For a Successful Dialogue Practice

Try the following:

~ Address the group as a whole. Avoid addressing your words to one or two persons.

~ Remember that it is most useful to listen, hear, and understand.

~ Avoid giving advice.

~ Remember that a speaker is probably doing her or his best to be honest.

~ Avoid interrupting another. Your group has a way of dealing with those who would damage your practice.

~ Keep expenses to a minimum. Everyone helps to take care of necessary expenses. Do your part.

~ Really listen to to what another is saying. Improved understanding is a major aim of your group.

~ Learn to listen well and gain greater listening skills.

~ Encourage everyone to speak at each opportunity. The words of each are gifts for us all.

~ Limiting each speaking time to 1 or 2 minutes. It's great to have time to speak more than once at a meeting.

~ Remember that focusing dialogue on personal experience is good practice.

~ In the beginning get 8 or 9 interested persons to commit to 4 or 5 consecutive meetings.

Practice perfects.

More to Come.

                                                                                rcs

  

Dialoguers

 As dialoguers we tend to say that we need to listen, and not to exclude anything; but we can't listen to everything. The whole is too much. There is no way by which we can always get hold of the whole. It is the nature of our thinking to abstract, limit, and define.

You might want to check your favorite online dictionary for a full meaning of "to abstract."

Another act nearly impossible for any of us, is to comprehend the whole truth. So, as practical dialoguers, we need to keep aware that we can't hear everything and that we can practically never understand all that we hear.

As dialoguers it is best not to demand anything of our dialoguing companions. I do hope that we are most often trying to be honest.

As dialoguers we are not authorities. None of us is a father or a teacher of the group. There is a lot that we can learn from one another.

Difficult for new dialoguers to understand is that we seem to have no purpose or agenda, no goal or set destination, that we seem not to accomplish anything, or that nobody seems to have to agree on anything.

Group dialogue practice can be among the best facets of one's life. The practice puts more meaning, understanding, and peace within our reach. Positively.




by Richard Sheehan