Conversation as a fundamental unit of change
Mon, 01/02/2010 - 12:02 | Paul
Conversation is the link between such disparate professional disciplines as coaching, facilitating, training, negotiating and selling.
What differentiates each of these activities is their contexts. Each has a different structure, a discrete set of rules – in other words, each is a different ‘Game’.
There are then commonalities between these games. Just as football, tennis and basketball are all ball-games; squash, tennis and table-tennis all racket games; and all racket games are also ball-games (I think?), so do different professional conversational games have sub-sets – perhaps most usefully distinguished by the set of skills each requires.
So, good listening may be handy across the entire range, though arguably less crucial for training; persuasive skills would play a greater part in the negotiating and selling games; and encouraging may be a coach’s top conversational skill.
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