Hello! thank you for your time today as you read this 🙂

So,

What does it mean to feel seen in relationships? We could go on and on in a philosophical conversation, but at the end of the day, suffice it to say, it’s complicated, and not easy. 

Here is a simple yet powerful practice you can do to enhance how clearly you both see each other. It’s most effective when you both participate in the exercise together, it takes two to tango after all. However, it can still be helpful to do it on your own. It starts with self-reflection and then sharing said self-reflection with each other. Alright, let’s get into it.

Some questions to consider…

Self-reflection: Here are a couple of different ways to ask a similar question. However you reflect on these questions is totally up to you. If you enjoy thinking through your responses to yourself, away from other people’s influence, before sharing them, try journaling. If you are a verbal processor and appreciate workshopping your thoughts/feelings live in conversation, you can simply bring these questions up as topics of discussion. 

1. What is it that you ache for others to understand about you?
2. If you were to die tomorrow, what would you want people to remember you by? 
3. How do you want people to feel in your presence?
4. Share your answers to the above questions with your partner (or whoever you’re doing this exercise with).

The goal of this exercise is to remove some of the guess-work around what you each want the other to understand about you. Once you know what to look for, it can be a lot easier to find it. 

Practicing this allows you to upgrade the experience of feeling seen to the experience of feeling “looked for”. The feeling that whoever you’re relating with is looking for the parts of you that matter most to you…your patience, sense of humor, the care you take to be considerate, the effort you put into certain things, how deeply you listen, the effort you put into learning from mistakes, the moments you chose to be compassionate, your sense of practicality and logic, your sense of adventure. 

What I’ve noticed, as a life and relationship coach, is that when people do this exercise, they realize that there are things they want to be seen for that they’ve never explicitly articulated to anyone, including themselves. This is why this exercise fits neatly into the LifeProof framework, under the third pillar – Expand Your Awareness. It expands your awareness of yourself and, if shared with another, your awareness of them. 

Analogies: 

Imagine your math teacher gives you a math problem, but doesn’t tell you what you’re solving for. How are you supposed to answer the question? What are you looking for? 

Imagine you hire a contractor to build you a building, but you don’t tell them what kind of building you want them to build…they just have to infer based on what they know about you what you might want? No thank you. 

Examples: 

Two friends:

Partners:

Mother and daughter:

My genuine recommendation is to treat these topics of reflection as things you consistently check in on with yourself, rather than something you think about once. Consider the first time you answer these questions as Draft 1. The second time you answer them is Draft 2, and so on. You’re not writing anything in stone, you’re developing a living and breathing understanding of yourself that changes and evolves as you do. You’re practicing and honing a sensitivity to yourself, a sense of self-curiosity. Reflection has become a lost art. It’s a practice, and can be approached like we approach any other practice (yoga, meditation, rock climbing, etc). With patience, persistence, and curiosity. 

Try this: 

1. Create a calendar event, starting on the day you decide to reflect on these questions. 
2. Copy and paste the above questions into the description box of the event. 
3. Set the event to recur every three months. 
4. Once you have answers to these questions, add them to the same description box. 
5. Then, three months later, after you’ve likely forgotten the specific questions and answers, your calendar will politely remind you to think about these things again.