Conversations Worth Having, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

5

What’s Fueling Your Conversations?

Each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations.

—Deborah Tannen

Tone and direction are simple cues that tell us what kind of conversation we are in. How we got into that kind of a conversation is a different story, yet it is an important one to understand if we want to make sure we have conversations that feel good (on balance) and that take us where we want to go. In chapter 3, we talked about tuning in to increase awareness of who’s driving our conversations. This makes it easier to be more intentional in our interactions. The Appreciative Inquiry principles, identified by David Cooperrider, ...