Why conversation matters

You'd think with all the words spoken every day we'd have this "conversation" thing down. But conversations that really matter, that change a mind or heart or course of events, are rare. I live for those moments of shift, when my own or another's certainties fall away and something fresh and true-er is spoken. I love to rattle my own cage gently until something stuck breaks loose - and really listening to what another says without any need to say anything back is a great way to do that. That's one reason why I started the Conversation Cafes in the Summer of 2001. To chew on good ideas with others. To feast on insights. To relish discovery. To invite the muse of conversation to light once again in this land of babble.

Babble. I got curious about how many words we do say in a day. Here's two estimates:

• The average woman speaks around 5000 words per day whereas the average male speaks around 2000. Apparently. (Source: Men are Lunatics, Women are Nuts)
• Working males average 2000-3000, females from 10,000-20000. However, both average about 500-700 words of actual value (i.e. words which have intent to communicate to another person an item of importance to both). (Source: book "Men are Pigs)

So women say about 5000 words a day but only 500 matter? No wonder I wanted to increase the meaning per minute in my days, the value of the words I hear and speak. No wonder I joined with two friends, Habib and Susan, in the summer of 2001, to invent the Conversation Cafes.

So here we are, over 7 years later, doing Conversation Week again, hoping tens of thousands more people will join us figuratively at the table to feast on conversations that matter. Hoping that thousands of people will take on the experiment Habib, Susan and I did - what if we took ourselves into public places like cafes and invited others to our tables and surfaced important questions and listened deeply and explored with curiosity and openess and discovered a kind of friendship and wisdom that's rare.

These seemingly simple, sometimes a bit awkward, conversations do something so important for us.

• They open and change our minds. We rally around "change" but deep, sustained and real change is not a spectator sport or armchair travel. It requires real honesty and humility.
  
• They expose us to people not like us and our friends. If we are lucky, people will come to our Conversation Cafes who actually see the world differently - shocking us into realizing that we do not know everything. To know something, you have to first know nothing - be hungry for answers. God we are so sure of ourselves, our words being used mostly to deBAT one another or to impress one another or to simply treat one another like empty receptacles to be filled with our ongoing narration of daily life.
• We make new friends. When it comes to being truly seen and understood, many of us are darn lonely - even if we have parties... and are the life of them. Building up layers of respectful listening can bring us into real relationship with others who may never be our lovers or our pals, but can be friends to our thoughts.
• We are listened to without argument. People give us a chance to gather our thoughts and finish our sentences and when we are done, the just nod and hold silence for a bit before speaking.
  

More on this later. for now, please do go to www.conversationweek.org and see what's cookin.