Challenge Two: Delcaring Your Intent and Inviting Consent

Explaining Your Conversational Intent and Inviting Consent
Moving from conversational eruption to conversational invitation

Summary

Why do so many important conversations go wrong before they’ve even really begun? And what is the one overlooked step that can transform a conversational ambush into a collaborative invitation?

In order to help your conversation partner cooperate with you, and to reduce possible misunderstandings, start important conversations by inviting your conversation partner to join you in the specific kind of conversation you want to have. The more the conversation is going to mean to you, the more important it is for your conversation partner to understand the big picture. If you need to have a long, complex, or emotion-laden conversation with someone, it will make a big difference if you briefly explain your conversational intention first and then invite the consent of your intended conversation partner.

This chapter explores why we almost never learn this skill, what it looks like when it’s done well, why it makes such a profound difference, what keeps us from doing it — and how to begin practicing it in your own life, one conversation at a time.

2.1 The Conversation Before the Conversation

Where do you want to go on Conversation Island?

I’ve always been a kind of go along to get along sort of person. Which meant that making complaints or starting challenging conversations were especially difficult processes for me. I filled out the ideas in this chapter by making lots of experiments in starting new conversations and I was continually surprised at how easy it had become.

One episode really sticks in my mind. I was in a large health food market searching for my favorite food, broccoli, which I tend to munch on raw, dipped in one or another salad dressing. You can imagine my disgust when I found that the store’s current offerings of broccoli were crawling with tiny insects and some sort of thick white insect dust! Get me outta here! I walked over to the customer service counter and decided to put my new-found interpersonal navigation tools to work.

Walking up to the person behind the counter, I said, in my most diplomatic voice, “I would like to make a complaint.” Alerting her to the kind of conversation that I wanted to have allowed her to get emotionally ready for that conversation. She said, “Yes. How can I help?” in a confident voice. Then I said, “There are bugs in the broccoli!”, in a tone of voice that expressed some of my surprise and disgust. She was not pushed off her balance by my expressing some emotion. She knew something was coming when I had announced that I wanted to make a complaint (have a customer service problem solving conversation). She answered again in a confident voice, saying, “We will take care of it right away.”

Many similar experiments and experiences taught me something I now consider one of the most practical skills in this entire workbook: the importance of the conversation before the conversation.

Before you launch into any important exchange — especially one involving strong feelings, significant requests, or potential conflict — there is a brief, crucial step that can make the difference between connection and collision. You explain the kind of conversation you want to have, and you invite the other person’s consent to have it.

This is Challenge Two. And of all the skills in this workbook, it may be the one that produces the most immediate, visible results.

But if this skill is so practical — and so simple — why don’t most of us already do it? To answer that, we need to look at what we inherited and what we didn’t.

2.2 Why Most of Us Never Learned This

If you’ve been reading this workbook in sequence, you’ll recognize a familiar pattern here. In the Introduction, we explored the “born to learn” predicament: you were born with a magnificent capacity for language, but zero words in your vocabulary. You had to learn every single one of them by absorbing the patterns of your family and your culture. The same is true for communication skills generally, and it is especially true for this one.

Most of us were never taught to name our conversational intentions. Our cultural autopilot simply doesn’t include this step. Think about how conversations typically begin in everyday life: someone walks into the room and starts talking. Someone picks up the phone and launches into whatever is on their mind. Someone corners a colleague in the hallway and opens with a complaint. The assumption — an almost universal one — is that if you want to talk, you just start talking. The other person will figure out what’s happening.

Sometimes that works. If you’re chatting about the weather, or catching up on weekend plans, the social cost of this approach is low. But when the stakes rise — when the conversation involves conflict, strong emotions, important decisions, or significant requests — just starting to talk is like jumping into a river without checking the current. You may end up somewhere you didn’t intend. And you may take someone with you who didn’t want to go.

Recognizing this gap — without shame — is the first step toward filling it. You didn’t fail to learn this skill because something is wrong with you. You didn’t learn it because it wasn’t in your environment. Now it is.

So if we weren’t taught to do this, what does it actually look like when someone does it well?

2.3 What This Skill Looks Like in Practice

Many good communicators already do this intuitively. Listen for it and you’ll start noticing it everywhere:

“Hi, Steve. I need to ask for your help on my project. Got a minute to talk about it?”

