Better Conversations Week

In 2002, at sixty-seven, Loren Ekroth launched two connected projects: the Better Conversations newsletter and Better Conversations Week. The newsletter was a free weekly ezine published every Tuesday; over thirteen years it produced between 720 and 780 essays (the number varies by source — his LinkedIn profile says 780, the memorial page says 720). The subscriber list grew to seven thousand readers in eighty-one countries.

Better Conversations Week, celebrated annually during the fourth week of November to coincide with Thanksgiving, was his most concrete act of public education. He chose the timing deliberately: “I decided to coincide the event with Thanksgiving Week, during which we had many chances to talk with others.” The premise was simple — if families and friends paid closer attention, for one week, to how they listened and what they said, the rest of the year could be different.

By 2008, the Globe and Mail in Toronto was quoting him for Better Conversation Week, identifying him as “a communications specialist in Las Vegas” and citing his advice on conversation signals: “Turn on the yellow and red lights.” He was already repackaging his expertise into syndicated content — his “How to Converse like Socrates” essay appeared on Creativity at Work in 2003, and a piece on Ben Franklin’s conversation group ran in the Master Facilitator Journal.