For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
—Newton’s third law of motion
The relationships we foster with family, partners, friends, and coworkers determine much of our personal happiness and professional success. Relationships are the human channels through which we learn, teach, grow, and become ourselves. Highly dynamic, the tone and balance of a relationship can hinge on something as slender as a passing comment. In a relationship any change to one person affects the other, whether the change is physical, emotional, financial, or linked to an event, such as getting a new job.
So how can just one person in a relationship make a microresolution that improves a relationship? By shifting behavior at the vital margin. While you may think that your relationship issues involve of necessity the other guy, you can’t change the other guy, you can only change yourself. The good news is that a change in your behavior can, on its own, increase mutual understanding and enjoyment, reduce stress, foster love, build respect, and keep simple disagreements from escalating into painful conflicts. And as the father of physics famously observed, there will be a reaction from the other guy, because any change in a relationship dynamic will have reciprocal, if lopsided, effects.
Often we resist changing our own behavior in a relationship because we get hung up on negotiating outcomes that we think are absolutely fair. Relationships aren’t generally fair, if by “fair” we mean that everything is equal. One partner may do more for the other; one may earn more; one may be more empathetic, energetic, neat, easygoing, outgoing, complacent, successful, compliant, confident, confrontational, righteous, timid, or aggressive. Partners may contribute fully and in good faith to the relationship’s health and success, but that doesn’t mean that such contributions can be weighed on a scale and brought into perfect balance. It might not be fair that you work to improve your behavior when the other guy is mostly to blame, but it might get you to a better place faster than waiting on the other guy to improve himself. If your relationship with your mother makes you unhappy, trying to get her to address her shortcomings is probably a longer (and perhaps less productive) road than simply modifying your response to her behavior patterns to reduce friction and achieve a healthier relationship dynamic.
Relationships may not be symmetrical, but they are symbiotic. Disrupting just one negative relationship dynamic can immediately improve your relationship, whether it’s at home, at school, at the office, or with a friend or romantic partner. If you pay close attention to how your communication with, investment in, and even thoughts of another person affect you both, you’ll identify behavioral patterns that you could improve all on your own.
I’d been practicing microresolutions for over a year before I made my marriage the target of a microresolution. One night, while apologizing to my husband after he reminded me of something I hadn’t done, I realized how much resentment I felt. At the end of a day that included getting my daughter off to school, working eleven demanding hours on Wall Street, and cooking dinner for everyone, his reminder felt unfair—but I rushed to apologize anyway. I followed up my apology with an elaborate explanation of all I had done that day.
Apologizing was something I witnessed my mother doing all the time I was growing up. She worked like crazy to keep three kids and a husband on track and happy, yet she apologized regularly for anything she missed. She was the housekeeper, gourmet cook, gardener, psychologist, nurse, laundress, art teacher, tutor, ego booster, and chauffeur. She put herself last, and yet she apologized instantly for anything she failed to do and the few sacrifices she wouldn’t make. I think she thought that apologizing was the easiest way to defuse the bad humor of others, but at some level she must have felt angry that, despite being deeply loved by her family, her extraordinary efforts on their behalf weren’t fully appreciated.
Here I was, a generation later, a successful working mother, observing in myself the same habit of making needless apologies over trivial issues. Stepping back from my behavior, I realized that my apologies didn’t seem to please my husband either; neither one of us felt good after these exchanges. I asked myself what would happen if I just stopped apologizing for the small things I’d missed. What if in response to a reminder or rare admonishment I didn’t say anything or just said, “okay,” “yeah,” “got it,” or “oops”? I decided to give it a try. I resolved:
To stop apologizing to my husband when I didn’t really mean it
It wasn’t until I tried to stop apologizing that I realized how often I felt the impulse to apologize and then explain. But stopping myself from apologizing had an almost magical effect. To begin with, skipping the apology meant I didn’t burn a lot of energy defending myself, and I stayed cool and relaxed. Because I didn’t apologize falsely, I didn’t feel abased or angry, and I could see that most of the small things my husband brought up didn’t really require an explanation. I had been responding to his comments as gotchas; now I stopped worrying whether or not they were intended as gotchas and just acknowledged them as informational. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a gotcha doesn’t getcha, is it still a gotcha?
