Take it away. Lou, yeah. Thanks very much. Yeah. So today I'm going to talk about a community project, a community listening project. I often call it a public listening project. In my local town, it's called Petaluma conversations and, and the purpose of it is bridging political and social divides through deep listening, and we use the empathy circle practice as our method of working, although I don't call it empathy circle, mostly because we're trying to attract people from both sides of the spectrum. And I was a little worried that conservatives might feel like empathy is squishy. So I just I say, we're using a mutual listening practice, although the materials that I distribute does have a link to the empathy center. So you know, people that explore it more will will discover that connection. And as you can see at the bottom of the slide, I do this with my partner, John Crowley, who in the context of the aquas Community Foundation. And aquas is a nonprofit that is run by John Crowley, and he and the way Petaluma conversation got started was John is a very, very well known community organizer in Petaluma, and he came to me and said, this was like, I don't know, seven years ago now, he came to me and said, there's this terrible controversy that's going on around a public art project in Petaluma, and people that I've known for a long time have really different opinions about this, and it's really shocking how mean they're being to each other, like and attacking each other, and he wanted to know if there was some way that we might be able to have a discussion about it that was more connecting. And so I said, Sure, I'd be glad to help. And so we had an evening where he invited all these people, and I brought, actually facilitators in Edwin, and Bill came for that night, and a couple other people and that I that I trained and and we had the evening and people who were very mean to each other online, sniping and judging and everything, they actually, you know, listen to each other other. They listen to each other as a result of doing the circles. And, you know, and like one person said the other, you know, you're, I understand you much better, and you're much more, you're much nicer in person than you are online. And so this started John and me together doing creating this thing called Pedal Petaluma conversations. Let's see here. So our purpose and we when we gather people, so we do Petaluma Petaluma conversations seasonally. So we usually do once, once in the winter and then spring, and then summer and fall. And we do it in four week a four week series of conversations a week apart. And we gather people at the beginning in a big circle, and we talk about our purpose and our the principles on which we're operating, and we describe the empathy circle process. So we say explicitly their purpose is to come together, to listen to each other, to get to know one another and understand each other, even if we don't agree with each other. And you can see a picture. This is after we've broken up from the big circle. We break into small circles, empathy circles, and we do this in the in the library. And then we why do we do this? We tell people we do this to connect with and learn about people in our community who are different than we are. So we're very explicitly. Our purpose is to help people connect across differences, to be heard about whatever is important to each of us and to build and this is really key. And I talked to the facilitators about this all the time. People are organizing the project. You know, we're not just trying to hold sit public listening sessions, that's part of it, but we're also trying to build resilience in the community for responding to difference, you know, with curiosity and understanding rather than what what typically happens, which is, you know, people arguing with each other, people trying to convince each other, people analyzing each other and demonizing each other. So these are the principles, and we read these at the at the opening of every session. So everyone wants to be heard and understood. That's one of our basic assumptions. We are. Here to understand each other, not interrogate, argue or try to convince each other or to problem solve. And while political problems do need problem solving, and actually all kinds of conflict actually need problem solving, mutual understanding is a very important step before trying to solve the problem, and that's what gets jumped over, skipped over, most of the time in conflict resolution is mutual understanding, and so we say explicitly that Petaluma conversations is just about mutual understanding. It's about just trying to understand each other and get to know one another. We're not here to try to solve problems with each other. Another important principles that and this is important to remind people of this, that showing understanding for someone and what they're saying is not agreeing with them. And sometimes people are reluctant to reflect back or to sit with someone who's very different than them, because they're worried that it means that they agree with them, you know, or that they're doing some kind of agreement. And that's so we say that explicitly. And then another principle is, and this is kind of, you know, instead of the problem solving, you know, we trust that people will find their own solutions or decide to change their minds or not as they see fit, and that the mutual understanding that happens during the conversation, it makes a contributions to people's individual choice about whether they decide to change their mind or not. And so we just try to make that explicit. So then also we say that people were asking people to have the intention of participating with curiosity, which means curiosity about others and what's important to them, and to participate with openness. And that means being open about myself and being open to different points of view. And again, that doesn't mean agreeing with them, it just means being open to hearing them and understanding them, and then honesty, which is saying what's important to you, even if it's different than what other people are saying. So you know, and that's a really important principle, well, of the empathy circle, you know that speak freely. The instructions to the speaker in an empathy circle are, say whatever you want, and the idea is speaking freely, yeah, and if there's any guidance really in the empathy circle, and this is really important part of the empathy circle dynamic is the emphasis is much more on listening. So if there's any guidance about what to do in the empathy circle, it's really for the listener. You know, how, how the speaker says whatever they want, and it's the listener who has to reflect back what they're hearing without judging and without doing the other things that we normally do in conversation, which would be argue, agree or disagree. You know, say what we think that's reserved for when it's your turn to speak. And then mutuality following the structure provided meaning the empathy circle structure to ensure that everyone gets a chance to be heard to their satisfaction. And that issue of mutuality, that's also really key, because what happens? You know what happens in normal conversation? If you have a group of people, you don't you don't get mutuality. That does not happen naturally. So it's the structure of the empathy circle that really assures that everyone gets a chance to be heard and to their satisfaction. And that's that's so important for people having a satisfying experience and feeling heard. So this is how we do it. We gather in a large group. Typically, we have between somewhere between 15 and 25 people. That's a typical evening. And we have, we meet in a big circle. We do the introductions, which I just did about all you know, our philosophy and our principles, and I describe the emphasis goal practice. Sometimes we do a demo of what listening is, what reflection is, so that people get a chance to see and then we split into groups,