Podcaster. Writer. š Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations ā https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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The real foundation
Tim Winders has published weekly for over six years despite the work being financially negative. The real foundation? The conversations nourish his soul. This is counterintuitiveāwe think good dialogue means disappearing into attentiveness for others. But being fed by the conversation yourself makes genuine dialogue sustainable. When we’re genuinely nourished, we’re not performing generosity but…
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 competenceāwe 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…
The open question
Stany Foucher’s training sessions always ended with open questions from his teacherānot 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…
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 strongerāeffortless 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…
The audience of one
Connection doesn’t scale through abstractionāit 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…
Modes of conversation
Each conversation exists in a particular modeāchit-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…
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…
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,…
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…
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.