“Maria, do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to you about the schedule change. Is that OK?”

“Well, sit down for a minute and let me tell you what happened…”

“Hello, Mr. Sanchez. I’m not completely comfortable about the safety conditions on this job. Can we talk about it for a few minutes?”

“Hi, Jerry, this is Mike. I want to talk to you about Fred. He’s in jail again. Is this a good time?”

Notice what each of these openings does. In a few seconds, the speaker accomplishes something that would otherwise take much longer to negotiate through body language, tone, and guesswork. They tell the other person: here is what I need to talk about, here is roughly how much time and energy it will require, and I’m asking your permission before I begin.

This is what I mean by the conversation before the conversation. It’s brief. It’s respectful. And it changes everything that follows.

The underlying principle is simple: the bigger the ask that is on its way, the clearer the invitation needs to be.

These examples may sound simple — almost too simple to qualify as a “skill.” But something this easy to demonstrate turns out to be remarkably powerful in practice. The question is: why does such a small step make such a large difference?

2.4 Four Reasons This Makes Such a Difference

When we offer a combined explanation of intent and invitation to consent, we help our conversations along in four important ways — and each one connects to something deeper about how human groups work.

First, we give our listeners a chance to consent to or decline the conversation. A person who has agreed to participate will participate more fully. This is not a minor point. It connects directly to the three-sided insight at the heart of this workbook (the Introduction): every human group needs to accomplish tasks together, support one another emotionally, and accommodate different temperament types. Some people need a moment to shift gears before an emotional conversation. Some people process information better when they know what’s coming. When you invite consent, you are accommodating those differences rather than steamrolling over them.

Second, we help our listeners understand the big picture. Decades of research in linguistics and communication studies confirm that understanding a person’s overall conversational intention is crucial for understanding their specific words (Grice 1975; Cohen et al. 1990). If I know you’re about to ask for my help, I hear your words differently than if I think you’re about to criticize me. The big picture frames everything.

Third, we allow our listeners to get ready for what’s coming — especially if the topic is emotionally charged. If we surprise people by launching into difficult conversations, they may respond by withdrawing, becoming defensive, or learning to be permanently on-guard around us. Preparation is not a luxury. For many people, it’s the difference between being able to listen and shutting down entirely.

And fourth, we help our listeners understand the role we want them to play. Do we need a fellow problem solver? A giver of emotional support? A sounding board? An advice-giver? A decision-maker? These are very different roles, and our conversations go much better when we ask people to play only one major role at a time. This connects back to the task-and-emotional-support balance we explored in the Introduction: if your partner thinks you want practical advice when what you actually need is someone to listen, both of you will leave the conversation frustrated — not because of bad intentions, but because of mismatched expectations.

This raises a genuinely interesting question: What role do we most want our conversation partner to play? Here we bump into a kind of universal truth about conversational intentions: although every now and then we may just stumble into getting what we want, most of the time getting what we really want depends on having a clear idea about what we really want.

These four reasons are practical, and they’re reason enough to adopt the habit. But beneath them lies something deeper — something that explains not just why this skill works, but why it matters.

2.5 The Deeper Why: Invitation as Respect

To be invited into a conversation is an act of respect. A consciously consenting participant is much more likely to pay attention and cooperate than someone who feels pushed into an undefined conversation by the sheer force of another person’s talking.

Think about it from the receiving end. When someone erupts at you — launching into a complaint or an emotional disclosure without warning — how does your body respond? If you’re like most people, you tense up. Your defenses go up. You’re not in a position to listen well, because you’re busy figuring out whether you’re under attack.

Now imagine the same conversation beginning with: “I have something important I want to talk about. It’s about what happened yesterday, and I think it might take about fifteen minutes. Is now a good time, or would later be better?”

The content is the same. But the experience is entirely different. The second version treats you as a partner rather than a target. It generates goodwill — the trust that your needs and availability will be considered. And that goodwill is exactly the currency you need for creative problem-solving, genuine empathy, and reliable agreements.