As soon as I stopped explaining myself my resentment dissipated and I realized that my knee-jerk (i.e., autopilot) defensiveness had only served to amplify petty frictions. Simply acknowledging my husband’s comment instead of defending myself kept the oxygen from being sucked out of the entire evening and created an opportunity (airtime) for my husband to play down the transaction himself. Where my effusive apologies had mostly been met with stony silence, my new de minimis acknowledgments seemed to prompt my husband to close out issues himself by saying something like “I know you have a lot on your plate” or “It’s no big deal.”
Once I rid myself of these gratuitous apologies, I could see that they had been a tactic—my apology was really just an excuse to recite all I had done that my husband should appreciate and make him feel guilty for picking on me. Undoing my habit of instant apology/explanation made me feel lighter, less burdened, because I had let go of some emotional baggage. I became a better half.
The no bad-faith apologies pledge is a powerful model for a microresolution focused on self-expression in a relationship. What we say, how we say it, and how we react to emotional cues determine whether or not we are heard and understood and our most personal feelings appreciated. Identifying and changing a negative pattern in self-expression can lead both to a positive shift in a relationship and greater personal authenticity. The first step in achieving progress is to take a close look at how you communicate your needs, thoughts, and support to your opposite number in a relationship.
If your goal in a relationship is greater understanding and harmony, analyzing what cues negative engagement is a powerful starting point for a microresolution focused on achieving cleaner, clearer, and more satisfying interactions. In analyzing your reactions to the behavior of others, you might discover that you’ve fallen into response patterns that impede mutual understanding and personal growth. We may not think of our relationships as governed by autopilot, but guilt-tripping, one-upping, told-you-so-ing, last word–ing, scolding, grudge-holding, snarkism, sarcasm, put-downs, interrupting, defending, complaining, and bossing are all habits that are automatically set in motion by cues that you don’t even realize exist. If you can identify these cues, you can create microresolutions to retrain your autopilot to respond in a healthier way. Most of these responses, even the most aggressive ones, are defensive (e.g., being snarky to a loved one to express hurt feelings without acknowledging vulnerability). If you examine these reciprocal dynamics in a particular relationship, you’ll discover opportunities to shift your behavior at the vital margin to achieve a better relationships and a more authentic self.
Being a parent can be a frustrating experience. We want so much to be able to help our children, yet we often feel that they don’t hear or respond to our guidance. Although we may sometimes feel tempted to give them a good shake to awaken them to our message, a breakthrough is more likely if we shake up our own behavior.
As my daughter approached her teens, I often reacted to her new rebelliousness with too much heat. This happened if I was especially frustrated with her behavior or stressed out about what I perceived to be my own failures as a parent. In such confrontations, I would raise my voice repeatedly, intensifying the battle of wills until we ended up in a loud, tearful standoff. Thinking through these episodes and how they escalated out of control, I put on my microresolution thinking cap and decided to turn my own behavior on its head. I resolved to lower my voice in response to a provocative action or comment by my daughter. As it turned out, speaking quietly created more intensity than yelling. My points came across as deliberate and serious. If my daughter continued to raise her voice, I lowered mine further until she had to quiet herself to hear me. This put the focus on the content of what I was saying, rather than on my manner of communication—my yelling had only made it easier for my daughter to dismiss me. My microresolution didn’t always carry the day, but it often kept the two of us from going to the brink, it left the lines of communication open, and I felt a lot better about my conduct as a parent.
The ability to respond to the content of a communication rather than to its tone and manner is a very valuable skill, both in and outside the workplace. The emotional style of a communication may be provocative, but what is actually being said? If your father’s tone is so aggressive when he’s telling you how to handle a situation that his advice seems more like an order than a suggestion, it might still be good advice. If you habitually respond with anger or protestations that you’re not an idiot or by hanging up the phone, perhaps a microresolution to always repeat advice given to me by Dad before responding would give you a chance to hear the advice in your own voice and a neutral tone before responding. Or you might resolve to thank Dad for his recommendations without giving my own opinion. Or if you really fear being drawn further into a discussion (or debate), you might resolve to respond to Dad’s advice only by saying, ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about.’ You may never get your dad to express his advice in a way that respects your autonomy and full maturity, so why participate in this emotional grappling? Instead, make a microresolution to respond in a way that puts you in control of your own feelings and self-expression rather than responding in a way that gets you into an emotional arms race with your parent.
