Introducing our New Framework

We keep telling ourselves this is just a moment to get through. It’s not. We’ve been living through sustained fear and chaos for years—and it’s shaping how we show up with each other. Our framework is built to meet that reality.

Now let me tell you what we mean by that.

We’ve been moving through disruption for a long time. Not a single crisis, but layers of them. Over time, that changes our capacity—how we process, how we respond, how long we can stay present when things get hard. And many organizations are still operating as if none of that is true. So when something breaks down—tension, misalignment, a decision that doesn’t land—people move around it or react to it. Not because they don’t care. Because they don’t have a shared way to understand what’s happening in the moment.

We saw this again and again in our work.

For a long time, we used the same tools and frameworks we were taught, exactly as we were taught them. Some of it was effective. Some of it wasn’t. We kept asking: what do we deeply believe and how does that interact with what we have been taught and what we see helps people move differently when it matters?

We realized we couldn’t keep asking people to do complex relational work without giving them a shared way to understand what was happening in the first place. So we started paying attention to what we were actually doing when the work did move.

Eventually, we named it. This is our very unsexy name for it: the Relational Practice Framework.

It’s simple:
feel, name, notice, choose, reflect.

Here’s a quick example. It’s simplified, but it shows how this works in real time.

You’re in a meeting. You start to share an idea. Someone interrupts you and moves the conversation forward without acknowledging your point.

First, feel.
You notice something in your body. Tightness. Heat. A shift.

Then, name.
What are you actually feeling? Irritation. Frustration. Embarrassment.
This is about naming the feeling—not the story.

Then, notice.
What else is shaping this moment?
Is this a pattern? A power dynamic? A habit in the group?

Then, choose.
What do you want to do, given your goal in this moment?
You might speak up. You might let it go. You might wait.

Not every feeling requires action. Sometimes it’s just information.
Choosing still matters—even when the choice is to pause.

Then, reflect.
What happened? What did you learn?
Did your response align with how you want to show up?

That’s the framework.

Most people collapse these steps. They go from feeling straight to reacting. This gives you a way to slow that down. And this isn’t just for when things go wrong. It’s just as useful when something feels right—and you want to understand why, or build on it with more intention.

It also gives you something else: shared language. Because without shared language, people can’t build shared meaning. And without shared meaning, it’s very hard to do anything differently together. We’ve been using this for years. What’s new is that we’ve finally named it.

We’ll be sharing more about the framework in the coming months as we continue to practice it, refine it, and learn from it.

If you’re interested in seeing it in action, we’ll be offering a few public workshops where we use this framework to work through real scenarios—conflict, communication across difference, and navigating complexity in teams. And if you want to go deeper, we’re also offering coaching for leaders and teams who want to learn how to apply this in their day-to-day work. You can let us know you’re interested.

We’re also happy to share our comprehensive proposal, which lays out our full theory of change, how we use this framework in our work, and what that looks like in practice. If that would be useful, just reach out (athena@betterworldpartnersmn.com) and we’ll send it along. We’re looking forward to exploring this more with you.