bible who expected and realized world-changing outcomes from each conversational episode. Listentalk frees readers to see daily conversation in a very different light by inviting readers to reach out in trust to each day’s conversational partners—an ever-expanding set of partners due to changing attitudes (about communication, authority and the loss of gatekeepers) and developing technologies.
Listentalk offers a primer on navigating the growing social media space as redeemed conversational partners. Creating communities of target audiences is the new marketing strategy. Leading public conversations by reaching out with dialogue that gifts and blesses is not only supremely Christian, but supremely strategic.
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On Intersubjective Finitude
I think I just made that phrase up (really: Google says “No results found for “Intersubjective Finitude”). What I mean is that the human condition is chock-full of limits: we have limited energy, we age and parts droop or just stop working, finances are always ¾ empty (partly because we always want more than we have). Look: we still have to sleep every day because we simply run out of steam! The human condition is all about these limits.
I think it is purposeful.
The wonder of conversation is that it has the possibility of bumping out limits in the most surprising ways. I talk with my wife and she says something that lifts my spirits (and energy) in an unexpected way. A dinner discussion with a colleague reveals a new approach to exercise that may provide a more sought-after outcome. A haphazard conversation outside a coffee shop and I suddenly realize a next step for a vexing copywriting problem.
Our humanness bespeaks frailty and limits at every turn. And at every conversational turn, we run smack into words that would free us from momentary miseries. Multiply the effect by ten thousand in the mysterious conversations with God we call “prayer.”
I’ve been writing about it here as I get my book proposal ready to go out and seduce potential publishers.
What pivotal conversation will happen today?
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[Image Credit: Marc Johns]
Sinister Egyptian Texts
"We're here to help you."
Vodafone and France Telecom SA were forced by the Egyptian Government/army to send texts to their customers, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The texts had to do with “national security and general safety.” One example texted message: “Egyptian youth beware of rumors and listen to the voice of reason. Egypt is above everyone so protect it.”
The Egyptian government/army would likely argue those were not threatening messages, and were intended for general safety. But every time an institution speaks to an individual with an institutional voice, the results are less than believable. In this case, they were wildly unbelievable—given Egypt’s continued attempts to break up the persistent crowds and silence their demands. None of the actions of the increasingly desperate Egyptian government actions are at all surprising given their general shut down of the Internet.
The medium hobbled the institutional message by showing up on private phone carried in a private pocket or private purse. This alone makes national security and general safety messages extremely threatening. One thing the messages through the medium made clear: the army has taken control of private industry and will force their message into your personal sphere.
That’s not the right message for this revolutionary crowd.
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Read Just Right-Hand Pages
Really.
Marshall McLuhan: “I read only the right-hand pages of serious books.”
It’s about redundancy, people.
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Work Posters: Violence in the Service of Safety
Careful: Train Cars will Crush Your Skull
In classes I teach we often puzzle through how to get and retain attention. As a nation our attention spans continue to shrink so that a block of copy seems too huge a commitment. Many readers move on. These old work-safety posters are a gory-wonder in gaining attention and remaining memorable.
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Oh to be an Introspective French Firm.
People have conversations. Do companies?
On Tuesday the head of France’s national railroad apologized for trundling 20,000 Jews to Nazi camps in 1943-1944, as reported by the NYTimes and carried locally by the StarTribune. US Lawmakers, survivors and descendants had moved to block SNCF from winning US contracts had the company not acknowledge their role. The official word from the firm said the apology was part of “the company’s longtime effort to examine its past and denied that it was prompted by the company’s U.S. ambitions.”
There are at least three striking things about this story.
One: It defies logic to disconnect the company apology from looming loss of revenue from possible US contracts. To insist otherwise cheapens their communication. One clearly connects with the other.
Two: Applying economic pressure to force a company to tell the truth about their role in administering a great evil is a marvelous use of our capitalist instincts. There is a fair amount of both optimism and boldness in this move, especially since official spokespeople nearly always sidestep words that link their brand with anything other than blue sky, sunshine and happy smiling faces. Bravo, lawmakers, survivors and descendants!
Third: To think that a company has a “longtime effort to examine its past” strikes me as, also, beyond belief. Companies incorporate for economic muscle. They organize to move forward, they look for opportunity, hone in and exploit. Companies make money. Companies don’t sit at an outdoor café examining past failings. I’m hard-pressed to think of any introspective executive who would free a budget line item for “Company Introspection.” Please, please let there be such a leader in this world. But maybe French companies have a soul?