Julia had the habit of second-guessing what others really wanted or meant: Wasn’t Jenny too busy to come out to dinner but just didn’t want to disappoint her? Neil had agreed to join her for a movie but his tone had been cool; should she let him off the hook? Rebecca said she didn’t need help, but she seemed so beleaguered; shouldn’t she keep offering until Rebecca accepted? In obsessing about how best to gratify the unspoken needs of others, Julia ended up sending mixed signals herself, always giving the other person an “out” after he or she had accepted an invitation, repeatedly offering help to those who said they needed no help, and seeking frequent reassurances that an already-agreed plan was still on. Julia made a microresolution to take friends at their word. That meant ignoring possible backstories and perceived emotional atmospherics and simply accepting that what was said was what was meant. Her resolution required that she simply take yes or no for an answer without second-guessing.
Julia found her resolution unbelievably difficult; before she could stop herself she’d offer excuses on the other person’s behalf. She tuned her resolution during its first weeks, scaling it back to a single relationship that she used to model her new behavior. With practice, she learned to work through her discomfort and stop herself from doing the thinking for both herself and the other person in the relationship. At that point Julia expanded her microresolution to cover all her social relationships. Did she continue to wonder what friend X might really be thinking? Yes, but she didn’t act on her insecurity by quizzing her friend about unexpressed feelings; instead she responded based on what he or she had said. In doing so, Julia discovered that the ambivalence she attributed to her friends was often her own, but it wasn’t until she stopped fixating on the real wishes of others that she could bring her own feelings into focus. Her interactions became more direct and less exhaustive and exhausting. Julia is now considering a microresolution to cover her work relationships, where she realizes she often second-guesses her boss and is overly solicitous of coworkers.
Sometimes the fear of disappointing others leads us to express ourselves in dishonest ways. Telling someone that they’re not getting promoted is a difficult work communication, and disappointment is to be expected; if you try to spare your worker’s feelings by telling him the cause was simply “quotas” or “politics,” you’re sending a message that his own efforts don’t matter, and depriving him of feedback that might contribute to a successful outcome next time. If you are letting an employee go because of poor performance, trying to depersonalize the interaction by blaming the system or shielding him from your reasoning negates your relationship with him and isolates him at a critical moment in his life. Trying to get between a child and his disappointment by convincing him that what he lost wasn’t really worth having won’t make him feel better or help him to come to grips with one of life’s essential realities: You can’t always get what you want. If you find that you habitually avoid situations and conversations that may cause disappointment, you might discover, as in the example below, that a microresolution can help you to learn to respond in a more respectful way that creates greater trust.
Alistair was an intelligent and charming person, socially much in demand, who had a terrible time disappointing people, both acquaintances and those close to him. He had trouble declining invitations, discouraging casual get-togethers, or cutting off phone conversations that went on too long. Rather than say no to a solicitation, he put off returning phone calls, and even e-mails went unanswered for weeks. If Alistair was pressed for time and ran into a colleague eager to chat, he escaped by asking him to lunch at a future date, even if he was already overwhelmed by work and social commitments. This habit of avoiding and deferring rather than disappointing created a pile of emotional IOUs that could never be paid off.
Alistair was determined to try to make a change in his behavior, at least in the workplace. He resolved that when he was in a hurry and encountered a chatty colleague, he would not end the conversation by promising to “talk later,” “call you,” or “have lunch.” He forced himself to say that he had to go, was on his way somewhere, or had an appointment and just left it at that. “It’s killing me,” says Alistair, “but I’m doing it, and it gets a little easier every time. Yesterday I just sort of blurted out I had to run before I had a chance to cringe.”
If you’re part of a relationship dynamic that you’d like to improve, think about the circumstances that cue your negative behavior and come up with a microresolution that replaces a negative response pattern with a constructive one. When your mother talks about your brother’s brilliant career, does it lead you to try to take your brother down a peg? What would happen if you resolved to match everything your mother said about your brother with something equally nice, or just calmly went on to a different topic, or resolved never to make an accusation of favoritism? (Honestly, what does it get you?) When your partner tells you he or she will be home at a certain hour and he or she is an hour late, do you respond with the silent treatment, ruining what’s left of the evening? What would happen if you greeted your partner warmly and committed yourself to an enjoyable evening anyway? When a coworker who is less competent comes to you for help, do you make sure that the boss knows it later? How might your relationship to the entire team and your own leadership improve if you resolved not to promote yourself by mentioning such incidents to the boss? Once you realize that you yourself can disrupt an ingrained relationship pattern by making a shift in your own behavior, you’ll be able to devise microresolutions that make a real difference with family, romantic partners, friends, and coworkers.
