A Professional Bridge-Builder
I hope that you are doing great this Memorial Day with friends and family.
It’s a difficult time in America. We feel more divided than ever, with guns and abortion laws now top of mind. Imagine if your job was to bring people of different beliefs and backgrounds together every day to find common ground?
One of my favorite organizations is Braver Angels, a non-profit dedicated to building bridges between people of different parties. It started with a workshop of 10 Trump supporters and 11 Clinton supporters in South Lebanon, Ohio in December, 2016. The workshop was structured by co-founder Bill Doherty, who had decades of experience as a family therapist. Yes, the events are essentially like family therapy for our country.
Braver Angels’ Chief Storyteller is Monica Guzman, whom I interview on the podcast this week. Monica is one-of-a-kind. She grew up in New Hampshire before starting an award-winning community news and event site “The Evergrey” (‘things aren’t always black and white’) in Seattle. She is a self-described liberal but her parents voted for Trump twice. She brought dozens of Seattle progressives to Sherman County, Oregon to meet with dozens of Trump voters to see why they voted the way they did. That event was named: “Melting Mountains: An Urban-Rural Gathering.” Minds were opened on both sides. Some rural voters in attendance were motivated by things like health care costs and water rights.
Monica has written a new book, “I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.” She argues that the antidote to our current sorting, othering and siloing are curiosity and real conversations.
“Secondary sources are never as good as primary sources. So why do we accept the answers [the media] gives us about who other people are and how they think?” Monica argues. She maintains that the only way to truly understand someone is by talking to them. “As conversations generate fuel, they also spin up something else: a connection. If two people are talking, they are in a relationship that has the potential to grow deeper. Always.”
As you’d imagine though, having a productive conversation is easier said than done. Monica has a wealth of experience in this and provides a ton of guidance in her book. In her view, quality conversations need time, attention, parity, containment, and embodiment. Containment – that it’s just you and the person – runs afoul of many of our modern interactions. It turns out that our social media comments are as much about the people looking at the conversation as they are the recipient. Private conversations often sound different than conversations for public consumption. Embodiment – ideally being fully present – requires, well, your physical body, which is something we often forego nowadays in the Zoom era.
Even if one is able to sit one-on-one with someone, conversations aren’t easy. Building traction and trust, avoiding assumptions, not trying to convince or win arguments, embracing complexity – each of these run against the grain of how most of us ‘talk’ to each other nowadays. Indeed, it may be why we all prefer to be sorted, where we simply interact with people we can make comfortable assumptions about politically. For Monica, if you engage thoroughly enough the goal is to have multiple “I never thought of it that way” type of moments perhaps in a given conversation.
I appreciate Monica’s perspective a great deal because she is literally walking the walk every day. It seems like a lot of work. But if enough of us become genuinely curious, it just might keep our fractured society whole. After all, what happens if we stop talking to each other, perhaps for fear that even talking to someone somehow legitimizes their point of view or that those with another perspective aren’t worth the time? The stakes are high. “We know what happens when the people we love don’t think we really see them; they go find someone who will. Someone who might exploit that basic need we all have to belong, to matter . . . Misinformation isn’t the product of a culture that doesn’t value truth. It’s the product of a culture in which we’ve grown too afraid to turn to each and hear it.”
For my interview with Monica click here.
