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.

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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.