As this course is getting going, I'm realizing that I definitely have some apprehension about facilitation skills. As in, I don't have any yet. However, these are skills I need to develop and I need to start thinking about how I should strategically go about achieving them. For now, my gameplan is to go to as many meetings as a I can, critique what I can observe, learn from people I respect, and do outside or extra reading when possible. So far from skimming the class readings, I've got plenty to work with already, though.
I'm also thinking about how reflective listening can help with my relationship. Too often I'm responding to the content of what my partner is telling me, and I need to respond to the emotion. She is an emotional person, whereas I have trained myself, after some things in my past, to suppress emotions and thoughts when really I need to let them emerge in a healthy way, and of course she tells me this. As we touched on in Deep Democracy, I need to "let go" in order to find myself and be happier. I think that learning to listen deeply and reflectively at home will definitely help at school and in my future career, etc.
I also need to figure out how to have better conversations in general. I find that I am the kind of person that becomes a vault for the problems and secrets of others. I tend to have friends that are talkative, and my girlfriend is no exception. She is the kind of person that will come home and spend ten or fifteen minutes debriefing about her day. I am the kind of person that rarely speaks for longer than ten seconds at a time. If I speak for a long time, I get nervous and lost in my sentence. I worry all the time if I am really being understood, or if I'm even close to conveying what I mean. Needless to say this is also an issue in my relationship! It doesn't seem to be as much of a problem in friendships, especially with men, who also speak in shorter sentences and are more likely to ask simple questions or exchange stories rather than my female friends, who will share difficult secrets or ask for complex advice.
In school, I find it difficult to participate in academic conversations at times because I feel like I can't form an opinion on a topic unless I have enough information, and I rarely feel that I have enough information. (My girlfriend, on the other hand, is a textbook example of someone who makes hard and fast instinctual judgments--opposites attract, right?) Even on subjects I am fairly knowledgeable about, I am reluctant to take one position or another. Maybe this has something to do with how I was raised by a white atheist Republican and a Mexican Catholic Democrat. However, I also think it's useful to be so in-between. I often find myself acting as a bridge, intentionally or unintentionally, whether between my parents, my mixed-ethnicity heritages, rural and urban friends and acquaintances and sensibilities (I used to live in an isolated rural area), leftist and conservative sensibilities, hip hop and indie and mainstream sensibilities, etc. Elisabeth and I often talk about how we can move comfortably in a lot of contexts, in a LOT of different situations, and how that can be sort of lonely (not having one grounded community) but also important. I think that relates to where I'm going professionally as well.
So, this post wasn't really so much about participatory methods, but I think it's important to establish where I'm coming from when I walk in the door each morning, and lay out where I want to go, and that I really do believe that learning participatory methods and tools is a great way to get there.
