How to make crickets be quiet?
It is obvious that we are being terrorized by a vocal cricket? It lives right outside an exterior door and said door is in our bedroom...
‘The stories you tell yourself are important’ is a common idea thrown around these days. I always thought this referred to the big broad stories we tell ourselves in our lives like ‘I can persevere through challenges’ and whatnot. But my mind was blown when I learned this week about what I would call the microstories that we tell ourselves within our interactions. This was illuminated by a professional development book I’m reading for work called Crucial Conversations. These are the flash stories we connect to an interaction that occurs right before our emotions. The practice of shifting those microstories (or at the very least being aware of them) is hugely powerful in shaping positive interactions.
This concept of microstories reminds me of the Buddhist practice of pausing and noticing your internal processes (thoughts, emerging emotions) before immediately acting/reacting to them. Are the Buddhist practitioners observing and adjusting their microstories to prevent themselves from being in a reactive state? I’m not sure because I haven’t read enough on either topic, but this microstories concept as a whole is rocking my internal world!
On a different note, I’m in a poetry revision group with 3 other women and recently we traded poems that inspire us or speak to us. I shared this poem by Rebecca Baggett that I read in Southern Poetry Review and then subsequently in her latest book of poetry. I love it.
Currently reading: The Ugly History of Beautiful Things by Katy Kelleher
Also currently reading: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Stephen R. Covey, and Joseph Grenny