Conversation Blooming

In this episode, I catch you up with what has been going on personally such as starting "The Artist's Way" and how it's already opening up some big questions around creativity and visibility. I also talk about the guest episodes which I have been planning this month and have been looking forward to...

This episode gets into the concept that I have been sitting with called Conversation Blooming -- the idea that our connections deepen when our conversations are intentional, meaningful, and focused. Arguably, part of our psychology is shaped by the conversations we have with people. Each conversation attempts to land on an agreement which subconsciously determines / creates our values...

Chapters

• 0:17 intro
• 1:54 updates (The Artist's Way)
• 6:59 purpose of a conversation
• 11:18 the impact of a conversation
• 14:42 we are dependent on people mirroring us
• 16:50 language manipulation
• 18:20 expression
• 20:51 partnership

Transcript

I can't tell if someone's actually like moving this mic or if it actually just has a mind of its own. My table's literally dented from the mic. It's so bad. And for I'd say like a good six months I've been using it the wrong way. Don't ask how. I literally was. It was so weird. It was in the weirdest angle.

Also I have so much like putty. You know like putty like slime. I have so much of it just on my desk. Like I have a mini Aaron's thinking putty and I have like this weird therapy putty that my dad's ex got. And I just love playing with it while I record like while I speak. But then I always just hear it while I'm editing. Like I always hear like that random like click of that putty. And I really hope that like when people are listening to it I mean obviously now like people are going to know what it is. But like in the past I really hope like when people listen to this like they don't actually know that I'm like literally playing with like Loki slime. But yeah I'm going to I'm going to try not make it have any sounds.

Also recording today is kind of weird because there's literal scaffolding surrounding this whole entire flat and I've had to close all the cartons in this room because there will be random builders just like popping their head in and I just find that so freaking weird. So yeah that's that.

Updates. I don't really know how to start off this podcast to be honest. I mean like I haven't recorded for over a month. This month has been really busy. I've been planning different podcast episodes with guests. I've been looking at studios and I've also started The Artist's Way. Well I've actually technically started it today and I'm I was very excited at first. I still am. I'm still very excited to start it but I'm also very nervous at the same time now because I've read the first I haven't like properly started it. I got up to the like if you've read it you know what I'm talking about but I've read up to the contract bit and for the people who haven't read it this book makes you sign a contract to dedicate 12 weeks to committing to this journey essentially and like you need to be doing your morning pages. You need to be going once a week taking yourself out on a solo date and this book literally warns you that you're going to go through so many uncomfortable emotions and reading like the first 30 pages of this book I've already felt like uncomfortable.

Like the whole idea of a solo date to me just feels so uncomfortable because yeah I mean look like I already do so many solo dates but like I've never really done them like in depth and obviously like she doesn't the writer of this book doesn't really expect people in the first week to like you know go out to dinner by themselves but like it's just so interesting that that kind of thing just freaks me out like I just I would feel uncomfortable I wouldn't like it I wouldn't enjoy it at all and that's the whole point of like this journey so I am excited and I'm excited where it's going to take me and I will be documenting my whole experience with this book on this platform.

I'm mainly going to be writing on threads every single day but on my Instagram on this Instagram I will be doing weekly updates of it so I'll be doing weekly posts of like you know every single week and like what I've learned from it like all the hard stuff from it and yeah like I'll try be as transparent as I can be because to be honest I feel like I'm going into something that I have almost no it's almost I feel like I'm almost like going into a hurricane and I feel like it's just like a light wind that I'm going into so yeah but you know to be plain like I hope to get out of this with the ability to be more transparent.

I think I'm going through a period of this I wouldn't say creative block but I would kind of describe it as just a difficulty to be a hundred percent transparent. I feel like as peoplethat are creating and are you know producing their own work into something it's so easy to think that this is so egotistical. We're all narcissists. And, you know, even in this introduction of this book, like this author literally says you're not, you don't have a big ego for producing your own work. And that is something that I really needed to hear. So obviously I know that I'm going on the right track, but I guess I want to showcase more of myself and be more transparent of who I am and just be more opinionated on here. And I feel like I've really started to do that even now. So that is like a journey that I'm going on because I just feel like if I posted a photo of myself on this podcast account, I would, I don't know why, but I would literally think that that is so egotistical and it's so weird and I shouldn't be doing that. And it sounds so irrational when I say it out loud, but in my head it makes sense.

