Transformative Dialogue part two: Twelve meta-frames for self advocacy
Part one of the Transformative Dialogue Series outlined how to explore your conversation partner’s beliefs by asking questions to generate more self-awareness, nuance, and complexity. So, how do we advocate for our own views?
The key to effectively sharing our opinions is to display as much meta-awareness in conversation as possible. In other words, you’re aware of how your belief was constructed and how it came into existence. This involves demonstrating to your partner that you’re aware of the all background factors that shaped your belief, including salient life experiences, knowledge/data sources, reasoning processes, core values, moral principles, as well as concerns and uncertainties. Oftentimes, we get hung up arguing about the content or products of thoughts, instead of exploring the underlying processes that led to those conclusions. Meta-awareness emphasizes sharing the processes that shaped our beliefs, making them transparent to our conversation partners.
Sharing from a meta-perspective has a depolarizing influence, while also lending to more nuance, subtlety, and complexity. It creates space in a conversation, which de-escalates tensions. Such spaciousness has the opposite effect of dogmatic fundamentalism. “My way or the highway” attitudes suffocate any room for nuanced exploration…
