Raye Rawls Discusses An Extraordinary Tool On The Omni-Win Project Podcast
“Can you imagine me asking a member of the Klan a question of genuine curiosity?”
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Episode Five: “Building Resilience and Relationship through Dialogue” with Raye Rawls
Listen here:
Discover reflective structured dialogue, an extraordinary tool for deepening our understanding of other's perspectives, rather than solving problems. Duncan and Raye Rawls talk about how this process, created by Essential Partners, can humanize our enemies and bring us together. In contrast, Raye raises concerns that our current tools for healing differences are actually pushing us further apart. In particular, Raye discusses what we're missing in the “privilege walk” and why it's unfortunate that the slogan “defund the police” doesn’t represent what the concept actually means.
You’ll also hear a great story from Raye where she highlights how we can become blinded to consequences and reason when we let fear rule us.
Raye asks how we can create spaces to connect across our differences, deepen our mutual understanding, discover the deep meaning beneath our actions, and strengthen our democracy. Let’s reveal the answer.
Highlights in this episode:
Discover the power of reflective structured dialogue.
Duncan talks about how our political conversations are unnecessarily adversarial.
Raye explains why we’re at war with the people who are supposed to protect us.
Raye's shares her concerns about the ways that people are currently teaching about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Raye talks about how we can work together despite our differences.
Discover how questions of genuine curiosity can enrich our lives and understanding.
Raye recounts a powerful story about how getting caught up in our emotions and fears can stop us from thinking rationally.
Understand the power of nuance in our conversations and opinions.
Find out why people are so scared of understanding other perspectives.
If someone said, "Do you think if you prayed more, you could understand the other perspective?" That's not a question of genuine curiosity.
That's a question that says, “I have the answer for you. I'll frame it as a question, but this is what you need to do.”
We facilitators are on alert to help people ask questions of curiosity and not rhetorical questions that have a tremendous amount of judgment.
About this week’s guest:
Raye Rawls is an award-winning mediator, arbitrator, and dialogue facilitator with decades of experience. Rawls has worked on thousands of cases in government institutions, court systems, corporations, and with private parties.
Some examples of topics that she has covered in her dialogue work include confederate monuments on campus, guns on campus, gender issues (what bathroom should people use), defining freedom of speech on campus, evolving roles of organizations or institutions (e.g., chamber of commerce), climate change, human trafficking, intergovernmental cooperation, immigration, and police-community relationships.
Raye Rawls is a Senior Associate with Essential Partners. She is also a Senior Public Service Faculty at the University of Georgia’s Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, where her practice area is in conflict transformation and dialogue. Raye is also a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International and the DPACE Initiative.
Connect with Raye Rawls:
Email: raye@whatisessential.org
Check out the episode page for more resources and information.
What’s coming next?
Next week, Tom Atlee, of the Co-Intelligence Institute, joins the Omni-Win Project Podcast for an introduction to Wise Democracy Pattern Language. He also talks about how we must respect, evoke, and engage the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole. Don’t miss the episode release on Tuesday, August 2nd!
Here’s a sneak peek!
I think of it sort of as out Gandhi-ing Gandhi to evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole. If you are including everybody, including your opponents, in the action of figuring out what to do, it's hard to resist that.
Working with Gandhi made it hard for the British to maintain their empire. Whenever they did the things that maintained their empire, it backfired on them and they had to end up playing on Gandhi's playing field.
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