Opening
The conversation you keep postponing takes up more room than the conversation itself would. Most of us were never taught how to walk into a hard dialogue with anything better than dread. Ame-Lia Tamburrini offers a different posture, one built in circle, where listening is the work and belonging is the ground.
The idea
Ame-Lia Tamburrini is a consultant and circle facilitator who delivers her work through circles for organisations and communities. Her framework begins with the shape itself. In a circle of four to five people, which she finds richest, a talking piece moves around the group.
If you do not hold it, your job is to listen, and nobody premeditates what they will say. Even talkative participants report the relief of not needing to jump in and fix.
Ame-Lia described how senior leaders, often the most uncomfortable in circle at first, gradually unlearn the habit of arriving with the answer.
She traced her own path through a childhood where conflict was avoided and feelings stayed bottled, until she recognised that the sense of never belonging was inner work she had not yet done. That realisation is why belonging is the centre of her practice now.
She is honest about the limits of digital belonging, encouraging teams to protect some in person time even though circle can work on video calls. She said:
“Difficult conversations are opportunities for growth and learning and that is something to get excited about.”
Her practice is to set an intention before any hard dialogue. Not that the other person will change, but that her intention is connection, to understand the person in front of her. She also described the empty chair exercise, rehearsing a conversation aloud with no one in the seat.
Belonging, she argued, begins with knowing yourself so well that it does not depend on the room.
What I took from it
Ame-Lia’s talking stick reminded me of the Friday heart circles in our ecovillage, where the same rule applied and the silence did the heavy lifting. I have carried that into work settings ever since.
When I stopped rehearsing my turn and started listening for what was alive in the room, the difficult conversations became shorter and kinder. The talking piece does the discipline for you, which is a kindness to everyone in the room.
The practice travels well, and it asks nothing more than patience and a small object.
Three things to try this week
- Before one hard conversation this week, write a single intention at the top of your notes, to understand rather than to win. Read it again just before you begin. Keep the intention visible on the table during the conversation itself. The written word steadies the intention when the dialogue gets lively.
- Practise the empty chair. Say the opening sentences of the conversation aloud once to an empty room, then notice what you want to adjust before the real thing. The rehearsal will show you which sentences are yours to change. Notice which sentences you would never say in the room, and start there.
- Host a ten minute circle with three or four colleagues or friends where each person speaks once, uninterrupted. Use any small object as the talking piece. Close by letting each person say one word for how the circle felt. Ten minutes is enough. The shape does the work, not the length.
Watch and go deeper
The conversation with Ame-Lia is embedded below. Watch it for the circle demonstration and the belonging discussion. Explore her work at humconsulting.ca.
Explore Ame-Lia Tamburrini’s website.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks, and you can subscribe at the Rediscovering Connection channel.
Close
Belonging is not a perk that arrives with a bigger team. It is practised in the shape of how we meet, one uninterrupted turn at a time, until the shape becomes culture. Explore the certification, then sit with the question this article closes on.