I first began to see what this deeper level looks like in the 1980s, when I spent several years studying with the communication trainer Marshall Rosenberg. In his workshops, I noticed that Marshall’s formal four-step NVC model — observations, feelings, needs, and requests — did not include the meta-communicative step of explaining your intent and inviting consent. But in live workshops, he did it constantly. He would pause, step back from the content of the conversation, and briefly negotiate with his conversation partners about what kind of exchange they were having and where they wanted to go next. He went in and out of this meta level so fluidly that most people didn’t even notice he was doing it. But as a sociology student (at the time), trained to pay attention to social interaction, I couldn’t stop noticing. And I gradually realized that this skill — this brief conversation about the conversation to come — and this topic — the intention that brings me to the conversation, and the intention that I attribute to you — were some of the most powerful and most underappreciated areas in all of human communication.

It turned out, I later learned, that intentions were (and are) a hot topic in linguistics. In order to understand your sentences I need to understand what kind of conversation you’re trying to have with me. The same sentence could be a friendly tease or a serious insult. But in spite of the fact that many scholars were analyzing the role of intentions under the heading of meta-communication, I had the strong impression that they would be content to study this for centuries without ever bothering to teach people how to meta-communicate more effectively in everyday life. Ever the contrarian, I decided that this was a topic so important for everyday conversation that it needed to be included in even the most basic workbook about communication skills. And so Challenge Two was born.

Of course, when we explain our intent and invite consent, we are giving up the varying amounts of coercion and surprise that are at work when we just launch into whatever we want to talk about. In asking for what we need, we are more vulnerable to being turned down. But when people agree to talk with us, they will be more present in the conversation and more able to either meet our needs or explain why they can’t — and perhaps suggest alternatives we hadn’t thought of.

I believe that the empathy we get will be more genuine and the agreements we reach will be more reliable if we give people a choice about talking with us.

Often people conduct this “negotiation about conversation” through body language and tone of voice during the first few seconds of interaction. But since we often have to talk with people whose body language and tone-of-voice patterns may be quite different from our own cultural group, we may need to be more explicit and straightforward in the way we ask people to have conversations with us. The more important the conversation is to you, the more important it is to have your partner’s consent and conscious participation.

On the other hand, just saying “Hi!” or talking about the weather does not require this kind of preparation, because very little is being required of the other person, and people can easily indicate with their tone of voice whether or not they are interested in chatting.

All of this makes a compelling case for the practice. But if you’re honest with yourself, you may notice a quiet resistance forming — a worry that sits beneath all the good reasons. What happens when you explain your intent, extend the invitation… and the other person says no?

2.6 When People Say No — and Why That’s Not the End

One of the fears that keeps people from explaining their intent and inviting consent is the fear of rejection. What if they say no? What if they won’t talk to me?

This is a legitimate concern. But here’s what I’ve learned: a “no” to an invitation is almost never a permanent refusal. It’s usually a “not now” or a “not like this.” And knowing how to respond to those moments can turn a potential dead end into a stronger connection.

When someone says “I’m too busy right now”: Acknowledge their situation and propose an alternative. “I understand. Would later this week work? Or I could send you a note with my thoughts, and we could talk when you’ve had a chance to think about it.” You’ve respected their time, and you’ve kept the door open.

When someone responds with emotional resistance — perhaps saying “I don’t want to talk about it” or “You always twist my words”: Validate their feelings first. “I hear that you’re frustrated, and I understand that. Would it help if we started by each writing down our thoughts separately? Or would you feel more comfortable if we talked with someone else present?” You’re not forcing the conversation. You’re offering a different path into it.

When someone makes a counterproposal — “I don’t have an hour, but I could do fifteen minutes”: Be flexible and prioritize. Focus on the most important points, and if you need more time, schedule a follow-up. The willingness to adapt itself demonstrates the cooperative spirit this whole workbook is about.

When someone says “Maybe tomorrow”: Agree to postpone, but pin down a specific time. “Of course. How about after dinner tomorrow, around seven?” Without a specific commitment, “tomorrow” often becomes “never.”

In each of these situations, the process of negotiating when and how to have a conversation is itself a form of communication. How you handle this process sets the tone for the eventual discussion and can even strengthen the relationship. You are practicing patience, flexibility, and respect — the very qualities you’re developing throughout this workbook.

Now that we’ve faced the fear directly — and seen that a “no” can become a doorway rather than a wall — you may be ready for a deeper question. Before you can explain your intentions clearly to someone else, you need to know what those intentions actually are. And that turns out to require a moment of honest self-reflection.

2.7 Clarifying Your Intentions for Yourself

Before you can effectively explain your intentions to others, you need to clarify them for yourself. This is worth a moment of honest reflection before any important conversation.