And even like videoing myself feels so weird to like post on like the Instagram of this podcast. But then I'm the one that's literally speaking in this podcast. So it's so weird, but there is just that block of like showing up as 100% me. It's like if there's no face, then there's a sort of detachment to this work that I'm doing. Whereas if I show my face a lot, then, you know, when people would see this, they would see, okay, you know, podcast, this is her, you know, she like shows herself on here a lot. And like that is scary to me. That is so scary. Like I'm so like, I don't want people going on the Instagram and like instantly seeing me there. Like that is so intimidating because like I don't have control of who goes on there. I don't have control of what like people say. But I know it's the right path and like I know that I'm going to grow so much with it and, you know, it'll be sick. Like it'll be so cool.

Anyway, I came up with this episode idea in the most random moment. I mean, I come up with a lot of ideas in the most random. I don't even feel like I come up with any ideas. I feel like ideas come to me and I just write them down. So I came up with this idea when I was walking with two of my friends, Joshua and Michaela, and they don't even know this, but it was just like such a random moment. We were walking. We're going to brunch and we were talking about something. And all of a sudden this idea came in my head about conversations and like just the nature of conversations.

And this idea was I wrote it. I have a whole page of like different episodes that I want to do. So I'm going to read out what I wrote as this episode idea. And I called it conversation blooming. So the point of any conversation is to connect with the person who we are speaking to and land on an agreed conclusion. With this, our focus around these conversations grow and we grow with these thoughts. In the same way as a flower blooms, we bloom. Our psychology blooms. Our connection blooms with the other person, people we speak with regularly. We need to speak with intention, not for satisfaction, but with a direction. So we would never like bring an idea up to someone that we think that they wouldn't agree with. Or maybe they wouldn't agree with it. But like, let's say at least challenge it, you know.

So the point of bringing up conversations, the point of speaking to people is to find that line, that place where you both agree with something or you both share an interesting opinion with something towards something. And that is basically where the friendship blooms, where we get a better understanding of, yeah, just I guess getting a better understanding of what the friendship is and also developing a sort of psychology around that. Like we have different friends for different things and we obviously talk to different people about different things. And that is all determined by focus and what we focus on.

I've recently talked a lot about focus because I think it's just such an important tool that we were given. And it's so easy to lose focus on things. It's so easy to lose ourselves in social media. It's so easy to actually just want to escape onto social media as well. But I feel like it's just the worst thing ever. I have this boundary with myself of not sleeping with my phone inside of my room. The only time I dois when I have friends sleeping over or if I'm staying at my boyfriend's. Then it's just like a normal habit to like, I don't know, go on my phone first thing. But now that I'm doing the artist's way, I'm not gonna have to. I'm gonna have to be that person that literally pulls up to someone's house with a notepad and pen and wake up in the morning and do my morning pages. I don't know how I feel about that to be honest, but I'm kind of excited for it. I think it's such a vulnerable thing to do.

I'm also going on holiday next month. I'm gonna have to do that every single morning if I even remember. No, I will definitely do it; like I will definitely stick to it. And it's also eight hours of reading a week, which is crazy. Like you can't do that with a degree while you're studying for a degree, I don't think. Or maybe you can, I don't know. I have no idea.

So yeah, I mean I don't know, there are so many different ideas around this. And firstly, before like anything else is said, I am a true believer of you can only know someone as well as they know themselves. So it could be so easy to point the finger of, "Oh, I don't have a deep relationship with like this person because maybe it's I don't know our problem." But at the end of the day, like they reveal all the cards that they wish to reveal about themselves and maybe that's just because of how well they know themselves.

