Building Connection In Community Through Authentic Conversation

Connection in community must start with honest and authentic conversation, and who better to initiate this work than leaders in community…

Recently, 1,500 people in 39 countries participated in a survey sponsored by Conversation Cafe and Global MindShift to identify the most pressing questions on the minds of socially-conscious people in the world today.  From an original field of approximately 600 questions, here are the top 10:

1. How can we best prepare our children for the future?
2. What does sustainability look like to you? How do we get there?
3. How do humans need to adapt to survive the changes predicted for this century?
4. How do we shift from “Me” to “We” on both the local and global levels?
5. How can you, as Gandhi said, be the change that you want to see in the world?
6. What kind of economic structures can best support a shift to sustainable living?
7. How should we re-invent the political process so that people feel that they have a voice?
8. What kind of leadership does the world need now?
9. How can we balance our personal needs with the most pressing needs of our community and the larger world?
10. What can we do to reduce or eliminate violence in the world?

Conversation Cafe is profiling these questions as the basis for their upcoming Conversation Week.  The objective is to encourage genuine conversation between friends and strangers about topics that matter, in an effort to start building bridges between people within communities.  These questions may be conversation starters only – the point is to engage in meaningful conversation with others, regardless of whatever course the conversation takes.  Important work!

As leaders in community, we should also consider:

• How do these questions resonate for us in terms of our own leadership in the world?
• How do they inform us about our leadership and the work that we are doing?
• Which questions really jump out for us and why?    

For me, the place to begin is “How do we shift from “Me” to “We” on both the local and global levels?”  Making this fundamental shift in mindset is germaine in my opinion to finding solutions to these other important questions.  We will not be able to solve any of these problems if we are trying to do so from a place of self-interest. 

In addition, I believe this shift will only be possible by starting at a grassroots level (i.e., starting locally) - by leaders like us in this community embodying a “We” approach in both our leadership and how we live our daily lives.  By moving to “We” with full integrity, we become able to genuinely engage others in searching for real solutions and being the change that truly addresses the greater good, even if the resulting solutions do not personally benefit us directly.  Ultimately, even such outcomes will indirectly benefit us as members of community, by growing our social capital of trust, respect and connection with others.

Craig and Marc Keilburger wrote a fabulous book on making this shift (called “Me To We“), which I highly recommend!  They propose that making this shift requires four skills:

1. gratitude to move from a mind-set of scarcity to one of abundance;
2. empathy to see ourselves in others and how much we have in common with them;
3. a re-definition of happiness from building a life of things to building a life of purpose and meaning; and
4. a re-definition of our idea of community to be more expansive and inclusive.   

Share your thoughts below about how this speaks to you!

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