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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …