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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Category: Nature of Conversation

Prayer as Conversation

George 0 Comments

This is a repost from 2007.

Recently a class discussion centered on the idea of prayer being conversation with God. It was suggested that an understanding of prayer as conversation with God can not only have a profound impact on our prayer life, it can be a window through which we can assess our relationship with God. Just as the character of our conversation in human relationships betrays the health of the relationship, so it is with God. For example if conversations with friend or family never progress beyond the trivial and/or self centered yada… yada… yada; at best, the relationship will not grow and most likely will diminish over time. On the other hand, when conversations reflect mutual interest and concern, share inner feelings, fears and desires, it is a sign of a healthy relationship. As I think about this, I am grieved by the shallowness of some of my conversations with friends and family and what that indicates about the quality of our relationship. It is also true of my relationship with God as I think of the prayers I offer and their meagerness and superficialness. It is important to resist the temptation to think that the solution to having healthy relationships is simply start having meaningful conversations. That is not the case. What I am suggesting is that an assessment of the character of our conversations will help us to understand the health of our relationships, it is an occasion for truthfulness. It will force us to the question, “How can my relationship become healthier”? That is the real question. When we answer that question, meaningful conversations will prevail.

Conversation and Community

George 0 Comments

This is a repost and update of a previous post entitled Changing the Nature of Conversation. Recent conversations prompted this repost.

Recently Wade Hodges’s blog linked to a booklet entitled Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of Conversation. It is authored by Peter Block and others. The purpose of the material is to present a set of ideas and tools designed to restore and reconcile community by shifting the nature of public conversation.  Although the subject put me off a bit, as I read through the material I found the information and ideas compelling. I believe the nature of our conversations can be a reliable barometer of the depth and meaning of our relationships as well as a powerful force in building and sustaining community. What follows is my interpretation/re-statement/paraphrase of some of the concepts and principles in the booklet.

Language has power. How we speak to each other is the medium through which a more positive future is created or denied. As we engage in conversation the questions we ask and the speaking that they evoke constitute powerful action. The questions we ask will either maintain the status quo or bring an alternative future into the room. There are traditional questions which have little power to create a future different from the present. These questions are, in the asking, the very obstacle to what has given rise to the question in the first place. For example, these questions seem to be universal to conversations about organizational issues:

  • How do we hold people accountable?
  • How do we get people to show up and be committed?
  • How do we get others to be more responsible?
  • How do we get people on-board and to do the right thing?
  • How do we get others to buy into our vision?
  • How do we get these people to change?i
  • How much does it cost and where do we get the money?
  • How do we negotiate for something better?
  • What new policy or legislation will more our interests forward?
  • Where is it working? 
  • Who has solved this elsewhere and how do we import the knowledge?

In answering these questions we support the dominant belief that a different future can be negotiated, mandated, and controlled into existence. They call us to try harder at what we have been doing. They urge us to raise standards, measure more closely, and return to the basics, purportedly to create accountability, but in reality maintain dominance. These questions are wrong, not because they don’t matter, but because they have no power to make a difference in the world. These questions are the cause of the very thing that we are trying to change: fragmented and unproductive communities.

In a related post I wrote about questions and how, in our conversations, they impact community. It was stated that the traditional questions that permeate conversation regarding organizational issues, have no power to change the future, to make a difference.

I recognize that truth in my own experience. In my corporate days, I sat in many meetings where the traditional questions dominated. They would create a frenzy of helplessness and hopelessness. On more than one occasion, I was compelled to comment to the participants that it was apparent that there was nothing that could be done and the company would be best served by us committing an honorable suicide. We didn’t and nothing changed. Sadly the process was repeated over and over. There was no enlightened leadership that understood the nature of great questions to lead us out of our squirrel cage existence.

 

 

The Proliferation of Bullshit (via Brene Brown)

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The Proliferation of Bullshit

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands.
The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor Emeritus, Yale University
(From his book, On Bullshit)
One of the biggest sources of bullshit today is the proliferation of “If you’re this then you’re automatically that” and “You’re either with us or you’re against us” politics. These are emotional lines that we hear invoked by everyone from elected officials and lobbyists to movie heroes and villains on a regular basis. They’re effective political moves; however, 95 percent of the time it’s an emotional and passionate rendering of bullshit.
Normally, we used forced choice and false dichotomies during times of significant emotional stress. Our intentions may not be to manipulate, but to force the point that we’re in a situation where neutrality is dangerous. I actually agree with this point. One of my live-by quotes is from Elie Wiesel. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
The problem is that these emotional pleas are often not based in facts, and they prey on our fears of not belonging or being seen as wrong or part of the problem. We need to question how the sides are defined. Are these really the only options? Is this the accurate framing for this debate or is this bullshit?
If alternatives exist outside of these forced choices (and they almost always do), then the statements are factually wrong. It’s turning an emotion-driven approach into weaponized belonging. And it always benefits the person throwing down the gauntlet and brandishing those forced, false choices.
The ability to think past either/or situations is the foundation of critical thinking, but still, it requires courage. Getting curious and asking questions happens outside our ideological bunkers. It feels easier and safer to pick a side. The argument is set up in a way that there’s only one real option. If we stay quiet we’re automatically demonized as “the other.”
The only true option is to refuse to accept the terms of the argument by challenging the framing of the debate. But make no mistake; this is opting for the wilderness. Why? Because the argument is set up to silence dissent and draw lines in the sand that squelch debate, discussion, and questions—the very processes that we know lead to effective problem solving.
Our silence, however, comes at a very high individual and collective cost. Individually, we pay with our integrity. Collectively, we pay with divisiveness, and even worse, we bypass effective problem solving. Answers that have the force of emotion behind them but are not based in fact rarely provide strategic and effective solutions to nuanced problems.
We normally don’t set up false dilemmas because we’re intentionally bullshitting; we often rely on this device when we’re working from a place of fear, acute emotion, and lack of knowledge. Unfortunately, fear, acute emotion, and lack of knowledge also provide the perfect set-up for uncivil behavior. This is why the bullshit/incivility cycle can become endless.

 

It’s also easier to stay civil when we’re combating lying than it is when we’re speaking truth to bullshit. When we’re bullshitting, we aren’t interested in the truth as a shared starting point. This makes arguing slippery, and it makes us more susceptible to mirroring the BS behavior, which is: The truth doesn’t matter, what I think matters.