Dialogue attitudes
Trust
The first step is to trust your own words: don't hold them back, don't hide them, don't hoard them, don't swallow them back. What's said is said and cannot be taken back under the pretext that "that's not what you meant." Words betray us, and that's why they interest us. Words reveal something about us, and it's about reconciling ourselves with this "something" when we reject it. They also reveal something to others, who can teach you about yourself by evaluating them.
To think, then, one must risk speaking even if we are unsure of what we are saying; one must engage in thought without fear of ridicule, error, or transparency. One must trust oneself because what we say always has meaning, for ourselves or for others, even if we don't always agree on the same meaning.
The structured framework of philosophical dialogue, in any case, prevents violent reactions, unspoken assumptions, implicit attitudes, and other hasty judgments. This also requires trusting others: to question you in a desire to deepen your thinking, to object to clarify your hypotheses, and to hold up a mirror to yourself without indulgence or malice.
To be authentic
Being authentic means first and foremost not hiding, not avoiding reality, others, or oneself. Philosophical dialogue fosters the transition to authenticity. We know well, especially in the workplace, that we each play a role in society. Some are confined to one or two roles, while others have a wider range at their disposal.
But philosophical practice, as an exercise, is also a game. If we were to name it, it might be the game of "stepping outside oneself" to see what is happening elsewhere, often in the case of others. And in stepping outside ourselves, we are compelled to step outside our roles. For some, this is easy; for others, less so. This is why genuine people generally set an example for others: seeing that there is nothing to lose, they begin to set aside their usual games and enter into this new one.
To sit
Descartes already said in his time that haste was the most harmful thing for conducting one's thoughts properly. In our world where everything moves very fast, where we are hyper-connected and hyper-stimulated, the temptation is great to react impulsively and to do everything in a rush, supposedly to save time and get rid of one problem in order to deal with the next.
At the same time there is a very powerful prejudice of the time, which seems to transcend our borders, according to which "one should not judge others".
But we often fail to see that to make a very quick decision, to react, we still need to make judgments. We have to assign a value to one option over another and act immediately accordingly. In doing so, we spend our time making micro-judgments that are so rapid and automatic that we no longer even notice them. Some authors denounce this phenomenon, which they call cognitive biases. While this generally doesn't pose too many problems, it can have catastrophic consequences in crisis situations. The example often given is that of an airplane crash caused by the co-pilot not daring to criticize a flawed decision by the captain because he held the prejudice that: "If he's the captain, it's because he must know better than I do." This is a prejudice.
In philosophical practice, we often pause during dialogue, which can sometimes be a source of frustration for participants who want things to move faster. This allows us to examine what people are saying and to learn to listen, breathe, and reflect before reacting. Taking a moment to pause begins with letting go of what we call "compulsive speaking," which stems more from insecurity and fear than from a genuine desire to understand and move forward.
Taking a moment to reflect allows us to avoid being carried away by emotion and saying things "that go beyond what we think" (this expression probably deserves some further consideration). However, in a group dialogue, especially when we start to broach "sensitive subjects," tempers flare quickly, the pace quickens, thoughts begin to falter, and old habits start to take over, as we can see in "televised debates," which are a good example of everything that shouldn't be done in dialogue.
Therefore, one of the practitioner's main roles is to require participants to reflect but not react. This is achieved primarily through questioning, which often interrupts what some might call free thought but is more likely a nervous outburst. By questioning the subject who tends to react, they will regain their composure and can consequently resume their place in the dialogue, now with greater awareness.
To confront
To confront is to encounter otherness. Since thought is an encounter with something other than itself (a subject thinking about an object), confrontation is inherent to thought. To put it another way, as long as you don't confront something, you don't think. This is precisely why we need a problem to think and to divert the flow of thought from the path of habit.
Several levels of confrontation overlap during a workshop or consultation: first, there is the confrontation with one's own discourse, particularly through reformulation. Hearing someone reformulate your discourse is already a way of seeing yourself thinking and examining the meaning of your words.
It also means confronting another subjectivity, another subject: the other person takes hold of your words and interprets them. Meaning is now their responsibility; it eludes you, but you soon discover that the other person has this miraculous ability to preserve meaning by changing the words. Sometimes, the other person will even formulate your thought better than you could have yourself. In this sense, we can say that the other person always understands us better than we understand ourselves and is indispensable to us. The more foreign they are to us, the truer their judgment of us will be, because it will be suspect of neither complacency (close friendship, love) nor malice (jealousy, envy, rivalry).
