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Leslie Harradine
The GTD Methodology for Emotionally Charged Relationships
So you’ve done a pretty good job of implementing the Getting Things Done approach into your life: the areas in which you collect get emptied and processed regularly, you have a system where you keep your lists and you’re up and running with your weekly review. Then why do you find yourself lying awake at night thinking about that certain relationship that is so challenging for you? (At work or home, it doesn’t matter.) Wasn’t the carrot dangled in front of you - the idea that if you got everything out of your head, you could relax more? You’ve got all your projects on your project list and all associated next actions defined and on the appropriate list. So why are you so stressed thinking about what that person said or did at that last meeting?
As is diagramed in the Getting Things Done book and seminar any time there is an open loop or an incompletion in our lives, it has a piece of us. Often when things have a lot of emotional content imbedded in them they grab our mind and we find out thinking gets wrapped around this situation or person and the more we think about it the more it seems to accelerate in intensity. If you’re anything like me, there are times you run the scenario over and over in your head either thinking about what happened, what should have happened or what will happen the next time you interact with this person. The more you think about it the more agitated you become. Before long you find these thoughts creeping into your mind distracting you several times a day. Then when you encounter the person, you have so much emotional content running that it’s hard to see and hear what is going on without skewing it into something more than that what’s actually happening. You can feel so entangled in your inner dialogue that anything you say or do is going to be some form of compensation often demonstrated by either over reacting or under reacting. How do you get out of this bind?
It all gets down to the same process we use when involved in managing a complex project even if the complex project is a complex relationship: defining the outcome and determining the next action. Usually when I have negative feelings about someone, it’s because I have a negative outcome or vision of what is going on or will happen in the future. It’s hard to feel good or clear about someone with whom I imagine some kind of negative outcome. The first step to getting out of this loop is to identify a realistic positive outcome. I say realistic because there are some people in my life that the best I can hope for is to be neutral about them… they will never be my closest friend. In that case a successful outcome might be that I stay balanced when interacting with the person or that I take time to respond to them rather than react without thinking.
In these types of situations most of the time the outcome works best if it has to do with something I can control inside of me—not about changing the other person's behavior. Once I have clarified an outcome, I determine what the next action would be to create the outcome. That could be anything from count to 10 before answering them or be open minded while listening to them rather than prepare my response while they are still talking or have a neutral party be present when interacting with them.
When we pro-actively think of our options in advance there is a much greater chance we will actually utilize them when the need arrives. Otherwise we can find ourselves repeating the same reactions over and over again. Our perceptions drive our behavior. If we start to take conscious direction over the pictures we hold in our head, it’s amazing how, whether the world (or people) changes or not, we can be in a more relaxed and balanced state from which we steer ourselves through our lives.
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