Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Excerpts from the book: “Mindful Conversation”
What is not a Mindful Conversation
Serial Monologue: The conversation that is “me” focussed rather than “we”. A conversation where people interrupt, undercut and disregard one another, compete for time, topic, and attention. They don’t have patience to listen to others, rather planning for their response.
Grabbing Response: One person grabs the topic from the other and typically redefines it, to their desire. The new speaker takes over telling his story, giving her opinion, or dictating the topic.
What is a Mindful Conversation
A Mindful conversation is a conscious approach to sharing our life experiences, thoughts and feelings, dreams and desires, in words and gestures, with friends and strangers. A conversation that engages the whole person: mind, heart, body and spirit.
Three goals of Mindful Conversation
Speak Openly: Speak with authenticity, daring to be vulnerable, sharing your motivations and intentions.
Connect Deeply: Striving to understand others (and yourself), being patient enough to listen, not too proud ask questions.
Talk About What Matters
Mindful Conversation requires Reflective Listening:
Have the intention and presence of mind to take in the full measure of your conversational partner (CP), not to reply automatically with your own story or advice
Attend to both spoken (words, tone, pitch) and the unspoken (eye contact, facial expression, body language, posture) message.
Respond to your CP in one of the three ways
Demonstrating that you have received the message through facial expression, body language (nodding) or simple murmurs (OK, I See)
Repeat back your CP’s actual words, your understanding of what you heard, or inferred
Inquiring to help clarify or explore what was said
Mindful conversation takes us deeper, digging down through the hard dirt, the rocks and roots, into a deeper level of exploration, beyond just the facts, into the world of thoughts, still deeper into feelings, and finally into the world of personal meaning.