… because he never stopped talking. It was pure stream of consciousness, out loud thoughts all day. We worked closely together and sat next to each other in the office, so I didn’t feel like I could escape. I felt overwhelmed, and increasingly bitter. I knew it wasn’t a healthy situation, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I sat down with these T, F, A cards to try to get inspired. The first step was to recognize what actually happened, or in my case, what pattern I kept repeating – what thoughts, feelings, and actions, or lack of actions. So I laid the cards out and pulled out the 3 cards that represented what kept happening, and how I was thinking and feeling about it.

“They are going to make me… crazy,” is how I filled out the Think card in my head. And that is frequently what I thought – he’s slowly driving me nuts. That’s the first card I picked, though honestly you can pick them in any order. Some people notice their actions most readily, while others notice the feeling, the physical sensation. I tend to start with the thought behind it all. But there’s such a dynamic interplay between our thoughts, feelings and actions that there’s no correct order. For more on this, see the box below. But I noticed my thoughts first, and my feeling irritated and angry and wanting nothing to do with him followed closely behind.

Seeing it laid out on the table like that was clarifying all by itself. But the best part is when you get to choose new cards, based on how you would like to respond. Here’s a side by side comparison of my typical reaction compared to what I really want.

Notice how my thoughts changed from a statement to a question. This is a proven effective method for increasing empathy – and that’s exactly what it did for me. The curiosity – what’s going on for him? – opened me up to empathy. When I asked myself, “What does this person really need?”, the answer was obvious. He’s lonely, seeking connection. And that totally changed my feelings, from frustrated and irritated to feeling compassion. And that, in turn, changed my actions, from giving up on him to wanting to be part of the solution. It made me ask myself: What can I do to help change the dynamic here? The answer didn’t come to me immediately, but it came. It was a twofold solution. First, I talked to him about how I was feeling (I felt like the least I could offer was honest feedback). He was surprised and apologetic. But at the same time made an effort to really connect with him, and even invite him to hang out outside the office. I had been living in town for a while and had a great social network, whereas he was new and knew almost no one outside the office. Before I opened myself up to compassion, I hadn’t given this much thought. This story happens to have a happy ending. He ended up getting really close with another friend of mine, and even though he’s no longer at the company, we still see each other from time-to time and have a good relationship. I don’t know if I could have made these realizations without really breaking down the situation.

T, F, A cards, for the win.

… with this problem, and really get to the heart of it. In a lot of ways, I was living in the perfect situation – on a beautiful farm up in the mountains. My partner and I were doing a trade – a few days a week of farm work in exchange for bunches of fresh food and a little cabin on the property. It’s something we had done before, and for a while, it was awesome. But something had started to not feel right. I would feel anxious too often on the farm. I loved the work, and the people I worked with, but something was off. Honestly, I felt overwhelmed. I used T, F, A cards to break down a big, complex situation into more manageable parts. And since my feelings felt clear to me, I started with that. I chose the card: Insecure, Anxious, Fearful.

Insecure. Anxious. Fearful. Those are the feelings that kept coming up for me. And deep down, I knew why. I lived and worked on this farm, and the expectations for work were never clearly established. And it’s a farm there is always something to do – weeding, harvesting, cleaning up the old barn. On days when I wasn’t working, I would question whether I should be. And so an act as simple as going up to lunch or taking a nice stroll on the farm would leave me feeling anxious and insecure. I had tried to improve the communication, but without much success. That left me thinking that I was powerless, and avoiding it altogether – basically telling my insecurity to be quiet.

So I went through the process of looking at the T, F, A cards and choosing the cards that represent what I would like to have happen.

Since I wan’t happy about how I was feeling, how did I want to feel? That question alone I found to be liberating – and when I looked at all the Feel cards, I found the one that sounded right: Happy, Content, Pleased. Isn’t that how anyone wants to feel – more often than not – about where they live? But I still didn’t know how to get there. So when I found the Thought, “What are some other ways to see this?” I thought that sounded like a good plan, try to think differently to not feel so stuck. And then the Action literally jumped out at me: “Identify 3 or more options and evaluate them.”

Ah, yes. I love organizing my thoughts into lists! Since I wasn’t happy about how I felt but didn’t know what to do, I should consciously think of, and write down, a few of my options. When I saw that, I remembered a passage from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle in which he says that there are 3 primary options when faced with this type of situation: accept it, change it, or leave it. So I thought of each of those and wrote down the pros and cons for each one. It looked something like this: 

Accept – Since these feelings had been recurring for me, I felt like accepting the situation as it is was not good enough. That’s what I had been doing. Change – This option actually became several options. One possible change was to talk with the owner about how I was feeling, but I had already tried to do that, unsuccessfully. But then I thought of an option that I hadn’t thought of before: change the situation by putting in a small kitchenette in my space on the farm. And that way get a little more separation from my living and working situations. Leave – I could leave the situation, and that led me to thinking about the pros and cons of living there in general. There were a lot of things on both sides of the list, and writing it down really helped me in a way that thinking about it repeatedly had not. 

What I decided to do in the end is actually less important than what the T, F, A cards helped me do, which is to see that I had more options, and more power, than I had realized. The cards helped me activate 3 vital skills of emotional intelligence: