Deepening Our Conversations

I remember chastising my children (and, at times, husband), “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it,” of course in a tone of voice that completely nullified what I had just said forcing me to follow with, “And do as I say, not as I do!” (So humbling.) But the point of my original scold was, I think, an especially valid one in our world today. Our choice of tone, which reflects our attitude and intention, along with the way we frame our words, can help us deepen our conversations – particularly with those with whom we disagree – or just plain do not understand. 

For example, if I try to talk to people about women’s ordination and leadership in the Catholic Church, I, more often than not, provoke either resistance or dismissal. The more devout practitioners lean on Church tradition and the comfort of archaic rules and directives. The lapsed or non-Catholics discount the pursuit as minor at best when set against the scope of the truly important goals of peace, reconciliation, racial, gender, ethnic, and environmental justice, alleviating hunger and suffering and illness, not to mention pandemics. How do I – or any of us – convince people that justice and equality and inclusion of women are critical to all of these concerns, and all institutions, especially large influential ones, you know, those who believe they take the moral high road, must model this equality and inclusion more than any others. (Luckily, you can’t hear my internal tone of voice right now!)

Rants do not do much, however. For the most part, they don’t even make the “ranters” feel better. More importantly, they do not enrich conversations or make them as profound as they critically need to be given the magnitude of the subjects. Fortunately, New York Times columnist and renown author, David Brooks, has some suggestions on how to make the clarity and depth we now so desperately need in conversations happen. 

He begins his November 19, 2020 NYT piece “Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations” by proposing, before we even start conversing, we approach each other “with a sense of awe.” He explains “The people who have great conversations walk into the room expecting to be delighted by you and make you feel the beam of their affection and respect.” How about if we turn that around and all of us go into conversations expecting to be delighted and feel respect for the speakers, even those who disagree with us and we with them? What if, before we even say our first word, we shine forth a “beam of affection and respect” on them?

His second suggestion is “ask elevating questions” rather than the routine ones we’re all used to. He offers some suggestions: “What crossroads are you at? What commitments have you made that you no longer believe in? Who do you feel most grateful to have in your life? What problem did you use to have but now have licked? In what ways are you sliding backward? What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” These are open-ended questions that cannot be answered in a yes/no or even a tirade. They are thoughtful and deep, and encourage heartfelt answers.

I liked this counsel, too: make people “authors, not witnesses.” Again he elaborates: “The important part of people’s lives is not what happened to them, but how they experienced what happened to them. So many of the best conversations are not just a recitation of events…but seeing (an event) from wider perspectives, coating it with new layers of emotion, transforming it.”

I plead ‘The Fifth’ on success with his next bit of advice: “Treat attention as all or nothing.” We all have so much busyness going on in our own heads, it is increasingly difficult to give others our full attention, especially if they are saying something we do not like. “But in conversation,” Brooks reminds us, “It’s best to act as if attention had an on/off switch with no dimmer. Total focus. I have a friend who listens to conversations the way congregants listen to sermons in charismatic churches — with amens, and approbations. The effect is magnetic.” 

Now that I have your attention!!!, I also like his recommendation that we stop fearing pauses. Be ready to wait a bit before replying if only to stop your formulating your own comments while someone else is still talking. Listen. Pause. Now speak. Or use what he calls the “midwife model”: That means spending a lot of time patiently listening to other people teach themselves through their narrations, bringing forth their hitherto unprocessed thoughts, “sitting with an issue as it slowly changes under the pressure of joint attention.”

The point I liked best is the one I have to think about the most. I’ll quote it in full:

“Find the disagreement under the disagreement. [bold type mine] In the Talmudic tradition when two people disagree about something, it’s because there is some deeper philosophical or moral disagreement undergirding it. Conversation then becomes a shared process of trying to dig down to the underlying disagreement and then the underlying disagreement below that. There is no end. Conflict creates cooperative effort. As neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes, “Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.”

Drilling down to those levels has the possibility of creating the kind of deep understanding and trust we can only begin to imagine. We just need to be willing to do so. I’m going to don my favorite pair of rose colored glasses and see, for example, the Pope starting at least to think about being willing to be willing. (See the glasses are not as rosy as you might have imagined.) He already thinks he has done a lot in placing women in leadership roles, and he at least acknowledges women’s ordination advocates exist even though he still labels us “purist”, “obsessive”, with an “isolated conscience” (What on earth is that anyway?), “huddled” in fringe groups.

But there’s an opportunity here we can seize. How about we call on him and other resisters and dismissers to plumb the disagreements underneath our disagreements ever more deeply? What a conversation that might turn out to be! As I said, we are willin