What are you Focusing on Regarding a Conflict?
When we are in conflict – within ourselves or with another person – we typically find ourselves focusing on something specific about what we are feeling and what happened. And our energy around that something grows exponentially the more we do so. Our hearts and brains take us to negative places, and we can get stuck there – building on the version of the facts that upsets us most and our feelings connected to those.
Once that happens it makes it harder to find our way back or to a place in which our concentration isn’t causing our emotions and thoughts to grow out of whack – even beyond what’s true and relevant.
Since we are ‘at choice’ when it comes to that on which we focus, it’s an interesting exercise to contemplate why we select certain negative parts about our conflicts to consume our energy. At these times, we are not likely realizing that – as the quote goes – what we choose to focus on grows.
This week’s Conflict Mastery Quest(ions) blog invites readers to consider specific parts of a dispute on which you are focusing your thoughts and your feelings – as you answer these questions:
- What happened in the conflict?
- On what part are you focusing your thoughts? What are your precise thoughts?
- Why do you suppose you chose that part on which to focus?
- In what ways have your thoughts grown (from where they started till now)?
- What words describe the feelings you are experiencing?
- In what ways have they grown (from where they started till now)?
- What is unresolved about the part on which your energy is focused regarding the conflict?
- What bothers you most about the other person in this situation? Why is that?
- For what reasons might you choose to stunt the growth of the thoughts and feelings about the other person on which you’ve been focusing?
- What might help you then, to diminish your thoughts that grew? What might diminish the feelings that grew?
- What else occurs to you as you consider these questions?
- What insights do you have?
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