Life Talks with Peggy Jennings-Severe Meeting Recap

Life Talks with Peggy Jennings-Severe

written by Joanna Metheny

Last week our group was treated to a presentation by Peggy Jennings-Severe, wife, mother of two, and grandmother. Jennings-Severe grew up benefitting from a close relationship with her mother, and then went on to pursue a degree in psychology. She drew from her life experiences to develop a concept she calls Life Talks, which is a method of asking open-ended questions designed to deepen existing relationships.

 

                Jennings-Severe shared some of her basic beliefs that helped form Life Talks: each of us wants to be heard, each of us wants to connect with others in deep and meaningful ways, and each of us wants to belong, or have a sense of community. She has developed a way to expedite achieving these goals in relationships through the use of targeted questions.

I think we’ve probably all been in a situation, whether it’s a family gathering, or maybe just a group of acquaintances, where you run out of ideas for small talk and the conversation stalls. Typically this leads to much awkwardness and everyone stops having fun. Use of Jennings-Severe’s open-ended question prompts can quickly take stunted conversation in a completely different direction, fostering a quick sense of happiness and feelings of connectedness. Our group was able to experience this first hand when we each had to pair up with someone we didn’t know well, and then take turns asking and answering a handful of provided questions. We were prompted to share things like advice we’d received about motherhood, as well as facts about ourselves that others likely would not know. I think we were all a little surprised how quickly the mood in the room lightened, and we began to feel a sense of camaraderie. Rather than feeling awkward and out of things to say, I found myself wanting to keep talking with the moms I was chatting with, and kind of annoyed when we had to cut our conversations short.

It was fascinating to see just how quickly a bond between two people, or even a larger community (like our whole MOPS group), can be strengthened through the use of just a couple of open ended questions and some quick back and forth exchange. Jennings-Severe went on to show how asking questions like these can help us strengthen our relationships not only with each other, but also with our spouses and our kids. She provided some examples such as instead of asking our kids something like What did you do in school today?, try something like Who did you play with today? or, What was your biggest success today?. Questions like this are much more likely to get kids to open up and start communicating, even for those kids in their sullen teenage years.

For those looking to explore this idea further, or for more specific ideas about what kinds of questions to ask, Jennings-Severe offered her two Life Talks books for sale. Each contained a multitude of questions themed around all kinds of events like birthdays, anniversaries, and family reunions. The beauty of the questions is, many of them could apply to not only brand new relationships, but also to long term ones as well. An anniversary question to ask a spouse could be something along the lines of What is your favorite memory of us?, while a Christmas related question appropriate for just about anyone could be, What is your favorite Christmas tradition?.

All in all, I learned some great ideas for fostering deeper connections with my family through the concept of asking questions that elicit more than a one-word answer. I think we all came away feeling a little more positive and hopeful about how to proactively strengthen bonds with our loved ones.