This Week’s Relationship Circle – Getting Related

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Review of this week’s Relationship Circle (names withheld):

I love you people. All of you, ______ the superstar, Gregg the sensei, ________ with the great smile, _________ with the heart like a forest, everybody there, individually and collectively you guys are awesome. I felt this the very first time I came to this meetup, I felt deep love for all of you, and I want to thank each of you for taking the time to open up and allow people to get to know you for the two or three hours we’re at Café Asia! WE ARE FREAKING AWESOME.

Mission Accomplished, huh?

Getting related is not as simple as you might think. First of all, it’s infinite. You can be infinitely related to another human being, so there’s no end to the layers of separation that can be peeled off. And what’s the payoff of peeling off these layers? Freedom, from fear, from the endless work of protecting ourselves, the possibility of deep surrender to unity, to share ourselves fully, to be known, to feel loved.

For most of us, giving someone the experience of being related to, or instructing someone else how to give you an experience of being related to is more accessible. The instructions are easy to remember and can be somewhat challenging to execute. Listen without judgment. Be with the person, as present as possible, while letting them be exactly as they are. When you apply this generously, people transform. They calm down and feel safe enough to look at themselves, because you are no longer a threat. Your point of view and getting related rarely can coexist in the same space powerfully.

Trained coaches and some other helping professionals can pierce through a person’s protection and get related right to another person’s heart. This can be a shocking and powerful experience. It’s like emotional open heart surgery, but the possibility it creates, the opportunity available for relating beyond fear can source powerful breakthroughs. Fear is the reason we are not related and love can scare (get right to our vulnerable spot) while being more powerful than fear.

Don’t try this at home, kids, because our upset or disappointment with another, which is often the impetus for wanting to break through someone’s protection, will wind up giving them a better reason to fortify that protection.

Keep practicing relating and getting related to others. You’ll see the benefits.

Last Night’s Circle

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There are so many simple pleasures from being a part of The Relationship Circle. One of my favorites is when someone moves from wading in spectator or advice giver to bathing in worker. Here’s what I mean by worker. A worker at the circle is someone who is willing to look at themselves without explanation or defensiveness. To see what they do and whether it’s working or not, period. Then the worker takes responsibility for their pattern and chooses that she is willing to discard it. It is a fully immersive experience, full of feeling, uncertainty, knowing your alive.

It takes courage to be a worker, when what we are trained in is self-protection, blaming others, throwing our hands up, seeking agreement from our “friends” who point the finger out there at what’s wrong and make us right for how we keep doing things. Workers inspire the entire circle, they raise the level of the work for all, because now at least one more person is willing to take the dive into stark self-reflection. One more person sees that you don’t die when you stop defending yourself over things you do.

The worker epitomizes strength and grace. It takes strength to live without your protection. Grace is what we see when someone is living in an undefended way, showing their scars and choosing to trust something where they cannot just rest on the safety of familiarity and prior knowledge, where you’re out on a limb and playing for what you really want out of life.

Be a worker, the water’s fine.

You Want to be Heard?

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There is no responsibility in speaking. Anyone can do it, it requires no special skills other than learning a language. There are a myriad of possible ways things can go once you’ve spoken.

Being heard is an entirely different story. If what you’re committed to is being heard, you want a 100% clean interaction. What you are giving is what has been received and that’s it and it is the speaker’s responsibility if that intention is his or her goal. Again today I did not take responsibility for being heard. I’m working on it, too.

To ensure being heard, we need to get behind the reality (interpretations, based on their own personal experiences) that other people bring to the table. It also takes an understanding of what we are bringing in addition to our intention (imbedded reactions and emotions, mostly), because your listener may get taken out by something other than your intention that is present in your communication, verbally, through body language, tone or way of being.

Here’s what I mean. If you are committed to being heard, if you have chosen that your sole intention is to make a contribution to another or to vent or to share or to brainstorm, unless it is made explicitly clear, the listener could hear it as something completely different. Contributions are often heard as criticism, venting is often heard as blame, sharing is often heard as a request for someone to do something about what has come up and on and on. If you want to have more than one intention met, then separate them for yourself and introduce them separately.

If you want it to come off as how you intend it, consider making it clear at the outset. Let the listener know that you noticed something about them that you wanted to share with them and find out if they are open to hearing it, let them know you just want them to listen to you vent. Even then, it is likely that your intention will be misconstrued, because we hold fast to our reactions and emotional triggers, so if we want to be heard, we can check in, by asking questions like, “How did that occur to you?” and then showing understanding that they could see it that way.

