Com101 – Safe Chat vs Safe Travel

Let’s say, I want to plan a trip.  There’s a lot involved with something like that.  I figure out where I want to go and why.  I might get some friends involved.  We need tickets.  We need to actually get to the airport and get on a plane.  If everything goes well, we’ll get where we wanted to be, but if something goes wrong, like bad weather, the plane might land early.  In which case, we’d have to get a new flight booked and keep trying to get to my destination.

That’s a lot, right?  There is a lot involved with traveling and a lot more involve with traveling with other people.  If you’ve traveled, you know this already.  It’s all obvious to a seasoned traveler, but if you’ve never gone on a trip like this before, you might be in for a surprise as you discover just how much effort it takes to get to your destination and just how much more complex it gets when there are other people involved.

A safe space conversation with someone is just like traveling with someone.  Let’s walk through what I mean by that.  I’m going to just stick to travel for a second.

I realize I want to travel.  I ask myself where do I want to go?  I ask myself why?  Why is this place important to me?  Why do I want to go?  Then I ask myself, who do I want to share this with?

First of all, look at all the dead end in that picture.  I’m trying to find someone that I want to travel with who also wants to travel with me.  I ask myself if they are good to travel with?  I mean, are they trustworthy with something as big and complex as travel?  If the answer is “no”, “not really”, or “I don’t know”, then I’m probably not even going to invite them on the trip.  Well, if my answer was “I don’t know,” I might invite them on a smaller, safer, less risky trip.  Maybe a weekend road trip, but not a flight to another continent or anything like that.  Why is this?  It’s because I want to have a good time getting to my destination and being at my destination and I don’t want to invite someone who’s going to ruin that.

If I ask myself, “are they good to travel with?” and I find myself saying, “hell yeah,” then I can put the offer out there to invite them.  “Hey, I’m going on an adventure.  Do you want to travel with me?  I’m not saying it will be easy, but the results could be life changing.”

What I’m really asking is, “do you have the desire to overcome all the obstacles involved with travel, and do you want to do that with me?”  They might say,  “nope.  Thanks for the invite, but I’m a ‘no’.”  That’s totally okay for us.  That’s a good thing.  If they don’t want to be on the trip, they would probably be a nightmare to be around anyways, so I say, “Okay, cool.  Thanks for letting me know.”  They just saved me a bunch of time, energy, and frustration by saying, “no, thank you.”  If I gave them a true invitation with zero expectation of them saying yes, then I will be thankful when they say “no”. 

If I get all bent out of shape because they said, “no,” that’s on me.  That’s my fault for having expectations and projecting those expectations onto them.  If I’m bend out of shape, it’s because I didn’t truly make it safe for them to say “no.”  In that case, I would be even more thankful they said, “no” because that means they were strong enough to stand up to my expectations and enforce their boundaries for the benefit of both of us.  They took a risk telling me “no,” because it might trigger a reaction from me.  Perhaps I’m not the safe-ask person I thought I was.  This twinge of being let down because they said “no” helps me realize I had expectations wrapped up in this request.  It’s even more important that I say, “thank you for your honesty.”  Yes, I’m letdown, but I’ll handle my emotions.  In the meantime, part of being a safe-ask person is thanking them for their honesty so I can be safe for them today and encourage them to be honest with me in the future.  Then I take a timeout with myself, and I get my head straight before I make this offer to anyone else.

On the other hand, they might say, “yeah!  Thank you!  I’d love to travel with you!  Let’s do it!  Thank you for inviting me.  Thank you for sharing this with me.”  They want to be there with us, and they know they are signing up for some work to make this happen.

The next question is, “do we both have the resources for this trip?”  Sure, we want to do it, but can we successfully follow through on this or are we just lying to ourselves?  Do we have the time, the energy, the experience, passports, and visas?  Do we have the necessary vaccinations?  Do we have the funds? 

If we have all these things, then we can get tickets.  If we don’t, we need to separately work on ourselves and our individual situations first.  We can try something together when we are both better prepared.

With tickets in hand, we go to the airport together, we go through the security checkpoints together, we get on the plane, and we strap in.

Then the plane takes off!   We’re doing it!  We’re on our way!

If something goes wrong while we’re in the air, like bad weather, the plane will land early.  In which case, we would go through the process of scheduling another flight that will get us there.  We would probably be booked on our next flight before we even left the terminal or walk back through a security checkpoint.  We would be delayed, but we would still have a plan for getting to where we’re going.

Regardless of if this is the first flight or an alternate flight, if everything goes well, we will have a happy landing at our intended destination.  We’ll unbuckle, get off the plane, go back through the security checkpoints, and we’ll exit the airport.  Life will be full of exciting new possibilities because we overcame what it took to get here.

