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Mindfulness in Conversations 💬

Engagement and social interactions through conversations are like fire 🔥 because in it, you can forge strong connections and at the same time, burn through a lot of energy at once.

Conversations with people create opportunities but the really intense ones can take up a lot of time and energy. It is a trade-off that can suddenly get skewed in favour of the costs.

An elusive balance

Here are a few things I consider to push the scales back towards what seems to be an elusive balance:

  1. Being intentional by choosing how I want to engage. This is the guiding principle for every step that follows.
  2. Blocking time to keep conversations contained in their designated spaces
  3. Visual reminders to help draw attention to my priority or focus for the day.
  4. Reviewing notification settings to allow only the essential ones to surface. Disabling the rest cuts the distractions down to size.
  5. Using placeholder responses to address incoming messages when occupied with something else to revisit them later in the next step.
  6. Batching the creation of new content and responding to asynchronous conversations with others.
  7. Meditation by doing whatever practice helps clear my head and be fully present for an interaction. It could be going for a walk, sitting still and with focus on breathing, or even looking at the sky watching the clouds go by.
  8. Slowing down and engaging only as much as my intention for the day permits me.

Preparation

For the conversations that I intend to have, it always helps to be prepared before hand. By thinking about the talking points before hand, I conserve energy. This preparation replaces the effort which would have been expended during an unstructured conversation to make sense of it as it progressed. I usually think about:

Conclusion

What I will readily admit is that these methods are by no means a guarantee for succeeding in being mindful through your interactions with others. They are merely starting points that I have experimented with and found to be helpful sometimes. My goal is to think about this aspect of our social interactions more often and cultivate better habits that benefit us and others around us.

#communication #mindfulness

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