Reflections from Dialogue Immersion
Last week my husband and I drove the winding road from Bozeman to Spokane, admiring the lime glare of larch trees at the start of their transformational journey towards winter-gold senescence. We noted the steep slopes of Fish Creek and I recounted stories from my wildland firefighting days at Ninemile, which seems to have been eons ago. The drive was a reminder that we are always in movement; that every cell and even life itself is composed of constant change.
The drive’s purpose, as beautiful as it was, was not just a joy ride. We were traveling to Spokane so that I could participate in a three-day immersion for my doctoral program at Gonzaga. This semester’s course, The Art and Practice of Dialogue, was led by Dr. Salena Beaumont Hill and involved 16 doctoral students, including myself. Over the course of three days, we engaged in nine “hot topic” dialogues around controversial issues such as immigration, artificial intelligence, capital punishment, the impact of Indian residential schools, the double bind of women in leadership, access to technology in rural schools, trans athletes in female sports, and household voting. We analyzed facilitator skills and aspects of dialogue while shifting from topic to topic and between roles of facilitator, participant, and classroom learner, all the while remaining anchored in each conversation, unfolding new layers of truth (as Bohm might say), and engaging in each present moment amid waves of new thought, learning, and perspectives.
The immersion left me with key new takeaways around dialogue, including reflections around slowing down to set expectations and establish a productive environment for dialogue, balancing connection with strangeness, selecting listening modes with intention, and practicing impartiality. As simple as it sounds, dialogue brings with it depth, complexity, paradox, and strength. Like everything else, it involves various moving parts.
In a world in constant motion, it’s important for us to slow down with intention. We do not land in dialogue by default, so it is advantageous to explicitly name when we are about to engage in it. In this way, we intentionally turn towards others to practice “being” versus “doing” (Reitz, 2015). Similarly, we’ve got to name when we’re going into dialogue in order to set expectations around “listening to understand” and responding to share personal insights and stories, lest we default to the societal norms of discussion and debate.
Another part of setting expectations is intentionally creating a “container for conflict”, or an environment that allows for depth and complexity in expressed viewpoints. This is not to say that the dialogue is comfortable. Rather than a “safe space,” dialogue requires a “brave space” that supports difficult conversations while simultaneously promoting mutual learning, embracing vulnerability and discomfort, and pushing participants to the growth edge that is found between the borders of safety and insecurity (S. Beaumont Hill, personal communication, October 12, 2026) .
Relatedly, one of the most important steps in dialogue is building a foundation of trust and respect. The foundation of this respect is what Isaacs (1999) coined the “principle of participation,” or recognition of shared humanity and connection between one another. Simultaneously, however, we must practice “making (the other) strange” (S. Beaumont Hill, personal communication, October 12, 2026). That is, we avoid assuming that we know all aspects of a person or that we can predict their thoughts on a topic in a given moment, no matter how long we’ve known them. What we see of someone on the surface does not reveal the unknown stories lying beneath.
When we approach others with the curiosity of “unknowing,” we are more able to listen to each other deeply enough to be changed by what we hear (Saunders, 1999). Rather than listening to our internal voices by preparing to share our own connections, opinions, or rebuttals, we can instead embrace other forms of listening. Three forms in particular are of greatest benefit to dialogue circles.
First, generative listening is primarily used by facilitators to surface knowledge that has been left unsaid as they listen for the unspoken viewpoints or understories in the room and provide opportunities for new understandings to be shared. Through generative listening, facilitators surface themes, skills, and capacities (Yeakley, 2026).
Generous listening, meanwhile, is most commonly used by all dialogue participants to stay open-minded and curious, focus attention not on our own internal thoughts but on the speaker, and hold others with genuine interest as we ask open-ended questions in order to surface deeper understandings of their personal insights and stories. Importantly, generous listening includes honestly admitting when there is something we do not know (Yeakley, 2026).
Finally, global listening is the art of turning toward not only the speaker, but to the room at large. We attune to the impact of what is being shared on other participants, practicing social awareness to take a temperature check on energy shifts, responses, emotional impacts, and processing (Yeakley, 2026).
Listening is a skill that we think we know, yet rarely truly practice. Yet as Archibald (2008) reminds us, it is our job to listen with three ears: the two on the sides of our heads, and the other in our hearts. This practice involves recognizing both the rationale of thought and the emotional weight of experiences, as well as acknowledging both our intent and impact of our words. That is, we acknowledge by listening with our hearts when an intent was well-meaning, but recognize when words have a positive or negative impact on others. In moments of negative impact, it is our responsibility to simultaneously recognize positive intent and take ownership of negative impacts.
Along these lines, dialogue is not neutral. When engaging in dialogue, both facilitators and participants are welcome to share backgrounds and positions as they relate to personal experiences and insights. The catch, of course, is to guarantee that all voices are respected no matter our personal views. In dialogue, there is space for all. To ensure this, facilitators must embrace multipartiality, a power-balancing approach that supports and sustains all perspectives, pushes back against dominant narratives, and names social norms and assumptions in order to make them almost as visible in the room as the participants themselves (Yeakley, 2026).
On the surface, all of these dialogical practices and components seem relatively straightforward. We understand that our role in dialogue is to respect others, to listen, and to make room for different opinions. These skills are harder in practice than in theory, and upon second glance, even paradoxical in nature. Some paradoxes are, for example, that naming expectations and a specific structure of dialogue creates freedom of expression, emphasizing connection allows differences to constructively arise, and attuning to both our own emotions as they arise and to the types of listening we engage in can help us better focus on the other. Furthermore, slowing communications down through dialogue speeds up collaborative processes later on, and the understandings attained through dialogue can change us even when we continue to disagree. We can even hold our own views while loosening our grip on them.
Yet through the complexities and depths of dialogue, we find greater connection and strength. As Isaacs wrote (1999), “Dialogue…is a conversation with a center, not sides…It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channeling it toward something that has never been created before. It lifts us out of polarization and into a greater common sense” (p. 19). By slowing down to engage in its complexity, dialogue propels us forward.
References
Archibald, J.-A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. UBC Press.
Bernardo, J., Epperson, J., & Yeakley, A. (2026). Online dialogue facilitation training: session 1 handouts [Unpublished training manual]. Anna Yeakley Consulting.
Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together: A pioneering approach to communicating in business and in life. Currency.
Reitz, M. (2015). Dialogue in organizations: Developing relational leadership. Palgrave Macmillan.
Saunders, H. H. (1999). A public peace process: Sustained dialogue to transform racial and ethnic conflicts. St. Martin’s Press.