Success at work can depend heavily on the quality of your relationships—with your boss, coworkers, reports, clients, and customers. Building strong relationships boosts your effectiveness and creates a valuable network to support you throughout your working life. One poor relationship at work can threaten your success, render your efforts on the job less effective, and cast a pall over your entire working day.
As discussed at the outset of this chapter, if you find yourself in a work relationship that needs improving, focusing on the shortfalls of the other guy won’t lead to a breakthrough. But changing just one behavior of your own—a tendency to interrupt, complain, dismiss, or defend—can put your relationship on a healthier track.
After many years in the same managerial position, Christine moved into a new job that she thought represented a great opportunity. Her new assignment came with a new boss, her first after years of working for a manager who had been both a mentor and a close friend. Christine’s new boss had an aggressive manner and was more likely to fault than praise. And he had a communication habit that drove her nuts: During their one-on-one meetings he interrupted her whenever he thought he knew what she was going to say. If he got it wrong and Christine persisted in clarifying her point, he seemed to feel one-upped, and she felt frustrated that she wasn’t able to communicate her efforts and achievements clearly.
Christine felt her boss’s impatience was rude, but after several weeks she accepted that his behavior wasn’t likely to change. She began thinking through how she might adjust her own behavior so that she and her boss didn’t end up wrangling over punch lines. Christine made a microresolution to create a briefing paper to send to her boss the night before their weekly meeting. Preparing the brief would be extra work, but it would give her a chance to make her points without a fight. She included a bold headline for every topic in the brief, so that if her boss didn’t read the details he could still see where she was headed. Christine was sorry to give up the informal meeting style that had been so productive with her previous manager, but she felt she had to make a change if she was to create a better communication dynamic with her new boss.
The briefing notes transformed the meeting and made it feel less competitive. Christine’s boss could get straight to the issues he thought merited more attention, and their discussions took off, becoming both shorter and more productive. In the aftermath Christine realized that she had been so eager to show her new boss all that she had been doing and thinking that he had become impatient with the meeting pace. She had been using the meeting to review her work rather than as a springboard for making decisions. Preparing the brief gave her the chance to demonstrate all her thinking and actions without bogging down the discussion.
Christine’s microresolution made her time with the boss really productive, but it’s important to emphasize the habits that had to be created to make it work. The first time she sent her boss the brief she raised his expectations that there would always be a brief sent the night before the meeting, and showing up without it would have counted as a fail. Introducing the brief meant institutionalizing it, and it required practice and discipline to make an absolute routine of it.
Simon was given an assignment to begin managing a team that was underperforming and had suffered defections of team members to other projects and companies. The team had an entrenched, depleted atmosphere, confidence was low, and the team was facing a difficult project schedule.
Simon understood that to be successful he would have to lift the team’s performance by turning around underperformers or by replacing them. He knew that his reputation as an aggressive manager had preceded him and saw that his new team viewed him warily. While he was committed to taking tough actions to turn the team around, he began thinking about his own behavior and what he might do differently to win the trust of the team and foster a culture of excellence.
If he wanted others to improve, Simon reasoned, he would have to demonstrate that he viewed developmental feedback as a personal opportunity. Simon made a microresolution to end biweekly face-to-face meetings with each of his new managers by asking for feedback on what he could be doing better. The first few times he asked for their feedback, his managers were either mostly vague or made only positive comments. Simon persisted in his resolution, and his reports soon began coming prepared to give direct feedback. Prompted by his example, most of his direct reports began asking him for developmental feedback, allowing him to engage team leaders about performance shortfalls in a natural and positive way. Following the pattern established by Simon, many of his managers began asking their teams for feedback, prompting deeper conversations about what needed to change and creating an atmosphere of open collegiality and collaboration. Soon a culture of continuous engagement, feedback, and problem solving took hold, and the team began to improve. While Simon did replace some people on the team for poor performance, most of the original team survived, and in nine months the team was humming.
Although Greta was a good person who enjoyed a good time, she had a habit of complaining. She complained about trivial episodes on transit, at work, and at merchants—the bus that didn’t stop when the driver clearly saw her running for it, the butcher who gave her loin rather than rib lamb chops, the salesclerk who pressured her into buying something she didn’t really want.
