This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
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It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
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Walk away for 30 minutes
The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about the small business he’s been running with a partner for the past twenty years. As you can imagine, twenty years is a long time to collect baggage.
Recently, they’ve been trying to work on their codependence issues, trying to stop enabling toxic behaviors that not only hold their business back, but also cause a lot of mutual misery on a regular basis.
One day, on a particularly heated phonecall, my friend recognized they were caught in a doom spiral, took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to hang up and call you back in 30 minutes.”
His partner protested with no small amount of ire.
So he said, “I don’t feel good right now, and you clearly don’t feel good right now, but I have faith that if we walk away for 30 minutes, we’ll feel better.”
His partner was not having it, and told him he’d better not hang up if he knew what was good for him. (I might be paraphrasing but whatever, I wasn’t there.)
He hung up anyway.
Then he set a timer, and went to do few personal things he’d been putting off, including getting something to eat.
30 minutes later, the timer went off, and he called his partner back.
Lo and behold, they both felt better. The conversation continued along a more rational trajectory, and wrapped up in a much better place than it had started.
Cooler heads prevailed.
As I started congratulating my friend on his wonderful self-awareness and restraint, he was quick to tell me that his partner just as often plays the part of the grown up when he fails to.
That’s why they can still be partners.
Regardless, I love this tactic. We’ve all been locked into bad moments with people we’re close to. I’m using the word “locked” very deliberately, because it does feel like a prison when you’re in it. In fact, it might be easier to pry steel bars out of concrete than to just walk away.
But if you promise to come back in 30 minutes? That could be the right key to get you out of that bad moment and into a better one.
How to get out of a bad moment