The reason why I want to talk about conversation so much is because I feel like they have a much bigger impact on us and on our psychology than we actually think. So this is why I think it's so important to really be aware of the people that we pick in our lives and the people we choose to hang out with most. Because even like a harmless bit of gossip, regardless of how harmless it may seem in the moment to us, the fact that we are choosing to focus on that and to focus on the flaws of people, at the end of the day we are programming our psychology to focus on that thing. And not only that, we're also basing our friendship around that thing because we know that it's a safe common ground.

We know that when we speak to someone about, if it's gossip, I'm using gossip because I feel like a lot of us do just gossip and it's unhealthy. But there are so many other things; that's obviously not the only thing that we talk about, but we're all victims to gossip. So when we do gossip, it's so easy to have that safety net in the friendship of, "Oh, there's nothing, you know, there's nothing that we can really talk about, so like let's talk about gossip."

But yeah, I mean it's just important to be aware that the point, the whole point of a conversation is to connect someone. Is to land on how do you end a conversation? You end a conversation when you're either in an agreement or a disagreement. And it's okay to be in a disagreement, but as long as there's some sort of satisfaction there, that's the whole point of a conversation: to bond.

So we don't want to be using the whole gossip card as a safety net to build connections because we're going to be connecting on really low frequency, just negative things. And that's what the whole friendship is based on; that's what people will perceive us as, and it's surface leveled. And I feel like in order to just grow as people, as well as with other people, we need to have some sort of vulnerability. We need to have like some level of deepness.

And yeah, and we need to speak with intention because then if we just let the first thing that come, I don't mean, I don't know, you know, like we do just need to speak with intention. We don't just want to speak for the sake of speaking because that can lead us somewhere that's not so nice. We obviously have people that we can talk to about anything, but like in general terms, in like day to day, we need to meet people with intention.

We want to meet people with intention. We want to talk to people about things that have intention because at the end of the day, the things that do have intention are not only going to help us build strong connections, but they're just going to help us grow. And they're going to help us develop as like our psychology. As much as our focus matters with our habits and our routine and what we get up to in our day, the conversations that we have in our day to day are just as important because they work as a sort of hypnosis.

The whole flat is literally shakingbecause of these builders. So I was going to say that there's a lot of dependence on other people to validate us. As much as we would like to deny that we don't crave validation, even if we don't crave it, we all naturally look for it because it all goes back to the idea that like because we can't see ourselves, we always need to look at a mirror. We always need something to reflect who we are back to us. And because of that, we also look for that with our friendships, with people.

People are really good at reflecting our character traits back to us, which is why we don't want to get a bad reflection back. Like as much as we are all dependent on receiving validation, there are different levels of it and there are levels that are okay and then there are levels that are like just not healthy. The levels that are not healthy are the ones that people actually do crave massively to be mirrored because we don't know how to essentially like trust ourselves.

So we firstly would probably have a very shallow relationship with ourselves if we feel like we can't mirror ourselves or if we can't like give feedback to ourselves, if we can't validate ourselves, if we can't spend time with ourselves. So that would make us more heavily dependent on other people like giving us that satisfaction. And we'd also just become like so detached from ourselves.

We'd probably just be chasing what other people, what we think other people want to hear. And that conversation, whatever that may lead to, it's not going to come from ourselves because it's essentially just coming from a place of detachment and just lostness. And that person will probably mirror that as well and they'll probably read that. We all read each other so well.

I feel like there's no, I mean, trusting our intuition with people is the most, people that don't trust their intuition I think are just so stupid because we can all read each other beyond language. If anything, language is so manipulative, especially with people that like really try to convince you that there's something with their words, especially people that talk a lot. Like that sounds so rude, but it's so true. People that talk more have more to hide. Whereas the people that are like just calm are normally just calm people and like are very well put together.

And yeah, it's just so interesting. I mean, I never really thought about that. I was just talking about this now that, you know, as much as like we can connect with people over conversations, over different things, as much as we would like to maybe manipulate people into believing with something different, at the end of the day, like we're all human. We all share the same body language. We are all energy. We all read each other's energy, whether we're conscious of it or not. Any weird vibes, that's us reading people's energy and sussing out like something weird or something amazing.

