Description
U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter
by John Stewart
Taos Institute Publications WorldShare Books ©2025 (original in print ©2014 new and revised edition)
ISBN 978-1-958170-10-6
How’s the quality of your life?
Are you as happy as you’d like to be? Feeling satisfied with your job?
Getting along well with family members? Experiencing serenity, at least some of the time? Do you think your life situation is contributing to your longevity or pushing you toward an early grave?
Nothing is more critical to the quality of our lives than our relationships, and nothing is more critical to our relationships than how we communicate.
U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter shows how to improve the quality of your life by improving your everyday communicating. In the first part of the book, you’ll learn the connection between effective communication and The Big Question, “What does it mean to be human?”
The first two chapters appropriate Iain McGilchrist’s argument (The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World) that contemporary culture is toxically imbalanced in what McGilchrist calls “impersonal” directions, and shows readers how they can enhance the quality of their lives by making their communicating “as personal as possible.” This doesn’t mean over-intimate or touchy-feely; it just means using one’s listening and speaking to bring elements of one’s uniqueness, choices, emotions-spirit-psyche, and mindful reflectiveness into one’s communicating. Then 8 chapters apply the basic approach to online contacts, courtship and dating, families, business, learning situations, politics, multicultural events, and spiritual and religious contexts.
The approach explains the importance of “moments” in communication, why some moments “matter” more than others, how the human brain processes information both “impersonally” and “personally” (when a primary distinction is stimulus generalization vs. stimulus discrimination), cultural forces that push us in impersonal directions, how to cope with the facts that communicating is continuous and collaborative (socially constructed), and the connection between quality of communication and quality of life. A sample of concepts the book discusses includes mindfulness, mirror neurons, vertical & horizontal media, relational dialectics, information and identity messages, conflict management, person-centered leadership, dialogic listening, learning-centered teaching, thinking globally and acting locally, social capital and facilitation, and microaggressions.
The revised edition adds the multicultural chapter, eliminates the too-dense Chapter 2 and integrates its main ideas elsewhere, updates the neuroscience, and expands the political communication chapter with a discussion of what to do when Uncle Fred provokes a political argument at a family gathering.
If you’ve ever used Bridges Not Walls, you will find that U&ME develops a similar approach in a single voice and applies it even more broadly than Bridges does.
If you’re looking for a resource that is very accessible, research-based, that can prompt serious discussions about depersonalization in every life-arena, and that is filled with concrete and practical listening and speaking skills, you might want to check out U&ME. Also see www.johnstewart.org.
Endorsements:
John Stewart has done it again with U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter. He has written another book about communication that is at once highly readable, grounded in the latest research and thinking, original, and deeply practical. With the focus on people meeting in moments of communication, he has reached a new high in relating the best of theory to the everyday lives of real people, like you and me. – Gerry Philipsen, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Communication, University of Washington
There is genuine interpersonal communication and what passes for communication in everyday life. Throughout his distinguished career, Dr. Stewart has drawn our attention to the difference. In U&ME, he discuses the benefits of not settling and how we can achieve genuine contact. – Paul R. Falzer, Ph.D., Clinical Epidemiology Research Center, V.A Connecticut Healthcare System
In U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter, Dr. Stewart has distilled a career of teaching, research, and practice in interpersonal communication into a highly readable discussion of the problems and opportunities of relationships in families, at work, and other settings. The book contains clearly worded principles and engaging vignettes, both of which are invaluable in helping readers apply the concepts. – Kenneth N. Cissna, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Department of Communication, University of South Florida
In U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter, Stewart extends the reach of his earlier work to include the everyday of our on-line lives, courtship and dating, family and friends, leadership, spirituality, and politics. Written in an accessible style with useful personal examples, stories, and exercises, U&ME is a must read for those committed to improving the quality of their relating, their relationships, and, consequently, their lives. – Kimberly Pearce, Co-Founder and President, CMM Institute for Personal & Social Evolution, Author of Compassionate Communicating: Poetry, Prose & Practices
U&ME: Communicating in Moments that Matter takes the complexity of this thing we call “communication” and boils it down to its very human core — to things we intuitively know and understand about how easy it is for our interactions to be nothing more than an attempt at communication. And then, it introduces practical skills that each of us can use to improve our communication. With chapters spanning everything from on-line communication to intimate relationships to leadership to the political sphere, this is a must read for anyone who is concerned with the state of our relationships today. – Kelly Larson, J.D., Director, Office of Human Rights, Dubuque, IA
A highly accessible guide to communicating in interpersonal relationships in intimate, political, intercultural and virtual settings. Written in an engaging style with many case studies, the book will be of value to anyone interested in improving quality of life by creating moments that matter through verbal and nonverbal listening, and conflict management skills. A touching book. And a potentially life transforming journey for the reader and practitioner. – Saskia Witteborn, Ph.D., School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong
This work earns a “bravo” in terms of freshness, solidity, seriousness of purpose, and therapeutic (small “t”) potential for those who agree, or come to agree with the author, that “Nothing is more critical to the quality of our lives… than how we communicate.” – George Diestel, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Communication and Humanities California State University, Fresno
John Stewart shows us that no matter what’s happened before, we can always choose to respond to another person in a way that makes us both more fully human. In U&ME he shares insights drawn from years of searching for and using effective, practical choices for responding to others—choices that can turn more of our moments with them into moments that matter in our lives and in theirs. – Robert Arundale, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Communication
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