Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues

A Summary

Themes:

1. Expressing one’s feelings and thoughts.
Be vulnerable. Be 15% more vulnerable. Be more fully known. It comes with a risk but that risk is, more often than not, worth it. Emotions are, after all, great signposts.

2. Learning mindset.
You always have a choice. Be curious. Try not to get so defensive so quickly.

3. Address problems as they arise.
Recognise that perhaps a problem is miniscule but that it still affects you — stops pinches accumulating into major crunches where multiple issues are likely to be entangled.

4. Address the others’ feelings.
Their feelings may not be logical, but they are there. Thus, they are worth exploring if you want to solve any problems together. Logical arguments do not negate their existence. It might often indicate that something deeper and more complex is at play.

5. Fear plays a major role in our lives.
It stops us from disclosing relevant information with the potential of deepening relationships. Fear prompts us to run away rather than double down and commit. Fear stops us from expressing how we truly feel, from raising pinches when they arise because we believe them too insignificant to be worth addressing.

6. Make your intentions clear.
The purpose of bringing this up is to develop our relationship further. It helps lay the foundation for a productive discussion. It makes it clear that your intention is not to accuse or blame the other.

· You always have a choice — that is the foundation of exceptional relationships — you must realise this before any of the following information can be useful to you.

· In almost every case, we have choices, and how the other person responds makes some choices easier and others more difficult. At the same time, people do influence each other, and if we want deep relationships, we need to be aware of how we might be freeing or constraining the other as well as how their actions affect us.

· In the same way that a great musical score requires both high treble and lower bass notes, to communicate well we must express thoughts/cognitions and feelings/emotions.

· Men, in particular, are socialized not to display emotion, while women who work in male-dominated environments often feel conflicted about how much emotion to show for fear of being seen as too sensitive and insufficiently tough, or as “dramatic.”

· It can be used to express an emotion, as in “I feel upset by your comment,” or it can express a thought/cognition, as in “I feel like you want to dominate this conversation.”

· “I feel irritated and dismissed” is a statement about me whereas “I feel that you don’t care” is an accusation that is likely to cause defensiveness

· What feels risky and most vulnerable is when you are especially uncertain about the impact of your disclosure. It's this vulnerability that actually brings others closer.

· A leader who is not willing to be vulnerable sets a norm that does not encourage any others in the organization to do that either. The only way for a leader to legitimize self-disclosure is to model it. It takes fortitude and internal strength to self-disclose

· The less we reveal, the more others will fill in the blanks in order to make sense of what they see. When we are too reserved with our feelings, we actually lose control over how we are seen. “We’re so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” Hiding one part can lead to hiding much more, resulting in progressive impoverishment of what we show and, ultimately, of our relationships.

· We argue that the causal direction has to be reversed — that risking a 15 percent disclosure is what builds safety. If each person waits for the other to take a risk, little progress is ever made. On this journey, you have to trust the process, believing that in the long run, by disclosing first, you are more likely to build trust, gain acceptance, and achieve the relationship you most want.

· More broadly, how easy is it for you to let others know what is important to you? What do you find most difficult to share? What are your concerns about sharing that?

· What are the things relevant to you that you haven’t shared? Your dreams to write a book? To set up a business? To become a public speaker? For those close to you, what are those things relevant to that relationship that you haven’t fully shared? That you find it difficult to trust others, to let your guard down because of bullying in secondary school? What are your concerns about disclosing such things?

· There are two areas of potential self-disclosure. The first is content, but the second is your feelings and concerns about sharing the content.

· There are power discrepancies in relationships that prohibit relationships from becoming exceptional since for relationships to endure, influence must be balanced and matched. Expecting someone who might already feel one-down to initiate self-disclosure is a lot to ask. It’s only logical that such disclosures come with a relatively higher feeling of risk. Yet higher-status people are often unaware that their role makes it hard for people to disclose to them. Bosses frequently say to their direct reports, “I expect you to speak up,” downplaying the risk of doing so. Those in a higher-power-and-status position need to not only be aware of this dynamic but also disclose to a greater degree than they would with someone of equal status

· Our desire to help can lead us to prematurely jump in before we discover the real issue. There is wisdom to the adage “It’s better to have the wrong solution to the right problem than the right solution to the wrong problem”

· Asking logical questions can pull someone out of their feelings and into rational responses that are not actually helpful.

· relationships have trade-offs, but for a relationship to be sustainable, each person has to have enough of their needs met, and each must give things up. Over time, the benefits have to exceed the costs.

· Again, emotions are great signposts. When we give credence to our feelings as an important indicator of what we really want, we have a good place to start. Feelings don’t need justifications to exist.

· But each person in a relationship has a responsibility to ensure that not only their own costs and benefits are in balance but the other person’s are as well.

