As we go through our day interacting with each other, at work, at home, on the internet—as lovers, as strangers, in roles or as friends—we leave little pieces of impact on each other.
This can be impact of any kind:
They can be feelings of admiration, empathy, confusion, just from witnessing someone in a specific moment.
They can be feelings of gratitude or resentment for something they did or didn’t do that we did or did not expect.
They can be physical forms of support or hindrance, like a project moving faster or slower because of something a co-worker did.
All of this collective impact forms the tapestry of our relationships.
Your loved ones are loved ones precisely because their mere existence impacts yours so deeply.
But even in a more distant sense:
The actions of the supermarket personnel is one that impacts your life, how they make sure the food is in supply for you and didn’t expire. Or place it in the places you might find it.
And your actions impact their life. Whether you look them in the eye and smile, or wish them a wonderful day back, for example.
Me writing this email, should you be reading it, impacts your life. I can write something that impacts you in the form of feeling or an insight.
I can also write something that ends up taking your time and leaves you wishing you had spent it on something else.
Every person who we connect with in some way is a life we touch. And we impact all of those lives in ways we aren’t always aware of.
Sometimes I make a well-intended tweet, not realizing it can hurt some people until I see they blocked me.
Sometimes I meet a person on the street who tells me one of these emails changed their life, and I didn’t even know they were subscribed.
This is happening every day of our lives.
There are moments when someone doesn’t arrive on time and the other person feels bothered but lets it slide.
…while maybe someone else was relieved that they had 5 more minutes to wait and breathe.
There are little comments we make that have another person feel deeply loved for days, and we don’t even remember saying them.
There are delayed responses that have someone feel worried we’re angry at them, but then when they read our reply they realize it’s all okay and never tell us.
This is what relationship are made of. It’s in the collisions between us. The craters they leave, the mountains they erect and the waters they stir.
One of the earliest blog posts I made, somewhere in 2015 or -16, was about aligning our relationship with reality.
About not assuming any of our interpretation of text messages or lack thereof meant anything. And focusing on relating to what happened in reality.
While the gist of that is still part of the core message in my work, a nuance I failed to see at the time is that the way we impact each other, whether that’s based on reality or interpretation, is the relationship.
It’s, perhaps, not as relevant whether our interpretation of each other’s actions and their meaning is correct or not. What matters is that we felt something in relationship to each other. And those feelings are what our relationships are made of.
So one thing we can do to align our relationships closer to reality, increase intimacy and see the connections between each other as they really are, is share these little moments of impacts with each other:
- “Hey, remember that moment when you did/said ____, here’s what was happening inside me at the time, that I was too scared to say____”
- “You said something earlier this week that is still on my mind, and it’s been helping me so much at work, here’s what it was ___”
- “When we were in situation ___, I felt ___ and I noticed a part of me longed for you to ____. I had never told you before that this matters to me.”
- “When I listened to you telling me your story about ____, I felt a deep love and care for you. But since we were in a work meeting, it felt a bit off to say it right then and there.”
(To make it more relational, you might wanna follow these up with “How does that feel for you to hear?” and if you’re bringing something painful, check if they’re up for that before barging in.)
You can also do this in the other direction, by checking for impact:
- “When I made that joke about ___ earlier I wondered if that was a bit too risky, so I wanna check how it felt for you?”
- “Hey, I know you were waiting on me to deliver my part of our project, how did it affect you that I was a daily later?”
- “I know it wasn’t appropriate to take of all my clothes during that family dinner but in my defense, they kept feeding me tequila. Anyway, how did your grandma feel about it?”
We can, of course, never keep track of all the impact we make, and that’s not the point—even sharing or asking about it already creates more impact (and we impact each other just by looking, but that’s for another day).
The invitation I want to offer you is to bring more awareness of when you feel impacted by other’s actions, and where you might underestimate the impact you have on them. For better or worse.
Then lean into your edges with what feels useful to share, or check for.
The cool thing about this is that it doesn’t just help clear up little things we’re wondering about, it gives us a more accurate map of each other’s interior.
And that can make all the difference for years to come.