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Personal practices of conversation

February 5, 2008 By Art of Hosting, Conversation, Practice 6 Comments

Dave Pollard sees skillful conversation as a key to the kinds of communities he is trying to create.   In this post he revisits his ideas about personal practices for being a good conversationalist.   These are great:

  • Tell the other person something you’re passionate about, and why. Tell them passionately.
  • Tell them something they should know that they don’t, preferably as a story, and make it clear why it’s important.
  • Tell them about a possibility you’ve imagined. A real possibility, not just an ideal, a wish or a dream.
  • Tell them a different way of thinking about something, one that sheds new light on what it means.
  • Don’t argue. Just don’t.
  • In all of the above, make sure what you tell is actionable. But don’t tell them what to do.
  • And above all, keep it short, clear, and simple or entertaining. A conversation is a mutual gift.

Principles for flowing finances

February 4, 2008 By Collaboration, Practice

I work with lots of colleagues and in general the flow of money is pretty straightforward.   With some fiends though, we often sit with each other and think about what else we could do with the economy.   Being clear about money is a life practice – in North American culture money holds all kinds of traps for energy between people.

My friend Tenneson Woolf has just blogged on this and he and his colleagues from a recent workshop worked these principles:

  • Whereas the old model for these decisions is more transactional, the new model is energetic. It is not about who did what work. It is about how we collectively invite, create, hold a field to work in before, during, and after the event.
  • As with design, work on logistics with open heart, enaged conversation, and clarity of action — beautiful.
  • Agree to this as a conversation each time, not a formula, to listen with attention and act with love.

And in a coincidental post, Jack Ricchiuto offers this wisdom:

Interesting chat yesterday with my friend Jean Russell of nurturegirl.net and the new blog, thriveability.net. She suggests that thriving communities practice a sense of “currency” that embraces both economic and social capital. Currency is anything that “flows.” A community’s flow experience then can include all forms of purchase, barter, and gifts.

What’s interesting is that anonymous monetary currency doesn’t build community. It only, as Jean suggests, “outsources connections.” When I trade my time helping someone start a wiki website for their business for their time doing plumbing or editing for me, a relationship builds. When I hand someone ten dollars for an item at Target or Whole Foods, no relationship builds in that transaction. In a monetary currency economy, flow occurs without the building of relationship. In a gift and barter economy, relationship is formed.

[tags]tenneson woolf, jack ricchiuto, money[/tags]

Johnnie tagged me

January 31, 2008 By Being 6 Comments

Johnnie Moore tagged me to reveal eight things about myself you probably didn’t know and then tag eight others…alright then.

  • Since 1987 I have worked with the I Ching as a way to understand the pattern language of change, using it to sharpen my seeing about all kinds of situations.   I don’t use it as a fortune telling device, rather as a user’s manual to change. It is one of my oldest practices, although   by no means a daily one.
  • Since January 1986 I have kept written journals which have recorded 22 years of living.   They are less diaries and more just notebooks of many shapes and sizes.   I have only lost one, spanning a period of nine months or so during which a close friend was murdered.   It was in a bag I had stolen at a gig.
  • All eight of my great-grandparents were born in Canada, and most of my 16 great-great-grandparents were born here too.   For a country of immigrants, and considering that most of my ancestry is European, that is a remarkable stat.   In 2001 only 4% of all Canadians had all four of their grandparents born here.   My wife is South African by birth, so my kids and grandkids will be firmly in the other 96%.
  • I have only owned two cars my entire life, but too many bicycles to count.   Because I grew up in Toronto, I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 24.
  • I wear a signet ring that has a phoenix on it.   It was given to me by my paternal grandfather in 1989 when I turned 21.   He mused that it was a crest that had been in our family since the 1300s, and was a common symbol that Christian crusaders adopted from their time wrecking havoc in the middle east.
  • My first job for which I was paid was working in a cemetery.   During high school I earned money lifeguarding, working at a self-serve gas station and selling tropical fish at AAA Aquarum on Yonge Street in the days before the big box pets stores did in the little guys.   The owner of that shop died from AIDS-related pnuemonia in 1986.   He was the first person I knew who had HIV.
  • I was a teenage stamp collector.
  • Although I have met many bloggers in my life after reading their blogs, Johnnie was the first one to offer me a safe harbour and a spare bed to crash on for a couple of days when I was travelling through London last summer. It was a generous gesture born out of a uniquely 21st century trust relationship.   Out of gratitude for   imposing on an otherwise perfectly good weekend of getting lost in WoW, I have responded to this tag…Thanks again, mate!

So that’s it.   I’m leaving Regina tomorrow for Calgary and Seattle to do a little work with the Quinault Nation and catch up with Harrison Owen, who is breezing through town.   To pass on the meme I’m tagging the last eight bloggers I’ve met face to face with: Tenneson, Ashley, Christie, Jeff, Andy, James, Nancy, and Andre.

Cold. Very very cold.

January 30, 2008 By Conversation, Facilitation, First Nations, Open Space, Travel

Workshop

Regina, Saskatchewan

I love it here…big open prairie sky meets wide expanse of earth. And over it all, the air is chilled, so cold that I actually succumbed to the spit test. I spat on the sidewalk and immediately poked at my saliva with my boot. It had instantly turned to ice powder. The thermometer in my ride’s car said -41. By this afternoon it had warmed up to -28, which is the current temperature. If the warming trend continues, it’s supposed to be a balmy -14 by tomorrow afternoon. That is a 27 degree difference: the difference between a freezing fall day and a too hot summer afternoon.

I can’t imagine how people survived out here in the old days. Getting to the fire, as Chistina Baldwin says, is indeed a life and death situation.

In a training workshop today with some lovely community leaders and tomorrow we run a day long Open Space for the community. Exploring hosting and getting ready to harvest leadership for community change.

You know you travel a lot when you are stranded at home by accident.

January 29, 2008 By Travel One Comment

I’m sitting in the Vancouver airport killing time before a flight out to Edmonton.   I spent last night at home, which was a surprising novelty.

I have been on Whidbey Island most of last week delivering another workshop on The Art of Hosting Conversations that matter – more on that soon.   Yesterday I was due to fly from Seattle to Calgary and then on to Regina where I am spending three days doing work to support the Urban Aboriginal Strategy there.   Two of those days (today and tomorrow) were to be a two day hosting workshop and Thursday I am opening space for a large community meeting aimed at revitalizing the process.   Following that, I have to fly back to Seattle for a day of work withthe Quinault Indian Nation and then home on Saturday for a week.
Travel was complicated by a blizzard that swept across the   prairies yesterday bringin temperatures in the low -40s to Regina and Calgary.   When I checked in in Seattle, I discovered that my flight to Calgary had been cancelled, so they routed me through Vancouver.   When I got here, the flight to Regina was cancelled in the face of a raging blizzard and windchills that dropped the temperature to -53.   I can’t even conceive of air that cold.   You’d think it would just drop out of the atmosphere and pool around your feet.

So, I lucked out by being stranded in Vancouver.   I went home and enjoyed a nice unexpected evening with the family.   When I woke up this morning, we had ten centimeters of snow on the ground and I was seriously doubting whether I would be able to leave Vancouver.

It’s now midafternoon, I’m checked in and everything seems clear on my evening flight to Edmonton and then to Regina.   I get in at midnight.   The weather should be warming up significanlty while I’m there.   They are expecting highs of -31 tomorrow.   Thursday should be a balmy -15.

If my flesh doesn’t freeze solid, I’ll be back to Seattle Friday and then home Saturday for a bit of a rest.