Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Dec/Jan 2019 Aspire Magazine Final | Page 45
First, schedule the conversation. If you’re
not going to wing it, nobody else involved
should, either. Give the person or people
you are going to speak with a heads-up that
you’d like to speak. And then prepare:
Reverse-engineer what you want to say
from your desired outcome. You should be
masterful at doing this by now!
Identify the questions you can ask to learn
other people’s truth. It’s easy to go into a
daring conversation with a laundry list of
complaints. Or assumptions. Instead, for
each thing that triggers you, pull out of the
emotion and find a question or two so you
can investigate what is going on for the
other party.
Distinguish what you are entitled to say
from what you want to say. As a kiddo, I had
several stints in therapy. It was one of the few
spaces where I could unload all my pent-up
emotions. Bang things. Occasionally break
things. And more important, say the things I
was too petrified to say to the people I wanted
to be saying them to. One of my therapists
told me, and I was too young at the time
to appreciate it, that while I could scream
profanities at a certain family member, if
we ever did have a daring conversation
that probably wouldn’t move me toward
what I really wanted — for the person to
acknowledge and take responsibility for his
actions. Now that it’s decades later, I always
WHEN YOU VERBALIZE
WHAT YOU PLAN TO SAY,
YOU MINIMIZE RUMINATING.
AND YOU ENSURE THAT
WHEN YOU DO SPEAK, YOU
ACTUALLY SAY WHAT YOU
INTENDED TO SAY— SO
THAT YOUR WORDS HAVE
THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE
POSITIVE IMPACT.
for someone who is brand-new to speaking,
when it comes to a daring conversation, as
a rule it’s best to have it within a week of
deciding your organs could finally unstick
themselves if you said something. And before
you do, here is how you can set up yourself,
and the other parties involved, for success.
give myself time and space to speak my
vitriol, especially when somebody has truly
wronged me. I just strive to do it without an
audience, because it never serves me to
attack another person, especially someone
I want something from—irrespective of how
entitled I feel I am to do so. And if and when
a daring conversation doesn’t go the way
I intend, and someone lashes out at me, I
(usually) resist the temptation to attack back.
Instead, I assert myself and then stand in
my power via silence.
Speak your words.
If you’re anything like
who I used to be, you spend a lot of time
thinking about what you want to say, but
you don’t always default to practicing your
words out loud. When you verbalize what
you plan to say, you minimize ruminating.
And you ensure that when you do speak,
you actually say what you intended to say—
so that your words have the maximum
possible positive impact.
45