And at the end of the day, if we're not authentically like blooming with the conversations that we have with people and if we're not just being authentically ourselves, then how can we expect to grow with the people around us? Like I think language is such an incredible gift and it really helps us connect more with like just the people around us and also just helps us understand ourselves.

And it's like it just guides us to grow completely, which is why we want our focus and the conversations that we focus on with people to be so finely in tuned with the people that we are. We don't want to have any fear of expressing ourselves.

And to be honest, there have been moments where like there are times and situations where I find it really difficult to express myself and like I don't really understand why. But I always like in those situations, I just have the image in my head that it's just not a safe place for me to express myself. And I also have the image in my head that the other person won't fully understand me and therefore like I get so, I just become closed off and I just can't really talk about myself.

I mean, it's hard to always be ourselves authentically, but like if we feel like we can't be ourselves around someone and like if we also can't really like avoid them, then the best thing we can do is actually just try and like still persist in it and just feel uncomfortable. I think it's really important to feel uncomfortable because then we will get so many different answers.

Also, there's another thing about if we ever have low level conversationswith people that aren't really enlightening and are just like kind of mid or like negative. And if that's just like the majority of our conversations, then we're basically building our psychology around that. And we're basically just trapping ourselves in this box of like thinking in a low level way and putting other people down and laughing at people that try. Like the fact that that gives us satisfaction, we would naturally build our psychology around that. So it's so important to like actually not do that, because then when we actually do try to do something, it counteracts on us. And we are essentially stuck on this box because now we've built this whole fear that we will get laughed at because that is like our whole psychology. And also we probably think that our friends wouldn't really support us because if our friends are laughing at that kind of stuff, like it's kind of weird and uncomfortable to do something so like just follow our creativity in that sense.

But yeah, I mean, all of that, like if our friendships are based on stuff like that, it's all artificial and it's all just stupid anyway. Like it's just such a waste of space. I feel like real friendships are more than just a friendship. I really feel like it's a partnership because we're all sharing our life experiences together. And I feel like because of our friendship, we are all managing to build something together by sharing our experiences, by sharing our characters and our personality and our like dreams and goals and all of our responsibilities to like show the love. But like I guess it's all of our responsibility to grow with the people that we're friends with and the people that we have in our lives.

I mean, I don't know. There are all kinds of different friendships, but I do believe that a friendship is so much more than just a friendship purely because we are sharing our life experiences. And conversations really aid us to bloom with our friends and to just grow and to also like create ideas from just being together. Like we're all so creative and we all have these unique ideas. We're all unique people. Like I love being with people that just inspire me and that make me just help me have a new perspective on things. And that is what really helps me grow. And that's why I think all of us should be doing to each other because that is what friendship is. It makes us and it makes our ideas collaborate onto something. That's the whole point of like conversation blooming.

And I feel like so many people are unable or scared to do that because there is just like that fear of rejection. And even if we get rejected, like so what? Like so what if someone doesn't agree with us? It's the whole essence of being challenged that is so fun. And I mean, I get when there's that fear of rejection because I sometimes have that fear of rejection and I completely shut off my whole persona to some people purely because I just feel like I sense that there's just like no alignment. And I wish that naturally like I didn't do that and I wish that I could naturally just be vulnerable. And I think that's like my next goal here. My next goal is to do that 100%.

Because we need to think to ourselves like why do we actively go out? Why do we actively feel the need to meet so many people or not even feel the need? But why do we go out so much? And why do we talk about the things that we talk about? Do we do it to gain some sort of validation? Do we do it to gain some sort of connection that we can't give to ourselves? And if so, then like what kind of character do we portray? Because it's clearly not a fulfilled one. And then obviously on the flip side, like if we are meeting with people that really like fill up our cup, why again like why do we talk about the things that we talk about? Because then it will reveal a lot about ourselves and a lot about our psychology about things. So yeah, very, very interesting. But I will end it there for now.