Communication in Relationships: Share Visions to Connect
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Tímea Csízik Coach | OD Consultant | Developer | HR Professional Follow me on Linkedin → |
Good news, it’s not the privilege of teams and managers: we can be the leaders of our lifes and we can leverage the power of shared visions in our close relationships as well.
Your relationships sets you back
You must have experienced through your self-development journey that sometimes it is your very close social environment that discourages you from implementing constructive changes in your life. Your partner, your family, your friends, your colleagues can be surprised when you start experimenting with new strategies on your way to get closer to your goals or dreams.
Often they are not happy with your new behaviors, thoughts and mindsets, because these new habits of you have an impact on them too, and it may imply they should change as well.
Their non-supportive feedback can set you back in your personal growth.
Communication Level #1:
Share your vision in your relationships
In this case it may help if you share your planned changes, your goals and your wants with your important others. You can explain them why this new direction is so important to you. You can make them understand your vision, the direction you plan to go forward to.
You can also show them how they can join you. When they understand your “why”, they will be more ready to focus on supporting you in the “how”. Hopefully, your new directions does not cross their plans, so they can accept your vision and may help you make it true.
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Communication Level #2:
Invite them to create a shared vision
Sometimes sharing your vision is not enough. In these cases you may find that starting to live up to your visions generates conflicts with your loved ones, even if you previously shared these visions with them. You feel that they hold you up, because they have visions competing with yours: different dreams, diverse destinations, contrasting targets.
Many of our everyday conflicts are rooted in this opposition. But that does not mean that your vision is better and the others’ are worse or vice versa. It only means that you have different perspectives.
And in a close relationship having different visions about an important topic may easily lead to a conflict.
In these cases it is not enough to share these opposing perspectives with each other. You will need to discuss them thoroughly with each other and come to a common ground if you want to prevent these conflicts.
Maybe the best solution is to invite your loved ones to create a shared vision together when an important topic comes up. And important topics are not necessarily big ones.
Visions are allowed to be small
Dream big, we often hear. And we usually think visions are great, far away sights. And that is often true, but it’s not a rule. Of course, we can have shared visions regarding our new family venture, or about what values we want to pass on to our children as parents.
But we can feel free to discuss our visions about smaller topics as well. It’s ok to deal with only the next step of a bigger issue, and create a shared vision about this upcoming, practical task. We can start to formulate a common picture with our partner, with a close friend or a family member about such simple everyday issues as:
How should we choose school for our daughter who turns 6 this month?
How can we imagine our days when both of us will get a full time job from next month after our sons goes to kindergarten?
How can we rearrange our apartment when we start to work from home regularly from next month?
How should we reorganize our household tasks when we move to the suburbs?
How do we picture our weekends after one of us plans to start a long-term, intensive training program with courses on every Saturdays?
How do we plan to stay in touch with our best friends when we move hundreds of miles away from each other?
We can agree, that these questions can easily generate conflicts, if you create independent future scripts and plans regarding them. But you can choose to discuss and co-create an exciting future together. Expressing your preferences, needs and ideas and being curious about others’ involved can set the stage for a win-win resolutions.
Communication Level #3: How to discuss what matters?
Sometimes we fear to express our preferences openly. Although we know well that a shared vision would be useful in the given topic, we won’t even dare to share ours with the other, This is because we are afraid that our needs would collide, and their discussion could generate more conflict than the everyday quarrels this opposition creates.
The truth is that it is much likely that we generate a conflict by not expressing our preferences, because silently we develop independent visions, that are rarely the same.
The question is that how can you discuss your visions regarding important topics in your relationship without a tense conflict?
Of course, you can go through and practice the steps of handling difficult conversations. Active listening and empathy are especially useful on your way. These are very good, but rather difficult solutions to this problem. They take a lot of practice, patience and awareness, and their effectiveness are still not guaranteed.
So now, we recommend something else. We recommend Symblify.
Symblify is a life coach application originally developed to be able to handle your difficulties on your own – through a fun, still professional workflow. Although this app is designed to help you out when you can’t or won’t talk about your problems with others, you can use it together with your partner, friend, family member or colleague to discuss what matters.
Symblify walks you through relevant questions to a solution you can create together. Besides, it makes it easy to express your thoughts to each others by using symbols.That’s because using the symbolic thinking of your right brain can tame your stirred emotions as well. The app creates an inspiring and playful platform that enables you to switch to creative mode instead of being locked up in your defensive state. That way difficult conversations can turn into a creative process that might involve tension, but it opens the opportunity of a common solution as well.
Shared visions light your relationships up
As you two work together to solve one of your mutual issues in a simple and intuitive way, communication improves between you and your relationship strengthens too. Co-creation of your visions in Symblify…
…drives you to change or even exchange your perspectives, that gets you closer to each other,
…provides opportunity to learn and use a common language regarding the topic, that enables you to talk about it later easily,
…builds trust between you, as you open up to express your thought and feelings with the help of symbols,
…gives platform to reach win-win solutions and create something together, that ensures both of you are represented in the outcome,
…results in a mutual understanding and a shared picture of the future that fosters your commitment to achieve it,
…offers an adventure when you can experience that you can deal with hard issues together in a constructive way.
Of course this process also requires empathy, but the free and cooperative atmosphere that Symblify creates makes it easier to give patience and attention to each other.
You feel connected
We often experience that our actions, plans, dreams and changes have impact on our partners, friends, families or colleagues, because in every relationship we have intersection with others. Along these intersections sometimes we are grazed by each other.
However, we can choose to share and discuss what is important for us, and involve others to create visions that we want to accomplish together in the future. This exposure of yourself may seem to be risky and make you feel vulnerable. And you are right, it is risky. But it also opens a door for deep and compassionate relationships.
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