Experiences of Braver Listening
By Joel Berman, Liz Spitzer, & Nancy Jo Chabot
Joel Berman
I was one of seven members of The Compassionate Listening Project who were invited to offer a breakout session at the 2024 Braver Angels National Convention in Kenosha, WI.
Our breakout, "Braver Listening," gave twelve Blue-leaning and twelve Red-leaning participants a 90-minute taste of the power of listening. The exercise of both silent and reflective listening can dissolve defenses and open our hearts and minds–not just to different views, but to the values beneath them.
The energy in the room was electric. At the conclusion of the session, nearly everyone stayed, eager to explore how CL’s practices might elevate the effectiveness of the work they do as Braver Angels.
What the participants didn't know was for the six months prior, my co-leader Yael Petretti and I spent many hours on Zoom with BA national field leaders, who coached us on the potentially off-putting impact that standard CL formats and phrases might have on conservative attendees.
While progressives might feel welcomed by a workshop that begins with a land acknowledgment statement and an invitation to share preferred pronouns, conservatives might experience discomfort and alienation. (If you’re a progressive, imagine how you’d feel at a meeting that begins with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing God Bless America.)
Our coaches also pointed out that many commonly used terms contain different political subtexts for conservatives vs. liberals—equity versus equality; undocumented immigrant versus illegal alien; democracy versus democratic republic. Each can mean different things to different people. [For more examples of the polarizing power of words, see allsides.com/translator].
Our coaches’ advice led us to replace many stock CL phrases with more neutral terms. We changed “Shared Agreement” to “Tips for Braver Listening”, “Triggers and Judgments” to “What to Do When You Become Hard of Listening”, and “Compassionate Listening” to “Deep Listening” (yes, even the word compassion contains strikingly different subtexts for conservatives and progressives). I believe the modifications we made were instrumental to the success of our workshop.
What Each Organization Teaches the Other
Braver Angels has solved a problem Compassionate Listening has not: genuine ideological diversity. Walk into a BA convention and you see an equal number of Reds and Blues meeting together, eating together, leading together. This is essential—because without the other side present, we only hear confirmations of what we already believe.
Conversely, BA struggles with something that’s core to CL: how to listen so deeply that we're changed by what we hear. CL’s methods offer listening that reaches beyond technique—listening to wounds, recognizing our own imperfections in the other's story, changing the world by starting with ourselves.
In Kenosha, I discovered that many Braver Angels hunger for this deeper work. BA’s own listening tool, called LAPP (Listen, Acknowledge, Pivot, Perspective) is easy to learn. It’s scalable brilliance. It has reached 70,000+ people. But scale and depth are often inversely related.
Philadelphia 2026
This June, I was back on a college campus and at the 2026 Braver Angels convention. Within the first 24 hours, something remarkable happened: five people who had attended our 2024 Kenosha CL session approached me to tell me how profoundly our “Braver Listening” offering had affected them. Two years later, each described how deep listening has stayed with them, shaped how they listen, and changed the quality of their conversations.
Their testimonials validated something I needed to hear: that CL has something to offer those already committed to bridging divides, and that such depth of listening, once experienced, doesn't fade.
The Structural Challenge
Despite CL’s commitment to listen to people ideologically different from us, our members and journey participants are almost exclusively liberals and progressives. Our homogeneity breeds blind spots. It magnifies implicit biases. It blunts our ability to recognize how the language we use and the rituals we choose can be unintentionally off-putting to the very people we must attract to build greater cross-partisan membership.
In Philadelphia, I learned that the US Constitution was built on the principle that conflict is necessary—that people who think differently must come together and act together. A sustainable republic needs many perspectives, held in tension.
If the Compassionate Listening Project is to more effectively contribute to the healing of our frayed and fragile social fabric, we need representation from all sides of the ideological spectrum. Cross-partisan inclusion is not optional—it's foundational to our mission.
Likewise, Braver Angels has something to learn from Compassionate Listening. Enduring transformation is more likely when we slow down to the speed of wisdom and listen to our opponents with our whole being.
The Pledge We Made Together
On the final afternoon of the 2026 Philadelphia convention, 900 delegates stood together, read this pledge out loud, and unanimously ratified it:
I pledge to be a courageous citizen—to choose curious listening over contempt, to build alongside those with different politics, and to embrace our shared duty to renew America's civic culture.
I thought of the Braver Angels from 2024 who carried the lessons of Compassionate Listening with them for two years. I recognized that such transformations happen not in plenaries and keynote speeches but in small-scale, heartfelt compassionate conversations, whether in breakout sessions or while breaking bread with your political opponent in a college cafeteria.
