Mutual Vulnerability

Many years ago I did a two-day training with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a social action organizing group that works to bring people together across differences to mobilize for positive change. As I think about how we might begin to rebuild connections across the acrimonious divide of red/blue and white/black, several things from the training arise that may be useful tools.

The IAF taught that effective social action and change requires organizing people around their own self-interest. The training I took did not teach us how to convince people to care about a cause, but rather how to have conversations to uncover what people already cared about. At that time, they called these conversations one-on-ones.

The skills involved in these one-on-ones are:

• • clarity of purpose,
  • curiosity and deep listening and
  • mutual vulnerability.

Clarity of purpose means to be intentional about the reason for the conversation. Most of our conversations drift from one place to the next. We talk about the weather, then politics, then our latest Netflix binge. These are fine and even nourishing conversations. But he purpose of a one-on-one is to deepen a relationship through sharing stories of personal events that have shaped our lives.

William James, the founder of modern psychology, wrote that each person has a ‘hot spot,’ where we truly come alive—some thing or cause or activity that lights us up. When he spoke with people, he was always looking for what he called ‘the ground of a person’s joy’. As we meet each other, can we discern this beating heart of interest in the person in front of us or on the screen with us? It’s often easier with children who are less self-conscious about their dreams and fears. But we adults have been carefully trained to cover over what we really care about. We hide it from others for fear of being disappointed or ridiculed. Eventually we hide it from ourselves because we have grown so discouraged or distracted that we simply forget.

The curiosity and deep listening in a one-on-one conversation are listening for this aliveness. These are exactly the skills I was taught in my life-coaching training—listening and following the aliveness. We all care about something, but clarifying that something and then acting on it is the work of a lifetime.

But the part of one-on-ones that was most surprising for me was the mutual revelation and vulnerability. From the time I was a young boy, I observed and absorbed my mother’s endless curiosity about other people. When we went on family vacations to new places we would often lose her. The rest of us would be moving on and notice she was no longer with us. We would then retrace our steps and find her in deep in animated conversation with some random shopkeeper or bus driver or passerby. She was promiscuous in her interest of the world.

My early training in one-on-ones also involved our Saturday morning trips to the local downhill ski area. We would get up in the dark to make sandwiches and take advantage of the ‘early-bird special’. While skiing individually, we played a family game. The object of the game was to see how much you could learn about the person you rode up on the lift with. (These were the days of ‘T-bar’ lifts and allowing ten-year olds to practice independence through wandering up and down snowy mountains.) Exhausted at noon, we would eat our sandwiches on the way home in the station wagon and tell stories of the strangers we had interrogated.

But the idea of sharing parts of yourself in conversation was not something I was accustomed to or comfortable with. While it may surprise the readers of these daily reflections, I tend to be rather introverted. I have this odd enjoyment of being up front and being the center of attention and have taken up this public practice of exploring my inner life through these daily writings, but in individual conversations I’m much more interested in listening to other people than I am in talking about my inner life. (We are all such a wondrous blend of this and that – of open and closed, of private and public.)

But in the one-on-ones, you ask questions about what people care about—about what has led them to where they are—about turning points in their life. Then you respond by sharing the same for yourself. The main focus is on the person you are talking to, but the practice is intentional mutual vulnerability.

I’m incredibly excited about the inauguration tomorrow. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be our new President and Vice-President! This, for me, is incredibly good news. But the work ahead to bring our country together will take years and will require the ongoing engagement of us all. Perhaps these few skills from the IAF may be useful tools for the journey.