- Bringing the Clarity Checklist to life (1x this week; should take about 20 minutes). Find some quiet time, and pull up your Clarity Checklist. Go through each item on the checklist one by one; for each item, find an example from your own life of a time where that item was or was not addressed, and write it down in your journal. That’s it!
- Notice your conversational patterns (during the week, pay attention to the items listed below in the background of your regular activities; journal 1x this week).
Part 1. The first part of this is to simply start to notice where you tend to hang out in conversation. To help your self-observation, review the questions in Part 2 below early in the week.
Part 2. After you’ve spent a day or two just noticing, find some time and take about 20 minutes to journal your responses to the listed questions:- How much of the time do you spend in one type of conversation – relationship, possibility, or action – compared to others?
- Are you in the same type of conversation as the people you are talking to?
- Are you resisting transitioning a conversation for relationship into something else?
- If you are in conversations for action, could you do more to perfect or close on your conversations for action by seeking more clarity, precision, or accountability?
- What else can you notice?
- Preparation: How you lead (at least 1x this week; should take 15 minutes, possibly more depending on complexity). Over the next week, practice preparing for an interaction with more intention than you might normally apply. Pick something you care about but also start small. You might start with a 1:1 with your manager or a roundtable at an upcoming team meeting. What is one thing you can do this week to bring more clarity into that interaction?
- Working with conversation types (during the week, in the background of your regular activities). Notice what is working in the conversations around you and what isn’t. Jot your observations and insights down in your journal to bring into your quad meeting. Here are some things to look for:
- What conversational “goals” are being achieved in the conversations happening around you? (refer back to your framework for a list of goals)
- Are there any patterns to those conversations that seem to have more clarity and those that seem to have less?
- What is happening in the conversations where there is friction or tension? or what about in the conversations where nothing is really getting done, or the things that matter are not discussed when all of the right people are present? Get curious about whether there are any patterns to what gets forgotten or ignored in terms of the building blocks for working successfully with others, or even more simply, parts of the group being in a different type of conversation than the other prats of the group.
- Do you notice people in the room being in different types of conversation?
- What else are you noticing?
Pro tip: It is often easier when first learning a new concept or technique to see things in others than it is to see them in ourselves. If this has been your experience, start your week by noticing the conversational habits of your colleagues and move from there into considering your own.
