William Isaacs
This book is the one that gave me the most during this academic year. It gave me so much knowledge, but also so many things to think about. It encouraged me to take a step back from things and situations, to see them from another perspective and point of view, a way to stop, think and then act, a way to more understand people’s reactions and why they act the way they act.
Dialogue is a way of thinking and considering together. Dialogue is a different form of how to speak/communicate together.
So what’s the book about? In this book dialogue is divided into three levels.
A powerful invisible architecture, or container, in which to have the conversation, one that legitimates each perspective without implying the other is right; enough predictive intuition to see how face-to-face dynamics and traps that arise between the people would tend to get in the way of a good conversation; and the active presence of the four behaviors of dialogue: listening, respecting, suspending and speaking one’s voice.
Even though I have always thought about what was going on inside of me and have tried to understand it, this book gave me the opportunity to name some of those things and processes inside me. It gave me the perspective to see my own reactions towards situations and people and it reminded me how communication is the key to really everything in our lives. It reminded me again how our strong emotions and reactions usually come from inside us and are just triggered by something coming from the outside, but the whole key to this is still inside us, because in the same situation somebody else doesn’t have that emotion.
By communication I mean verbal but most importantly the nonverbal which some of us like to disregard, or make the words more important and things that weren’t named out loud are “not that important” or sometimes “not even there”. And why is this? Probably it’s just easier and today’s world is a lot more focused on verbal communication.
With this book I started to try to consciously “do listening” in our training sessions and in life, because I have always been good at expressing myself orally and after actually having a goal, for example for our sessions, to do listening as much as I could have, I was able to see more. All the conversational and communicational lines that you can see which we are sometimes not aware of if we don’t stop, be quite and listen. I also started to see those communication lines in our family and the people closest to me, how when we sometimes try to speak it would be more helpful just not to . How we are speaking but not listening and how we try to defend our own opinions which in the end we don’t have to. Shouting out loud our opinions is not going to make them more valuable than the ones of others.
How it is connected with TA?
Just as I believe that dialogue is an important instrument for most of the times in our life, it is also a very powerful instrument for our studies where we should be aware of these practices of dialogue and we should be consciously using it in our training sessions. At the beginning of the year we tried to set a topic and decide before going into it if it’s better to solve it by discussion or going into dialogue. As the year progressed into the second semester we stopped doing this and sometimes I feel that we get lost. I think it would be good to say how we want to discuss things in advance, but on the other hand we somehow developed in a way that we don’t have to speak about it every time and we still know the way we are speaking/solving things at that moment which is a transition.
„If we cannot talk together, we cannot work together.“
I feel that as more and more people read the book, and as more people are getting into the methods of dialogue, conversation between us is changing and we as a team work differently and we also might say better. What is a big help is Dan’s mapping of our conversation and the processes happening inside our dialogues (or attempts at dialogue).
How did we develop? In the beginning of the school year we called our Training Sessions - Dialogues. After starting to read this book (we started as a group of people, our classmates made a learning cell on this theme – this book, because it is neither very easy to read nor understand properly) we realised that our sessions are not named correctly because first of all we actually know so little about techniques of dialogue and how to reach in, and second of all it’s not always dialogue that we use, it is also discussion, so from that point on we started to call our sessions – Training Sessions. Honestly, I’m not sure that we can say we practice dialogue, I would say that we try and sometimes we get into dialogue and sometimes we don’t. That’s definitely something that we have to work on in the future as a team.
„Coming together is beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” Henry Ford
Closure
To conclude I would like to say that the D2 learning cell on the book theme was very interesting and informative. The book we read and the skills we learned will be a great use to me in the future. In the beginning of the academic year I felt a bit lost and was lacking more information which (as you know) I like so much and D2 was the light in the week for me. It gave me somehow more understanding by seeing and hearing all the others’ points of view and how they understood the methods and the texts in each chapter and how they, for example, connected it with their lives. Of course it also gave me the knowledge and information I was craving, as well as a lot of things to think about.
I would recommend this book to absolutely everyone. If everyone could be at least simply aware of these methods, communication gaps and the power of good communication, the world would be a much better place, because people wouldn’t be so focused on giving their opinion but on listening and respecting others’ differences. There might not be so many wars and people wouldn’t focus on things that make them different, (beliefs, religion, lifestyles, colour,..) but on things that can bring them together, how they can work together and live next to each other in the same society. As I mentioned, communication is the key to everything and this book is just the first step towards something beautiful in the future. First of all we need to work on it, then we need to start with ourselves, and work on ourselves which is probably a never ending task. But as someone once said, we should never stop educating ourselves and we should never stop working on our inner being.
