Seven Elements of Conversational Leadership

Finisterre - the ends of the earth. The place where ground turns to ocean. The first step toward a new conversation is to stop the conversation you are having now. “No way to make sense of a world that would not let you pass, except to call an end to the way you had come.” Finding a different way to tread.

Overcoming the temptation to manufacture a new conversation too early in the process. Cultivating a relationship with silence. Finding a different relationship to the horizon and the ground on which we stand. Asking beautiful questions: questions that shape our identities as much by asking as by answering.

Start close in: don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first step, close in; the step you don’t want to take. In the midst of the silence created out of stopping the conversation, a new deeper if darker and disturbing spaciousness, a deeper attention and intentionality and, at the center, a newly discovered ground from which to step into our new lives.

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature; the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse to ask for the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

Following this axis of vulnerability and revelation through the conversational world and giving it outer form may be the closest definition we have to our personal artistry. Let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked sliding limestone be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen. Vulnerability not as weakness but as a way of seeing, hearing, imagining, and coming into contact with a world larger than our own. Finding your own physical practice of this artistry, finding an outer craft to your inner artistry as a way of being fully in the world.

Human beings are very good at working hard, preparing, planning, sowing and tending; not so good at bringing in the harvest of all their labors. We often refuse to have the patience that a true ripening calls for, moving onto new initiatives before the one we have worked so hard for has had time to flower. There is also the difficulty that lies in the hidden, unspoken, almost invisible harvests connected with our shadows and our difficulties. Many of us have elements inside us that did not set right in our growing, were confined or nipped in the bud when they should have been coming into full blossom.