· If you don’t double down on commitment when conflicts arise, you are less likely to have a good outcome, which then makes it harder to commit further. Suddenly, you are in a negatively reinforcing loop. On the other hand, the very act of demonstrating commitment can begin an important positively reinforcing loop. The more we commit and invest, the more rewarding the outcome is likely to be, and the better the outcome, the easier it is to commit more.

· On minor issues (pinches): “Hey, this isn’t a capital offense, but it’s bothering me.” These aren’t major conflicts; some of them pass, but others get under your skin and, if not dealt with, can grow into sizable problems — what we’d call a “crunch.” When pinches are caught early, neither party is likely to be emotionally hooked. But when an annoyance is left to fester, once it’s finally brought up, it’s often grown bigger than the precipitating event and it can lead to multiple issues becoming intertwined.

· Adults often fall into the trap of thinking that they know other people’s motives and intentions. But unless they’ve explicitly told us, what we surmise is only our hunch. Their intentions are their reality, not ours. Remain on your side of the net — your feelings, their behaviours. “I felt unappreciated when you didn’t mention my role in that decision,” The reason why we stress behaviorally specific feedback is that too much feedback isn’t specific and therefore ends up being useless or even destructive.

· I want to also be clear that my intent in giving you all of this feedback is to point out ways in which your behavior is affecting me negatively and to do that early enough for it not to turn into a big deal. It is precisely because I care as much as I do about our relationship that I feel compelled to have this conversation.” Feedback starts a conversation. It doesn’t end it.

· Convey your intent when giving back feedback. Change positive and negative feedback to affirmative and developmental.

· Feelings are never “wrong.” What might be inappropriate is how you express them or what you attribute the cause to. You might say, “I can’t justify my feelings in this context”.

· Once we make up a story, an attribution is an easy leap. “He just wants to have the last word” quickly turns into “He’s insecure.” “She only likes to talk about herself” becomes “She is self-centered.” Once attributions are made (for which we select confirming data, as previously noted), we often jump to labels.2 “Self-centered” becomes “narcissistic.” Attributions and labels oversimplify and are dangerously reductionistic, as they create a very specific lens through which we see someone else.

· There are four critical stages when it comes to addressing complex issues. First is getting the other person to take the issue seriously. Second, they have to be willing to fully share what’s going on for them. Third, you want to arrive at a mutually satisfying solution, not just settle for the minimum that will end the discussion. Finally, you need to determine if the relationship is in need of some repair work, because when the discussion has been contentious, it is easy for each person to feel bruised and the relationship to suffer.

o “This is how your behavior is affecting me.”

o “Your behavior is not meeting your goals.”

o “You might be meeting your goals, but you’re paying some unnecessary costs.”

o “Am I doing anything that is causing your behavior?”

· You want discussions surrounding conflicts to improve your problem-solving ability. This may include understanding how you got into this problem in the first place, but it also should examine how you went about resolving it. Were there places you got stuck, or was it more tortuous than necessary? The objective is to increase, not decrease, each person’s willingness to raise difficult issues in the future.

· Whether you are giving or receiving feedback, defensiveness is often a sign that there is a kernel of truth in the feedback, and therefore something valuable to explore. A therapist friend of ours once said, “Sh*t sticks only if there’s something for it to stick to.”

· Most people have a tendency to first go to their head, to try to understand what’s going on logically, before paying attention to their own or someone else’s feelings. It’s a hard habit to break.

· Even when people do express feelings, they tend to downplay their intensity. We conceptualize emotions on a ten-point scale, from very mild to extreme. Not infrequently, it’s only when an emotion passes a threshold of seven that people notice or report it. Isn’t this crazy, so much below the surface. What kind of person and what kind of friendships could you have if you opened up about all this stuff?

· We also “leak” emotions, through sharpness of tone or facial expressions of disdain, which results in even more dysfunctional exchanges. If that’s the case, why not just express them in the first place and put such emotions into the clear? Define them.

· The most valuable lesson in this exchange is the importance of persistence. At any point, they could have turned away from each other, potentially damaging the relationship further.

· It was also important that they took a break. When you’re exhausted or so emotionally flooded that you can’t take in much more, a temporary hiatus makes sense. There’s an important distinction, though, between refusal to deal with a situation and taking some time and space to let thoughts and feelings settle.

· An adage from the 1960s personal growth movement was “Never let the sun set on a dispute.” We strongly disagree. A break can provide needed perspective, whereas the desire to “get this over with” can lead to hasty agreements that don’t feel good after we’ve slept on them.

· In the Interpersonal Dynamics course, we say, “Trust the process.” That means, “At this moment, I may not know what’s really going on or what the solution is, but if we can hang in there in expressing our feelings, then it will become clearer and eventually work out.” No running away — we are sticking with this until we resolve it. Both of us have a responsibility to come up with possible solutions. Costs have to be incurred and accepted by both of us.

