Good enough

Today, I went to a “lunch and learn” thing at work on stress.


The speaker is a wonderful man of God (who also happens to be a counselor), and he also is the dad of a special needs child. So I would imagine he knows a LOT about stress!!



The highlights of the talk were that it’s important to find balance in your life, be resilient, and learn how to have hard conversations. I won’t bore you with the details of the program, but there were a couple of things that stood out to me, and so I thought I’d share them.



He had us do an exercise where he gave us a calendar that covered an entire week, from 6 AM to midnight. We were supposed to list all the “roles” we play in life, such as wife, mother, employee, Christian, etc and then fill in the times on the calendar that we DO these things. It is a GREAT tool in forcing you to look at WHERE you spend your time. And we were also supposed to realize “Who takes care of me?” and to make ourSELVES a priority in our own lives.



But when he got to the part about having hard conversations, it REALLY hit home for me. We ALL have to have hard conversations as we go through life, whether it’s a problem client at work, a “moment” with your kids, or a “discussion” with your spouse. We all have them; and some of us have them more often than others!



He talked a lot about our body’s “fight or flight” response. For me, when I start to have one of these hard conversations, my heart rate speeds up, my breathing gets faster, and my face becomes red. These are just biological phenomenas that happen without any thought behind it. BUT what we DO with this response IS our choice. We can “go with it” which causes us to “run” or to “defend” ourselves. But really, when either of these two things happen, our little brains are deprived of oxygen, and we just stop THINKING. So the next time this happens to me, I am going to try to calm myself and take deep, slow breaths. We’ll see how this works.


But then he tells us this: We have “agreement” on about 90% of things with the person we have having this hard conversation with.



Really? I’m ARGUING with this person.

 But then I got to thinking about it. If it’s a client you’re dealing with, chances are you BOTH want the issue to be resolved. If it’s your kids, chances are you BOTH want to get to the bottom of it.



And what about your spouse? Oh, that’s the good one. Chances are you really probably DO have many of the same values and goals for life. Why would you marry someone who DIDN’T share these things with you? (For the sake of this post, I’m not going to address the people who are in marriages they shouldn’t be in.) You probably have children that you BOTH love and want protected. You probably BOTH have the same faith background. You probably BOTH really want your marriage to work. (I could go on and on, but I don’t want to stress you out by making this too long!)



So if we assume that this counselor is right and you really do have agreement on about 90% of things:

ISN’T THAT GOOD ENOUGH TO CONSIDER THIS A POSITVE RELATIONSHIP?

Oh, man.

Don’t you just love conviction?! I just love it when my God takes the time out of His busy day to speak a Word to me. To give me a little knock on the head. To let me know He is listening to me. But maybe, just maybe, I need to look at some things differently.

So WHY do I look at the little 10% of the glass that’s empty, instead of seeing the 90% that is FULL?

Isn’t that good enough?


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