It’s all too easy to find ourselves pulled into daily arguments that leave us upset and exhausted, and, what’s more, don’t achieve anything.
Prof. Steven T. Collis wants to help change that.
Collis’s new book, “Habits of a Peacemaker: 10 Habits to Change Our Potentially Toxic Conversations into Healthy Dialogues,” identifies practical skills all people can learn to enable them to handle hard conversations coolly and productively. Collis, the founding faculty director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center at Texas Law, has plenty of experience conversing on challenging topics. As he writes, “I get paid to discuss, full time, the most pressing and divisive issues in our society.”
Collis’s work has taken him all over the U.S. and to Canada, Rome, London, Eastern Europe, and South America for such discussions. “But here’s what will surprise most readers: as of yet, neither I nor the people I speak with have experienced a negative outcome in our conversations,” Collis writes.
“This book is born of those experiences—moments when people who are so very different from one another find a way to reach across the chasm and enjoy a time of productive peace in each other’s presence,” he adds. “I want others to have those moments, and to have them often.”
We recently spoke to Collis to learn more about the book’s origin, the members of Texas Law’s community who shared their own wisdom, and the habit Collis finds toughest to implement. He also reveals the most unlikely inspiration of one of his habits: the legendary sitcom, “Seinfeld.”
What inspired you to write this book?
Law professors—especially in the First Amendment space—talk about controversial issues daily: free speech, campus protests, and religious freedom and its intersection with abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Most of society seems to feel like they can’t discuss these things easily, yet, when I travel to conferences or speak to audiences who disagree with me, we’re able to have productive conversations.
And so that got me wondering: What habits allow us to have more productive conversations? How can I consciously identify those habits and distill them into a book that’s helpful for others?
Who is the target audience?
I genuinely mean for the book it to be for anybody. The skills in it can be used in our daily lives: We all navigate difficult conversations at home and work; when we’re talking about politics or religion; and in our roles as parents, children, and siblings. I’ve been gratified to have people come up to me and say, “This helped me so much in a situation I’m having with my son” or “This was really helpful for me when I had to talk to my boss the other day.”
While it’s critical to use these skills talking about the hot button constitutional law issues that I deal with, those aren’t the only topics that get us struggling to have productive discourse. So, my hope is that they can be transferable to every other area of life.
You must have faced some tough audiences. How do you handle it?
I can give a million examples, since I speak to lay audiences all the time. During the pandemic, I remember speaking to one audience where you could just see the feeling of betrayal in some folks. People could not talk in a rational way about church closures versus religious freedom rights. I’d take a heated question from the audience—and people were really upset on either side of this issue—and then reframe it so we could talk in a healthy way. Framing conversations (or reframing if necessary) is a critical habit I talk about in the book.
For people who haven’t yet read the book—and they should! —what’s the first concept you’d recommend they apply?
The foundational concept is the one I start with, which is intellectual humility. As I’m traveling around the country on the book tour, when people ask me about the other habits, I always find myself pointing back to intellectual humility: We often don’t know much about topics we’re talking about, the people we’re talking with, or even ourselves. Intellectual humility for those different areas and many others becomes the foundation to then incorporate the other habits in an effective way.
What’s the toughest habit to apply?
Chapter seven recommends spending time with people doing anything other than talking about hard topics. I’m the worst at that. The reason I’m a law professor is because I like sitting around talking about these issues! My experience has been most other people don’t enjoy that. They would rather just watch the ball game. So that, for me, is a challenge. For other people that might be engaging in real learning and not getting sucked into social media addiction. Or for still other people it might be intellectually humility. We all have our own unique challenges.
The Texas Law community will recognize the names of several faculty who shared their peacemaking wisdom for the book.
In my acknowledgements, I mention Professor David Rabban, who’s one of the best at this. I interviewed him as one of the peacemakers who has these talents and who I wanted to learn from. I cite Professor Emeritus Doug Laycock in the book a couple of times, because here’s this man who’s an agnostic, who’s deeply skeptical of the claims of every religion on earth, and yet has spent his entire career figuring out how to protect the religious liberty of everybody, including agnostics and atheists. And he reflects a deep open mindedness and willingness to understand other people. That’s a valuable skill to learn. Professor Ward Farnsworth has written several books with some great, relevant ideas I wanted to incorporate, especially from the Socratic method. Professor Samy Ayoub, one of the leading Islamic law scholars in the world, was another person I interviewed as I was trying to condense these principles.
You also thank some of your law students, too, including from the Law and Religion Clinic. Can you highlight them?
3L Veda Tsai is my research assistant, and she helped me do a ton of work on the book. Meg McDonough ’24 was my research assistant and she’s on her way to clerking on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She did very well in law school, and she played a huge role in the research.
I interviewed 3L Clayton Dana-Bashian since I have always been impressed with his natural peacemaking skills. He’s an intellectually curious atheist who joined the clinic to learn the law and understand it better, rather than just pounding the table and arguing with people. I was always impressed with him in that regard.
Speaking of intellectual curiosity, when are you influenced to change your stance on an issue?
It happens often—for example, how I think about constitutional interpretation— and is usually because somebody has earned my respect. It’s the result of how they treat me in daily life, showing kindness and selflessness. It’s the way they approach things like their scholarship that makes me take them seriously. They’re not argumentative, so I want to learn more from them. Usually, either I respect them, so I go read something they wrote, and it changes my way of thinking, or I hear them say something I’ve never thought about in that way before. In my experience, it’s harder to change someone’s mind if you’re just directly attacking them. How we live our lives—earning people’s respect, and then having them be open minded to listening—can persuade people in a more effective way.
If we’re selflessly lifting others up and treating people with respect instead of directly arguing with everybody, we might have more influence than when we’re just constantly arguing, arguing, arguing all the time.
On a lighter note: You’re a fan of “Seinfeld.”
Very much so, yes.
What is the lesson that peacemakers can take from that show?
There’s an episode where George Constanza, whose life circumstances aren’t very impressive, decides to try the opposite of everything he’s ever done before. So, when he introduces himself to a woman he says, “My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.”
We were talking about how not arguing with people directly, but instead doing the opposite, might have the effect of better persuading them. So, you can do the opposite of your natural instinct to argue, and you’ll be in good shape.
That seems like good step towards serenity now. Ten habits is a nice round number. Was there anything you’d have added to the book if you had more space?
I spent a lot of time in chapter two talking about the very intentional methods social media companies are using to get us addicted, and I’m not using the word loosely. They have literally figured out how to keep us chemically addicted to our phones. I would have liked to talk more about how to overcome addiction. You can’t just stop doing something—you have to replace it with something else. That’s implicit in the book, but I wish I had had it more as a clear message. We can’t just magically get off our phones because of what we’re up against.
Also, I’m not pretending like these are an exhaustive list of habits people can engage in to have productive discourse. The ones in my book were the most prevalent from the people I talked with. My hope is people will take other things they’ve learned and add them.
What else should readers know?
I don’t want people to think that when someone writes a book like this, they’re suggesting that they’ve mastered it all. These are the skills I gleaned both from myself and lots of other people I talked to who are good at it—some of them a lot better than I am. But if we never write or teach something until we perfect it, we’ll never write or teach anything like this. As I was writing the book, I was thinking, “I need to work on this particular skill more.” In certain situations, we all have things that get us worked up, and it’s hard for us to have productive dialog. But these habits are what good peacemakers do, and I hope we can all keep working on them our whole lives to try and get better.