Let me put that all together in one picture:

In the first part, we realize we want to travel, we ask ourselves “where,” “why,” and “with who?” All of that is Step 1.  That’s getting clear with ourselves, what we’re feeling, and why we’re feeling it. 

Step 2 is a vast amount of setting up a safe space and ensuring it’s safe.  It starts with a safe person to share our experience with and a safe, doable plan to actually have the experience.  Then we go to an airport, where we can safely fly together.  When everyone walks through that same security checkpoint, we’re ensuring we’re in a safe environment.  The plane takes off form a safe space and it lands in a safe space, even if we hit bad weather and land early.

Step 3 is the flight.  It’s actually the smallest part of that picture.  Can you see now why this series has spent so much time talking about creating a safe space and keeping it safe?  Even if we’re in flight and something goes wrong, we can make an emergency landing in another safe airport. 

When we’re all done flying, we go back through the security checkpoint, we go back through the airport, and then we’re free to go have an amazing time in a new place because we made this trip happen successfully.

Compare that to having one of our safe space conversations.

Step 1 is we get clear.  We ask ourselves, “what do I want,” and “what am I feeling?”  We feel it for what it is.  We sit with it.  Then we ask, “why am I feeling this?  Who or what is my monkey brain trying to blame?”  We’re getting our head straight before we get anyone else involved.  What are our feelings, wants, needs, and unmet expectation?  We get clear.  We strip out blame and expectations.  Then we go find someone to share our experience with. 

Who do we want to share this with?  Are they a good person to share with?  Are they trustworthy or not?  When we find the right person, we make them an offer with no expectations.  “Hey, I have this thing and I’d like to share it with you.  I’m not saying it will be easy, but the results could be life changing.  Do you have the desire to overcome all the obstacles involved with me sharing this?  Do you want to hold space for each other?”  They can say, “no, thank you,” because we’ve gone out of our way to get our head right and not have expectations wrapped up in the invitation.

If they don’t want to have a conversation with us, they would probably be a nightmare to talk to anyways, so we say, “Okay, cool.  Thank you for your honesty.  I’ll find someone else to talk to.”  I’ll go get my needs met elsewhere.  No harm, no foul.  That part can be hard sometimes, but remember, we got our head straight before we even gave them the invitation.

They might also say, “hell yeah.  Thank you for trusting me with this.  Thank you for sharing what’s going on.”  From there we know we want to have a conversation together, but do we have what it takes to do it successfully?  Do we have the spoons to do it?  Do we have time, and the experience?  If we do, we schedule a conversation, which is the “buying tickets” part.

Again, if we don’t have what it takes to do this successfully, we need to separately work on ourselves and our individual situations first.  We can try again when we are both better prepared and have more experience with these things.

After we “buy tickets” to this conversation, we get together to have the talk.  What’s next?  No, we don’t just start talking.  We walk ourselves through the security checkpoint first.  We go through all the safe space boundaries.  It might be slow the first couple of times we go through this checkpoint, but the more we do it, the quicker and easier it will become.  After we make it safe for everybody, we strap in and start our conversation.

Step 3, the flight is the conversation.  This series breaks the conversations into two pieces; holding space, and then whatever naturally comes next.  We start with holding space because getting on the same page, listening to each other, clarifying, understanding each other’s experience, understanding each other’s point of view, validating, empathizing, –all of these things come first.  We also take great strides to do it all without blame.

Once we’ve finished taking turns holding space for everyone, we do whatever naturally comes next.  We might find apologies are in order.  We may see some low hanging fruit type solutions, or we may decide to put our heads together to actively work on a solution that benefits everyone.  We also may decide to do nothing at all.  It amazing how sometimes no further action is needed.  The action that was needed might have been to get on the same page.  In other cases, we may agree to disagree or agree that we can’t help each other with this specific topic today, and that’s okay too.

If something goes wrong, we can have an emergency landing by calling a timeout.  We land in a safe space with our timeout.  We might even do a check-in, in mid-flight to realize, “oh, we don’t have to land, we’re just doing a little course correction.  We’re good now.  Let’s keep going.”  If we make our emergency landing, we’re still in a safe landing place.  In the same way we scheduled our next flight before leaving the airport, we schedule our next conversation before leaving our safe space.

At the end, we unbuckle, we leave the safe space together, and now we’re back out in the world where we have all of these exciting new possibilities because we overcame what it took to get here; we had this safe space conversation together.

Now I’m literally going to swap out the words on the diagram to show this: