Setting the Table: How Small Shifts Can Change the Way We Show Up

The holiday season is upon us, beginning this coming week with Canadian Thanksgiving. For many people, this can be a particularly challenging time of year. It brings with it the knowledge that we will be spending time with family, which can sometimes feel more like an obligation—or something to endure—than something to enjoy. Dysfunction rarely skips a family, and most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum ranging from annoying antics to utter chaos. I won’t be speaking to the latter here, other than to say that no one needs to attend a gathering where they feel mistreated.

For many of us, these are gatherings we could skip some years, or perhaps revamp, but we often attend with an attitude of partial optimism, lowered expectations, and a genuine desire to connect with the people who are important to us. Nothing is ever entirely black or white, good or bad, and families are no different. There are aspects we can enjoy and people we can love without feeling fully aligned with them. We can focus on what we like and still be true to ourselves; it is not a zero-sum game.

So, how do we get there?

The following approach is something I like to refer to as setting the table. It involves deciding in advance how you want to feel and how you want to show up in a given situation. Setting this intention becomes an anchor—a commitment to yourself that you can actively return to.

We might decide that we want to feel calm or at peace, empowered or self-assured, and we can support that feeling state by acting in accordance with it. We maintain the understanding that no one actually has the power to dictate how we feel. If we find ourselves shifting under the weight of someone else’s opinion or emotion, we can recognize that we have given some of that power away and return to our intention through embodiment.

Embodiment involves the tangible, lived experience—not just our thoughts. In this case, it might be anything from our stance, speech, and body posture to the physical sensations that align with our intended internal state. Acting in alignment with peace might require a few deep breaths and some re-centering. Acting in alignment with self-assurance might mean speaking up instead of staying quiet, or resisting the urge to become defensive when someone challenges or disagrees with us.

This combination of deciding how we want to be and then living as if it is already true creates an internal feedback loop, gradually updating our system to match the desired reality.

Conceptually, this sounds simple enough, and yet many of us feel a strong resistance to acting in ways that are unfamiliar or unexpected. This is understandable and very common, but it isn’t a good enough reason to pull the plug on rewiring our behavioural patterns.

The reality is that we got to where we are by repeating our existing patterns so often that they became automatic. Our brains don’t assess every behaviour for whether it is good or bad for us. The brain prioritizes energy conservation and survival, making it far more efficient to choose a familiar action over a novel one. The only way to wire in a new pattern is to take a new action—and repeat it.

And yes, it’s likely to feel a little uncomfortable before it doesn’t. That’s okay.

What’s important to remember when embarking on this personal upgrade is that you don’t have to make a wholesale change overnight. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, I prefer a titrated approach of small actions as you begin this process.

This could look like refraining from speaking for a few moments during a social gathering if you know you tend to speak to fill the silence. Or setting a time frame for an engagement or conversation with someone who typically leaves you feeling drained.

These are shifts you can make without requiring any external changes—and that is precisely why they are so powerful.