Say your third thought
Craig Freshley
Craig Freshley is a professional meeting facilitator, speaker, and author with an inspiring attitude and a well-earned reputation for helping groups be efficient, harmonious, and productive.
Good Group Advice
from Craig Freshley
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I’ve just been learning about a project called “Can We?” where high school students from several different high schools came together and learned how to talk with each other about really hard things.
One of those high school students is Coutia. She attends Deering High School in Portland, Maine. She had this idea that it’s probably best not to say your first thought, but you should always say your third thought. I asked her to explain that idea. Here’s what she said.
“We were having this really intense dialogue on race and it was just, for the first hour and a half, it was just screaming back and forth with people waiting for one person to finish talking and then jumping in. And in the midst of that there was this one girl who did an impassionate speech about what it’s like to be a person of color and the response that was given by another person’s opinion just really irked me. Because I was like, that did not come from a place of really understanding someone else’s feelings. That came from a place of like ‘Oh, you’re done talking now I’m going to talk.’ And it really made me think about how people should take a moment, pause and say their third thought (or maybe not the first thing that comes to mind). And I think that’s when I really adopted the motto of: ‘Say my third thought.’”
I made a short video about this. You can watch it below or read the transcript and see related resources h?ere.
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