Three Reasons Message-Based Discussion Groups Change Lives
I love my church! And I am delighted with the message-based discussion model we offer to promote active journeying with God and His plan for each of our lives. We have developed a 4 D model that we use to explain this pathway.
Let’s dissect this for a bit.
Discussion leads to Discovery. There are two ways this works.
First, when we discuss we have to choose words to explain what we are thinking. I don’t know about you but there are many times when I talk about something and end up working out the whole situation just because I am verbalizing. It goes something like this, “I'm dealing with _________ in my life right now. It’s tricky because__________. I’m not sure what to do, but I wonder if I should __________. You know what? That actually might work. Thanks so much for talking about this with me.” The other person may, or may not, have had much input, but just the fact that I had a safe place to talk made all the difference.
The...
Two Healthy Pathways To Manage The Discussion Dance
We probably all have at least one. You know, that person that drives you crazy. You just know when you see them next that the conversation will probably go south.
In fact you could probably predict the dialogue. You are going to say something, and then they are going to say their thing. You reply, they counter, etc. (In fact, you could probably change sides and say each others lines just to spice things ups sometime!)
There’s two healthy ways you can work on a conversation/relationship like that. I call them the Pre-think and Re-think.
The Pre-think Pathway
This pathway pre-empts the tricky conversation by (you guessed it) thinking ahead about what is going to happen. If you can pre-think what they are going to say you can change something in the way you move and disrupt the familiar dance.
The idiom “It takes two to tango” has quite a bit of merit to it.
Gary Smalley calls it “the fear dance” in his insightful book The DNA of Relationships.
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