Greta was a hard worker, very skilled and conscientious, but if she had to work late, pick up the slack for an absent employee, or miss lunch, she complained about it. She wasn’t a person of ill will; her complaints were mostly a misguided attempt to bond with other employees and to feel a greater sense of belonging (we’re all powerless together).
After Greta received feedback that she wasn’t being promoted to a more senior spot because her negative attitude wasn’t right for a leadership position, she began to take stock. Her first impulse was to feel that she had been treated unfairly, as her general resentment was a defensive posture. But looking back over her career, she could see a pattern in her attitude and behavior that she decided needed serious attention.
Greta’s first microresolution was I will not to be the first to complain about a work issue. The very first day of her resolution, something happened in the office that she thought worthy of complaint. In accordance with her resolution, she made no comment and instead waited eagerly for someone else to bitch. She recalls, “I thought to myself, Here it comes, here it comes, wait for it!—and nothing happened. No one said a thing!” It was days before anyone voiced a mild complaint on a different topic. “It was me,” Greta said. “I never realized that I was at the core of the complaining; it seemed to be a general thing. But when I stopped taking the lead, most of it died off.”
Greta’s pledge not to complain first is a classic example of working the vital margin. Greta didn’t pledge never to complain again under any circumstances; instead her target was limited, reasonable, and, as it turned out, revelatory.
If you have the habit of complaining at work, you might try a resolution that places some limits on your complaining. For example, you might resolve to give up complaining about a certain topic (coworkers, boss, work assignments, hours) or limit whom you complain to (for example, I resolve to complain about work only at home) or limit when you complain (I resolve not to complain at lunch or on coffee breaks).
If you’re a complainer in your personal life, you might resolve to give up a single (boring) category of complaint entirely, such as traffic/transit/travel, disappointing food, the weather, minor health issues, petty work grievances, life’s necessary errands/chores, or minor disses you’ve suffered. Narrowing your resolution to a very specific target you know you can achieve is the key to making your behavioral shift stick. Reversing the complaining habit will be hard work, since complaining is a kind of self-comfort. So think fearlessly about a change in behavior that will have a positive impact, and work it.
Listening to a chronic complainer turns out to be more than just annoying, it’s actually bad for your brain! New research conducted at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany demonstrates that being on the receiving end of complaining can have a negative effect on your brain, outlook, and ability to solve problems.* If you play the role of ear to a chronic complainer at work or in your personal life, think about a microresolution that will shake up the dynamic so that you don’t end up absorbing all that negativity.
Mei often responded to issues raised by clients, colleagues, and subordinates through e-mails. She found communicating asynchronously convenient to her work schedule and less stressful than in-person or phone communication, especially if there were issues to resolve. But her lengthy e-mail responses led to hardened positions more often than to better understanding. After one such exchange blew up with a client and caused an intervention by her boss, Mei thought about her habit of conducting most of her client business through e-mail. She made a microresolution that if an issue didn’t get resolved after one brief e-mail exchange, she would pick up the phone and call her correspondent. Calling up a colleague or client and saying, “I saw your e-mail. Shall we talk it through together?” is much more disarming than sending a “no need to worry because you have it all wrong” e-mail, and some of the conversations ended with a simple “Never mind!” within sixty seconds. It’s worth emphasizing that making a commitment to take disagreements out of e-mail every time takes discipline and practice before the impulse to type is replaced by the impulse to dial. Examining the role a communication channel—e-mail, text, phone, chat, social media, face to face—plays in a relationship dynamic might reveal an opportunity to make a change that leads to more productive exchanges.
The skill, creativity, and dedication you bring to the performance of your job is the greatest predictor of your success, whether your job is tending bar, managing a newsroom, or nursing people back to health. But the success of your relationships at work will also determine your effectiveness and how your job performance is perceived: your ability to work with a positive attitude and as a productive member of a team, manage diverse relationships in a healthy and professional manner, communicate effectively with others, and lead with integrity. Changing a key behavior or attitude through a microresolution can improve your job performance, satisfaction, and career prospects.
