I enjoyed reading Griffin's "cause for pause" at the end of every thread in this last chapter. He throws in his candid two-cents worth and comments on his own experience or background in dealing with the certain thread.
The one that stood out to me today was "Dialogue," because Griffin admits that he did his best to capture what it really is but struggled because of the complexity and depth of the term. Dialogue as defined on page 482 is " Transparent conversation that often creates unanticipated relational outcomes due to parties' profound respect for disparate voices."
The thing that blew my mind the most was in his "Cause for Pause" at the end of this thread's section when Griffin states that "probably less that 1 in 1,000 conversations would qualify as dialogue." I was surprised by that at first, but not so much as I thought about it further. The US is a very independent culture and sticks to a lot of surface level communication. Only with the people that are truly close to us or people that we have an interest in talking to for some specific reason do we open up and get beyond superficial topics.
I think it gave me a different perspective on relationships as a whole; I bet that if we have more meaningful "dialogue" on a regular basis we would enrich our relationships across the board.
2 comments:
I like Griffin's "cause for pause" comments as well because he turns a critical eye to an aspect of communication we tend to take for granted. I blogged about dialogue as well this week. I do wonder how Griffin arrived at his estimation of how often individuals engage in dialogue. It may be more a matter of degree, with conversations varying in how much they approach dialogue. In addition, we don't want to be engaging in dialogue all the time. Some conversations are simply meant to let others know you're acknowledging their existence, as with saying hello to the bus driver every morning. Others, tho, with family and friends likely do tend toward the dialogue side of the spectrum. I suppose I'm more optimistic than Griffin.
The cause for a pause was nice because we got to see Griffins personal ideas about t he subject. I actually liked this book because Griffin does use a lot of his personal experiences to illustrate the theories throughout the book. It made reading the chapters more like reading a novel than reading a textbook written by some robots.
I also was surprised by the 1 in 1000 conversations that do not qualify as dialogue statistic. It made me realize that I tend to not listen closely when I'm having a converation. I need to work on my approch to having a real dialogue.
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