Each MCD Relationship Competency identifies 6 Skills, along with specific practices for learning each. For more context about MCD Relationship Competency 3: Honest Expression, see Skill 1: Ask the other person if they are willing to listen before engaging in honest expression.

Skill 2: Distinguish neutral observations from types of thoughts (interpretations, advice, story, predictions, explanations, justification…) by naming them as you express them or deciding to share or not share relative to what supports connection

What is a neutral observation?

Observation is the ability to refer to an event in a neutral way, that is, without mixing in your opinions and interpretations of that event. The ability to separate what happened from your interpretation gives you two incredible advantages. One, you get to choose whether to believe your interpretations or gather more information to find out what’s true. 

Inaccurate interpretations probably stimulate more suffering than anything else in your life. Being able to name them and check them out can interrupt a cycle of suffering. 

 Two, referring to what happened rather than your interpretation of it, immediately gets you and the other person on the same page. This means you are more likely to bypass defensiveness and move towards connection. 

The tricky part about learning to express an observation is recognizing what’s really an observation and what’s not. It’s harder than you think. Let’s look at the details.

An observation includes only what a camera could record. It is specific and concrete enough that someone could re-enact what happened based on your description. 

Neutral observations answer at least some of the following questions: 

What? Where? When? Who? How long? How often? 

Here’s an example, “This morning at breakfast she was tapping her pencil as I talked,” is an observation. “She was impatient,” is an interpretation of that behavior.

Potentially Life-Alienating Types of Thoughts

The moment you perceive something with one or more of your five  senses, your thinking mind creates meaning. First, you categorize it as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral and attach an identifying label. Then you engage in one of the following thought processes:

• Judgment refers to good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, pleasant or unpleasant, etc. Praise is a form of judgment.

• An evaluation involves an assessment or measurement of someone’s ability.

• An analysis is about understanding how something came to be or why it came to be. It involves taking someone or something apart and examining the individual components and their relationship to each other. It is often problem focused and accompanied by the intention to find out what’s wrong and fix a problem or a person.

• An interpretation involves making meaning of an observation which may or may not accord with another’s experience.

• A story often begins with past related events as a way of making sense of present events.

• Predictions about what might happen are complex and may involve all of the thought processes named above.

• Justification or explanation in personal relationships may show up as an attempt to prove you have good intentions.

• Blame is an attempt to make someone else responsible for your own hurt or upset, or can be an oversimplification of causality.

• Exaggeration or deletion of key facts is often used to persuade someone to see your view and meet a need for acceptance.

The decision whether to share your thoughts or not is based on what you imagine will contribute to connection in the short or long term. Sharing a thought can sometimes bring focus away from the heart and other times is essential in bringing the other person into your world and creating connection..  

PRACTICE

Take a moment now and reflect on a recent interaction. Choose a point in the interaction in which you remember specifically one of the forms of thinking identified above. Trace your thinking back to the observation that stimulated those thoughts. 

Use the definition of observation above to make your observation as precise and neutral as possible.