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Aliens Sit at This End of the Bus
let's explore depth together
Hope on the Other Side of Doubt
If you’ve ever been made to feel like the alien, the other or the stranger, Anna Scott’s response in Patrol magazine (Life as a Leaver) will add fuel to your alienation/otherness/strangeness. Ms. Scott was responding in turn to an article in Christianity Today (The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church). After dealing with the article’s pointing toward moral compromise, among other things, as the reason for leaving the church, the bulk of her argument is a cry to recognize difference. And not just recognize difference and set it aside, but to recognize and incorporate. To set a place at the table for those who would help re-imagine what it means to be a Christian and to be together—not just for the same old male faces that show up when the hierarchical-authority bell is rung. To set a place for women to lead, for instance. Or for divorced folks to be full-fledged participants rather than living with what many evangelical churches treats as an unforgivable sin. Or even just to cultivate listening to the folks in the pew.
She wrote from the perspective of a person immersed in faith—a “real” believer, as one might say. But the difficulties of life changed how she saw things. Ms. Scott’s article is worth reading, as is the original Drew Dyck article.
My point in highlighting this discussion is to say I resonate with her argument. The plight of young skeptics is more than skin deep. It is more than a matter of an easily dismissed people who are “morally compromised” and/or utterly self-focused. My point is that of agreement with Ms. Scott that the “world is complicated, unpredictable, volatile and tragic” and that the church needs to be immersed in many conversations that bring to light some of the mystery of this ancient faith, conversations that honor the shades of gray that disappeared during recent decades when we smugly thought we knew everything.
There is actually another entire category of “old skeptics.” Real believers who have been immersed in the system for decades and now sit idly by for many of the same reasons: the complicated, unpredictable, volatile and tragic world did a number on them, but the depths of their pain and experience have no place in the current sanitized conversations and full-throttle programs.
Conversations with skeptics could be very productive, because they could begin to unearth the concrete hope that can sustain real people living in a complicated world.
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Two Words Cost Me Dearly
My Splendid Sabotage
Please know:
First: I wrote the words 40-some hours into a 51 hour project spread across a week and a half.
Second: I was desperate to capture the zeitgeist bouncing between client and agency principals.
As I wrote these two words I immediately moved to delete them. But something stopped me. Was it reckless whim? Had I given up? Why oh why did I pause over “Delete”? My self-editor should have been there, sitting beside me. He was still locked in the self-editor-dungeon where he has a cot and a Folgers can to pee in. He doesn’t get out much when I’m creating.
“Flabby Paths”
Oh, sure. They seem innocuous—even forgettable. But as a subhead for a component of this project, they were the stalled car on the track that derailed the train pulling boxcars of produce that needed to get through right now. Or: These words distracted the creative team and hurried them down a path and off a cliff.
So, my bad. Personal penalty: pulling my invoice and attacking it with scissors and fresh resolutions. It’s a matter of integrity. It’s also a matter of retaining relationships.
Floated or Finished?
It’s never just the words, of course. It’s the trust built between creatives as a project moves forward. With some team members you are free to say the really stupid stuff and let it sit for a moment between you, even as you all know some better idea is moving up an esophagus about to be uttered. But with other teams, and especially in hurry-up mode, words appearing on paper carry more weight: not of an idea floated but an idea finished. At this point in the project, my self-editor needed to be there with his “HIT DELETE” stamp poised. Because time was flying and next steps need to step up solidly.
My point? Conversations are never formulas that work in every case. And: while creating, the self-editor needs to dwell in the dungeon, but words making their way out in public need to meet his approval. Let him out sometimes.
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A meditation on living in chesed
My friend and I both worked for a long time at a very stable medical device company in Minneapolis. We both eventually left to form our own companies. About this up and down adventure of working on your own, she liked to say “the universe will provide” because her experience was exactly that: interesting clients sought her out with interesting work, she had opportunities for growth coupled with the opportunity to learn and earn for herself and her family. I had to agree that opportunities popped up all the time—especially with the eyes-open approach of a consultant.
My question has more to do with naming the source of these opportunities. Recognizing “the universe” sounds too happenstance. Don’t get me wrong: I am all for whimsy and also a great believer in serendipity. I just want to name the source. Why? Out of joy. Out of wonder. Also because naming the source honors the source. So I credit God as the originator of opportunity.
I’m a beginner at living in dependence on chesed (God’s lovingkindness).
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conversation is an engine 