Re-Vision a Relationship (Past, Present or Future)

For our final February weekly post about the Life Theme of RELATIONSHIPS, I invite you to consider how you might wish to have changed or to currently ‘tweak’ some aspect of a meaningful relationship in your life. With the divine gift of imagination, you are capable of effectively “re-visioning” your relationship events; past, present or future.

It may help first to consider if there is a PATTERN about some of your relationships that you would choose to alter if you could.  This is an active exercise; it is about what YOU CAN/ COULD have done differently–or would do differently today–that might have lead to some different results.  Re-visioning a past event or situation can have a profound influence on your current disposition when it comes to actions or decisions you could be contemplating now, so that you can avoid pitfalls of the past.

The strength of this exercise is that it brings your present awareness to bear either on a past situation or more mindfully upon a present set of circumstances.

So do this with full exercise of your (re-)constructive imagination. Once you have identified a pattern you would wish to change and you have remembered a particular moment in a particular relationship which itself you feel you might/’should’ have enacted differently in retrospect, imagine yourself IN THAT MOMENT again. This time, change  the conversation or the action knowingly, with the awareness you have since gained. Journal or internally dialogue with the other person in this relationship moment. Let him or her speak, and respond or initiate your own conversation as it could have been rather than as it was.  Listen to the other person and see that they listen to and hear you deeply.  Continue the scenario in your imagination until you bring it to a new level of resolution. As you emerge from your reverie, give yourself time to reflect on how the future might have been altered from this re-visioned exchange.

I find that when I do this re-vision the past technique–and I have often as a life mapping tool (see right panel)–it really feels as if not just the memory of the event but the actual event itself HAS CHANGED. I feel less attachment afterwards to the initial triggering moment and better equipped to approach any similar situation in the present or future.

I welcome YOUR Comments and Story!

Practice Mindful Communication

Have you ever wished you could go back and change those words you spoke in a relationship? or with a departed loved one? or with your child? Are there certain situations that seem to “bring out the worst” in you, instead of the best, with respect to communication? Here then is your chance to revise what you said then, or to better prepare for what you will say, next time.

Tuesdays are Prompts List days at Better Endings. I invite you to use the list of topics below to write/journal, actively contemplate, or talk about a REVISION of a communication situation in your life. Create a dialogue that revises or remodels how you did, or would, engage in a conversation, to improve the outcome more in the direction you might wish that sort of conversation might have gone, or could.

Woulda/ coulda/ shoulda…but if you practice the principle of Better Endings we are developing weekly with this blog, you CAN change habits and improve communications in the present as well as envisioning how you might have done better in the past.

Already this week since I have been practicing some communication “re-writes” with respect to recent workplace and past personal relationship situations, I find myself becoming more mindful in the present moment with email and face-to-face conversations. Mindfulness, especially Mindful Listening to others as well as to ourselves, is the First Principle of Better Endings that governs the Prompts List this week.

So, here is a Prompts List, below. How might you apply a revision to one or more of the following situations? Go ahead, Practice Better Endings! I invite you to pay attention afterwards as you go through your daily life, to see how you may apply this principle Now!

• what you wish you WOULD have said
• workplace communications
• email communication
• social media communications
• what to say to someone who has lost a loved one
• what you wish you had said to a departed loved one
• how you might rewrite or revise a conversation that went awry
• how you might repair words said under stress or duress
• talking with certain others: your child; your boss or employee; your spouse/ significant other; a stranger;your pets
• changing bad communication habits (e.g. situational cursing)
• revising road rage thoughts or talk
• improving specific kinds of situations in which you have trouble communicating
• finding just the “right words” (e.g. editing)
• self-talk: positive affirmations
• self-talk: revising negative self-talk
• other-talk: revising critical harping or gossip

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Please feel free to share your results, comments, insights, and stories!

Better Communication to You! – Linda

Better Communicating

This week let’s return a bit more to the original gist of our Better Endings theme. How might creatively revising a movie ending or the outcome of an historical event, for example, empower us to constructively apply that same revisionist approach to improving situations in our lives? So this week, let’s consider how we might apply the revisionist principle of Better Endings to situations involving COMMUNICATION. This might apply especially to situations where communication has gone awry or where you might tend to falter in specific kinds of communication situations.

For example, what about email communication snafus? I remember how after email had recently come out in the 90’s, it was difficult to hold a genuine conversation because we (myself, anyway) had not yet learned how to express our feelings well through email. I nearly lost a longtime, good friend because we each thought the other was sounding uncharacteristically gruff or crisp with each other over some trivial matter. I don’t even remember what the issue was that blew up to the point that we stopped interacting at all for over a year! Let me practice a Better Endings revision of how our communication might have gone differently with greater awareness, or mindfulness, on both of our parts.

Scenario: Over the telephone (Lindy in Colorado, Molly in Arizona):

Molly: Well, you should know I didn’t mean it that way.

Lindy:  I know! Isn’t that awful how easy it is for people to misread each other’s tone of voice in email? I apologize for assuming anything less than the best of you, Molly.

M: Should we just stop using email altogether?

L: I don’t know. Is there some way we could communicate better with email, in a more personal way? It is convenient, day to day.

M: Well, some of my friends use those emoticons. Maybe we could try adding some of those to express our feelings better.

L: Okay. I’ll look for some. We could also maybe try putting more context into what we are saying.

M: You mean like just explaining ourselves better instead of being ‘short’?

L: Hey, I’m the Shortie! Just kidding. But that’s part of it too I guess; we should feel free to check each other’s intentions if we see something we might be misinterpreting.

M: Ok. Let’s not let it get away from us like that again. I do care about you—you know that, don’t you?

L: Of course I do, Molly. I think of you as a friend for life!

M: Me, too.

******

Tomorrow I’ll provide a list of Writer’s Prompts around this weekly theme of applying Better Endings to communication situations.  Feel free to Comment with your insights and send stories! Thanks for reading! 🙂 🙂 :-)))