6 months ago I bought this pack of “conversation menus”. As a lover of deep conversation and intentionally connecting, this was such a fun thing to get my hands on. Cut to early April, I started running biweekly “Queerantine” chats with a random gathering of LGBTQ+ friends in my life who I wanted to know each other (everyone is in different cities and from very different parts of my life). To help build depth in those conversations, I started creating my own conversation menus and wanted to share what I came up with so others can use them during these odd times:
- Music conversation menu
- Comfort conversation menu
- Rules conversation menu
- Learning conversation menu
- Celebration conversation menu
- New friends conversation menu (featuring a screenshot of some of the crew
- Social distancing conversation menu
- Possessions conversation menu
- Fear conversation menu
How to play:
Spoiler alert: There’s no real way but to make it easy I’ll share what I have landed on doing.
The way I “play” is by having each person take turns picking questions from each section one at a time. This means the first person will pick something from the “starter” section for everyone who feels comfortable answering to chime in on. The next person will then pick from the “main course”. After doing all three sections, it then opens up where people can pick any question from the menu. This tends to be pretty fun as there’s always some question someone really wants to hear answers to!
Finally, I like to wrap up the conversation with either of these questions:
- What are you looking forward to/excited about/thankful for?
- What are you going to take away from this conversation/what did you learn?
Important concept to keep in mind: the idea of “emotional consent” is huge for this to work well (more thoughts on this here). No one is obligated to answer and there should be no forcing anyone to answer including calling on people to answer especially at first. This makes intentionally creating a safe space even more important to do and get right.
As I create more, I’ll add them here! If there’s a theme you’d love to see tackled, comment below and I’ll do my best.
agm 
2 responses to “Conversation menus”
[…] a conversation starts: I’ve been running “Queerantine” calls with friends using conversation menus. While these calls were with friends from various parts of my life who I had great trust with […]
[…] know what to talk about in your check-ins? Have a look at the conversation menus in this article. Here are some additional starting points for the first two […]