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Connecting through Meaningful Conversations
The end of November marks the start of the holiday season. For many of us, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is usually a frenetic blur of parties and gatherings with family, friends and co-workers. It is a season of fun and exhaustion. It is a time of year when all the relationships in your life come into the foreground as you go from one social event to another mixing and mingling with loved ones, friends and people you know from all parts of your life. As much as I enjoy the opportunity to catch up with distant friends once a year, the brief five minutes I get to spend with everybody can sometimes feel unsatisfying. What can we really cover in five minutes of conversation? How do we slow things down and have more meaningful conversations with the people we interact with?
One way to do this is to engage in mindful presence. Mindful presence is the state of focusing your full attention on what is happening right now. When you are in a conversation with someone, this means you are not distracted by:
· replaying a conversation you had at work earlier
· making a mental to-do list for tomorrow, the weekend, next week, etc.
· coming up with something impressive to say when it is your turn to talk
Get the gist? Being mindfully present is about actually listening—not just hearing the words—and focusing your attention on what your conversation partner is saying. A conversation should be an exchange between two people—not simultaneous monologues. Having a simultaneous monologue instead of having a conversation is the equivalent of two people going out to dinner and spending most of the time on their phone (texting others or checking in on social media) instead of talking to each other.
Having a meaningful conversation is about truly engaging in a moment with another human being. When was the last time you looked someone in the eyes as they were talking to you and fully took that person in? There is something about being listened to with full attention that makes a person feel seen—truly seen as they are. When you listen with attention, you notice more about the person, you can relate to how a person is feeling. This experience shifts the dynamic and immediately changes the energy around a conversation. It opens up the space between two people allowing for greater understanding and true connection. I invite you to experiment with engaging in the now of your conversations and see what unfolds.