In Chapter 8 of Your Divine Fingerprint, Keith Craft teaches us about Our Life Sentences. We all have sentences that have been spoken over us, either by others or by ourselves, that we have accepted to be true about ourselves and how the people in our surrounding view us, which have ultimately sentenced our life.
These Life Sentences become a filter through which we run everything we hear and experience, and this filter ultimately determines our outcomes. The outcome of the conversation somebody has with us has been run through this Life Sentence filter and is the reason we are left feeling the way we do after that conversation.
Whether it’s been your spouse, a good friend, or your parent, how many times have you heard a statement like this? “That’s not at all what I meant by what I said, what I was trying to say was…” and yet it keeps going back around and around again to you feeling the same about what they said until they say it enough different ways that you finally become convinced of what they were really trying to say or you just leave the conversation with that less than wonderful feeling about what has been said.
Many times it is not actually because of what that person is saying, or even how they are saying it, but it’s about that Life Sentence filter that we are hearing them through, which ultimately determines how we hear what they are saying.
Here are two ways to change this outcome and to be able to leave these types of conversations without those negative feelings. We’re going to talk specifically about the first one today, and the second on tuesday.
Ask For Help.
This is for people with whom we’re are close to, and it is a way to help us to hear them better.
When we start to have those negative feelings about what is being said, typically we are thinking “I can’t believe they said that to me” and some times we begin making a list of reasons that they are not qualified to say that because they aren’t perfect and have no room to talk.
But to change these outcomes, we have to make our Life Sentence Filter something more like “I know this person cares deeply about me, so even though what they are saying hurts me, that is not their intent.”
Then we need to ask for help. “I’m having a difficult time with what you’re saying because of how I am allowing it to make me feel…I know it’s not what you are trying to say, but it’s how I am choosing to hear what you are saying…so can you help me to hear the heart of what you are trying to say to me because this is what I’m hearing…” Then let them know how you are hearing it.
The key to this working successfully is us always owning the way we are feeling about what they are saying, rather than saying “you made me feel” or “you said.”
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