The Replay
A conversation went wrong. Someone came at you in a meeting and you did not meet them where they were. You froze, or you over-explained, or you said the one line you wish you could take back. It is days later and it is still playing.
Most of us only ever rehearse the miss. We run the bad version at night, again and again, until it is the only version we have of that meeting.
This gives you a second one. It does not change what happened. It gives your body a second reference for what it is like to be in a moment like that.
If you are open to it, this takes about five minutes.
The practice
- Sit somewhere you can close your eyes for five minutes. Three slow breaths. Shoulders down.
- Bring the moment back. Not the whole day, the thirty seconds that stuck. Where you were sitting. Who said what. Let it be as uncomfortable as it was.
- Before you change anything, notice what happens in your body when you see it. Chest, jaw, stomach. Just notice.
- Run it again. Same meeting, same people, same words coming at you. This time you are the version of yourself you would want to be in that moment. Not a superhero. You, on a better day. What do you say? How fast? What do you do with your hands? What is your face doing?
- Stay there long enough to feel the difference. That is the whole exercise. Not the words, the feeling of being that person in that meeting.
- Open your eyes. Write one line below: what did the better version do differently?
What this is and is not
This does not guarantee the next hard conversation goes better. What it does is give you two experiences of that moment instead of one, and one of them you chose. The next time you walk into something like it, your body has both to draw on.
Who were you in the second run, and where else do you already know how to be that?
One of these every two weeks
Groundwork is a letter. One situation, one tool, one question I actually want you to answer. Every other Sunday.
Get the letter