MEETING PROTOCOL

The Three Principles

• Rotating Leadership
• Sharing Responsibility
• Relying on Spirit

The Three Practices

• Speaking with intention: Intentional speaking means contributing what has relevance, heart, and meaning to the topic of the moment.  Story, rather than facts and figures, is the heart of intentional speaking.
• Listening with attention:  Attentive listening means focusing clearly on what someone else is saying.  To listen attentively, we need to reprogram ourselves to listen without competing for attention or preparing to interrupt.
• Self-monitoring our impact and contributions:  Conscious self-monitoring is the ability to consider the impact of our words and actions before, during, and after we interact.

The Talking Piece: Talking piece council is a formal pattern of meeting.  A talking piece is a designated object that is passed hand to hand and grants the holder of the piece the chance to speak without interruptions.  One person at a time has the floor, while other members listen attentively.  The purpose of using a talking piece is to guarantee that people are heard, or have the opportunity to be heard.  The presence of the talking piece controls the impulse to pick up on what a person is saying, to interrupt with humor, sympathetic remarks, argument, commentary, or diverting questions.  It raises our awareness of how customary it is for us to interrupt each other consciously or unconsciously over-powering each other's words, instead of holding them within the container of the group and letting them sink in as individual contributions. 

The excerpts above were taken from the book "Calling the Circle" by Christine Baldwin.