I once attended a master class given by Stella Adler, Marlon Brando’s acting teacher, where I heard her say to an actor struggling to play a character in love, “How can you tell when a someone is in love? How can you tell? You can tell because they pay attention. They pay attention to their lover’s every action, gesture, and expression. So,” she continued to the actor (and the entire room), “if you’re playing someone in love, give the love object your complete attention in a scene. Even if you aren’t looking at your lover directly, even if you’re talking to another character, you are always paying attention. Everything the love object does should fascinate you.”
What’s the quality of your attention when you finally make time for an important relationship? Do you check your cell phone for updates when you’re out with your kid and immediately respond to even noncritical e-mails as he chomps down his grilled cheese in silence? Do you multitask on the computer while carrying on a phone conversation with a parent? If your girlfriend comes into a room and sighs, do you pretend not to have heard her through your earbuds? Do you space out as soon as your spouse begins telling you details of a hobby or work project but make grunts at intervals to indicate active listening? In short, do you pay attention, or do you phone it in?
Our multitasking, asynchronous, headlines-only, emoticon culture can erode communication and connection in even our most cherished relationships. Yet just as you learned to understand and communicate in texts consisting of four misspelled words and a face made out of a colon and a parenthesis mark, you can retrain yourself through microresolutions to pay better attention to the relationships that matter most, when it matters most.
A divorced dad of two budding teenagers, Alex wanted to make the weekends he had with the kids count. He moved out of the city and into a community of rustic weekend houses that share one thousand acres of hiking trails, lakes, and horseback riding. The idea was to create a second home with distinct advantages over the life the children lived in Manhattan.
During the first weekend in the house, the kids spent plenty of time on their phones, talking and texting with friends, exploring apps, and playing games. While the kids occupied themselves with their electronics, Alex caught up on work on his computer. After he dropped the kids at school Monday morning, he realized that although they had spent the entire weekend together, they hadn’t had the kind of experience that the move to the country was supposed to make possible. What was the point of gathering together in a wonderful setting if all three of them just enjoyed their electronics severally? So in the two weeks leading up to their next weekend together, Alex resolved to limit cell-phone time on weekend days to an hour. When he told the kids about the new rule, there were vehement protests. “What do I tell my friends?” demanded his highly social preteen daughter. “Tell them your dad’s a jerk!” (or similar), he replied. Alex collected the cell phones and gave them back each day at 5:00 p.m. for half an hour. The weekends became about going outside to swim, ride, or hike. In the evenings they read, played board games (!), or watched a movie together. The grousing about the phones stopped. And Alex himself kept to the rule, staying off the phone for all but the most important business calls. The house in the woods did indeed become the special place he had envisioned for his children.
Fran had a demanding job and went to bed earlier than her husband, Ted, whose work kept him up long past midnight. Ted often kept the television on in the background, sometimes watching a late movie at the end of the night when he ran out of creative steam. He liked to recap these movies to Fran, which she found extremely boring, such boredom expressed in lack of eye contact, fidgeting, and sighing. But despite the lack of interest she showed, Ted continued to tell her about the movies. Since he was going to tell her anyway, Fran reasoned, she might as well make him feel good about it by responding with more interest. She resolved to give Ted my complete attention when he tells me about a movie. Rather than busying herself with something as her husband recounted the previous night’s movie, Fran kept eye contact as he talked and even asked questions. While she says she never really got much more interested, the warmth her attention created was palpable. “I’m honestly surprised,” says Fran, “how much goodwill was created between us just by my sitting down and giving him my complete attention when he told me about a movie. The whole thing only took five minutes, where when I was trying to discourage him from telling me it seemed like forever. And I realized something else once I stopped resisting—I had felt resentful that Ted’s work allowed him to stay up late and watch films, when I have to get up so early.”
Paying attention makes loved ones and work colleagues feel valued. While it’s impossible to pay close attention to another person all the time (posthoneymoon, anyway), picking up the most important bids for attention (cues) can work wonders. If your partner has a special project or hobby, you might resolve to show particular interest whenever it comes up (isolate the cue), rather than just nodding in an absent way while waiting to engage on a topic that interests you.
It’s hard to pay attention to people if you’re always too busy to spend time with them.
Time in a day is a zero-sum game—you can’t make more of it, so it’s really all about priorities. Most of your time is managed by autopilot, where the priorities are baked in. You may not think much about spending two hours reading the newspaper on Sundays, but if you do it regularly, it’s a top priority. If you spend time surfing the Internet every evening or vegging out for a few hours of reality TV, those are the priorities you’ve established for your time. If a relationship you’d like to improve wants attention, examine how you might change your habits to free up more time for it.
