Ten Commitments to Your Success by Steve Chandler - Commitment Number Seven - To Your Partner - "We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love." - Tom Robbins - If you have a partner right now, stop judging and evaluating that partner. Stop critiquing and keeping score. Stop holding up judges' cards and calling out numbers. Just appreciate and let live. "The deepest craving in human nature," said William James, "is appreciation." Without a commitment to appreciation of your partner, the relationship goes out of control, and control is what you want. Not control of your partner, but control of how you feel about her. As far as your relationship with your partner is concerned, you will want to make the differences you can make, and not the differences you would like to make but can't. It's the giving of appreciation you can control, not the getting. So forget about the getting. That will happen on its own. You don't need to push the river. Or, to rush in on the wave of another metaphor, if you pull up on the seat while the airplane is lifting off you don't help it lift off one bit. Always focus on what you can do something about. "But what if she keeps criticizing me?" Trent asked me one day as we were discussing how his wife was making his relationship almost impossible to enjoy. "It's a partnership, not a judging contest," I said. "Back off and she will back off." "She starts it." "It doesn't matter, just back off and hook into your higher spiritual purpose, to serve and celebrate everyone you love and care for, your partner, your family, your friends and your customers, internal and external." "What if it doesn't work?" "It works. I've tried it." "What if I relapse?" I almost told Trent to "be patient." But because of what I have learned and applied from Shrunyu Suzuki, I told Trent to "be constant." Suzuki said, in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, "The usual translation of the Japanese word nin is 'patience,' but perhaps 'constancy' is a better word. You must force yourself to be patient, but in constancy there is no particular effort involved-there is only the unchanging ability to accept things as they are." Trent is like so many of my coaching clients who use a segment of their session for family issues, especially when those issues are getting in the way of career focus and success. Often it's about a partner. A wife, or husband, or any kind of life partner. I am not a marriage counselor, so I simply use the same advice I give for professional relationships that are not working. It seems to get good results. It can be summed up in two words: "Stop disagreeing." My client named Boris came to me once with a problem he was having with his reputation at work. Boris was a CEO whose employees didn't trust him. They didn't trust his requests to be open and forthright with him. It showed up on the employee surveys. So I decided to get to the bottom of this. I followed Boris around for a few work days, sitting in meetings with him with his various teams and even in his one-on-one meetings. Pretty soon his problem with trust became clear. So I gave him an assignment. "I'm giving you an assignment, Boris," I said. "Well, okay, you're my coach, and I guess it's what I pay you for, so whip it on me," said Boris, "what is it?" "Stop disagreeing with people," I said. "What do you mean by that exactly?" "For two weeks, I don't want you to disagree with anyone, no matter what. Not just at work, but at home, too. Your wife and kids included. No disagreeing." Boris looked stunned. Then he looked puzzled. "I don't know how that would be possible," he said. "What am I supposed to do. Do I just remain silent? Put duct tape over my mouth for two weeks?" "No, not at all. Just don't disagree." "Do I lie and pretend I agree with things I don't agree with?" "No, no. no! Don't lie or pretend. Just don't disagree. Stop disagreeing. It's an exercise. Exercise leads to strength." "Well," said Boris, "I'm afraid I'm confused. I don't know how this would work unless I just remained silent." "If you want to continue to talk and interact with and support your employees and family members, then I'll give you an idea about how to do that, but you'll have to be willing to change how you listen to people." "Don't I listen to people? Is that what you're saying?" "Oh, you listen, but you listen from a very dysfunctional place. You listen to people from whether or not you agree with them. When someone speaks to you, the first thing you try to determine for yourself is whether or not you agree with what they are saying." "What's wrong with that?" "Look at your employee surveys." "Disagreement wasn't mentioned." "Disagreement leads to distrust. It makes you disagreeable." "What other option do I have?" "How about listening for something else? Instead of listening for whether you agree with them, listen instead for the value in what they are saying." "Listen for the value?" "Listen for the value." "What if it has no value?" "Who has no value? If you hire people who have no value, then we have a hiring issue, not a CEO trust issue." "Okay, okay, I see what you mean. Even if I don't agree precisely with what they are saying, what I talk about when I talk to them is the value in what they said?" "You've got it. There's value in every idea. Your job is to find it and comment on it," I said. "At home, too? Does the assignment carry over to home?" "Yes, especially at home. Don't disagree with your wife or kids either. In two weeks you can go back. It's only a two-week assignment. You can do it."
Destroying the make-wrong machine Boris agreed to give this very odd assignment a try. The reason I gave him this assignment was because Boris had become a major league make-wrong machine. Somehow he had gotten his own sense of personal power from making other people wrong. He always listened from a place inside himself called "I'm Right You're Wrong." That made him feel like he deserved his position as boss. He went around being right. Soon, that was all he knew how to do. But in the process he was making everyone in his life wrong, and he knew that they were very distant from him (especially at home) but he couldn't figure out why. Boris had an interesting two weeks. Because he was faithful to the assignment. When someone in his production meeting at work piped up and made a suggestion that his company ought to start prospecting in the outside towns where the higher-income customers were, Boris had to bite his tongue. Boris knew that the company had tried that five years ago, and it hadn't worked. The buyers in the foothills weren't a good match for their product, it turned out. But this time Boris couldn't disagree. So he commented on the value of the idea. "I see what you're thinking." Boris said. "I understand your strategy here, the drive for bigger margins, and I like it. I admire the motivation that had you come up with that, so I have a request. I know we made an attempt to do this five years ago. Will you research the marketing archives on that and see what you think of that effort and why it failed at that time? In the next meeting we'll hear your analysis and see if you still see it as a good idea. It may be." Boris' employee beamed. Then, at home, Boris had many opportunities to not disagree. One time his wife Susan came to him and said, "I think we should just let Jason have his room be any way he wants it." "His room? Totally his call?" Boris said. "Yes," said Susan. "I think he should let it be messy if he wants. It's his room. We call it his room. Why not just have it be his room and stop criticizing him for it?" Boris paused a moment. He realized that he disagreed with this idea, but he knew about his assignment. So he allowed himself to tune in to the value in what his wife was thinking. "I see what you're saying," said Boris. "Your idea is that if he has his own space that he's completely responsible for, but we don't check up on him about it, he'll feel a little more respected as a person...maybe be even more willing to keep house rules outside his room...in the mutual areas?" "Yes!" said Susan, amazed and surprised that Boris had not cut the idea down with some withering reference to the military and what he had learned in the Marines at Jason's age. "Your idea is kind of reminding me of that old Beach Boys song I used to love so much...In My Room?" Boris said. "Okay, but do you agree?" "Do I what?" "Do you agree that we should do it?" "I might not agree," said Boris, "but I don't have all the answers either, and I've been wrong before about him. There were times I didn't trust him when I should have...so let's give it a try and see how it goes. What harm could it possibly do? And it might lighten things up around here a little. I don't have to be right or even wrong about this."
Would I rather be right than happy? Susan was stunned. She couldn't remember having had one of her ideas ever considered this way by her husband. Not since courtship. She remembered that in courtship he was fascinated with her thinking, amazed at how different she was, and that he loved it. Later, Boris told me the same thing. "When we were courting, I loved all the differences," he said. "They made Susan exciting to me. I looked forward to how much fun it was going to be to learn the way she saw things. I even remember telling all my friends in a very excited way that we were as different as night and day. And that I loved it. It made it so interesting getting to know her." "And now?" I asked. "Well, I don't know what has happened to me. Now the differences are a problem. They make her seem wrong for me. In fact, I even told a marriage counselor I didn't think the marriage was going to last because we were just too different. Just too different." "You can look at the differences any way you want to," I said. "You have absolute freedom of thought. You don't have to make the differences wrong. You can, but you don't have to." Boris was typical of someone who had simply not made a full commitment. Not just a commitment to be faithful and true in the sense of romantic love, but to be faithful and true also in the sense of appreciation. It may sound crazy at first, but I know from experience that it is possible to make a commitment to myself to appreciate my partner. On a very deep and fundamental level. And when the commitment feels like it's about to drop from your hands, like you are starting to drop the ring at the ceremony, a quick motion can catch it back up again. You catch the commitment back up by listening for the value in what your partner is thinking and saying. Most of us look for way too much from our partner. We even look for our partner to make us happy. As songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote in one of his notebooks during his time as a Zen monk on Mount Baldy, "I set out for love, but I did not know I'd be caught in the grip of an undertow. To be swept to a shore, where the sea needs to go, with a child in my arms, and a chill in my soul, and my heart the size of a begging-bowl."
Release from the grip of the undertow Someone once taught me that there is a little pill you can take (or practice you can do) that improves your relationship with your partner. "It's called the practice of non-judgment," he said. "Oh, well, that's impossible," I said. "How much judging did you do when you were first in love and courting?" he said. "That's different," I said. "No, the whole point is that it's not different. So begin small if you're out of practice. Try it 20 minutes at a time. For these next twenty minutes I will not judge her. You'll really see the benefits when you can get it up to an hour. Soon you'll spend a whole day not judging in any way." "What do I replace it with?" I asked, knowing that a habit doesn't just go away. Habits are not broken, they are replaced. "Replace it with appreciation." So I realized, through practice, that non-judgment was like a little pill I could take to make the trouble lift and the good times return. My commitment to my partner is to love her. This commitment seems pretty complete in and of itself, but synergy gives us more than that. The brilliant biologist Dr. Humberto Maturano said, "Love...allowing the other to be a legitimate other...is the only emotion that expands intelligence." And in the words of Hamlet, "I eat the air, promise-crammed, when I am with you." Visit www.SteveChandler.com for more information.