Posts Tagged ‘conversation’
The Etiquettes of Therapy/Religion/Business
When must we say “No!” to etiquette?
We don’t talk in elevators. Many of us avoid taking a cell phone call in a restaurant. We don’t use church language at work. And we don’t use plumbing words at church (those words that come with a pipe wrench in hand and head under a sink—according to Steve Treichler). We observe all sorts of behavior habits and patterns from day to day, all of which we call “etiquette.”
In Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy (Guildford Press, 2002), James and Melissa Griffith attempt to bridge a taboo of talking about God with clients in their psychotherapy practice. As you may or may not know, conversation is key therapeutic tool and Griffith and Griffith believe therapists too easily dismiss a powerful ingredient when they don’t allow for stories of how people’s faith effects whatever is the topic of therapy. The caveat is that Griffith and Griffith have opened themselves to hear all sorts of faith stories—not just those they might have considered orthodox. The two therapists tell of their own journey toward openness to the varieties of ways patients tell personal stories. By the way: let the record show that openness to hear the wide variety of things our conversation partners say is not the same as giving up on our deep-seated beliefs. We too often confuse openness with wishy-washy. Not the same.
I was initially attracted to the Griffith and Griffith book because of the details they reveal about conversations: how to help each other talk, the amazing nature of a simple conversation, and the mechanisms of speaking that prove so healing. Along the way I’ve come to realize they’ve done something substantial by breaking down a Berlin wall between problems and potential solutions (though perhaps psychotherapy practices have changed quite a bit since 2002).
Over the years I’ve found that colleagues at work will talk about all sorts of stuff in the course of a day, from money to sex to faith to the Twins to the boss to marriage and kids—plus everything else. This is to be encouraged—this flow of words is both natural and cathartic. It’s all about encouraging relationships (which are the primary source of joy for many at work) and work talk routinely breaks across walls of etiquette.
###
Image credit: fredrikrattzen via 2headedsnake
Is Your Job Fulfilling? (Shop Talk #3)
Depends: what do you mean by fulfilling?
An art director and I were talking once about the different jobs we had done over the years. Al said he did some work as a freelancer he was not particularly proud of: wasn’t bad work, just didn’t highlight the creative style he had become known for. Why did he do it? “Well, I had a family and a mortgage and…you do what you gotta do.”
This is my story, too. It is everyone’s story.
An English student asked me how someone writing for an agency or corporation can find fulfillment when the writing is essentially voiceless. By that I understood she meant that the writing was not coming out of some personal deep need to communicate. I get what she means and I think this is an important question. But I also think we romanticize the production of art, novels and poems.
I’ve been arguing that work and art sometimes fit hand in glove and sometimes stay at opposite ends of our daily teeter totter. I’ve been arguing you need both to make either work. If you just have paying work, you are not exercising your creative self. If you just are creating, you’re broke and maybe you don’t have a place among real people in real life. Here are a few things that happen when work and art find a way to live together:
- Workmanlike attention: Our work with its deadlines and status updates helps us (sometimes forces us) to be productive. This is useful when it comes to delivering on our art or craft. Just getting to it—every day—is the way we produce anything. None of this waiting for enlightenment stuff.
- Having a place among people: isolation is not good. Those colleagues and bosses and clients who critique our work help shape it (no matter how painful). In the same way as we try to explain our craft or art to others, it gets shaped as well.
- It is your job to develop a voice. It may not be your voice, but it must be a believable voice. And to run that voice through the gauntlet of critics and peevish managers and lawyers and regulators is no small feat. The voice you produce can become a team or corporate asset. That is something to be proud of.
- Now is not forever. If you are not producing the art/poems/novels you intended, find a way to get to it. This usually involves owning up to the myriad excuses we present for not doing it. And if today’s work is less than fulfilling: start looking. It’s the steely beauty of the free market system that you can change. Recognize that this job is for now and not forever (more and more I’m convinced different seasons in life hold different tasks and levels of fulfillment. Plus, we are personally changing all the time, which means fulfillment is a moving target.)
Several of the hard-bitten copywriters I know would say “Who has time for writing outside the office?” To these I would say your own art and copy is a gift to yourself that pays back in meaning and insight.
There’s more to say about this. What would you add or subtract or say to my student?
###
Image credit: Kirk Livingston
How I’m Writing Today: Palimpsest
Here’s your close reading.
These days nearly all these posts grow out of a much larger manuscript I’m working on. It’s as I were on a teeter-totter: falling with the gravitas of this larger work but then buoyed by the thought of breaking my indulgent thoughts and sentences into smaller pieces and stripping away language. Or this: pushing forward with the larger more difficult manuscript opens windows and doors in passing that frame tantalizing ideas that turn into posts.
Someone I recently read mentioned the notion of a palimpsest: an old manuscript that was erased and rewritten, because the parchment itself was valuable and endured. Modern techniques have allowed for the reading of the words that were erased.
