Article contributed by Wilma Ham.
“Before anything happens there is a conversation that precedes it.
That conversation is a necessary preamble that sets two or more people up to effectively act together or to coordinate action.”
(WomenLikeMe on How to Create our World through Conversation)
There are three different types of conversations that eventually lead progressively to intimacy that supports sponsorship.
Every type of conversation has a different interaction with a listening that has a different intention.
The three types are;
- conversation for social integration to suss each other out and get to know each other
- conversation for shared understanding to deepen our intimacy and understanding
- conversation for coordinating action to effectively end up working together to make an awesome expedition happen
Each of these conversations has a different level of intimacy, and a different intent with the listening and the sharing.
Let’s explore social integration a bit further as we already have a sense of shared understanding and coordinated actions by having covered asking questions and making requests.
Social integration is the first type of conversation that takes place when people meet.
The pattern is determined by culture and to be effective one needs to know the culture.
Different countries do social integrations differently and so do people of different age groups, religions and professions for example.
Social integration is done by talking very superficially about very non threatening subjects and looks like the talking that happens at work around the coffee machine on a Monday morning.
It is the social lubricant in the early stages of connecting or reconnecting in any social setting.
At this level of conversation most listening is usually very light and the level of intimacy very low.
We actually do not expect to be listened to, we do not expect requests at this stage and we certainly do not expect too many personal questions.
If you have ever tried to get down to business straight away, you know that without some form of social integration you are dead in the water. People will look at you as if you come from Mars and will not play with you.
What I’m talking about here is light weight social interaction and everybody attunes their listening and their intimacy expectations to that level.
However and this is the big however . . . most of us stay at this first level of conversation and never move beyond, onto the next stage.
If you look closely at relationships, many couples, families or friends do not go beyond social interaction.
They joke, they talk about insignificant things and never reach intimacy by exploring personal questions to deepen further understanding.
Sex, money, careers, child rearing, household chores, beliefs, future dreams stay very much unexplored terrain.
Shared understanding is never reached and thus many people cannot literally get their act together to get on to bigger things and bigger expeditions.
To get one’s act together, one needs to go beyond superficial talk.
One needs to be daring enough and allowed to dive deeper into intimacy to reach shared understanding to come to coordinated action.
There are tons of examples of people staying stuck at this level in their relationships and thus they can never play a bigger game. All they do is work together to have life work out, but not much else is happening.
