The Magic Recipe for Interactions

The Magic Recipe to experience positive interactions can be found in two words: high regard. Holding the other person in high regard.

If you are a regular user of social media, that is the opposite of what most posts look like.

Holding another person in high regard means you assume positive intent rather than suspecting something negative. You hear a crash from the next room. Walk in there to see what happened without expecting your naughty kids of playing tag with a cinder block. Ask them what they intended as you gaze upon your broken lamp - don’t assume they meant to break it. Calmly reflect on their responses. Of course they will have to pay for repair or replacement, but you don’t need to place extra intent unless they really were throwing the cinder block.

Holding another person in high regard means that you stay positive rather than going immediately negative and defensive. Someone was supposed to give you some old piece of furniture but they didn’t know you expected it? Rather than writing a ranting text about their character and assuming they were out to get you, pause. Hold them higher than the garage floor and ask about your precious old table. You’ll likely learn they didn’t know it was part of the load you expected because the item was broken. It had nothing to do with the angry adjectives used to condemn them.

Holding another person in high regard means when your partner says something snappy with a tone that you bypass an immediate response and check things out. “Hey were you intending that tone? You sounded so harsh, I’m confused.” When we don’t expect that they were trying to be cruel and dastardly and ask first, we often find out the other person had a bad day or read a tough email and it wasn’t about us in the first place.

This works really well with interactions in public, too. Not everyone is trying to be selfish or rude or take your parking space. Sure sometimes they are, but sometimes there is more to the story.

If you find yourself tending toward suspicion and defensiveness, some work with internal family systems would be a great help. That’s for another post.