“We don’t exist if we don’t fight for who we really are” - an old Polish saying.
"I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach.
Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens,
but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communication skills.
It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves:
is there any 21-st century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?"
– Paul Barnwell
10 rules to a good conversation by Celeste Headlee:
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Don’t multitask. Be present in the conversation. Be in that moment.
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Don’t pontificate. Enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn.
“True listening requires a setting aside of oneself. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker becomes less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener.”
– M. Scott Peck
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t.”
– Bill Nye
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Use open-ended questions. Take a cue from journalists, start with who, what, when, where, why or how.
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Go with the flow. Don’t hold on to a thought so you can talk about it after the other finished talking. Stories and ideas will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind.
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If you don’t know, say that you don’t know. Assume you’re on the record and be careful about what you claim to be an expert in and what you claim to know for sure. Err on the side of caution, talk should not be cheap.
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Don’t equate your experience with theirs. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And more importantly, it is not about you. You have nothing to prove or to promote.
“I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers.”
– Stephen Hawking (when asked what his IQ was)
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Don’t repeat yourself. It’s condescending and/or boring.
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Stay out of the weeds. People seldom care about the details, they care about you and what you are like, about your experience.
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Listen.
“If your mouth is open, you are not learning.”
– Buddha (paraphrased)
“No man ever listened his way out of a job.”
– Calvin Coolidge
“Most of us don’t listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.”
– Stephen Covey
- Be brief.
“A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject.”
–Unknown
I can think of several of those rules I got down and several I don’t. Fortunately I don’t have to worry about #10 and #7, my posts are always brief and I never repeat myself on this forum. 
EDIT: Buddha did not talk about my “moth” you silly typo.
“Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.”
– Kevin Kelly
“No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.”
In honor of Love Bomb for Humanity:
“World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.”
– Dalai Lama XIV
“Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, yet less attached to it”
-Ram Dass
“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”
– Ashleigh Brilliant
“Every great change is preceded by chaos”
– Deepak Chopra, when asked about reconciliation
“When you want to hear with your ears don’t listen with your ears. When you want to see with your eyes, don’t look with your eyes. When you want to understand with your mind, don’t think with your mind. Listen, see, and understand with the Tao (the deeper intuitive nature of your being)”
— Ram Dass
This is so cool!
on the chapter regarding honesty…
“to be transparent is a relief. Muddy water hides a host of unpleasant surprises. Clear water shows us the bottom of the sea ----- the rubbish and debris if they are there, but also the multicolored fish, shells, starfish.
Honesty allows us to look into someone’s eyes and through them into the heart, because there is no veil. no fiction, it allows us to let ourselves be seen ----- and look back without averting our eyes.”
the power of kindness by piero ferrucci
“The Great Way* is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.”
The Third Chinese Patriarch Of Zen
“The price of discipline is always less than the pain of regret.”
-Nido R. Qubein
I can say by personal experience how real this is. I slacked off for a year while a brother of mine did not and he put out an amazing book that blazed through the entire town and there was an entire celebration with a huge launch party, meanwhile myself (the previous star) was almost not thought of. Could have been me, but I made my choice to slack off that year. Never doing that again.
"Dude, let’s be honest with one another. We are who we are. What does it matter in the end? Let’s dance till all of this ends”. - Varuna on Dragon Reborn
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun".
Alan Watts
" Well, one of the most radical and powerful forms of action is the transmission of one’s intention, of one’s film, without worrying about what is happening around.
Usually you find yourself passively watching the movie that has happened to you and that runs in your reality. More precisely, someone “introduced it to you and made you turn it around”. It is something that you accept as due.
Look at the screen of reality and repeat in your thoughts what is happening there. Yes, things are bad. What has been accomplished has been accomplished. And what will happen next, it is not difficult to imagine: that and that. The worst expectations.
This is how practically all people react because most of us, by nature and level, are made up of receivers, not transmitters. And so it has always been, with rare exceptions, since the time of the birth of our civilization.
The transmitters, creators and architects, were our “gods”, while we have always been receivers, or consumers and postulants. Our psyche is entirely subject to information coming from outside. What is on the screen, we have it in mind, and not vice versa. What we see, we draw " Vadim Zeland hacking the matrix
There’s a room. A small boy enters with a candle. The man in the room (referring to the candle) asks: “Tell me where this light comes from.”
The boy blows out the candle and replies: “If you tell me where this light went I’ll tell you where it comes from.”
– Sufi parable
“For us, there is no spring. Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.”
–Conan The Barbarian