The values of dialogue

I was asked to write a one-page about values of dialogue. Here are some thoughts related to that...

One might say that there are different definitions of dialogue starting from those ones that define dialogue as old as humanity when first two humans met each other and started exchanging verbal or non-verbal communication. But in its essence, dialogue is about people, the people who hold certain identities, values, personalities and even prejudices with themselves. And that's all that we share with each other when having dialogue. Dialogue is about sharing.

We can hear very often people telling about importance of active listening. Why not just listening? Because active listening means putting some efforts together in order to understand one's position, standpoints, attitudes or beliefs and to be able to interpret them in a right way, which is correct, transparent and true. But why is this important? It's important in order to avoid misunderstanding.

„There is no way to dialogue. Dialogue is the way.“ It happens primarily between two persons who are interested in exchanging their opinions and stories. Otherwise, it's about monologue and it's not about active listening neither about sharing.

Dialogue is about empathy. I put myself into position of another person who is dealing with certain life situation. We start dialogue to enable two-way communication and to show that we care and that we approach problems eventually with certain solutions. Dialogue is about finding the way that will make our life better.

Sometimes people have dialogue just to get certain information for themselves, but at the same time they enter, explore and discover a whole new world, the world that belongs to another person, the world that can enrich us in a way to start questioning our own standpoints and beliefs. Dialogue is about knowledge i.e. exploring, enriching and developing critical thinking.

Very often people tend to get in a dialogue with people of similar interests and lifestyle, but it can happen as well that those people have different opinion that can confront our own. Sometimes it can bring out certain feelings of confusion, despair or even isolation. The only way is to continue with dialogue. Dialogue connects people by showing us the beauty of diversity and bringing new friends to our life if we are to improve understanding. What really happened? By choosing dialogue instead confrontation, isolation or potential conflict, we actually choose to reduce prejudices, to avoid misunderstanding, to make better relations and to build new ones. We choose the mission of peace. Dialogue is about peacebuilding.

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