We also frequently bring our upset to other people, we want them to know that we are upset with something they did and we also think we are trying to help them. The thing is, it’s more likely than not that the listener will respond to the upset and get triggered themselves. The value of what you were trying to bring is then lost.

I understand completely that what Im suggesting is hard work, but if you want to be heard, these are some things to consider. People’s listening is what it is. They may reliably look for the threat in other’s words, tone and way of being. We can’t fix or change that unless they see for themselves that it’s getting in the way. As speakers, we take people for where they are and be responsible for our reactions and emotions or we deal with the dissonance and not meeting the goal we set out on by choosing to speak in the first place.

Lower the Divorce Rate by 50%? How?

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I let you know that I am committed to cutting the divorce rate by 50% in ten years. Here’s how:

I plan on cutting the divorce rate by bringing our education on being in a relationship up from negligible to useful coupled with powerful practice. Relationship is the area that affects the quality of our lives most (happiness, love, success in all areas of life, fulfillment, well-being, personal growth, etc.) and we have the least handle on it.

Taking on relationships from full responsibility, powerful agreements and personal transformation can cut the divorce rate with ease. It’s just a matter of creating widespread awareness and getting people into better practice. It happens with all of my clients. This leaves people empowered in their relationships, able to handle issues in a positive way, for each other and for the relationship itself. We begin to serve the relationship over ourselves. The results are better performance and joy at work while becoming more of who we really are plus getting to the core of why were in relationship with people in the first place and enjoying the commitment while moving it forward.

It’s easy, it just takes some adjustment, like anything new. And the education is for everyone, so when people are about to get into a relationship, they already know on a deeper level why they’re getting into it, how it’s likely to go and what they need to do/who they need to be to make it successful for everyone.

I’ve been married for 11 years and with my wife for almost 19. We’ve been through a lot and it’s been our commitment to getting better at being in a relationship and looking at our own responsibility that has us feeling fresh and excited about each other and the future even while knowing each other (the good and bad, or as I like to say, the conscious and yet to be conscious parts of each other) as well as we do.

Bottom line, our relationships will help us let go of everything that’s inauthentic about ourselves and we’ll get back to the core of being ourselves, if we learn to listen the right way to the cues and do something useful with what we hear i.e. practice. That’s what I teach and coach people on. When that transformation happens, our inner beauty shines through (people want to be with us) and we can listen, be with people and support them and what they’re up to with love. Who wouldn’t want that?

Relationship Mastery

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I am offering one free relationship coaching session for you or someone you know this month. We’ll look together at one relationship in your life, business or personal, where you want things to go differently. Jump in.

In relationships, we’re given no manual, we usually follow flawed guides and the sheer amount of desires, interests and concerns we bring into them are so daunting to satisfy, let alone working with our partner on theirs. No wonder we are rarely truly satisfied over the long term.

It’s time to raise our games and take this as the awesome and possibility-filled undertaking it is. If we take on relationship mastery, imagine the benefits. Imagine hearing and accepting others as they truly are and feeling understood, empowered and supported.

Relationship mastery as some ultimate destination is impossible, or course, but it’s the commitment to learning, practicing and deciding that this is an area of life where you choose to always grow and thrive that will reap benefits.

Let’s have our relationships resemble the world we want to live in. All of them. It’s absolutely possible.

If you want to start down this road or know someone that can benefit from it, contact me and let’s get started.

Listening and Following Directions

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So much of what people who love us want for us to change is incredibly useful, but our common reaction is to defend and accuse the speaker. Sure, the speaker is often one or more of these things: upset, exasperated, an authority figure, guilty of similar (or, in our minds, worse) infractions, angry and always imperfect. We look for perfect teachers, our bar for trust is so high and we lose the power of the feedback that’s all around us.

When we take on transformation, we learn that those who love us have already been telling us the same things we now relate to as breakthroughs or insights. We just wouldn’t hear them when they said them. I don’t say couldn’t, because there’s a part of us that wants to be right so much that we will not allow ourselves to hear. We feel threatened and go right into survival behavior instead of listening and considering the words. What we need to hear is right there, potentially saving us years of anguish or lackluster results.

