Exercise Twenty-Six – Clarifying Interpersonal Goals and Priorities

What are my current priorities? More open windows? Not making things any worse than they might already be? Um.

“In this exercise, you will practice identifying and prioritising among your objective, relationship goal, and self-respect goal. You will also consider the ways in which your goals might come into conflict with one another so that you are better prepared to act on your priorities.”

One thing has been bothering me recently. Am I now conflict-averse after having spent most of my life seeking a good argument? Probably. The fallout from difficult interactions seems too hard to manage these days. My main aim now is to make sure that most interactions go as well as they can. But what if I needed to get into conflict? Could I still do it? Yes. Would I worry afterwards? Yes.

I don’t like this exercise much. I already try to keep out of trouble, avoid upsetting anyone and supress a load of stuff. I look at closed windows longingly and imagine a world where they could be freely opened. In fact, I have a window open while I’m writing this. It’s heavenly.  And I’m also very aware that some of my relationships in the past were characterised by poor communication, dishonesty and destructiveness. Oh, and avoidance. And maybe control too.

So, on with the exercise, which asks me to try getting interpersonal so I can practice clarifying my goals and priorities. As I often write here, good luck to me.

Here are the steps -

1)   “Briefly describe the facts of the situation.”

2)   “Identify your objective. What is the result or outcome that you want from this discussion? What do you want to ask for, say no to, or express? What will help you bring about this outcome?”

3)   “Identify your relationship goal. How do you want the other person to feel about you based on how you based on how you behave in this interaction? What do you need to do to achieve this goal?”

4)   “Identify your self-respect goal. How do you want to feel about yourself based on how you behave in this interaction?”

 After this, it’s time to do some weighing up. And think about Wise Mind priorities. I had to go back to the start of the book here to remind me about Wise Mind, which stands apart from Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind. Here it is below, bravely making its way through a storm.

“Wise Mind is an inner wisdom that every person has access to within themselves. Some might call it intuition  or one’s ‘highest self.’ It is often experienced as a calm eye-of-the-storm, deep knowing of what to do, even during really emotional times.”

How does Wise Mind fit into interpersonal goals and priorities? Well, it can be used in when trying to prioritise between objectives, relationship goals and self-respect goals.

The book asks us to consider three questions -

1)“If the only way I could achieve my objective would be to sacrifice the relationship goal, would I do it?”

2) “If the only way to achieve my objective would be to sacrifice my self-respect goal, would I do it?”

3)”If the only way to achieve my relationship goal would be to sacrifice my self-respect goal, would I do it?”

On a good day, goals may all match up. But often they will be in conflict with each other. This is all too familiar to me. If I leave x job or person, I  think, I’ll lose y. And y is important to me, and who says things will be any better once I’m free of x - they may be worse - and if that’s the case, what have I gained? And very quickly I’m back in the land of internal conflict, a place I really don’t like to be.

“It is not uncommon for someone to say, “I don’t have a relationship goal, (or self-respect goal) in this situation! While the relationship or your self-respect may be less important than your objective in a given interaction, we actually always have goals in each of these categories – don’t ignore them just because they are a lower priority!”

Let me have a think about what I want in the coming months. I’m quite stressed with a new job, and I don’t always feel that well physically. I’m trying to slim down, get stronger in body, avoid unnecessary stress, reduce my OCD symptoms, stay alive, manage my money and not make any of my problems worse. How do interpersonal goals fit into this list? Sometimes I feel I’m just a walking collection of symptoms trying to write a blog.