Our Story . Learning to Pay Attention

For the better part of four decades, Jim Henderson + Jim Hancock have been learning to pay attention.

“It’s funny,” they write, “how on one hand, we pay attention to loudmouths and louts insulting each other without regard for truth … because they reinforce our beliefs and values — or at least entertain us.

On the other hand, we are deeply attached to celebrity empathizers who listen on our behalf. We pay them to model what paying attention looks like when it’s well-produced and perfectly coifed. We’ve come to think of this as a rare gift granted to a special few instead of a gritty skillset anyone can acquire with determination and practice. There’s a big difference between aspiring to pay attention and operationalizing it in ways that train us to become the sort of people who connect — repeatedly and on purpose — with others who have real differences in opinions, beliefs, motivations, and lived experience.

Our first project together took us from Seattle to Peoria Illinois to make a documentary about a rabbi, an imam, and a born-again evangelical preacher who didn’t walk into a bar but did walk deeply into each other’s lives. We took that story on, in part, because we were looking for a proof of concept.

Over many years, we had developed a hypothesis about how some people decide to cross the difference divide and how they actually do it — not just once, under special circumstances, but over and over again. Poring over a hundred hours of footage for the movie, we were looking for evidence of paying attention in ways that don’t require anyone to become an expert in “the art of listening,” that don’t pressure anyone to violate a good conscience, and that also don’t turn into a shouting match.” We were looking for confirmation that there are practices anyone can employ when listening to others who disagree or are simply different. 

As it happens, we ended up calling our movie No Joke … because, first, everyone we told about the project broke into a wide grin before we even finished describing the premise. They were way ahead of us.

The second reason we decided to call the film No Joke was the seriousness of those three leaders in Peoria, and the seriousness of those they led. They were unassuming, intelligent — funny as all get out — and they were not kidding around. 

The heroes of No Joke had counted the cost of their controversial friendship — each of them lost congregation members on account of their relationship — and, every time there was a conflict, they decided it was worth it to keep going, not because they agreed with each other about religion, or politics, or immigration, or even sports… they decided it was worth it because they came to respect, and then love each other.

All this rang true to what we’d found over years of testing this sort of trust-building in less concentrated, shorter-term friendships.

To be clear, if we hadn’t uncovered the relational practices we expected to find in Peoria, we would’ve still had a good movie because the story of their friendship is so good. But we did find the practices we expected. Talking in depth with the rabbi, the imam, and the preacher — and interviews with their families and colleagues, mutual friends, city officials, and members of their congregations — confirmed our hypothesis.

Practicing the Practices 

Once our three heroes watched the first cut of the No Joke movie, they gave us their blessing to structure the final half-hour around what we call The 3Practices. While, of course, they’d never used that jargon to describe their journey, they instantly recognized how the 3Practices were reflected in the weaving of their story on the screen.

They had, from the beginning, practiced being unusually interested in each other. That’s Practice One.

Despite broad and deep disagreements on very important matters, each of them chose repeatedly to stay in the room with difference That’s Practice Two.

Each of them — the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian — knowing a great deal about the historical and contemporary landscape of harmful encounters between some advocates of their respective religious traditions, nevertheless chose to not compare their best with each other’s worst. That’s Practice Three.

We’d seen these practices before — between opposing political figures … between leaders in labor and management … between people from antagonistic racial and ethnic groups … between women and men … between religious folk who believe their counterparts are sadly mistaken at best and, at worst, are wolves in sheep’s clothing … we’d seen these practices between people who couldn’t agree about much of anything, but still decided to respect each other as human beings. 

What we hadn’t seen anyone do was put the puzzle together to give us a clear picture of how these practices mesh to enable ideological opposites to admit that agreement is overrated because, real life includes a lived experience everyone recognizes (once it’s pointed out): When people like each other, the rules change. For better or worse, we make allowances for people we care about … or need … or both.

What if we learn to expand the circle of those we care about — on purpose, in good faith, without violating our consciences….

When we toured with the No Joke movie and its three protagonists, we found that, as much as audiences loved the three men — and people were crazy about them — what folks asked about most was variations on the question How can I take the 3Practices home with me?

That’s when we started experimenting with invited guests in living rooms, restaurants, and houses of worship in Seattle. Seattle is one of America’s most politically divided cities. To be sure, the divide in Seattle is not equal … Seattle is overwhelmingly liberal/progressive. Which means people who retain conservative views in Seattle don’t do so by accident or because it’s inherited from their parents … they mean it.

So, when we got folks from the left and right together to talk about politics, morality, racial equity, economics, immigration, religious convictions, gender, law and law enforcement, culture wars and shooting wars, there was no shortage of strongly held, passionately stated opinions.

Before the two of us joined forces in Humane Resources, we both spent decades studying how people form and communicate beliefs and opinions, handle conflict around deeply held values, and in some instances, change their minds. Together, we had a pretty good tool kit.

For two years, 3Practice Circles were the lab where we tested everything we were thinking in carefully curated exchanges between ideological opposites. Our monthly gatherings in Seattle and occasional out-of-town events, put us in spaces with ten, or a few dozen, sometimes a few hundred people, willing to tackle tough questions in public. 

In the beginning, we started with a three-minute clock for volunteers to state their opinions and beliefs, followed by clarifying questions from others in the Circle … but three minutes turned out to be too much time. Ironically, when people knew they weren’t going to be interrupted, almost no one could fill three minutes. So we cut back to two minutes, finding it easy to give volunteers another minute if they couldn’t wrap it up before the alarm dinged. 

We learned that anyone can listen for two minutes to someone they disagree with. Because they can see the clock, they know it won’t go on for five or ten minutes … and they know they’ll have a chance to ask questions soon.

We tested several approaches before deciding to insist that every clarifying question begin with the phrase “I’d be curious to know." We tested and re-tested, concluding, that ”I’d be curious to know" yields better results than "I would be curious to know" or "I’m curious to know."

We started calling our gatherings 3Practice Circles — because people look at each other across a circle and practice the Practices with their allies and opponents.