Craig Constantine
Like jazz
Who’s playing at your jazz club? Conversation is a musical thing, like jazz or birdsong: more ‘call and response’ than question and answer. It enables us to travel great distances, but the joy is in the journey not the destination. We are meant to sing and dance along the way, jamming with others, riffing off More →
Quiet Disruptors
Book Quiet Disruptors by Sue Heatherington, 2021 — Thoughtful and creative, this is a beautifully written manifesto about the new change-makers: those with the courage to speak softly about things that matter. This book will inspire, encourage and provoke you to become the change you want to see, wherever you are. Have you noticed, we’re entering a More →
Salience
Let go of self-judgement and follow your curiosity Genuine interest on our part is appreciated by all true conversation partners. Our sense of salience is a super-power. (Salience is the quality of being particularly noticeable or important.) We all have this super-power. I believe it arises from our sub-conscious when something we’re just encountering, rhymes More →
Experimentation and exploration
What has surprised you recently? That’s not a good way to live. That’s a way to live in stagnation and complacency. Great conversation is rooted in experimentation and exploration. It’s an art of discovery, and play. Great conversation is about composition: Listening to many people or ideas, and create something new. That’s common for us More →
Do Conversation
Book Do Conversation by Robert Poynton, 2024 — Why do some conversations flow, while others are stilted and awkward? Can we make difficult conversations easier? Conversation is about more than communication. It’s how we connect with each other and make sense of the world – it’s an essential part of being human. And something we’re naturally very More →
Fishing for great conversations
Great conversations require intention and effort The difference between the negativity of bait, and the high road of a good lure is our intention. It’s true that good conversation might be stumbled into. But if we desire good conversation, then we’re going to need to seek it. Good conversation can be found, and even directly More →
Inward versus outward
Looking outward to do your inward work We must be able to think about any idea without it breaking our ability to think. Choice is at the center of everything. It’s important that we ask ourselves why we are conversing. It’d be great if we could always do that in advance, but we can settle More →
Good faith
Making space to clean up our thinking The correct posture is preparation for uncertainty by expecting exploration and discovery. There’s no recipe for great conversation. Sometimes we click into harmonious discourse, and sometime we don’t. No amount of preparation will guarantee success. In fact, preparation can guarantee failure. We will fail if we prepare by More →
Connection isn’t dull
Probing for the strong points If we’re in conversation for the connection, we’ll never be bored. What is failure in a social context? I think failing to connect with others is the most important sort of failure. Our job in any social conversation isn’t to force connection. Our job is to be ready for, and More →
Active, not passive
Flipping the internal to be external Taking action implies taking responsibility. One of the keys to great conversation is to be active, and not passive. It’s important to go into any conversation with a clear intention, but intention alone is not enough. Your intention must affect your actions: What you do, how you act, and More →