· It can be good to acknowledge that your feeling might not be logical, but it is there nevertheless

· Growth in one relationship should not be at the expense of another.

· It’s difficult, if not impossible, to build exceptional relationships with people who are fragile

· One of the potential downsides of focusing on exceptional relationships is devaluing any connection that doesn’t reach that level. Sometimes it’s necessary to simply be grateful for what’s been achieved.

· Carol Dweck suggests that when identifying a present limitation, it is important to add the word “yet.”1 When a statement like “I can’t fully express all my needs with my significant other” gets a “yet” at the end, the meaning changes from hopelessness to possibility.

· Wanting different things out of a relationship doesn’t necessarily have to be an obstacle, but it does have to be addressed

· Most work relationships can probably reach the meadow. Once there, you need mutual commitment, a steady and ongoing process of increasing self-disclosure, continually stretching 15 percent beyond your comfort zone, and seeing setbacks as something to explore and learn from rather than as a reason to retreat.

· Logical arguments often not only do not work but are counterproductive — meet the other person where they are. What are their feelings, logical or not? Accept their feelings as valid and then convey that acceptance.

· You’ve probably resisted making a commitment to someone else because you were afraid they wouldn’t reciprocate. Perhaps you’ve been hesitant to try something new because you’re afraid of making mistakes. You may not have asked for what you needed, or confronted others when they hurt you, because you feared damaging the relationship. Even more basic is the fear that if someone really knew you — all of you — they would reject you.

· “Fear” is sometimes an acronym for “false expectations appearing real.”

· The risks you take as you build and maintain an exceptional relationship can free you from much of that fear. That is partly because you have tested those fears, only to discover they were false expectations. The process of building deep relationships has increased your interpersonal competence and given you the confidence you need to speak your truth and be more fully yourself.

· All of this frees you from constantly asking, “Do I dare say …,” “What does she think of me when I …,” or “How does he feel about my doing …” Instead of wasting energy on self-doubt, you can focus it on curiosity and learning. Sure, you may still worry about how things will turn out, but that’s different from worrying about being rejected for who you are.

Total summary:

How to be more fully yourself, including seeing the power in expressing your emotions. You have learned how to use the 15 Percent Rule for increasing self-disclosure in building relationships. Even though there can be risks in being vulnerable, in most cases the benefits far exceed the costs. Being willing to be more fully known takes courage, and you have learned that vulnerability can come much more out of strength than out of weakness. How to build conditions where the other person is willing to disclose and be more themselves. Listening for their feelings and encouraging their full expression is crucial in that process. Likewise, you have learned not to rush to judgment but instead to be curious when you don’t initially understand the other or they do something that upsets you. You also have learned to value the other’s uniqueness as opposed to requiring that they be just like you. The limitation of giving advice and the power of open-ended questions. You have increased your ability to be empathetic, and just as you want to be more fully known and accepted, you have learned to do the same for the other person. How to give and receive behaviorally specific feedback, to both raise and resolve difficulties, and to help the other see what they do well and might build on. The difficulties between you and the other might range from minor pinches to some major conflicts, but irrespective of where the issue is along that range, you see that feedback, although challenging at times, doesn’t have to be an attack. Instead, it can be a way to surface the core issues so that both of you can jointly resolve them. Feedback truly is a gift when you are both invested in each other’s growth and in your relationship. Appreciating the power and range of emotions, you have become aware of your capacity to feel many at the same time, as well as all the ways you can block yourself from recognizing and appropriately using them. Support comes in many forms, but being supportive sometimes requires raising difficult issues that can be uncomfortable for both the giver and the recipient. In doing so, you have learned how to be more honest than you thought possible. That honesty starts with sticking with your reality — how the other person’s behavior is affecting you — not in providing your psychological interpretation of their motives or character. You have many more choices than you previously thought. It is not that you “can’t” do or say something, but that you choose not to. Sometimes saying nothing is the best alternative, but it’s important to recognize that’s nonetheless a choice. Conflict need not be destructive. If you use the feedback model, difficult issues can be raised and resolved in a way that actually strengthens the relationship. Relationships rarely develop in a straight line. It’s often “two steps forward and one step back.” Building meaningful relationships requires persistence; difficulties are just temporary barriers that can be resolved, and damage can be repaired. You have learned more about yourself — what you do well and how you limit yourself. Perhaps most important, you see the multiple sources of learning. You can learn from your emotions, since they can signal what’s important to you. You can learn by asking yourself, “Why am I reacting as I am?” You can learn from feedback, since others know, and tell you, the impact of your behavior. And you have learned what situations are likely to trigger you