Restore Integrity To Restore A Relationship

Have you seen the movie, “It’s Complicated?”

Meryl Streep is divorced from Alec Baldwin, the father of their three children. At the college graduation of one of their children, she begins an affair with her former husband with consequences that give the movie its title.

In reality, however, it’s not complicated at all. It only gets complicated because Streep and Baldwin’s characters don’t keep their agreements. They didn’t keep their agreement when they got married (they missed the “until death do you part” thing), they didn’t keep their agreement when they got divorced (their relationship as a couple is over) and they didn’t keep their agreement to remain divorced when they began their affair.

I suggest that people say “It’s complicated” to justify why they aren’t going to keep their agreements. Keeping agreements is not complicated. It’s the breaking of agreements that creates complications.

If you have relationships that aren’t as great as you would like them to be, the source is likely broken agreements. You don’t trust someone who is consistently late or cancels appointments or fails to meet a promised deadline or fails to love, honor and cherish you even though that was the promise.

By the way, it’s not a matter of morality. You’re not a good person if you keep agreements and a bad one if you don’t. Keeping agreements is simply what works. It creates trust and safety that will allow the relationship to move forward.

I’m also not advocating staying in relationships that don’t work just because you made an agreement to do so. Having an agreement to end a relationship may be as beneficial as an agreement to stay together.

I am suggesting that whenever you’re in a conflict and someone maintains that the explanation for why they behaved in a particular way is “complicated,” that person either has already broken an agreement or is about to.

If you break an agreement, restore integrity to the relationship to restore the relationship. Apologize. Make a new promise that you will honor the agreement and stick to it. Or request a renegotiation of the agreement.

If someone breaks an agreement with you, confront it as soon as you find out. The longer you wait, the more you give tacit approval to the broken agreement.

Here’s a possible sequence for doing so:

1.   1. Say, “I want to talk to you about something that’s bothering me. Is this a good time for you?” You’re getting permission to proceed to ensure that the person is ready to listen to you.

2.   2. “We had an agreement to do X and you instead you did Y.” Say what the person said or did not your opinion or judgment. For example, don’t explain why it’s important to you for the person to have kept the agreement. The more you explain, the more opening you give the other person to discuss your explanation versus the fact of the broken agreement.

3.   3. The other person will likely rationalize, justify and /or explain the reasons for why he/she broke the agreement. Listen with respect, paraphrase what he/she says, but don’t lose sight of the necessity to get a clear agreement for the future. Without adding your own comments, keep asking, “Is there anything else you want to say” until the person is done.

4.   4. Ask if the person “will” keep the agreement in the future. “Will” is the operative word. Change is an act of will. You want to find out if the person has the “will power” to keep agreements in the future. Don’t ask, “Could you? ” Might you?” or “Will you try?”

5.   5. There are only three possible responses to the “Will you” question: “Yes” in which case thank the person, “No” in which case realize that the agreement no longer exists and you may choose to renegotiate or end the relationship or some form of “Maybe” which calls for the conflict resolution strategies I outline in my book, “Everyone Wins! Playing The Game of Conflict Resolution In All Your Relationships.”

Remember: Keeping agreements is not complicated although some people will try to make you believe that it is.

Animal Lessons

Mark Twain famously wrote in his book Pudd'nhead Wilson,“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

Here’s another difference:

My Golden Retriever Becca is 11 years old and she still chases Gekko’s in our yard in Phoenix. You know what a Gekko looks like if you’ve seen those Geico commercials on television.

My house is surrounded by a wall and, in the summer, 5 or 10 Gekkos can typically be seen scurrying around the wall. What they are looking for I have no idea (a better deal on car insurance?).

When my dog looks through the sliding glass door into our yard and sees those Gekkos, she invariably starts barking until I open the door and let her out. She immediately runs to the wall and tries to capture the Gekkos in her mouth. She snaps at them but, of course, ends up snapping at empty space because the Gekkos are way too fast for her. However, the next day (or even the same day) when the Gekkos return, my dog is back at the door, barking to be let out. She never gives up even though she hasn’t got a chance of ever catching one. I sometimes think the Gekkos return simply to torment my poor dog.

Now here’s the lesson: Not once has my dog come back into the house, head down, declaring, “I’m such a failure. I try and try and try but I just can’t seem to do anything right. I’m just going to give up.” My dog attaches no meaning to “failure.” She will never fail. She simply hasn’t yet succeeded.

For human beings, however, failure has a lot of meaning. We don’t simply fail to catch our “Gekko.” We are failures. We fear failure and, after awhile, give up.

The “formula” for success is to keep our eyes on the goal and not be attached to how we get there. Failure simply means we didn’t get the Gekko this time. Perhaps we need a different Gekko capturing strategy (my dog will never grasp this concept). Perhaps we need help from others to capture our Gekko. Perhaps we are looking for our Gekkos in the wrong place.

The key is not to give up on having our Gekko but to give up on the self defeating self talk that stops us from achieving our goals.