Why to Practice Workshopping Sentences

When you’re in the hotseat and providing support to someone in crisis, you don’t have time to edit.

You’ve got their words waiting for you on the screen, or their voice waiting for you over the phone.

You don’t have the luxury of crafting a perfect reply if they’re waiting!

However despite not having the time to craft a perfect reply, if you’re anything like I was when I started crisis support, you still get stuck in editing paralysis!

The truth is editing your words well offers immense benefits; from clarifying your thinking to increasing your confidence and plenty of others.

If you want to sharpen your editing skills and stop having your help seeker pay for it; it’s up to you to give yourself time to practice outside of any urgency, responsibility or demand.

Before or after shifts is a great time to take a bad sentence and elevate it with a Workshopping Exercise.

Of course this wont change your practice overnight.

But…

If you give it time.

If you show up with compassion and awareness for yourself.

If you remember the importance of service unto others.

If.

Then you will one day find yourself much farther along the road to mastery than you ever thought you would be.

So! Let’s dive in shall we?

How to Practice Workshopping Sentences

1. Take a bad sentence.

Maybe pick something that includes one of the basic empathic blocks so it’s clearly and uncomfortably bad.

Extra points if it’s one you’re regularly guilty of.

Your boss has been bullying you for years. You could try going to your HR department.

Blatant advice giving plus a few other potentially unwanted spices thrown in.

For the sake of this exercise, we’re starting with a terrible sentence. I hope you’ll see how you can start with any sentence no matter how garbage – and by giving yourself permission to be imperfect, you can turn it into gold.

Now that you have your starting point, let’s make it a single step better.

You may want to immediately jump to the final draft and simply renovate the entire sentence, but I urge you to take your time and impose a throttle on your desire. There’s a good reason for taking it slowly. I promise.

2. Pick one single part and reword that microscopic edit. Make it small!

Your boss has been bullying you for years. You could try going to your HR department.

You’ve felt bullied by your boss for years. You could try going to your HR department.

That’s an improvement.. if you can’t clearly explain why, try saying them out loud and see how the sentences feel.

But wait, there’s more!

3. Do it again

You’ve felt bullied by your boss for years. You could try going to your HR department.

You’ve felt bullied by your boss for years. Have you tried going to your HR department?

Great.

Still shit.

But waaay better than the start, right?!

Still a little directive though.. and in a place where it might not really belong (directiveness is a necessary and important part of the mental health frontliners toolkit, but we reserve directiveness for when someone is in danger, doing otherwise robs them of processing for themselves).

Which of the empathic blocks is still lingering in our example?

Let’s remove it.

4. Etcetera

You’ve felt bullied by your boss for years. Have you tried going to your HR department?

You’ve felt bullied by your boss for years. What options have you explored in dealing with this?

Now we’re getting somewhere!

We’re cooking with gas, baby!

You can see what a difference it’s made already, to take it slowly, pick the improvements one at a time and really give the workshopping exercise some air to breathe.

Perhaps it can still be improved…

I wonder, for example, how might you rephrase the last draft so that it clearly includes something emotionally validating?

5. Now you try it.

The Absolute Importance of Compassion

In this exercise hopefully you can see easily and clearly how important self compassion is.

One of the biggest barriers to self awareness and therefore true development of skills often lies in criticism.

It’s a fact psychologists are uncovering everywhere they look; criticism kills.

It kills connection.

It kills self esteem.

It kills marriages.

It kills companies.

I’m going to let you in on a secret.

This exercise isn’t really about editing words on our paper.

It’s about writing words on paper while editing words in our head.

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This post is written specifically for crisis support and mental health work, if you’d like to read more, click here.

I would really appreciate every stray thought and piece of feedback you have so please do reach out via socials if you’d like to chat.