How do you design a public meeting when you believe that everyone has something to say, not just the vocal few? A conversational process makes room for everyone. Listen to this article here Note: the names used in this article are not real people’s names. I should have asked Stan…

When we avoid sharing opportunities to make meaning of our experiences and make choices from the meaning we’ve made, we avoid the challenges and brilliance of community. —listen to this article here — Consider these words of Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t…

Choosing transition means choosing to participate in our changing — — listen to this article here — Mixed signals signal resistance to changing in personal and professional arenas of life. With a dating partner, they want a relationship and run away when things start looking like a relationship. With clients, they want my insight and skills on their projects, and…

We level up our experience of community by growing beyond sharing an experience to sharing choice-making — — listen to this article here — Community work is messy, and we like to avoid the conflict-ridden work we find in our community experiences. Yet when we can meet each other with connection, deepen our conversations to strengthen our connection and find our way into relationships that involve accountability…

An emotional upset and a ski trip helped me unearth two limiting beliefs about relationship skills — — listen to this article here — I was thrilled to find myself at the top of the mountain after several weeks of slogging through challenging emotional terrain, wondering if I’d ever feel the thrill of feeling good again. A couple of months ago, a dating experience woke me up…

When we avoid accountability and responsibility, we become untrustworthy and bypass opportunities to be in relationship with each other — in both our personal and professional lives. In this article: 2 symptoms of, and 7 antidotes to, relationship bypassing. — — listen to this article here — After a few years of strained relationships and hurt feelings for myself and some people close to me, there was an invitation to me one day to connect and talk about our relationship. I made a request: “Let’s first talk about how we’ll…

Assuming the expertise in the room is with one or a few people disables and minimizes the resilience of community — — listen to this article here — Conversation is not a metaphor or a program; it is an activity in which we connect with each other and explore joy and laughter, as well as grief and hardship. …

How we gather fosters connection between people only when we design in opportunities for people to make contact with each other — — listen to this article here — The November air was crisp but not cold last fall, while I walked around an alpine lake in the Canadian Rockies. A cloudy day, but most of the mountains were visible. While surrounding ponds were frozen over with a thin layer of ice…

It is scary — but worth it — to have a clear and shared understanding about how we’ll talk and relate to each other — — Listen to this article here — These words shocked me last month: “A caring relationship doesn’t require agreements in place about how they converse.” Here was the situation: a group of people with strained relationships and two people didn’t want to have a conversation about how they would talk…