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The Half Hour Meeting

By Charlene Crilley

All the steps to constructive conflict resolution (fair-fighting) are incorporated into  this meeting.  It can help you build trust, reduce defensiveness, and help you and your partner communicate openly.  It's a good way to practice. It also helps you:
  • Build Trust
  • Decrease Defensiveness
  • Allow your partner their thoughts and feeling while attending to your own
  • Constructively report your anger and resentment and still propose a solution
  • Experience first few steps in Constructive Conflict Resolution (Fair Fighting)
  • Express and receive compliments
  • Express your wants and needs
  • Feel Heard and Hear your partner
  • Feel safe to say your truth
  • Experience consistency (positive predictability)
  • Gain mutual accountability
  • Emphasize "We Are A Team"

What You Need

  • Half hour of uninterrupted time once a week
  • Relationship Journal (blank book)

Agreements

  • Meet weekly at prearranged time
  • No interruptions.
  • Equal time for each person.
  • Listen without comment
  • Speak without requesting or expecting a response.
  • Request a mutually acceptable time for discussion
How It Works
  
Sit down at the kitchen table.  Take turns listing what your partner and confided. The recorder lists in your relationship journal the points each of you have made. List form rather than paragraphs or descriptive sentences helps keep this simple. Using the format below you report to each other your thoughts, ideas, wants, needs, feelings and joys, leaving each other room to ponder what has been heard. Discussions can come later, separate from your Half-Hour Meeting.    Note: this is a weekly routine.
 

The half hour meeting is divided into three parts,

  •  What you appreciated about your partner from the past week

  • What you did not appreciate about something your partner did or said from the past week.

  • What you are looking forward to with your partner in the coming week.

  • each person has equal time for each part of the half hour meeting. 

1.  Start by telling your partner what you appreciated about them during the previous week. This can be something you appreciated in relation to yourself or how they related with others. When one person has finished and that has been recorded, the other person reports what they appreciated about their partner and that is recorded.
 

2.  Tell each other what you did not appreciate.

For the purpose of this exercise, report something you did not appreciate, only if you have a solution for your partner.

For example, if you were upset with your partner's anger, your solution would not be that your partner not be angry, but how your partner could have expressed that anger in a way that would have been easier for you to hear. Remember, for this experience, solutions always follow what you did not appreciate.

3.  Share with each other what you are looking forward to enjoying with each other in the coming week.
If you do not have anything you are looking forward to then plan a date.

This is the time to let your partner know if you want to talk about anything that has been said during your meeting.  (To this point you have not been talking back and forth.) Tell your partner what you want to talk about and make an appointment with your partner for a talking-time.  Leave a minimum of an hour between your Half-Hour Meeting and talking-time.   Be sure this is uninterrupted time.

Negotiating and conflict is here to stay.  You might as well find a way to have it work for you. Conflict with resolution is what long term relationships have in common.
 
Caution: This exercise may evoke past or present feelings or issue you have been successful at avoiding. If you find yourself avoiding your Half-Hour Meetings or unresolved conflict increases, you may want to consider professional help with your relationship. 
 

 

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