Braver Angels shows us what's possible when we insist the other side belongs. Compassionate Listening shows us that deeper, braver listening can catalyze the creation of true cross-partisan communities. Neither Braver Angels nor The Compassionate Listening Project is complete without the other.
Nancy Jo Chabot:
I was one of the three-person team from The Compassionate Listening Project who set up a display at the exhibit hall at the most recent Braver Angels conference, late June in Philadelphia. Braver Angels is a 10-year-old experiment in gathering people of different political views (identified mostly as "leans red" or "leans blue"). Braver Angels seeks to create opportunities to hear one another and practice appreciation for the human experiences behind the political leanings. The BA method begins with listening, followed by acknowledgment. I'm not a person who engages much in political discussion, but to be among 900 people who elevate listening as one of their highest values felt amazing. The appreciation showered upon TCLP was equally remarkable. People visited our table with great interest in workshops that teach listening skills, and those who had participated at the previous conference praised our workshop from before.
My takeaways: TCLP facilitators and community would benefit by attending this conference, which happens every two years. The BA community would benefit from the opportunity to receive TCLP introductory workshops. Being in physical presence with so many people who value listening was nourishing. There were plenaries and presentations that could help us expand our vision and understand where TCLP fits in the broader bridging movement.
I'll close with a small but meaningful interaction. Another person who spent much of the conference staffing a table in the exhibit hall, someone who clearly held different political views than my own, and I kept finding ourselves in conversation. After a few attempts to find our footing, we landed on common ground: the value of listening. We followed up by email a few weeks later:
B: While we may have differing viewpoints on some issues, I appreciated your warmth and curiosity, and I hope I was able to reciprocate as well.
N: Great to hear from you. I also really appreciated having that great space to walk up to someone who has come to different points of view, and just be human beings together in this complex world. Hope you do get up to New Hampshire, and reach out if you have time to grab a cup of coffee.
B: That sounds wonderful! I appreciated being able to share our different points of view with one another. I will definitely reach out when I plan my trip up to New Hampshire. I look forward to connecting then.
That, to me, is Compassionate Listening in action.
Liz Spitzer:
When I was asked whether I would consider attending the 2026 Braver Angels Convention, it felt out of the question. I was closing the school term and could not perceive myself adding to my already long to-do list. But life is funny.
Weeks prior, when I was sitting with how little time I had been giving my husband and how distracted I had been from our relationship and the care of the "space between us," I decided that we would get away the weekend of June 26-28. Well, it turns out–not only was I asked to attend by The Compassionate Listening Project, but my husband had been asked to attend by the national team of Braver Angels! Guess we were supposed to have a getaway weekend after all, in Philadelphia, representing our heart projects. What magical synchronicity.
The magic continued, and got better.
I cannot describe, even if I attempted to convey a felt sense, what it is like to be amongst more than 800 people from across the nation who came together because they share a common love: America. Not the America we are most often told about through the platforms we use for information, distraction, or to fill the silence. Rather, the America created by people with different ideas about life, united around a vision of the common good. The convention was a gathering of people who dreamed this dream.
I noticed that while many thought the way forward was square blocks, others thought round, and some thought oblong–they all wanted to help build a friendlier, more resilient world (a personal moon goal of mine, so please forgive the projection!). Isn't that what TCLP is trying to do as well?
Our Board President, a seasoned TCLP member, and I were spread throughout the meeting hall–the location of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 speech–when we encountered the concept of "the between." Keynote speaker Jim Ferrell asked, "How can we see the space between us? And how can we improve it?" He proposed that rather than looking AT each other, we do better to look at the space BETWEEN each other, and to allow healthy tension as part of the process of creating–like how different molecules, under pressure, form something vital: water.
We were all moved by this. When our TCLP cohort huddled afterward, we realized–among many things–that TCLP's teachings and practices help people manage, heal, restore, and reconcile the space BETWEEN them. This ripples across households, schools, workplaces, and community leadership, extending to towns, cities, nations, and the global community. As Jim says, "relation is what produces everything."
TCLP is not a small deal; it is a huge deal. It seems small because it is small, in numbers, but its potential impact is beyond our imagination. We share something that can change the space between people, create room for healthy tension when new things are being formed, and this is where I believe much of what we long for will happen.
If you're willing, try this: the next time you feel the impulse to assert yourself–to make a request, share an opinion, or correct something–ask yourself: what would this do to the space between us? The challenge isn't about holding back. It's about noticing your first reaction, reflecting on how it may have affected the between, and observing whether you would change anything, and why.
We'd love to hear what you notice. Let us know!
Nancy Jo Chabot is the President of The Compassionate Listening Project Board of Directors
Joel Berman is a certified Compassionate Listening Facilitator
Liz Spitzer is the Treasurer of The Compassionate Listening Project Board of Directors and a Certified Facilitator.
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