The centerpiece

The Hosting Palette

Fifty-six in-the-moment moves in nine working groups — from drawing out a truer answer to the register you play a moment in. You never need many at once; a conversation usually turns on doing one of them at the right time.

How to work with it

Before

Constrain yourself

Pick one or two moves to feature in your next conversation — or let Palette Draw deal them to you. A constraint sharpens attention more than a resolution to "listen better."

During

Notice the opening

Each move has a trigger: sprawl calls for Redirecting; jargon calls for the Naive Question; a rehearsed answer calls for the Second Answer; a pile-on calls for Protecting the Guest. The skill is spotting the trigger. Put your working set on the Host's Dashboard.

After

Count what you used

Which moves did you actually make? Which trigger did you notice and let pass? Mark used moves in Palette Draw and they accumulate on your progress page — over weeks you'll see which moves you avoid.

The moves are cheap to say and hard to time.

Training

Move Roulette deals the whole palette; Palette Draw deals hands of it into real conversations. Each group in the tree names the games that drill it specifically. For a physical deck, print the cards.

Beyond the fifty-six: Explorations holds two hundred-odd looser things to bring to a table — one line and one stem each. A move earns a place here only after auditioning there.