Our Practices
Foundational practices for embodying and expressing The Experience of We
Sense-Making Together
A quick start guide
Something is off, and neither of you can name it.
You can both feel it. There's a tension at dinner that wasn't there last week. Conversations that used to flow now stall in odd places. Someone is quieter. Someone is shorter. Something has shifted, and you're each reacting to it in your own way, from your own angle, without ever stopping to figure out what's actually going on.
This is one of the most common experiences in relationship.
We sense that something has changed, but we skip the step of actually understanding it together. Instead, we jump straight to interpretation ("you're pulling away"), or straight to solutions ("we should spend more time together"), or straight to blame ("you've been on your phone too much"). We respond to a situation we haven't actually understood. And that usually makes things worse.
Sense-making is the practice of pausing before all of that and asking a simpler question: What is actually happening here? Not what it means. Not whose fault it is. Not what we should do. Just: what is going on?
And because each of us sees different things from different positions, we need each other's observations to get the full picture.
One practice to try
Think of a person in your life who’s open to experimentation, and invite them into trying something new with you.
The observation pool
Choose something you've both noticed but haven't quite figured out. A shift in your dynamic. A recurring friction. A decision you're circling. Something where the question "what's going on here?" feels genuinely open.
Share observations, not conclusions. Take turns naming what you each notice. "I notice we've been quieter at dinner." "I notice I've been more irritable after work." Describe what you observe. Leave interpretation for later.
Include the odd things. Pay attention to what surprises you, what doesn't quite fit, what seems small but keeps showing up. Anomalies often carry the most important information.
Don’t filter for agreement. If you notice something your partner doesn't see, share it anyway. If they notice something you're skeptical of, let it in. You're gathering data, not building a case.
Look for patterns together. After both of you have shared, pause. What shows up across both sets of observations? What connects? "It sounds like we're both noticing a kind of withdrawal. Yours looks like quiet, mine looks like irritability."
Name what you see, tentatively. "It seems like something shifted after that weekend." Hold it lightly. You're not delivering a verdict. You're orienting together.
Ten minutes of honest observation, pooled between two people, will almost always reveal more than either person could see alone.
The full guide, Sense-Making Together, has several practices for developing this capacity: gathering signals, finding patterns, testing them against reality, making sense of the relationship itself, updating your understanding as things change, and more. It also explores the difference between sense-making and meaning-making, why we need each other for this, and how to work with the common breakdowns: going in circles, getting derailed, or being unable to agree on what's happening.
When sense-making works between us, everything else becomes easier. Decisions have ground to stand on. Conflicts become navigable. We stop responding to situations we haven't actually understood. And the ongoing practice of orienting to reality together keeps us current with our lives, rather than navigating by outdated maps.
If this resonates, we recommend trying …
Sharing Perspectives Together
Meaning-Making Together
Developing Meta-Awareness Together
