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In this video, high school student Coutia Giriteka explains how she got the idea to always “say your third thought.” She came up with this idea while participating in a program called Can We? It’s a collaboration of seven Maine High Schools to promote understanding and civil dialogue on hard issues.

Thanks Coutia!

This video has captions. To see them, click CC on the video screen.

Here’s what Craig says in the video

Hi everybody. Hey it’s Craig Freshley here.

I’ve just been learning about a project called “Can We?” where high school students from several different high schools came together and they learned how to talk with each other about really hard things.

One of those high school students: her name is Coutia. She goes to Deering High School here in Portland, Maine. She had this idea that it’s probably best not to say your first thought but you should always your third thought. I’ve asked her to explain that idea. Here she is.

We were having this really intense dialogue on race and it was just, for the first hour and a half, it was just screaming back and forth with people waiting for one person to finish talking and then jumping in. And in the midst of that there was this one girl who did an impassionate speech about what it’s like to be a person of color and the response that was given by another persons opinion just really irked me. Because I was like, “That did not come from a place of really understanding someone else’s feelings. That came from a place of like Oh you’re done talking now I’m going to talk.” And it really made me think about how people should take a moment, pause and say their third thought (or maybe not the first thing that comes to mind). And I think that’s when I really adopted the motto of: ‘Say my third thought.”