Ask yourself: What do I actually need from this conversation? Do I need to share information, solve a problem, express a feeling, make a request, repair a relationship? Sometimes our surface intentions mask deeper needs. I might think I want to argue about the dishes, when what I really need is reassurance that my partner still values our shared life together.

Consider the context, too. What is the other person likely to be feeling right now? How much time and emotional energy is this conversation going to require? Am I asking for something small, or something that will take real effort from them?

And here is a question worth borrowing from Carol Dweck’s growth mindset work (which we explore in depth in Challenge Seven): What would a successful version of this conversation look like? Not a fantasy in which you win and they lose — but a real exchange in which both people feel heard, respected, and closer to a workable outcome. Holding that image in your mind, even briefly, can change how you open the conversation.

Once you’ve reflected on these questions, you can formulate a clear intention, drawing from the list of fulfilling intentions presented in the next section:

“I want to share my experiences and feelings about what happened at work this week.”

“I’d like to explore some possibilities concerning our summer plans — I don’t need a decision, just your thoughts.”

“My intention is to resolve the conflict we’ve been having about the budget. I think it will take about half an hour.”

“I’d like to express my appreciation for something you did that meant a lot to me.”

Your intention should be specific, positive, and focused on what you can control — your own actions and responses, not the other person’s.

With your own intention clarified, a question naturally arises: just how many kinds of conversations are there? You may be surprised to discover how wide a range of doors you can learn to open.

2.8 An Exploratory List of Fulfilling Conversational Intentions

As you become consciously familiar with various kinds of conversational intentions, you will find it easier to invite someone to have one of a wide range of conversations, to agree to someone’s conversational invitation, to say “no” or renegotiate an invitation from someone, to gently prompt a person to clarify what kind of conversation they’re trying to have with you, and to avoid conversations that are negative, self-defeating, or self-destructive.

What follows is a list of approximately thirty fulfilling conversational intentions. Don’t try to memorize it. It is a reference, not a test. Browse it the way you’d browse a menu at a restaurant — not to order everything, but to discover possibilities you didn’t know were available to you. Some of these will feel natural and familiar. Others may feel surprising or uncomfortable. The uncomfortable ones are often the most valuable to explore, because they mark the edges of your conversational comfort zone.

Although few conversations are exactly alike, for the sake of exploration we can group most English conversations into approximately forty overlapping types of intention. I classify about thirty of these as fulfilling and about twelve as unfulfilling. The goal here is not to develop rigid logical categories, but to suggest many of the “flavors” of conversational intention that can be distinguished in everyday talking and listening. As you explore the list, feel free to add your own entries.

Imagine each sentence starting with: “Right now I’d like to take about [number] minutes and…”

1. …tell you about my experiences and feelings — with no implied requests or complaints toward you, or so that you will understand the request, offer, or concern I want to raise.
2. …hear what’s happening with you.
   (More specific: hear how you are doing with a particular topic.)
3. …entertain you with a story.
4. …explore some possibilities concerning a particular topic — requiring your empathy but not your advice or permission.
5. …plan a course of action for myself — with your help, advice, and/or permission, or with you as listener and witness only.
6. …coordinate and plan our actions together concerning…
7. …express my affection for you, or my appreciation of you concerning…
8. …express support for you as you cope with a difficult situation.
9. …make a request about something you have done or said. (For better resolution of conflicts, translate complaints into requests — see Challenge Four.)
10. …confirm my understanding of the experience or position you just shared. (This usually continues with “I hear that you…,” “Sounds like you…,” “So you’re feeling kind of…,” or “Let me see if I understand you…”)
11. …resolve a conflict that I have with you about…
12. …negotiate or bargain with you about…
13. …work with you to reach a decision about…
14. …give you permission or consent to… / get your permission or consent to…
15. …give you some information about… / get some information from you about…
16. …give you some advice about… / get some advice from you about…
17. …give you directions, orders, or work assignments / get directions or orders from you.
18. …make a request of you — for action, time, information, an object, money, a promise, etc.
19. …consent to or decline a request you have made to me.
20. …make an offer to you — for action, information, an object, a promise, etc.
21. …accept or decline an offer you have made to me.
22. …persuade or motivate you to adopt a particular point of view.
23. …persuade or motivate you to choose a particular course of action.
24. …forgive you for… / ask for your forgiveness concerning…
25. …make an apology to you about… / request an apology from you about…
26. …offer an interpretation of what something means to me / ask for your interpretation.
27. …offer an evaluation of how good or bad I think something is / ask for your evaluation.
28. …change the subject of the conversation and talk about…
29. …have some time to think things over.
30. …leave or end this conversation so that I can…

