The Pie is a Lie: ➏ Lower the Priority of Winning

Let's look at winning.

I'm not going to dis winning.

Winning can be good

First of all a game with a winner—like chess—can be great fun for both players.

Whoops, I stepped outside of the game with a winner and included aspects outside the game such as the joy in puzzle solving and social interplay. Playing chess is fun! (Well, for many. Maybe being coerced to play chess would make both players feel like they lost overall in the ordeal. )

Winning can be important in discussion!

One case is in an emergency. "Step away from the cliff edge. Tell me more about how you believe you can fly." Or maybe the very short, "Duck!"

It might be long term, a consistent important plea. "I love you and I want you to enjoy life. I don't think that bottle can say the same to you. Please hear me."

Even so, the focus on winning can take away from all we can gain from fruitful dialogue...

Winning! Ha-ha! Or maybe not.

Sometimes the act of winning is the reward itself. I might not remember the argument, but I can chant, "I won! I won!"

We see this in humor all the time.

A common gag in movies is to have two arguing "Is so!" and "Is not!", yet somehow switching sides.

On the other hand, sometimes it is not that funny. In a meeting another argues against your position and yet somehow takes credit for it and "wins". A politician shuffles position in a debate just to say it is a win, not really caring about the core elements of the issue. One exclaims that he won a debate because his statement caused an opponent to become dumbfounded.

When winning in conversation, dialogue, or discourse becomes primary, we lose the cornucopia of the possible fruit of that exchange.

Framing the dialogue

Let's look at how we look at dialogue.

In Neil Gaiman's Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife," the TARDIS—inhabiting a human body for the first time—declares: "Biting's excellent. It's like kissing. Only there's a winner."

Idris sees moving from kissing to biting as adding a winner to a winner-less situation, maybe both are losers or are unlabeled. After the advancement to biting, an actor becomes a winner, thus making the other a loser.

I think that moving from kissing to biting is removing a winner.

There might be exceptions (such as aunt Bertha's kisses at Thanksgiving), but we usually think of kissing as win-win. When we move from biting to kissing (switching the order), we add a winner. Everybody wins!

If we consider dialogue to be potentially win-win, if we desire that win-win interchange, then we have taken a few steps to being ready to engage in dialogue that is fruitful. Jump in or plan on learning more.

Listening

As I have repeated, the first three steps to fruitful dialogue are listen, listen and listen. That helps us to disengage from the winning mindset. After listening, we realize that we have paused as in taking a breath, we see the setting as different, and we envision a potential abundance in conversation through what we have learned. But, what if I keep jumping into snapping up a win, or conversation cannot move forward because I am not able to get past the other's fixation on winning?

Safe-mode dialogue

I feel like I am an abecedarian in fruitful dialogue. We abecedarians need training wheels. One way is to put aside initial interaction as having anything to do with winning

The lie

We have so many preconceptions that tend to say the pie is fixed and limited. Based on valid experiences, too! Yet in looking closer at the psychology and mechanics of interchange we see hints that we can think beyond the bounds of the pie as we can think outside the box. Pie. Yum. Yet the word pie creates boundaries in our minds. I want more so you have to have less. We can now see that is not quite right. Here we see that it boils down to winning. The lie is telling us to fight. Let's put aside winning as the primary goal (or as any goal) and move to win-win.

What do you do when the other is caught up in wanting to win?

Is winning like capturing the other and moving that other across the line to your side?

When has an urgent need to win in a conversation come up?