This month marks nine years since we hosted the very first book discussion of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, in Jackson, Mississippi, which planted the seed that became End It For Good.
One thing that hasn’t changed from the very beginning is how often people comment on the respectful, winsome style of our communication. They enjoy it. It helps them engage. This is not by accident. How we communicate has always been just as important to our culture and mission as what we communicate because our goal has always been to invite people who don’t yet agree with our perspective to learn, think, and consider changing their minds. As we’ve said internally for years, we don’t want to preach to the choir, we want to grow the choir. Many of you do too.
So we want to share some of the principles behind how we communicate, and we hope you’ll find some nuggets that empower you to share your passion in ways that draw people toward the mission instead of push them away.
5 Keys to Constructive Conversations
1. Respect
Even opening the mental door to considering if we’ve been wrong about something is really hard for humans. For people to open that door, they need to feel safe, and they only feel safe when they feel respected. We work really hard to respect people, period, no matter how they think on the issues we work on. We’re asking them to respect us enough to listen, and to respect people struggling with addiction enough to care about their lives and health. Respect across differences is the foundation of End It For Good’s approach.
2. Integrity
Most of the education people have gotten about drugs throughout their lives has come in the form of fear-based messaging that has relied a lot more on feelings than fact. Fear is effective if the goal is blind obedience, because fear shuts down the thinking and reasoning parts of our brains. We committed early on at End It For Good not to use the tactics of the drug war to fight it. Our goal is for people not to be afraid. We want them thinking, asking questions, following evidence, and using reason. For us, this is a commitment to integrity in how we communicate. We try hard to tell the truth without sensationalizing or manipulating.
3. Dialogue
It took Christina a year and a half from the time she started wondering “Have I been wrong?” until she had confidently changed her mind about the best way to reduce harm from drugs. Changing our minds is not easy, and it often requires learning, wrestling, and figuring out how a new perspective fits into our current value system. This isn’t just true for rethinking drug policy, it’s true for all significant changes. Just ask any parent who has changed the way they approach their child’s addiction. It’s really hard to go from “tough love, let them hit rock bottom” to learning that there are other ways, to working through the guilt of things you’ve done and said already, to actually implementing a new way of engagement. People need time and safety to rethink ideas and beliefs. Open, non-judgmental dialogue is the best way to give them the space necessary to explore.
4. Curiosity
People think the way they do for a reason, and it’s a combination of a million experiences alongside a million messages they’ve picked up. Early on in our advocacy, before End It For Good became a nonprofit, Christina was posting on Facebook about what she was learning, and a woman messaged her privately to ask if she was anti-law enforcement. Christina hadn’t said anything against law enforcement, but she was questioning the laws we were asking them to enforce. Turns out this woman was the wife of a deputy sheriff, so when she saw Christina post about rethinking our laws, she read that as being against police. Only curiosity about the people you’re talking to can help you understand why they think the way they do, and what they’re hearing, even if it’s not what you’re saying. Helpful communication is based on the audience, not the speaker.
5. Listening
A hallmark of End It For Good events is that we spend the majority of the event listening to feedback from attendees. Our flagship events are two hours long, with the first 30 minutes dedicated to our giving a presentation on the ideas we’re asking people to consider. Then we pass a microphone around the room and everyone gets one minute to say what they think. As long as they’re respectful, they can say anything they want, including that they think all of the ideas are crazy. No one is corrected, even if they say something factually false. What we’ve found is that when people are given a space to listen, learn, and wrestle, they actually engage. When they don’t have to worry that they’ll be called out publicly, they risk sharing what they really think, which is the beginning of dialogue. It is so hard not to correct people who say things that aren’t true, but the goal of an event for us isn’t to only have facts presented. It’s to open a dialogue with the people who attend, and listening to them as equals is the first step.
How to Make Change Happen
This may all sound like a waste of time to you, but it’s based on the evidence of how people change their minds. We didn’t know that when we started; we just tried to create the best opportunity for people to learn and consider new ideas, and through trial and error, this is what created the lightning-in-a-bottle experience people love about our events and our work more broadly. We didn’t know why it worked so well until we read David McRaney’s How Minds Change and several of Jonah Berger’s books. Turns out, treating people like we want to be treated is pretty transformative.
As you invite people to the movement, lay down your sword and get a cup of coffee with someone instead. We’re bridge-builders, not warriors, meeting people where they are and inviting them on the journey. And wherever they land, they’re always people worthy of respect.