Exercise 2.1: Practicing the Conversation Before the Conversation

With a practice partner (or on your own, in your journal), try starting each of the conversations on the list in section 2.8. Begin with: “Right now I’d like to take about [number] minutes and…” Note which conversations feel easy to start and which feel more challenging. The challenging ones are often the most valuable to explore.

Your notes on the fulfilling intentions exploration:

Browsing this list of fulfilling intentions can expand your sense of what conversations are possible. But to see the full picture — and to understand what you’re growing away from as well as what you’re growing toward — it helps to look honestly at the conversational intentions that create suffering rather than connection.

2.9 Intentions Worth Avoiding

In order to be realistic about how people actually behave, I have included a second, shorter list that contains what I call conversational intentions that create problems for both participants.

1. To lie, deceive, or mislead (on extremely rare occasions partly redeemed by good overall intentions, but usually not)
2. To threaten with physical harm
3. To hurt or abuse
4. To punish (creates resentment, avoidance, and desire for revenge)
5. To blame (focuses on the past instead of the present and future)
6. To control or coerce — to force or influence someone against their will and consent
7. To manipulate — to influence someone without their knowledge and consent
8. To demean, humiliate, or shame — to try to make someone look bad in the eyes of others, or to try to make people doubt themselves or feel bad about themselves
9. “Stonewalling:” to deny the existence of a problem in the face of strong evidence and sincere appeals from others
10. To hide what is important to me from you, if you are an important person in my life
11. To suppress or invalidate someone’s emotional response to a given event or situation — as in “Don’t cry!”, or the even more coercive “You stop crying or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”
12. To withdraw from interaction in order to avoid the consequences of something I have done

These conversational intentions and related actions are unfulfilling because, at the very least, we would not like someone to do these things to us. And when we start conversations with these intentions, we teach and encourage others to do the same, and/or we teach them to avoid contact with us.

In our time, television, movies, popular music, and books continually present us with ready-made examples of all the above, plus examples of extraordinary sarcasm, cruelty, and violence. So, in the process of developing our own positive personal style of interaction, we may have to mindfully out-maneuver what is almost a cultural brainwashing in favor of cruelty and coercion, and against cooperation, respect, and kindness.

There are many moral arguments about these matters, and I leave it to you to decide the deep issues of morality. I would, however, like to point out three of the most serious pragmatic liabilities of these coercive and demeaning conversational intentions.

It will come back to you. The first pragmatic liability is that whatever we do to others, we teach others to do back to us, both in conversation and in life in general. This was brought home to me quite chillingly over a period of years as I observed a stressed-out, single-mother friend of mine use sarcasm as a way of trying to discipline her bright ten-year-old son. Quickly the ten-year-old became a teenager who would speak to his mother with the same withering sarcasm she had used on him. He spent the rest of his teen years with another family because their relationship had become unsustainable. (Notice the “already a trainer” insight at work here: she was training him in sarcasm, even though that was the last thing she intended. Every interaction is a lesson, whether we realize it or not.)

They will leave. The unfulfilling intentions on this list may provide some short-term satisfaction as ways of venting anger or frustration. But the second drawback is that anyone who can avoid being the target of such behavior will probably not stay around to be coerced or demeaned. And if someone can’t leave, no one involved will be happy.

Very bad things can happen. There are tragedies in recent years that illustrate how catastrophes can be created by coercive conversations. An engineer warned managers at the Challenger rocket site that cold weather would cause parts of the rocket to harden and fail. The managers “stonewalled,” the rocket was launched, and the astronauts on board died when the rocket exploded. An Air Florida airliner crashed on takeoff from a snowy Washington, D.C., airport, killing almost all passengers on board, because the pilot coerced the actively reluctant copilot into taking off when the plane had too much ice on its wings. (See the reading in Challenge One for more on this disaster.) And it has become a recurring sorrow in the United States that teenagers continually humiliated at school have returned to murder their classmates and teachers.

