A participant recently told me:
‘My biggest achievement this week was having a full conversation with my partner’
When I asked her what made it ‘Full’, words like ‘Focus’, ‘Both listening and talking’ ‘Felt equal’ ‘Opened up’ ‘Eyes centred’ and ‘I was able to demand’ came up.
When we allow enough space - a generous space - to invite qualities like ‘centre’, ‘open’, ‘both/and’ and ‘equal’ to the table, we’re inviting a part of the other person that might have not showed up before - and whatever they bring. When I say generous, I’m not talking soundbites. Efficiency and succinctness have become such pressuring - sometimes suffocating - markers of what makes something productive and ‘successful’. But we risk losing the nuance, the granularity, the glimmers of what could be. The Full-ness. That fullness allows us to get clearer about how we become with the other, and how they become with us.
We get clearer about what choices we can practice. What we should consider next for ourselves. What the relationship needs from us. To recommit to the relationship. Or maybe not. Either way, we have clarity.
There are 3 shifts I witness in my work with others that I would say are the most powerful during deep conversations being had in the room.
Here’s how I categorised them:
Interruption - ‘I didn’t know this about myself’ or ‘I didn’t know this about you’
Articulation - ‘This is what I know about myself and my experience’
Release - ‘I think it’s time you knew this about me’ or ‘I think it’s time I acknowledged this to myself’
The reason I say they’re powerful is because these moments of interruption, these shifts to their routine and to their story, tend to throw them off. You see it on their faces, you see it on their bodies. They become still. Almost surprised about how they did what they did; almost uncertain about what to do with what they just found out. Either way, the shift was about being felt and seen more fully.
Interrupting rehearsed stories is a big thing for me.
It’s these cracks in your story that reveal that multiple truths co-exist within you. It allows you to see yourself in a complex and fuller image - and to be seen in a fuller image. That’s what you’re investing in when you engage in a generous conversation. The interruption. The chance to not know. The surprise. It means we, or a loved one, are ready to be seen a little more. And once we recognise that we are complex, multitudes, we can extend the same generosity to the other.
If we’re lucky, we’ll get that interruption once in a while.