Background Conversations Part 2
January 6, 2020
Background conversations is probably one of the most challenging aspects of rebuilding trust.
TRANSCRIPT
Clearing background conversations is a is takes a lot of skill. I'm gonna teach you how to do that. But you don't always need to clear up a you don't always need to clear a background conversation by talking to the person.
Most of us have had experiences of having someone explode background conversation on us or we've exploded on them. Because like I said, they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and then all of a sudden. So we're not very effective when we're like that, when we're upset and we're communicating the background conversation. So we wanna be able to do it when we're not upset. Right? We wanna be able to communicate it for the purpose of improving the relationship.
But even then, sometimes we might find that it's not even necessary to, to share it.
Because sometimes what's what's going on in the background is really fiction. It's made up.
It's something happened, we got upset about it, and the interpretation is the thing that's upsetting us. You have a negative history with someone that could get in the way of working together or you feel the relationship has changed for the worse. And you may have noticed sometimes that, everything seems fine and then something changed. So that could be that someone else has a background conversation with you, and that might be your only indication. If you have a negative history and if you're kind of thinking about something a lot and when you're with them, you've got that little voice in your head and it's just going over your resentment and your your, the problem, you're obsessing about them, you have a background conversation.
So when we have a background conversation, we usually blame them.
Why bother? I don't wanna tell them. If I did, it wouldn't make any difference. It could make things worse.
And they would they wouldn't care anyway, can be some of the justification.
You wanna ask yourself, what am I feeling? What am I interpreting?
What am I imagining? This is all story.
You wanna be able to say, what happened? So this is separating fact from fiction. And what could I have done? This is really critical.
Asking yourself what could you have done to contribute to the problem or misunderstanding.
When you have a background conversation, you're never to blame.
Right? It's always them. They did this to me. You feel justified.
So if you can get yourself to reflect on what could you have done differently, even one little piece, one little thing you you could have done differently could can make a huge difference. Clearing up a background conversation and understanding a background conversation takes intention. It takes understanding what it is and and what it's doing to your relationships. If you wanna be really open and able and free to create, when you have background conversations, you have less possibility.
You have less possibility, individually. And if you have a team and the people on the team have background conversations with each other, you have less possibility.
And if you're the manager of that team, it's gonna be very hard to create anything.