Exercise 2.2: Conversational Intentions to Grow Away From

To what degree do you find yourself relying on these kinds of conversations to influence the people in your life? What possibilities do you see for change? To what degree are you — or were you — an unwilling participant in such conversations? What possibilities do you see for change as you become more aware of conversational intentions, your own and those of others?

If you find yourself relying heavily on these negative behaviors in order to navigate through your life with other people, or if you find yourself continually confronting these behaviors in others, please consider the following three actions:

• begin practicing all of the positive conversation openers described in Section 2.8, above, in order to expand your conversational navigation skill
• start keeping a private journal about when and how your conversations become painful
• seek professional help from a therapist, counselor, or communication skills coach

Having explored both what we are growing toward and what we are growing away from, we can now step back and see how the practice of explaining your intent and inviting consent connects to the larger journey of this workbook.

2.10 The Spiral: How This Transformation Connects to All the Others

If you’ve been reading this workbook in sequence, you’ll recognize that explaining your intent and inviting consent draws on almost everything we’ve explored so far — and points toward everything that’s coming.

The “born to learn” connection (the Introduction). Most of us were never taught to name our conversational intentions. Our cultural autopilot simply doesn’t include this step. Recognizing that gap — without shame — is the first step toward filling it. You didn’t fail to learn this skill because something is wrong with you. You didn’t learn it because it wasn’t in your environment. Now it is.

The listening connection (Challenge One). When you explain your intent, you are making it easier for the other person to listen. You are giving them the “big picture” that allows them to hear your specific words in context. And when they respond — even if they say “not now” — you have an opportunity to practice the responsive listening described in Challenge One. These two skills are natural partners.

The three-sided triangle (the Introduction). When you explain your intent and invite consent, you are addressing all three sides of the triangle that every human group needs: you’re clarifying the task (“here’s what I need to accomplish”), you’re offering emotional respect (“I care enough about you to ask”), and you’re accommodating different temperaments (“I know you may need a moment to get ready for this”). This one small practice serves all three needs simultaneously.

The adverbs-to-adjectives insight (Challenge Seven). When you consistently explain your intentions respectfully and invite consent generously, you are not just using a communication technique. You are, in those moments, being a respectful, generous person. The adverbs of your conversations become the adjectives of your character. Naming your intent before launching into a conversation is a practice of constructive goodwill — and over time, that practice becomes part of who you are.

The “already a trainer” insight (the Introduction). Every time you model the habit of explaining your intent and inviting consent, you are teaching everyone who witnesses it that this is how conversations can begin. Your children absorb a new template. Your coworkers see a different possibility. Your friends notice that you treated them with a kind of respect they may not have encountered before. You are training people — consciously — in a better way to start important conversations.

The peer learning connection (Chapter Eight). Explaining intent and inviting consent is itself a skill worth practicing with a Purpose Partner or a Circle of Six. It feels awkward at first — most new skills do. Having someone to practice with, to role-play difficult openings, and to reflect with afterward makes the learning faster, deeper, and more durable. If you’re working through this workbook with a companion, this is a wonderful skill to practice together.

2.11 New Possibilities

As you become more consciously familiar with various kinds of positive conversational intentions available to you, you may find yourself empowered in ways that surprise you. You will find it easier to:

• Invite someone to have one of a wide range of conversations, depending on your wants or needs, or the needs of the situation.
• Agree to someone’s conversational invitation with greater clarity and willingness to participate.
• Say “no” — decline or renegotiate a conversational invitation from someone — without guilt.
• Gently prompt a person to clarify what kind of conversation they are trying to have with you and how much time and attention they need from you.

May all your conversations be lighter and clearer!

References for this Chapter

Please note: Because the chapters of this Workbook are often distributed as separate study documents, we reference a given book or article in every chapter where a reference may be needed.

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press, 1962.

Bales, Robert F. Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Addison-Wesley, 1950.

Cohen, Philip R., et al., editors. Intentions in Communication. MIT Press, 1990.

Deutschman, Alan. Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life. Harper Business, 2007.

Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006.

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2019.

Grice, H. P. “Logic and Conversation.” Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan, Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41–58.

Hamilton, Diane Musho, et al. Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart. Shambhala, 2020.

Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Rosenberg, Marshall B. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 3rd ed., PuddleDancer Press, 2015.