Chuck Weisner

and our identity gets addicted to, I believe this.

And if I believe this is true, then that defines who I am.

And that is often why we enter with fists or why we enter defensively and can't just say, okay, I do have an opinion.

I'm going to set that aside and I'm going to see if I can explore really what's driving this other person's thinking.

Right.

So these are four types of conversations.

They organize the book, and the reason they work well to do that is each conversation has its own lessons to learn, tools to try, practices to try on, because each conversation demands different skill sets.

And they're all interconnected.

We're generally, without knowing about the conversation, we're just in conversation like fish and water.

And as soon as we get, wait a minute, there's storytelling, there's collaboration, there's creativity, and there's commitment conversations.

Already, we have a different lens to think about conversations.

If I took you to spend six months with the Inuits in Alaska, and they taught you there's 27 names for snow in those six months, when we came back to New England, you would never see snow the same way.

Because all of a sudden you have distinctions about snow that allow you to see and perceive and have a different story about snow.

Right?

Conversation is the same way.

If we can begin to think about different conversations and different ways to listen and different ways to ask questions and why it matters, we can't be in conversation as innocently.

Right?

We go, oh, I need to wake up here a little bit because I'm locked down.

And I'm creating a fight because I'm locked down, right?

So that's why the four conversations are just the beginning to say, we can start looking at conversations with a better lens.