The Course

Course Outline

Consider how you’ve learned skills throughout your life. You likely learned to drive from course or being taught by a family member. When you learned math or how to play a sport, you received lessons, opportunities for practice, and feedback.

None of that is true for conversations. Despite being one of the most foundational parts of our lives, no one teaches us how to do it well. There’s no course in school, no real opportunities for structured practice or feedback, and so we’re left to puzzle it out ourselves.

Listen First, Speak Second is my attempt to fill this gap. It is a 5 week online course, with an hour and a half interactive class each week. Each class combines discussion of theory with breakouts into small groups to practice the topic for the class. I’ll drop in to groups to observe and provide feedback, and the intention is for you and the other members of the class to give each other feedback as well, so everyone can learn and grow.

As a general philosophy, I don’t believe that you need to memorize a bunch of rules or tricks to have good conversations. While I will teach you are a handful of strategies which can be useful, I fundamentally believe that the primary reason conversations are hard is us getting in our own way. If we’re able to be present and really listen the person we’re talking with, we’re most of the way to having great conversations. That’s the primary thrust of both my personal conversational philosophy and the course itself.

I have a few hopes for you, should you sign up for this course. Firstly, I’d like for you to feel more comfortable and confident talking with people. Secondly, I want to give you the tools to continue to improve at conversations, letting you reflect on how and why a conversation went a particular way and how you might approach similar conversations in the future. And, lastly, I hope you simply enjoy your time in the course!

Week By Week

In Week One, we’ll discuss at a high level the approach of this course. This includes going over different types of conversations, particularly the interpersonal conversations this course focuses on. We’ll discuss at a high level what characterizes good and bad conversations, and I’ll introduce the primary focus of the course - listening, and why I believe it is so central to good conversations.

In Week Two, we’ll go over why listening is difficult, including specific blockers such as common yet poor advice, discomfort with pauses in conversations, getting lost in our own heads, and more. We’ll do specific exercises to bring attention to the subtle ways we stop listening and practice staying present.

In Week Three, we’ll go over how to ask good questions. We’ll discuss ways questions can accidentally disrupt a good conversation, a simple strategy for keeping conversations flowing, and address specific situations where finding good questions can be difficult. The exercises for the week focus on practicing questions collaboratively, giving you space to try out different techniques with others.

In Week Four, we’ll turn to speaking. We’ll go over a couple types of conversations and how the way we speak may vary between them. Additionally, we’ll discuss how to approach situations where we don’t feel someone else is listening to us and ways we may unintentionally impede a conversation with the way we share. The exercises this week are mostly reflective - looking back at our past experiences sharing and trying to learn from them.

Finally, in Week Five, we’ll do a survey of various other ways that conversations can go awry that haven’t been covered in the class, strategies for getting conversations back on track, and generally hold space for discussion of any other topics that are of interest. We’ll end by simply having unstructured conversations your fellow classmates, giving you the opportunity to practice everything you’ve learned throughout the course.