Field Notes
Field notes explore the art of conversation through moments that linger—tensions worth examining, questions that resist easy answers. Each essay follows one thread from dialogue into something larger: how we listen, what we miss, why connection sometimes happens in the gaps between words.
Worth doing badly
David Wilson describes himself as a recovering perfectionist who realized that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly and playfully. Wilson calls it addiction to competence—we become so identified with being capable that we lose the ability to try things we might be bad at. What if the willingness to converse… More →
The open question
Stany Foucher’s training sessions always ended with open questions from his teacher—not answers or corrections, but questions like “why were you in that state of mind?” that resisted easy resolution. The open question doesn’t close the training but extends it. The question travels with you, working on you long after. What if the best conversations… More →
When effort gets in the way
Nima King demonstrates something counterintuitive at his seminars: when he releases tension in his outstretched arm, the movement becomes not weaker but stronger—effortless yet difficult to stop. This suggests effort itself can become the obstacle. Applied to conversation, subtraction might mean letting go of the need to sound smart, fill every silence, or extract particular… More →
The audience of one
Connection doesn’t scale through abstraction—it scales through specificity. When Lindsay McMahon thinks about one isolated listener struggling with language, she’s not limiting her reach but sharpening it. Making that listener concrete instead of abstract makes the connection more transferable. Thousands in different situations recognize themselves in that portrait precisely because it’s drawn with enough detail… More →
Modes of conversation
Each conversation exists in a particular mode—chit-chat, small talk, professional, gossip, intimate, banter, and thousands of others. Figuring out which mode we’re in is the first thing we do when interacting, since each mode comes with its own norms. If you let someone gossip only to declare you’ll tell others now, you’ve betrayed them by… More →
How do you prepare?
People spend more time thinking about what to wear to a dinner party than what to talk about. Research shows 50 percent believe thinking about topics in advance makes conversation feel forced and artificial. Only 12 percent think mental preparation enhances the experience. But it really matters how you think about conversation and how you… More →
At its deepest level
Curiosity seems to be the single catalyst for everything. Without it, how would you ever get interested enough in anything to actually work on it? When you’re not actively curious about something, that’s when you run out of ability to work on it. The balance is keeping enough curiosity in the fuel tank to explore,… More →
Is understanding even necessary?
At zero understanding, you don’t even realize someone is trying to communicate. At the other extreme lie deep, considered conversations. But how much understanding is necessary to say we’re in a conversation? If you know only that the other is trying to communicate, isn’t that enough? Those conversations where you’re aware you’re not understanding turn… More →
Forward
Wanting to be right leads us to counter-arguments. Wanting attention leads us to take up space. But if we can hold the position of being curious about where our conversation partner wants to go, that flips our thinking and direction. It flips us to exploration, wonder, and perhaps even succeeding at communication. More →
Thinking together
What if thinking could be done with others? The theory of dialog suggests that these situations reflect a series of problems in how we think, for we have learned to think alone. And what I mean here by “thinking” involves the whole of us—our emotions, our ways of feeling in the body, our ideas, and More →