Communicating in a relationship can be a challenge. One of the reasons is that each person comes from a different background. They learned how to communicate differently from a young age. They had different experiences with communication in their past. And each individual forms their own story about how they communicate and perceive communication from others. 

Learning how to have better communication with your partner can sometimes even be more of a challenge, because often you’re trying to figure it out after the fact. You know what happened didn’t work so you go into analyst mode and try to figure out what happened. Why did one person react a certain way? How can the other person be more sensitive or do it differently next time? 

The problem with trying to fix it is that no two miscommunications are the same. It’s not going to happen exactly the same way next time. And if you identified something that triggered one person in the relationship, they are going to be hyper vigilant about that the next time, but it’s possible the trigger wasn’t really the problem anyway.

If you’ve ever had trouble fixing communication with your partner, give yourself a break. It’s not easy to fix something in the future based on something that happened in the past. You don’t ever actually know if you’re fixing the “right” thing. Plus, there are a lot of things that go into communication, tone, verbal, non-verbal, body language, their perspective, your perspective, etc.

To reiterate most of the time when it comes to communication, partners are trying to fix it rather than create a different experience. 

This happened with Mia. She had an incident with her partner and she was reading a book about the brain at the time. Because she wanted to get better she was going to do an exercise in the book. 

When she shared this on a call, the exercise felt like it was all about digging into the “why”. The “why” it’s happening doesn’t matter as much as the “how” you want it to be in the future. The “why” is looking to the past and trying to remember what happened in the moment and figure out why. When you focus on “how you want it to be in the future” you are creating an experience rather than trying to avoid an experience. It’s a lot easier to do. So, I asked Mia if she’d be open to a different way of improving her communication with her partner. She said, “Yes.”

Then I shared with her an exercise I call Take 2 (like in a movie where you shoot the scene again). After you experience a less than ideal communication experience, complete these steps:

1. Tell your partner you’d like to Take 2 for the situation. 
2. Ask them if they would be willing to play with you.
3. Start the “scene” over and do it how you would have liked to do it. 

By doing a Take 2, you are changing your brain in the moment. You are changing the experience and giving your brain new information to pull from next time you’re in a similar situation. This exercise is solely focused on what you want to create and not how to fix what you don’t want.

In this week’s interview on Manifesting Success Stories, Mia and I talk in depth about Take 2 and what happened when she did it with her partner. Listen here if you need a boost of confidence or inspiration to try it with your partner. 

Written with intention, compassion and a dash of magic by Cassie Parks, founder of Enchanted Life University.