Difficult Conversations is a book about straying away from blaming others and opening our eyes as to how we contributed to the problem. We read five chapters during class and learned various concepts about arguing in a more productive way, and being more open to difficult conversations.
Chapter 2 : Everyone's story is different. And we each have different interpretations as to who is to blame and why. We always think its them and they think its us. We always think what we say always make sense, but we need to look at the bigger picture and reconsider that. We need to understand that there are truths to both sides of the stories. Chapter 3 : We are always quick to defend ourselves when we impact somebody negatively. Often saying "It wasn't my intention so you can't be mad at me!" and we expect them to forgive us like that. Because our intentions were good they aren't allowed to feel hurt. But good intentions don't sanitize bad impact. Since we feel hurt by the action, our immediate thought is that there intention was to hurt us, we need to take this as well into consideration. We need to go about this by talking about intentions and impact and how to work it all out. Take responsibility of your contribution early.
Chapter 4 : Blame is an instinct of ours. Whenever something goes wrong we all look around as in thought of "Who is to blame?" Blaming holds us back from finding the real cause. The contribution system helps us map out how each person contributed to the problem. We need to look at ourselves clearly and think "What would they think I contributed?" to get a bigger picture of the problem at hand.
Chapter 5 : Often we bottle up our feelings thinking, they'll only make matters worse during a difficult conversation. But in reality we need to map them back into the problem. We first need to realize which feelings are hard to express and which are easier, this also known as an emotional footprint. This can all depend on your past experiences, We need to begin talking about our feelings slowly expressing where we were hurt and explain what certain emotions are harder to express for ourselves.
Chapter 6 : Am I a good person? Am I competent? Am I worthy of love? These are the top 3 topics that makeup our identity. Some being more sensitive than others. And when someone makes us feel incompetent or unworthy of love, we can tend to lash out or shut down. That is known as an Identity Quake, when our identity is threatened and we're unsure of what to do. The first step is letting go of their reactions. Understand that is not something in control. But rather prepare for identity quakes and regain our balance, by recognizing this is a sensitive place to you.
Forum Theater is an interactive form of theater. The audience can stop the play while in motion and step in as certain actors to change the scenario to their liking. It's dominantly used as an education theater.
For our forum theater skits the topic our class chose was Toxic Relationships. The class divided up into groups of 4-5 to create various skits that revolved around the topic. We would then perform them to our class, watch it once, and then the second round we were able to step in as characters to help the relationship.
My groups skit revolved around a toxic friendship, you can read it all here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K5rkHihfQwgySsgXjZADCaz1mjfCy3KlOKkY39CbfYQ/edit