Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In then today's session, I'm going to share a simple strategy you can use for more effective communication. So this strategy involves a question. And the question is, is this useful? Is this useful? Now this is a question that you can drop in before sharing something. Partner, friend.

Something to a total stranger. Asking yourself is what I'm going to say useful right now. And what I like about the simplicity of this is that it brings a certain intentionality and reflection to what we're saying and why we're saying it. We tend to respond and say things out of the scripts in our minds that were given to us by culture or a family members or the emotion of the moment that's causing us to react in a certain way. All of which can be fine and may be aligned with us.

But if you really take a moment to consider, is this useful right now? Well, sometimes the response is, nah, actually not really. It actually just feels like something I'm saying impulsively or feels like something I'm saying out of habit. This can kind of get complicated when considering the obvious question, which is what is useful and what is not useful. And I'm not as interested in going into that because I think there are an infinite number of responses to that, depending on the context. There are so many variables involved that go into assessing is something useful or not, that it would be nearly impossible to say objectively what's useful and what's not useful.

For instance, if you're assessing whether you should say something to your partner that's coming from a place of anger, you may intuitively think, Oh, well I'm angry so maybe I shouldn't say this because it wouldn't be useful. But actually, if you really feel into it, the anger might be a gateway into you speaking a little bit more honestly. And that honest conversation is perhaps the gateway then into deeper intimacy and connection and truth speaking. So it can get sort of messy when we really get into the nuances of all of this. But the thing I like about this question is that, that extra moment of pausing and reflecting, at the very least, does give us a baseline assessment of why am I saying what I'm saying.

And even though it might not be objectively true that this is useful or not useful, you'll have your own internal compass that based on having as much data as you do in that moment of, does this feel useful or does this not feel useful. And if we can speak from that space of this is useful, our words have a bigger impact. Our relationships become more meaningful. And the, what we say is, it tends to be listened to more by other people. So this is just something to consider as you go about the journey of integrating mindfulness with interpersonal communication, which can sometimes be a tricky, a messy territory.

It's one thing to do your meditation because, meditation practice on the cushion and it's another thing to bring this into real life. And so this is a simple strategy you can utilize when you're trying to bridge that gap. Is this useful? Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.