Javier A. Tabush

          The idea that was revolving around the dialogue the most this week was team work, and some of the difficulties it brings to some people. Some simply want to have control of the situation and don’t accept other opinions. We had a design thinking workshop for a couple of weeks with Karla Silva, the woman in charge of maintaining the UFM webpage. What I like about this workshop was that you had to listen to everybody´s ideas and later incorporate them in some sort of design, in this case for our MPC webpage. I find it hard to listen to others when you have your idea so clear in your head and don´t want to change a thing, but most of the times other ideas make yours so much better.

          In relation to team work, I also want to mention Difficult Conversations. We had a dialogue last week on this book, and we discussed something very important. We talked about how it is important that both sides of the difficult conversation we are having know the different techniques that are mentioned in this book and that we are creating a culture in where we interact with ourselves in a certain way, that people that don´t belong to our culture don´t understand. So, how useful is it going to be for us to learn all of this? Or, how can we bring the book to as many people as possible so little by little we spread these ideals.

          During the dialogue, I was amazed how these three books (The Trivium, Difficult Conversations, and Getting Real) related to each other. In Getting Real we were taught to “stop being right, and start getting real”. In Difficult Conversations we read that we are NOT right when we are forming part of the conversation. In The Trivium we learned that we should go into a dialogue without knowing anything, and being as open-minded as possible. I also want to mention Socrates and his idea of “approaching everyone as a stranger”. I really saw the meaning in this phrase, since it is applicable to our everyday life, and what is most important about it for me, is that it teaches us to leave all the prejudices behind when we are meeting someone new, or approaching a situation.

          Speaking of dialogues, Javier Parellada mentioned something that really caught my attention about them. He said that  “that a dialogue is to build something” and “that difficult conversations happen because we are not trying to build something new but to remodel something already built”. Alejo also mentioned something that I found valuable for our culture, “we learn more by listening for an hour, than speaking for an hour”, and I want to relate it with one of the thirteen virtues that Benjamin Franklin gives us, which is “silence”, and he wrote that silence is when “you speak only to benefit others or yourself, avoiding trifling conversations”. This also relates to the lesson Plato gave us through Meno on communication and using it to understand others. I feel that people most of the time are afraid of silence and talk only because they feel awkward not doing it, but sometimes is better to stay silent instead of saying something that will build, or help build something. In fact, one of the rubrics that have helped me the most is “embracing silence”. I never realized how much you can learn from your self and from others by doing deep thinking and observing your surroundings. I now understand Bert when he told us that a dialogue can have so much more meaning when there´s a long pause at the beginning. Everybody is more focused and more connected to what they know and more ready to share it with the rest of the group.

          In my acting class I did an activity where you had to connect with your inner self and simply be aware of what you do. Afterwards we did another activity in which you had to think about a special toy that you played with and had a connection with when you were a little boy/girl. After you had to switch places with that young version of you and interact with the other classmates just as if you were that young child again. I didn´t realize it was going to cause such an impact on some.