Finally, there is the confrontation with the objective problem: the question posed (what future for our company, should I resume my studies, why can't we recruit the right profiles...), the conflicts to be appeased, the messages to be elucidated, the attitudes to be deciphered, etc. The range of dialogue skills will be used to achieve this rigorously, especially when the dialogue is collective and brings together divergent interests that will need to be brought to light.
To commit, to take risks
It may seem surprising to emphasize risk-taking and commitment in an activity that primarily involves thought. This would be true if it were academic philosophy. But in philosophical practice, thought cannot be separated from emotions and behavior. In being, everything is interconnected, for better or for worse. Thinking requires engaging with hypotheses to see where they lead us, even if we are unsure of anything, even if we don't know the truth, even if we are neither an expert nor a specialist. It must be acknowledged that this is difficult, especially in a group, because we fear being judged. But defending a hypothesis does not require subscribing to it: dialogue is not an exercise in convincing others of anything, but rather in making them reflect on themselves and on a problem that concerns the group.
Moreover, nothing prevents us from supporting a hypothesis and then going back to modify it, or even supporting the opposite, as in an exercise already practiced in the Middle Ages and which was called controversy (disputatio).
It is striking, however, that even when there is no immediate stake, most of us hesitate to commit to an answer when we are unsure, hesitate to explore the consequences of our hypothesis, and hesitate to object to someone for fear of offending them. We must therefore learn to "take our chances," like in tennis, even if it means stepping off the court, in order to fully experience the exercise. After all, who knows what someone else might do with a well-placed shot?
Laughing at oneself
Laughter is generally provoked by the discrepancy between what we expected from a situation and what actually happens. Laughter is therefore a form of awareness of a gap, a disconnect. Like all forms of awareness, it is fostered in philosophical practice. Sometimes we laugh at ourselves, other times at others, or at both.
Laughter allows us to distance ourselves from our emotions; it's a quick way to relax in a tense situation. It's a healthy faculty, especially when we often realize that what we're saying is absurd, empty, or contradictory. We can often feel foolish and pointless for getting worked up over trivial matters when we refuse to see what truly matters.
Laughter allows us to normalize phenomena that we emotionally overwhelm. Saying something foolish in public, for example: what will people think of me? They'll say I'm incompetent, that I have no business being in that position if I say such things. Well, no. Philosophical practice teaches us that before we can be collectively intelligent, we must first reconcile ourselves with our individual and collective foolishness, because not only is this foolishness funny, but acknowledging it allows us to find peace. And to think clearly, to be effective, fair, and relevant, we must know how to "keep a cool head when everyone else is losing theirs," to paraphrase Kipling.
There is humility in those who know how to recognize their own stupidity, without making a matter of state out of it.
Being present
Being present to oneself, to others, and to the world seems to have become a luxury, so numerous are the temptations to pull us away from the present: worries, regrets, fears, distractions, the obsession with always being up-to-date with the latest news, the compulsion to check our emails or share a post on Facebook. Any excuse is good enough to escape the present moment, which is probably why meditation retreats are so popular with overworked professionals. Philosophical practice has this in common with meditative practices, and especially the mindfulness movement: it invites you, even strongly encourages you, to be in the here and now. This is also a significant difference from psychological practice, where the search for connections to the past and the individual's history plays a major role.
Being present is embodied by awareness of what we say at the moment we say it, of what others are saying, and of the emotions that flow through us and others during the dialogue. Yet reflection is also a form of distancing oneself from and escaping the immediate present. Consequently, the specificity of this practice lies in alternating moments of pure self-presence and interruption of reflection to fully receive what is happening—an attitude similar to the practice of holding or suspending judgment (see also phenomenological reduction)—with moments of "metacognition" where one extracts oneself from the present to account for the phenomenon through reason: why did I say that, why does this person adopt this attitude, what objection can you raise with this person, etc.
In relation to others, it is a matter of being on equal footing with them in order to grasp what is unfolding, the inflections of their thought and the tone of their being, to paraphrase Heidegger. It is a matter of seeing how others reason and resonate. In this respect, philosophical practice is as much an intellectual practice as an existential one: it touches upon the thoughts, attitudes, and emotions of a subject who is restored to a whole. A human being.
Understanding emotions
Understanding them means recognizing them when they arise, in oneself or others, and naming them. The next step is to give them meaning by explaining what they reveal, if the person wishes to discuss them. If they hinder dialogue, the aim is to soothe them using the same method in order to continue the conversation and remain on the delicate thread of reason.
Emotions tell us about ourselves, and it certainly makes sense to ask why we feel a particular emotion at a given moment. However, this questioning marks the boundary with psychology, since emotion will draw upon the individual's personal, even intimate, history: it is their responsibility to continue their exploration with a professional psychologist if they wish, but we consider our work to end here.