Week 6 Reflective Entry

By Noora Haraholma

While telling my story to Phuong I started to feel that I almost overreacted during my conversation. The things that made me annoyed were not big deals at all but they still made me feel irritated for some reason. I think people are close with each other (or have been in the past) they get more easily under your skin. I’m really happy that I cooled down and reflected on my reactions before acting on them because otherwise the whole conservation may have escalated without a good reason. Using suspension is a really good thing to do in the heat of the moment so that we do not say or do something that we could regret later.

Both while being coached myself and listening to Phuong and Muriel to tell about their suspension experiences I realized the importance of paying attention to your body. Disputing on something makes you feel tense and impacts your whole body and I think this reinforces the negative feelings and thoughts about the situation that again makes you even more tense. Being aware of your body and trying to relax can make a huge difference since it enables you to cool down and observe also the other points of view.

I also found based on our stories that sharing what we are experiencing with the other person can make a big difference. It makes it easier for them to understand why react in a certain way and it also helps us to explain our on views. In my own suspension conversation I tried to use I-I statements to explain how I feel about the situation but now thinking the whole situation in retrospect I feel like I failed to actually tell the other person what I was truly experiencing and why I got annoyed. On the other hand I think Muriel and Phuong were able to use this second stage of suspension really well and use it as a tool to build their relationship with the other person.

Reflecting my own situation and the situations that Muriel and Phuong talked about made me think about the assumptions that we bring in the conversation already beforehand. In my case I was already predicting that he might say something that would piss me off or that I would not approve. Because of this I probably became more prone to get annoyed and I also paid more attention on the things that I did not like in our conversation and which confirmed my assumptions on him going to say something that would annoy me. During our coaching session I also asked Muriel whether the assumptions she had beforehand affected her conversation. She told that she felt really tense already at the beginning of the conversation because she was able to predict that there would be a huge disagreement. This made me realize also the importance of being aware of the assumptions that we have because these can affect how we feel about the conversation and they can make the cooling down harder. I think noticing these assumptions should be as important as noticing our emotions and thoughts in the first part of the suspension process.