Master Your Stories

This post is inspired by Crucial Conversations. Everyone has a story. For some of us, it’s easy for that story to become a resentment narrative. One of the steps in the Crucial Conversations framework is to master your stories. We are meaning-making machines, and very often in our attempt to understand a person or a situation, we let our imagination masquerade as reality. We play both parts of a conversation, sure that we know what the other person is thinking. We don’t, and we are lousy at guessing. Our brains are trying to quickly interpret incomplete information, and those quick judgments are often wrong.

We think we are telling a story about what happened, but we are protecting who we are.

I love the three “peaces” from Sonya Renee Taylor’s book, The Body is Not an Apology, especially this one:

“Peace with Not Understanding: Accept that you do not need to understand someone’s choices, appearance, or life to give them love, honor, and respect.”

So my slow productivity tip is to make peace with not understanding. Protect your boundaries, of course. But be okay with not understanding. And be okay with people not understanding you.

Also, this classic from Jen Sincero bears repeating:
“Do not waste your precious time giving one single crap about what anyone else thinks of you. Imagine how liberating that would be!”

Photo by Maegan Martin on Unsplash