In a thinking environment âencouragementâ returns to its literal meaning: to give courage. It gives us courage to go to the unfamiliar edge of our thinking. In order to do that we have to trust that there will be no competition between us as thinkers. We have to champion each otherâs mutual excellence as thinkers. And so you could say that the component of encouragement converses steadily with the component of equality.
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Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them âthe ten components of a thinking environmentâ. We will explore them in depth in a little while because when we live them, as a system of being, we and the world around us do begin to change.
This âthinking environmentâ starts and ends with the promise not to interrupt each other. It really does. I know that sounds too simple a thing to change a life, much less a world. But that simple promise is loaded. Like an atom. Take it apart and you see an unimaginable force, a force that generates the brilliance of life, in this case the brilliance of independent thinking.
And in that promise, too, there is a rich colony of catalysts. There are at least ten conditions â the âcomponents of a thinking environmentâ I mentioned, conditions we are providing when we give attention and donât speak. These âcomponentsââ attention, equality, ease, appreciation, feelings, encouragement, information, difference, incisive questions and place â we will explore in fresh detail later. The point here is that they actually generate thought. To decide to live them is to decide to cherish independent human thinking.
People want to think for themselves more than they want to think as someone else. Offering people ideas, only when they ask us, and only through the language of information and experience, keeps them thinking for themselves. And ironically that language increases the chances that our ideas will penetrate. The language of information and experience is not an interruption. The language of advice is.
We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to âshare the stageâ equally.
When the practical or emotional investment in the outcome of a thinking pair is potentially high, the chances of its working are potentially low. And with independent thinking you just never know what territory it will wander aimfully into. So I would look somewhere more lateral for this partner.