Before we begin today’s sermon…wanna buy a book?
Well my Sunday friend, I have some good news, my brand-new book, “The Sunday Blog Volume 1: The Bathroom Book” should be available on December 6th at Amazon.
Oh, but you say you want more than one? Excellent decision. Apparently in paperbacks I can’t offer a deal, but as an author I can buy direct and ship do you. So here’s what we’re going to do: If you buy two, I’ll give you one for free, I’ll sign all three and I’ll pick up the shipping. Apparently it’ll take a couple of weeks for me to get my author copies, so it’s going to be close for x-mas. We’ll ship USPS Priority mail. Santa is on it.
I just have to say, I’m more excited about this whole book thing than the first time I kissed Betty Lou Zumback behind the back stop in 5th grade. It’s been a ton or work but super fun learning about all of this and now it’s almost done.
This week’s photo in the header will be on the back cover. It’s my dog Moto fulfilling his life’s purpose: fetching the tennis ball.
More next week.
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This week I’ve been binging on David Brooks. David is an academic – Yale professor, author, PBS News Hour guy, and a moderate democrat. I’ve been watching this talk gave a couple of weeks ago about his new book: How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Today I just want to share a few nugget takeaways I got from his wisdom and insight.
The book is built on a problem-solution template. He starts out talking about the great ills of American society in the post-covid time. Suicide rates are up by 35%, 36% of Americans report being lonely, 45% of teenagers say they feel hopeless, there’s been a 4X increase in the number of people who say they have no close friends, and membership in the most unhappy of the unhappy has increased by 50%. And if that wasn’t enough, he then tells us that if we can never understand other people, we’ll be miserable and make then miserable too. That’s the problem.
He then tells us that the solution is finding, maybe for the first time, a set of skills. He calls it, “seeing and being seen”, and a few of these skills include:
how to be a good listener,
exposing vulnerability in the right time and place,
offering criticism in a way that’s caring,
learning to disagree well.
Here are a few of the big paragraphs of his talk:
1. The Gaze
When we greet a stranger, we all have a series of unconscious questions we ask ourselves about our self-worth and whether the new person will like us or not. These answers are given to us through the other person’s eyes in the form of “the gaze”. The gaze is our subconscious intent and the manifest of our judgement, openness, and kindness. He then tells us about a pastor he knows and how that pastor greets everyone as if they were built in the image of God and so important that Jesus was willing to die for them. What if every time you met someone new, that was the frame you used? You’d probably have a ton more friends. So be open and excited when you meet someone new; and hey – if they turn out to be an ass, just remember there are 325 million other meet and greets wandering around in America.
2. Accompaniment
Brooks says that accompaniment is how we show up in daily life. Most of life isn’t deep, heavy, and real, most of it is just going through the motions, and learning to just hang out and being with each other is a vital social skill. Think about “play”. When you are playing, you’re in your natural state. The people you know best are the people you play with best.
Think about your role in your relationships as accompanying. Just as a pianist accompanies a singer, take the frame that you are there to accompany the other person. To support them, to help them, to let them have the spotlight.
3. Conversation
The third aspect of seeing and being seen is conversation. It’s easy to have bad conversations. A good conversation goes somewhere, it builds back and forth. Here are a few tips to be a better conversationalist:
1. Your attention should be a light switch – either 100%, or 0%, not in the middle.
2. Be a loud listener. Acknowledge what the other person is saying.
3. Make people authors, not witnesses. Get people into story mode.
4. Don’t fear the pause. Don’t feel the need to automatically fill the silent space.
5. Don’t be a topper. One upping? Don’t.
Sure, we should all be better storytellers, but in your conversations, learn to ask open ended questions and how to get others into storytelling mode. In his talk, Brooks referenced a focus group moderator who was trying to understand why people went to the grocery store after 10:00 pm. One woman said, “I had smoked a joint and I wanted to have a manage a trois with Ben and Jerry.”
And then there are the questions we ask. The quality of conversation is always in direct proportion to the quality of the questions that start it. It sometimes takes 3 or 4 times with a question for people to get to a point that they are willing to answer honestly.
Finally, here are a few questions he posed that I thought were pretty interesting:
What crossroads are you at?
What would you do if you weren’t’ afraid?
How do your ancestors show up in your narrative?
What’s the commitment you made you no longer believe in?
It’s about an hour total. If you want to check it out, the link is here.
Good luck and have a good week.
Joe Still
2023.11.26
Cite
“In love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.”
-Thorton Wilder