How to Become Better In Any Relationship

I was typing up a summary of the philosophies of the Arbinger Institute, and thought I'd also share it here.
The thing to remember in our relationships is this:

We think other people's bad behavior gives us an excuse for when we are less than our best. I had to get angry, or impatient, or bitter, we say, because of the way they were acting.

But we forget that our actions give them an excuse, too. "I had to act the way I was acting," they say, "because that person was so angry, or impatient, or bitter."

Even if they "went first," we gave them an excuse to keep being bad. "I knew I was right to act that way," they say. "I knew that person would be angry, impatient, or bitter."

And then we use their behavior as our excuse, and the cycle goes on and on, in a hopeless downward spiral that no one can ever win.

And it is not enough to try to break out of it by simply "taking the higher road." Because they will just see our attempts to "be the better person" as being condescending, as talking down to them, as passive-aggressive. They'll just use that as their excuse to keep acting the way they're acting.

So then, where is our hope? If we can't make it better by the low road, or the high road, what is our hope of making it better?

It lies in seeing them as a person again. A person equal in importance to us. No more special, and certainly no less. Walking next to them.

And then recognize that our anger, our impatience, our bitterness made them feel exactly the way we feel. And then in our feeling bad for making another person feel that way.

If it was so bad when they did it to us, it must have been just as bad when we did it to them.

Our ability to empathize with them gives us the hope of reconnecting with them. Our ability to understand them gives us the hope that things can become better.

Even if they were the ones who "started" it.

Because then we stop seeing them as a monster, but as a person. A person like us, who has been hurt, like us. A person who sometimes doesn't quite know how to deal with their hurt, and lashes out at a world before it can have the chance to lash out at them. It doesn't make their actions right, any more than their bad behavior made ours right. But it can make their actions more understandable, and make them people to us again instead of monsters.

And that will change our behavior--because we only felt it was okay to act as we acted toward another human being because we weren't really seeing them as a human being at all.

How To Handle Conflicts (And How NOT To Handle Conflicts)

Some ways of dealing with conflict don't work.

Competition

When we see ourselves as having to struggle against other people to get what we need, it makes us see other people as enemies and work against them. This usually makes them struggle back. It leads them to mistrust us, and us to mistrust them. As was said, "When we see the world as a jungle, it becomes a jungle."

When we think we have to fight against everyone (and by fighting we don't mean punching--it can be arguing, or even passive-aggressive manipulation) it becomes true, because, as often as not, they feel they have to fight back.

People doing this usually believe that if someone else is getting something, that means they're losing out on something themselves.

Capitulation

The other thing that doesn't work is just giving in. We usually do this because we want to keep the relationship good, and are trying to avoid hard feelings. However, when we see how easy it was for the other person to let us give in, it usually results in our getting upset, resentful, and mistrustful of the other person, even though we're the one who gave in! Rather than helping the relationship, it also makes it worse.

And it makes the other person more likely to expect us to back down again the next time--which means it becomes even harder to get what we need.

These people also think they have to give up what they want in order to give someone else what they want.

Compromise

Believe it or not, compromise usually doesn't help either. Combining the worst parts of conflict and capitulation, compromise could be called when, "Both people give up a little of what they want so that nobody ends up happy."

People compromising usually still think that everything someone else gets means something they have to lose, and so every inch of who gets what is struggled over, leading to the same kind of problems for the relationship that Capitulation and Conflict cause.

So if Conflict, Capitulation, and Compromise all don't work, what does work?

Cooperation

This is a fundamental change in attitude about how we see conflict. Instead of thinking, "If I give other people what they want, it means giving up what I want," it says, "I believe that, in most cases, a solution can be reached that can help everyone get what they really want."

Instead of saying, "I just have to think about myself," it says, "The other person here is just as much of a person as I am, and what they need is just as important. I should try as hard to help them get what they want as I would try to get something for myself."

Now this may seem hard if you focus on "What" people say they want--This is called their position. For example, a child might want mom to take them to the arcade, but mom might want to go to the gym. Looking at their positions, it seems impossible to do both. At best, they might find a compromise and mom only goes to the gym for half the time, and takes him to the arcade for a couple quick games.

But was there a better solution?

In order to find out, it helps if you focus on "Why" they want it--their fundamental interests. In this case, Mom's been trying to lose weight to win a contest at work, She's gone to the gym every day this week, and she doesn't want to break her streak.

But when she asks the child why he wants to go to the arcade, he says, "You've been gone every night this week. I just want to spend time with you."

