Handout
Click here to View: Three Questions
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
MIKE: . . . Sean is gonna to give us a talk, but before he does that, I want to refer to three questions that we’re gonna use to discuss this talk when it’s over.
In your folder, you will see another small piece of paper, with blue on top, and these are the questions we’re gonna use for this conference, to discuss Sean’s talk, and others.
You may have brought the questions that we used at the last one with you, if you were at the kickoff1, but those were slightly different, so use—put those aside. They were right for that conference, and these are the ones for this conference. So, it says “Questions for Discussion” on top. So, I’m gonna go over them quickly.
The first question is: What did the speaker say?
The second is: Why did he or she say it?
And the third is: Note your personal takeaways.
So, the first question: What did the speaker say? What did you hear?
It sounds simple. We all heard the same talk. But when we start talking about it, we realize that we didn’t all hear the same things. I missed parts while I was taking a note, and a brother might share it, and, “Wow, I didn’t even know—I hadn’t heard that at all.” But in addition to filling in the picture of the talk by sharing what we heard, we also learn about each other. I learn what my brothers found noteworthy, what they remembered. And that’s helpful to know, too.
During this question, avoid—we want to avoid arguing or disagreeing about what he said: “No, he said this, he didn’t say that.” Well, we’ll just let that slide, ’cause each person is just sharing what they heard him say, or her say.
So, what I say can be different than what someone else said; we’re just getting it all on the table. You can think of this question—number one— as setting the table for a meal. We’ve got the forks and the plates, the corn and the chicken; it looks—“Is everything here? Yes? All right, let’s dig in.”
And then we “dig in” to the second question, which is: Why did he or she say it? What was the point? What was she or he getting at?
This question helps us dive a little deeper into what was said. Like the second part of the art exercise2, this is where we draw conclusions. We’re trying get at understanding the subject matter from the speaker’s perspective. This question, too, can sometimes get rushed on our way to figuring out what we think, so we want to slow . . . down, and really answer this question from the mind of the speaker, as best we can.
The third question . . . we’re putting off for four months. So we might as well get good at the second question. [Laughter.]
’Cause the second one—trying to understand the intention and the mind of the speaker—is going to help us enormously when we get to Phase II, ’cause we’ll have a lot more experience trying to understand, “What did my brother actually mean when he said this? I know my first reaction was this, but maybe I got it wrong.” And so we’ll be habituated to thinking more about, “What were they actually trying to communicate with what they said?”
And then, like I said, the third question won’t be discussed yet; we’ll pick it up later. But it’s still good to record it. So record your personal takeaways and anything else you may want to take up later, in Phase II of the consultation.
Okay? So that’s an explanation of that, and let’s welcome Sean Connolly.
Endnotes
1. Mike is referring to the May 2022 Consultation Kickoff weekend in South Bend, Indiana. Return to text
2. Mike is referring to an earlier talk he gave at this mentors event. In that talk, called “Observation,” he guided the audience in answering two questions about a work of art: (1) What did you see? and (2) What do you think the artist was trying to convey? That talk is also available here. Return to text
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