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Group Presentations
- Dialogic listening
- finding true I-thou interactions and relationships
- shifting from me or you to us
- moving from understanding someone while being right to being mutually committed to something you both can support
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- Focusing not on what is inside either of us, but the interaction that is ours
- Beyond Encouraging
- Paraphrase plus
- Asking for a paraphrase
- Building the space between us
- Asking for an example
- Encouraging self-disclosure
- Running with the metaphor
- Dialogue Strategy 2: Focus on common interests, not devisive ones.
- Dialog is a converation with a center, not sides.
- Dialogue Strategy 3: Keep dialog and decision making compartmentalized.
- Decision making is getting to yes
- Dialogue is getting to understanding
Cases and Emotion
Yankelovich, 58-72
- Example: Research institute hiring decision by board
- There is a natural human predisposition to see criticism of how we do things as a criticism of us.
- The result is often defensiveness
- Or worse, countercriticism
- It is the natural path of conflict, and one of the primary reasons why people involved in conflict NEVER point to the same event as the the starting point of the conflict
- punctuation
- symmetrical escalation
- kitchen-sinking
- It takes two to make a fight.
- But different subcultures make different assumptions, and criticism of how we do things is usually about advocating another way of doing things that is valued within a subculture.
- This, in its essence, is what Nola Heidelbaugh's book Judgement, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability, is about.
- "two opposing sides cannot translate the issue into each others' vocabulary."
- So how do we build bridges between the varied assumptions of different subcultures.
- Nola recommends creating awareness of opposing arguments
- Yankelovich puts it a bit more simply: clarify assumptions.
- Dialogue Strategy 4: Clarify assumptions that lead to subculture distortions.
- Assumptions are often a bigger issue that get in the way of smaller issues.
- Understanding assumptions often makes it easier to move forward with a win-win strategy.
- Dialogue Strategy 5: Bring forth your own assumptions before speculating on those of others.
- Opening yourself up is a risk, but it will encourage others to do the same
- Self-disclosure leads to reciprocity and trust
- Dialogue Strategy 6: Use specific cases to raise general issues.
- In truth, its usually conflict over small things that points to a much larger value discongruity.
- Example: Hospital discussion of patient request in the light of managed care costs.
- Dialogue Strategy 7: Focus on conflicts between value systems, not people.
- Those conflicts are often within us.
- Competing subcultural assumptions in our own subculture.
- Dialogue Strategy 8: When appropriate, express the emotions that accompany strongly held views.
- This works best when the emotion seems out of character, so its good to save it.
- But we need to remember that values are fundamental. It is natural to feel emotion when our values are compromised.
- Its OK to feel angry.
- The question is what we do with it
Empathy and Trust
- Yankelovich, 73-89
- Stewart, 585-594
- Dialogue Strategy 9: Initiate dialogue through a gesture of empathy.
- Empathy can take many forms
- A statement of understanding
- An act of compassion
- Simply working together on the same thing
- Apologies are often an effective empathic gesture.
- Empathy is an effective way to create a feeling of equality and openness.
- It can also help us break through to assumptions
- Sometimes our assumptions are deep, and they spill over from the past into the present.
- Dialogue Strategy 10: Be sure trust exists before addressing transferrence distortions.
- Trust is earned (via)
- self-disclosure
- commitment
- investment
Commitment ------------------+
^ ^ v
| +---> Trust <---> Self-Disclosure
v v ^
Investment ------------------+
- In dialogue, each person transforms the other
- There are tensions in dialogue
- between presenting and receiving
- between privacy and disclosure
- between holding our ground and letting the other happen to us
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Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this page
were written by participants on the Media Space Wiki, operated by Davis Foulger,
and should be cited accordingly. For example (APA):
Foulger, D. and other
participants. (August 27, 2008). Relationships And Communities Session Fourteen. MediaSpaceWiki. Retrieved on from
http://evolutionarymedia.com/wiki.htm?RelationshipsAndCommunitiesSessionFourteen.