Maybe the palimpsest is not that different with how we are with each other: our rewritten and redacted conversations help catalyze thoughts, actions and intentions with each other. Completely tangential words have the capacity to present a new and quite fruitful direction. Or waste lots of time.
Diversions present. I give chase. It’s neither a tidy nor effectual way of writing. And yet, the result is a fortuitous amount of blasting that clears away the surface…crap…and bores down toward the issue. Sometimes.
###
Image credit: gifmovie via 2headedsnake
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #14: Please Say More
How To Be A Verbal Philanthropist
I always like it in the classroom when the professor says to the student, “Please say more about….” It is a sign of active listening, a phrase which pulls the reluctant student further into the conversation.
“Please say more” is irresistible in its eagerness to hear more of a person’s thinking or reaction or opinion. It is also a demonstration that people and their thoughts and ideas are important. And it is a crazy generous way to engage in conversation. Generous because by nature we rush to fill the space between someone else’s words with our own thoughts.
When someone says to me “Please say more” I feel honored and free and engaged—almost like having been given a gift.
Being a verbal philanthropist doesn’t cost much—just your attention.
###
Image credit: Neil Swaab via 2headedsnake
You might also like:
- Listen Up: #2 in the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
- Listen to Other People’s Stuff:: #6 in the Dummy’s Guide to Conversation
Don’t Bother Me, I’m Busy Talking to Myself
Just because you have a budget doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about
I just finished with a client who refused to take direction.
What’s that? You think a consultant should not give direction to a client? You could not be more wrong. That’s exactly what a good consultant does. It’s just that a consultant’s direction doesn’t look like orders or demands. A consultant’s direction looks like alternatives to the usual and invisible way of doing things.
Sometimes we need help seeing what is right before us. We are soaked in teams that are steeped in detail that is loaded with the talk that just circulates between people in the know. This adds up to a set of increasingly narrow word choices that are interesting only to the team. Those words sound like gibberish to anyone on the outside.
My client continued to talk in the insider terms only they understood. And they would not be dissuaded. In the end, they approved copy that ensured no one outside their little circle would understand.
Which feels like failure to me.
This doesn’t happen often, but it’s a bummer when it does. And it makes me think again about how complicated communication is, and why it is so important to start talking earlier rather than later. And why it is critically important that we pull our head out of the huddle from time to time.
###
Image credit: killythirsk via 2headedsnake
Our Words are Fatally Flawed—By Design (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #13)
4 ways our words succeed even as they fail again and again
Words seem like the perfect carrier for an idea. Say something and you’ve just told your thought. And now someone else understands that thought of yours.
Not so fast: assuming others understand is a bit of a leap.
The best you can say is that someone heard the words you said aloud. Whether they understood those words, whether they gave those words the weight you think they deserve, whether they have any clue about what you really mean—all these are in limbo. It’s very difficult to say if understanding happens in someone else. And I’ve taught enough college classes to know that a direct gaze back has little if any indication about what is going on deep in the whirring cogs of understanding.
Yet the very failure of words to communicate your thought exactly is actually the genius of our species. Because when we see our communication has not worked precisely—or perhaps it has failed to work at all—then we take action. We grab other symbols, we grab a pencil to make a sketch, we grab someone else’s words, we stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon or point to the stars or maybe we grab somebody by the lapels. One way or another we keep working at making ourselves understood. And as we do that work four things happen:
- We grow in relationship. Time spent communicating is time spent paying attention to each other. And time spent growing relationships, relating to each other—maybe even honoring each other by listening—is prime meaning-making time. Gathered together, these moments become the most memorable in our lives.
- We grow. We grow in communication. We grow in use of different tools, some of which we may find we have particular skill. We grow in understanding of our thought and of what this other person needs. Perhaps we grow in caring.
- Something new emerges. It turns out our original thought was not all that complete. The very act of communicating that thought changed it. For the better.
- We realize we need each other to move forward. Whether in our project teams at work, or in discussions about some ancient text, or in philosophy class, or discussing a web page design, or our daily exercise regimen—name any endeavor, and it benefits from being talked about. Even a silent retreat feels complete after we form words to tell our spouse or friend what we learned.
I hope 2013 is a year of growth for you in using words, especially as you work around their fatal flaw to communicate your passion.
###
How To Solve Things With Words
Business, guns, diversity could all benefit from simple talk
I had a boss who would stand amazed at what could be accomplished through simple communication. After a team meeting with a difficult client, she would say, “All we did was talk and that problem just went away.”
She went on to become Le Grand Fromage at Medtronic, which seems fitting and a happy circumstance of a good person rewarded for aggressively doing good (an atypical reward, in my experience).
Could simple communication help us hash out reasonable restrictions for assault weapons? Just people talking together about the rights we cherish, but also weighing them together in the multi-dimensional needs of a diverse culture—aloud. It is OK to become heated, but adults know also how tone it down. Our leaders have led us to bitter partisanship, which our media has been happy to reinforce, so maybe it is up to the regular people, the ruled (as it were) to point the way back to ordinary conversation. In fact, I would argue that it is the ordinary conversations that carry the most extraordinary power for permanent change.
Let’s bring our passions to discussion, and let’s also listen to understand that good point our opponent, but fellow human, wants to make. Covey’s advice to “First Understand” makes sense for today. What if we began to appreciate the very things that made us different?
###
Image credit: marcedith via 2headedsnake
Rob Bell and Our Costly Questions
Conversations to engage a generation of questioners
There’s a telling line in the recent story of Rob Bell in The New Yorker (“The Hell-Raiser”), where the author Kelefa Sanneh conjectured that in writing “Love Wins,” Bell was “dreaming of a world a world without arguments—as if the right book, written the right way, would persuade Christians to stop firing Bible verses at each other and start working to build Heaven on earth.” (60) Conjecture about what others are dreaming is often problematic. But Sanneh, like the rest of us, take our cues from what others say and write, which is standard operating procedure for human communication events. Conjecture is always fair game for conversation.
There’s a lot the author gets right in the article and there are a few places with loaded language and mashed-up history. For instance, the notion that the “church matured” (60) out of the notion of Hell as a physical place is too loose a summary to really work. Debates about interpretation rage today, from all quarters.
Sanneh’s focus on how a preacher became a questioner among a people who do not respond generously to larger questions makes for interesting reading. These are my people and I confess that I too have responded without generosity too many times. And yet these larger questions are exactly the conversational fuel that can help move forward this often awkward project called the church. Especially because the generations behind me are increasingly wed to questions rather than dogmatic answers.
Much of what Bell wrote resonates with me. In particular, I’m smitten by this notion that people can talk—even about very deeply held things—without demonizing or judging each other. The notion reminds me of those noble people who early in the history of the church were in conversation with the inveterate letter writer. They eagerly heard what he had to say then examined it on their own to decide whether it was true or not. I imagine them discussing with authoritative texts and possibly disagreeing, but maintaining their relationships.
Bell has done us a great service by voicing these questions, even though the penalties for him have been high.
###
Image Credit: The New Yorker
How to Talk About Stuff That Matters
2 Places to Begin
We’re at a restaurant, my friend and I. We have not seen each other for a while and I am eager to hear what is going on—really going on. Not just work. Not just hobbies or movies or other distractions. But what is the stuff touching my friend’s soul?
With some friends, a movie watched or a book read or a work assignment is the gateway to a conversation that opens up the irritations and joys, the tough marriage or relational issues we’re going through and the spiritual questions and self-doubts we’re currently entertaining. Maybe some ancient text seems to have pointed the way forward or that inveterate letter writer has provoked a response in us that looked like this set of actions last week. Those are conversations to cherish. They can fill a person up for long time—not with information but with connection and ideas and forward-motion.
With other friends, our work is the only topic and we don’t venture far from that. Rather than opening up, the conversation seems to circle the wagons and becomes something less. Probing is not part of this communication event. I leave somewhat disappointed.
Why is that? How can conversation be so different? I’ve often puzzled through this. Both conversations can happen with friends old and new. Maybe introvert/extrovert/personality type has something to do with it. Maybe trust has not built or has been destroyed. Or maybe we don’t have the language to adequately express what is going on or maybe the last time we were honest with someone they shot us down.
Conversation has so many variables that direct cause and effect is impossible to pin down. And there are no formulas or road maps. But two things are certain:
- Engaging in direct conversation is profitable. If not today, then tomorrow. Or next Tuesday. Or in a month/year. Engaging in conversation is a gift we give to each other, and sometimes it takes time to explore the topic and trust that has risen between us. Our conversation says we value someone.
- Our own willingness to share the deep stuff in us has a direct effect on opening the talk and life of our conversation partner. This is scary: what if someone doesn’t respond? What if they put me down? Trust and boldness help answer that question.
With whom will you talk about what matters today?
###
Image credit: fer1972 via 2headedsnake
Today’s 1pm Meeting: Make It Work
Zoning out should not be an option.
Cut the web. Don’t zone out.
Not every meeting is a useless waste of time. Some of my must-read copywriting bloggers have written about meetings they attended ranging from useless to suicide-inducing.
But I recently sat with a client to hash out what was going right with their messaging to a particular audience. They had seen a spate of cutting-through-the-clutter moments with a particular set of customers and the wins were tumbling in.
People from different roles in the organization pulled up to the big conference table. Each spoke to the success with this audience from the vantage point their position afforded. I was there to hear and gather and (ultimately) tighten and sharpen the message. The message—and the story around the message—would fuel a set of communication vehicles and events.
The meeting was entirely successful, at least for me, because I could question and challenge as the discussion unwound. And my pages of notes have served to bring back quotes and directions. Just connecting the dots on my notes has been productive.
All this to say it is up to us to make a meeting work. That means cutting through the rhetorical web spun by the power-seekers. Sometimes we need to call “bull” on people. And sometimes we need to play catalyst and lob a softball question to pull forward the silent person’s thoughts.
Zoning out should not be an option.
###
Image Credit: via Frank T. Zumbachs Mysterious World
conversation is an engine 