So the gym wasn't really about the gym--it was about getting fit. And the arcade wasn't really about the arcade--it was about spending time with Mom.

They decide to go play Frisbee at the park. That way, Mom gets her exercise in, and the child gets to play with Mom--everybody's getting everything they want!

Only this way strengthens relationships instead of hurting them, and helps people get what they want more often than any of the other ways.

To make this work:

1. You have to really want to help the other person find a solution as much as you want a solution for yourself. You can't just want enough for them to get them by. You really have to be as committed to finding them a solution as you are for yourself, otherwise it's too easy to give up too soon, or settle for less for them as long as you're getting what you want.

2. You have to be relatively flexible. Remember the difference between "positions" and "interests" and don't get so caught up in arguing over your "position" that you reject solutions that would meet all of your interests.

3. You have to understand what the other person's interests are as well as you understand your own. Do you really understand what the other person wants? Or have you just made assumptions about what the other person wants? Usually we just assume things, and, most often, we assume the worst. For example, if an employee doesn't want to work late, a manager will usually just "assume" it's because they're lazy or they're trying to see what they can get away with (We do this because, by assuming negative motivations for another person, it becomes easier for us to justify not helping them get what they want and still think of ourselves as nice people). Finding out their real interests is about communication, not assumption.

4. Attack problems, not people. Don't be either defensive or reactive. Try to do and say things that will both strengthen the relationship and help solve the problem. Personal attacks--even if made defensively--only detract and derail discussion. If you're trying to change anybody or make them want something different than what they already want, you're going to be banging your head against a wall.

Spring Water Clear Messages

When I was doing volunteer work in Brazil, I met a wonderful indian family living in the city of Manaus.

Manaus is a huge city of four million people, but when you start coming to edges of it, the rain forest still creeps its way into the city. This family was living in a little ravine on the edge of a neighborhood near the north end of the city, where the foliage around their house was pretty thick.

The person who I was working with at the time was a huge nature fanatic. He dreamed of becoming a fly fishing guide and had owned snakes and other reptiles as a teenager.

He was trying to learn the names of all the different animals in Portuguese. We'd bought a couple of animal books and he'd been studying them. When we were talking with this indian family, he realized they were pretty familiar with the animals of the area. He started talking to them about different animal names, especially lizards.

When they got talking about one particular kind of giant lizard (I have no idea what kind--he was the nature fanatic, not me), they told him they'd seen one of those around their house lately.

He was ecstatic. He wanted it. Having raised so many reptiles as a teen, he was excited at the chance to have such an exotic pet.

"If you see it, you've got to get it for me," he told them.

They smiled and told him they could get it. No problem.

The next time we stopped in, he was hopeful that he was about to walk away with a new pet.

Sure enough, they smiled when they saw him. "Hey, we got it for you," they told him. "We already started in on it, but you can have the rest."

Yeah, you probably guessed it. They brought out the charred, half-eaten lizard they'd shot with a bow and arrow, and cooked up for him.

He didn't try it (But I did, just so I could say I had).

It was Dr. Benjamin Martinez of Panamerican Associates that first introduced me to the idea of "Spring Water Clear" messages. He defined that this way: Messages so clear that not only can they be understood, but they cannot possibly be misunderstood.

Making sure instructions are spring water clear is one of the biggest challenges of management. Communication is a tough thing--you're trying to get an idea out of your mind, and into the mind of another. Generally, any number of obstacles can keep that mind-to-mind transition from going smoothly.

Often, businesses have certain cultural "lingo" that aren't always clear to new employees. Even worse, sometimes it can vary from state to state. A term that the west coast divisions use to mean one thing may mean something entirely different to the east coast divisions.

Also, one phrase is often used to describe entire processes. Although the manager and the employee might be clear about the job to be done, the details of the process might vary.

There are two lessons to take away from this: It requires caution before, and understanding after.

When delivering a message, we must be cautious that we make all instructions as spring water clear as possible, and that as many of the relevant details are outlined as we can. Taking time at the start will lead to time saved later, both because there are fewer mistakes to fix, as well as because even though confused "lingo" costs time, confirmed "lingo" saves it.

After the message is delivered, when problems arise, understanding is necessary. We need to remember that it is often inadequate communication that leads to mistakes, not incompetent employees. If you're repeatedly finding employees performing tasks incorrectly or differently than you would like, it is more likely that you're inadequately communicating your expectations than they have begun to suffer from communal, contagious ineptitude.