Conversation Field Guide: Create better conversations

Sharing the insights that will help you be a guide during a Legacy Interview.

Why call this a field guide?

A field guide is meant to be taken into the wild, and help you navigate and identify various aspects of the world around you. It is densely packed with information that will help you understand where you are and how to react, but it does not claim to be an encyclopedia covering every subject extensively.

For people that want to become better conversationalists:

We all want the opportunity to both tell our stories and to hear the stories from others that help us understand our world. 

Stories are a human invention as valuable as the discovery of fire.  With stories we can understand who “we” are, what we are capable of and what values will help us live our best lives.

Every guest is unique, not just their stories, but in how they react to being interviewed by you. What you do, how you look, what you ask, what you notice, and how you interact with the guest will determine if and how they will open up to share important stories and experiences with you.

Creating the next Legacy Interview Guide.

I am writing these Conversation Field Guide with the hopes that it can be used to one day train another Legacy Interviews host. But I also feel strongly that even if we had 100 great hosts, we could not capture all of the stories that our culture will benefit from passing down.

It is obvious what is lost when a child does not receive family wisdom from their grandparents. But it is equally tragic the number of people in the late fall/early winter of their life that don’t get a chance to look back, so they can let go and grow in different ways. 

Imagine the impact of getting others to open up and share what they care about with you.

Learning how to have better conversations is a “live art” you can only get better by trying, failing, learning and then improving while talking with people. I will write this in a way that you can use the things you practice to be relevant in both  a formal interview or a casual conversation.

I will share ideas about how to build rapport, ask questions, alleviate conflict, and how to be graceful when hearing stories that are sacred to the person telling them.