Language for dealing with repetitive storytelling

How to explore and address stories about what happened so that problem-solving can move forward.

🔆 A big thanks to the paid subscribers who responded to last month’s 1-question survey! If you didn’t have a chance to chime in, I’ve left the survey open for now. And I’ll be working through the requests in Vocab Lab posts, starting today.

In their survey responses, several subscribers said they would like ideas for addressing situations where someone keeps returning to a specific story. Sometimes it’s a thread that plagues a relationship, like a point of contention that seems to show up in every argument. Other times it’s a story that comes up repeatedly in a series of conversations, perhaps in a mediation or in team meetings. One subscriber put it this way:

I would like help transitioning from the sometimes repetitive storytelling to a more productive future-looking perspective of engaging, whatever that is for an individual.