Reframe Your Relationships

Two people sitting down with their backs to one another with a venn diagram representing conflict above their heads

Wouldn’t it be great if life had a refresh button?

Say a situation isn’t going the way you hoped, imagine just clicking refresh and you get to start all over again.

Well, in a sense, we actually can hit that refresh button and start anew. We can do this by shifting our perspective and looking through a new lens.

This applies to how we see ourselves, how we approach our work, and how we show up to our relationships – professional or otherwise.

It’s so easy for us to get stuck in particular patterns of thinking, and much harder to free ourselves of those mental fetters; but, with concerted effort we can gain an entirely new perspective on every aspect of our lives and open ourselves up to experiencing people, problems, and people problems, differently.

But where to begin?

Understanding how you think is a great place to start. We all have deeply ingrained patterns of thinking which begin at the cellular level, in our neurons, which in turn dictate our behaviors and reactions. Without this awareness and also being armed with the knowledge that we are able to change these patterns, we can easily feel lost and overwhelmed by our natural tendencies.

The 5 Dynamics methodology interprets these patterns in a straightforward way and the Simpli5 platform provides an easy-to-use common language to articulate why we do what we do, and, why others do what they do.
This is the key to allowing us to reframe our relationships with others – whether they are teammates, family members, friends, or significant others. Once we understand ourselves, we are then better able to understand the people around us and can separate the person from their process.

Let me provide an example from my personal life.

I co-parent with my ex, and we actually do it pretty dang well, and if you knew how tumultuous and hostile our relationship was you would know how truly shocking this is.

We are opposite in almost every way imaginable, and we spent almost all of our relationship and our subsequent separation butting heads, but eventually, after all of the intense feelings had time to settle, something clicked. I finally started seeing his actions as part of his energy and his process and I stopped taking them personally.

For instance (and this is a very minor example), he doesn’t shut cabinets or doors, like ever, and I just could not understand this because I would ask him over and over again to shut things once he was done with them and when he wouldn’t I would become increasingly frustrated and annoyed. When we talked about this and I explained that if you open it, shutting it should be part of the same stream of consciousness, I finally started to understand that for him it doesn’t work that way. His brain is going in a hundred different directions all at once and doesn’t stay in one line from start (opening cabinet) to finish (closing cabinet). Ultimately, he genuinely just doesn’t see the cabinet as open because he has already moved on to the next thing.

I finally started to accept the fact that our brains work differently and that’s okay.

This also allowed me to open myself up to the things he noticed about me that I was missing. Resetting my approach to this relationship has enabled me to reframe my perspective of myself as well.

This is one of the greatest gifts of 5 Dynamics. The ability to see things differently by being able to truly see ourselves and those around us.

Other platforms may focus on the individual, which is great because individual awareness is the foundation of everything else, but the Simpli5 platform takes it a step further by including the ability to see the energies of others and provides customized content based on how those energies collide and collaborate.

This information sets us up for success in any type of relationship we may encounter. The same reasoning behind why my ex doesn’t shut cabinet doors might be the same reasoning behind why that one coworker of yours rapidly fires 10 different streams of consciousness in 2 minutes without leaving room for anyone else to jump in.

We all think differently. We all see things differently. We experience, feel, emote, communicate, differently. Making sense of this complex and complicated puzzle we call human relationships and approaching them with curiosity and humility is actually an amazing opportunity to uncover something pretty wonderful.

I encourage you to take a look at some of your relationships, especially the frustrating ones, and then take a look through a new lens and see what you find.

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