Last week I wrote about feeling like my narrator abandoned my protagonist. Unsurprisingly, connection is one of my top values. When my experience is neither seen nor heard, when I feel like my story is being negated because the other person experienced the event completely differently, my anxiety rises and I often prematurely close the discussion to manage my discomfort.  

I can deal with disagreement as long as I can trust that I and the other party can maintain contact. Not being in psychological contact feels inhospitable and unwelcoming of discussion. That definitely feels like a story with an unhappy ending. Yet, disagreement can often become the engine of creativity and can deepen my own authority as I expand to include other people’s experiences and stories. 

How do we stay connected when we’re not aligned?

Some questions to consider: 

Can I remain in my own authority without making you wrong?

Can I allow your authority to exist without requiring it to become mine?

Can we remain connected when we genuinely see things differently?

When connection is disrupted, am I willing to participate in finding our way back?

Rather than doing the hard work of staying in the conversation, do we use agreement as a form of premature closure?

When we prematurely resolve the tensions that actually transformed us, we deprive the story of the material through which transformation becomes visible.

Yet again I’m thinking about the word authority and about its echo of author. When you step into your own authority, you are authoring a story. You are not only empowering yourself, but you are also inviting your audience to empower themselves. 

When I started writing these blog posts, I believed that I was writing about story, the components of story, and how to change your story. Now after all these months, I see that I’ve also been writing about relationship. I shouldn’t be surprised. Stories are holding environments for relationships and the feelings they engender.

Whether we’re actively interacting with another person or with parts of our internal selves, we are always in relationship. Transformation happens when we commit to telling all of our stories and they are heard, experienced, and even disagreed with. When we are present to it all, we open the door to our own and others’ growth. 

How do you stay connected when you’re not aligned?