Today, my wife told me she thought we weren’t connecting well over the last few days. What did I do? I immediately looked at the things I know she does that gets in the way. I was defensive, not listening, being right. Everything I had to say may have been useful, but I made no use of her simple observation. If I took responsibility for our gap in connection, I would be learning a lesson I clearly was not getting and I’d have much more possibility in all my relationships. It took a few hours and a swim in the pool with the boys, but then I finally heard her simple message, apologized and told her I loved her. Her immediate response was to apologize to me and give up what she was holding. She saw who she was being the minute I stopped defending and took responsibility.

Transformation requires us to follow directions, take cues and surrender beyond our normal reactions. In the end, it’s the only way, because everything else is just another version of the behaviors, reactions and patterns we’re looking to leave behind. People in our lives may be sick of our stuff and showing it, but the message is still vital for us to hear, because in the end, we’ll see our stuff that’s making them sick. If we were all willing to take on listening following directions and leaving our reactions behind, imagine where we’d be.

Unprotected Partnership

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I saw a movie a few weeks ago that taught me more about relating than any course or book I’ve ever spent time with. It’s called “Buck” and it’s about a horse trainer named Buck Brannaman, who calls himself a natural horse trainer.

http://www.buckthefilm.com/

By watching Buck train a horse and train people, I learned about where I fall short in relating to others. To watch him with a horse is to see a master of owning his space, connecting without fear and leaving the luxury of one’s own reactions at the door for the sake of relating to another being. These horses tame themselves by choice. Buck creates a magnetic space that attracts their partnership, their union. It’s as if the horses see access to their own greatness through Buck and then as the horse’s owners follow Buck’s path, through human beings.

The striking thing for me was to see how Buck accepted the animal fully without making the story of where they had been important. He saw through it right to the center of the horse and all he saw was goodness and exhibited the patience required for the horse to follow suit and surrender it’s own story about life. To feel safe to connect with Buck and create unprotected partnership. He wasn’t trying to fix anything. He was an invitation for the horse to let go and remained that way, steadfastly.

I try to support people’s greatness, but I never understood the responsibility to own my reactions in such a deep way. To drop being right, to stand for the power and possibility of relating first, as access to the most impactful relationship possible with another human being.

Our fear sends others into theirs. Our righteousness about our fear (anger, disappointment, etc.) keeps us separate, in a place where we cannot possibly help or support others effectively. Truth is, we can barely get along without prioritizing relating in an on purpose way.

Since seeing the film, I have taken it on with my family, friends, clients, waitresses, strangers and found it to be energy providing and the source of miraculous possibility. Please support the film. It’s available on Netflix and showing the next two months on Showtime. There’s a lesson for every viewer.

Getting Off It

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Every relationship suffers from parties choosing to be right.  The problem with being right is that  we become nearly impenetrable.  When you’re right, you don’t need anyone, any new ideas, any curiosity…When we need to be right, we’re always making someone else wrong.  How does it go for you when you feel made wrong?

I’ve been learning this the hard way, noticing every step as I learn, how important it was to be right and the damage it has done in relationships with those closest to me.  It’s been as rewarding to clean these up as it was to hold my beliefs over people.  Just this time, there’s a win-win at the end of it, not just my domination or upset from feeling dominated by their “no”.  Finally, I can appreciate the points of view of the group, of my friends, of those that love me and learn from them.

Being right usually comes from fear.  The fear of things not going your way.  The fear of living in an unpredictable world.  The fear of possibility.  In relationships, we hurt each other with our rightness, we demand agreement, because without it, we’re letting go of the safety of our own reality.

Being right has nothing to do with relating to people.  It’s a dead end.  Just because you don’t agree with someone, you’re going to create yourself as opposing them, just to defend your worldview.

We insist upon being right the most in the relationships where we have experienced the most pain.  Just look at sibling or parent relationships.  If you’re married, look at how you need to be right with your spouse.  If you’re divorced, see how it affected the ending of the relationship.  If you look closely, you’ll see your health, sleep, weight and other life issues are negatively affected by prolonged periods of needing to be right.  Being right takes vigilance, energy, all out defense to keep it alive and we suffer for it.  The more right we need to be, the more alone we find ourselves.

We can either be right or be in relationship.  Inside relationship, that static concept of ourselves, our reality, starts to bend, shift, detach, it becomes malleable.  It’s difficult to put your finger on, because it is truly an experience of aliveness. Like love, laughter and joy, it’s the uncertainty of what will happen,living in the unknown for just a moment, that fills our soul.

Sure, we may have something valuable for others, but we must surrender to their reality, listen to our partners and truly enroll them if we have a hope of keeping our good advice from becoming the next thing to separate ourselves from each other.

Try it on.