Life of Matt

The scenario I mentioned above is a common one facing people who are thrust into a leadership role.  It goes deeper than the old saying “power corrupts”, rather, the power builds weakness in the one who wields it… unless you know what to watch out for, and stay vigilant to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap.

The problem that I fell into was this:

I relied on my position to force compliance, instead of using my relationship to inspire respect.

In doing so, I bred weakness within myself, coming to rely on an external position instead of my own internal strength and relationships.  By forcing people to follow, instead of being the type of person that they wanted to follow, I dramatically decreased my effectiveness as a leader.  There are several techniques you can use to keep your focus on the relationship, instead of on compliance.

2 Ways to Keep Focus on the Relationship

1. Don’t Take it Personally

Oftentimes, as a leader, we take dissent as an affront to our authority or character… we take it personally.  This can cause us to focus on “proving ourselves” or “putting them in their place”, which detracts from the relationship.  Instead, when you get dissent, dissassociate the dissenters behavior from yourself, and ask yourself why they’re feeling and acting the way they are.  From there, you can solve the problem in a way that will affirm the dissenter.

2. Remember the Emotional Bank Account

Sometimes, we rely on our position simply because it seems like too much work to reach out to a person, after all, it’s faster just to tell them what to do.  In situations like these, it can help to remember that every time you borrow power from your position, you’re making a withdrawal from the emotional bank account (Credit Stephen Covey).  It may be faster to do it that way, but do it consistently and one day you’re gonna get an overdraft charge, in the form of small or large acts of mutiny.

What Now?

Are you in a leadership position right now, formally or informally? Can you think of a recent situation where you borrowed power from your position instead of the relationship?  Make a commitment right now to use the techniques mentioned above to become a better leader, and start by apologizing for the mistake you made.  Be sure to let me know how it turns out in the comments!

Cheers,

Matt

This is the sixth article in “Things You Don’t Talk About at the Dinner Table“, a series about how to create an environment of trust and openness, where anything can be discussed.

One thing that I’ve seen lots of confusion about regarding connection is questions and their relationship to connection.  On one hand, you have people who think that asking questions shows weakeness and stops you from “offering value” to the interaction.  On the other hand you have people who think asking questions are the end all and be all of connection, and they’ll ask questions till the person they’re with is blue in the face.

The truth is, just like most things in interpersonal interactions, there are good questions and  bad questions, and good times and bad times to be asking questions.  For the purposes of connection, I have a very simple definition of what defines a good question:

A good question is a question that lets someone else talk about what they want to talk about, and let’s you hear something you want to hear about.

That’s it.  Anything else for our purposes is considered a bad question.  Any question that fulfills those simple criteria will enhance connection, 99% of questions that don’t fulfill that criteria will hurt connection (the exceptions will be discussed in a later article about enforcing standards).

So there are two aspects you have to worry about when asking questions.  The first part is “Am I really interested in the answer?”.  If the answer is no, you’ll want to learn how to develop a sincere interest in other people.  The second part is “Does the other person want to talk about the answer?”.  To figure out what other people want to talk about, read on.

What Do Other People Want to Talk About?

Figuring out what other people want to talk about is another challenge entirely, it involves some amount of trial and error, casting around a bit until you hit upon a topic that makes the other person happy to be talking.  What you can do is greatly increase your chances by focusing on a topic that is universally important to human beings:  themselves.  The trick is to find an aspect of them that THEY consider important.  I’ll list a number of possible topics below.  If you can think of any more, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

1.Their Passions

2.Their Worldviews

3.Their Future

4.What’s On Their Mind

5.Their (Happy) Memories

That list is just a short list to get you started.  Anything that people like to think about, they’ll usually like to talk about as well.  The trick is showing that you’re genuinely interested in what they’re saying, and letting them feel safe enough to talk about it.  Next week, I’ll talk about conversational tools you can use to better hone in on the right questions.

Click Here to Read the Rest of this Series.

This is the fifth article in “Things You Don’t Talk About at the Dinner Table“, a series about how to create an environment of trust an openness, where anything can be discussed.

Today I want to take some time to dispel a number of common yet harmful mindsets around the issue of creating and maintaining relationships.    They all center around this issue of what I call the myth of compatibility.

The myth of compatibility in a nutshell, is this:

Some people are meant to connect with each other, and some aren’t.

From this erroneous belief, stem other harmful and false mindsets, which hurt your ability to connect with others. First, that connecting with others should be effortless and simple, and second, that superficial commonalities determine the success of a relationship.

The Myths of Compatibility

Myth 1: Connection Should Be Effortless

This myth was brought to my attention in a comment on one of my other articles about how to create relationships.  The gist of the comment was that because the article talked about how to CREATE connection, it was automatically a bad idea, because connection should not have to be created.

While I see where the commenter is coming from, I categorically disagree with the sentiment.  In every worthwhile relationship I’ve had, there’s always been a point where the relationship becomes strained, and it takes some work to rebuild the connection. I would venture a guess that if you look at your own relationships, you’ll discover a similar situation.  Wouldn’t it be silly to discount a relationship, just because this period of lower connection comes at the beginning of the relationship instead of at the middle?

Reality: Relationships are hard work.

Myth 2:  We Have Nothing in Common

This is a common one I see.  There’s actually two beliefs that bring this statement about, both of them false.  The first erroneous belief is that it’s actually possible to have nothing in common with another human being.  The truth is, you have more in common with any given person than you have differences with them (The Second Formulation of the Law of Average Joes).

We can start with the most obvious way to disprove this: Do you both have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth?  On the most basic level, you’re both human.  But honestly, that’s a pretty stupid argument, who connects on aspects of their anatomy?

What I’m going to argue is much deeper.  I’m going to argue that deep down, in all of us, there’s a basic human goodness.  There’s an inherent value deep inside our being, which is common to every human being on the planet. It’s THAT commonality that you can connect on, and that’s why I think you always have something in common with another person.

Reality: Everyone has a deep inherent value in common with everyone else.

There’s also another myth hidden in this statement, and that’s the idea that you must have something in common with somebody else in order to connect with them.

However, have you ever met someone who had such different beliefs from your own that you were immediately fascinated by them?  Ever had the experience of trading differing beliefs with somebody, and feeling closer to them because of it? You didn’t connect on commonalities, you connected on differences. (I also talk about this briefly in my article about how to begin to create relationships.)

Reality: You can connect on differences just as easily as commonalities.

The Reality of Relationships

The misconceptions above, and the idea of compatibility itself all stem from a fundamentally flawed mindset.  It’s a mindset which says that relationships are something which happen TO you, a mindset of reaction.  I want you to consider coming from a more proactive mindset.  Love, trust, connection, understanding, these are not things which you simply HAVE, they’re things which you must DO, ways that you must BE. Instead  of whining that there’s no trust in a relationship, BE more trusting.  Instead of complaining about not understanding someone else, BE more understanding.

With hard work on yourself and a relationship, I believe that you truly can connect with anybody.  Hopefully I’ve convinced you that compatibility is a myth… the rest is up to you.

Click Here to Read the Rest of this Series.