Many of us count on the weekends for catching up with others and devoting time to personal interests. Yet weekend time, which from the vantage point of Monday appears as a lavish, solid block of free time, reveals itself as limited and fragmented by Saturday morning. If you cheat on sleep throughout the week, you may sleep away half of Saturday and stumble through the rest of the day at half throttle. Add to that miscalculation the burden of myriad chores and obligations that collect throughout the week, and it’s easy to find yourself wondering on Sunday night how it is you didn’t manage to find time for an outing with a partner, friend, or child or a single hour to pursue a personal interest.
Using microresolutions to help you get more sleep during the week (see chapter 10, “Sleep”) so that you don’t waste half the weekend recharging will release some time that you can spend on yourself or others. Ditto creating habits that keep administrative work from becoming an oppressive pile that can be dispensed only via a marathon weekend session (see chapter 17, “Organization”).
Another way to increase the time you have for nurturing relationships is to convert a solo activity (on weekdays or weekends) into an opportunity to spend time with someone. Walking to work with a colleague; working out with a friend; establishing a monthly lunch with a subordinate; doing laundry with your girlfriend; going to the green market with a parent; doing your own homework at the kitchen table alongside your kid—examine how you spend your days and see if you can commit to a microresolution that creates a new opportunity for sharing and connection.
For years my routine on returning home from work was to check in with the fam and then get straight on to making the evening meal. I put pressure on myself to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour, that pressure increasing if I made a late exit from work. As revealed by my personal anecdotes in the book, I’m a speedy multitasker, and nowhere is this more evident than in the kitchen, where my actions resemble those of a Benihana Chef minus the grace and entertainment value. When my husband came into the kitchen to hang out, I’d tell him I’d rather visit during dinner. But dinner was the three of us, and much of the time after dinner was absorbed by homework and bedtime routines. My husband and I often didn’t have a chance to visit alone until late in the evening, when we were most depleted.
In trying to alter my habits to create more weeknight time with my husband, I made a microresolution to hang with him during dinner prep, even if it slowed dinner down. It took me a while after making this resolution to relax my approach enough to enjoy visiting with him while I was making dinner. Dinner did indeed end up taking about ten minutes longer to prepare, but in exchange for this minor delay I gained around forty minutes of early-evening time with my husband. The whole dinner hour was more relaxed since my husband and I had already synced up on our days and discussed any pressing issues before we sat down to eat as a family. Rushing to make dinner and stressing myself out about timing was a habit that I had to work consciously to unwind; now I can’t imagine anything more pleasant than chatting with my husband while cooking the family meal.
Many relationship issues, in both public and private life, come down to trust. “Honesty is the best policy” we learn from the elementary-school history of George Washington, but few of us practice this principle in the purest sense. Telling the absolute truth in every situation may not be the best policy, but how many of us manipulate the truth as a routine matter of convenience? For example, do we really need to make up an intricate excuse to get out of a date, or can we just cancel and say that we are sorry to do so? If we’re late to work, do we have to tell an elaborate story about the perils of public transit? If a friend asks us for an honest opinion about a life issue, should we hide or shade the truth in order to tell them what they want to hear? Sparing feelings can get to be a habit, a modus operandi for dealing with any less-than-pleasant topic, and it’s not always easy to know whether we’re protecting ourselves or another person when we are less than truthful in our communications. A microresolution can help you shift your relationship habits in a more truthful direction and create more trust.
There’s a famous I Love Lucy episode* where Lucy, reproached by Desi, Ethel, and Fred for her pathological fibbing, bets them a hundred dollars that she can tell the absolute truth for twenty-four hours. The struggle to keep her resolution intensifies rapidly, as Lucy confronts how often she shades the truth, exaggerates, or tells white lies just to get through the day. When she and Ethel visit their friend Carolyn’s apartment to play bridge, they find she has recently redecorated with Chinese-modern furniture. With Carolyn out of earshot, Lucy looks around and remarks to Ethel, “Looks like a bad dream you’d have after eating too much Chinese food.” On reentering, Carolyn asks Lucy point-blank whether or not she likes her new furniture. Lucy, chafing under her resolution, threads the needle by replying, “Uh, I said it looked like a dream, didn’t I, Ethel?” Ethel, a party to the bet, sees her chance and demands that Lucy give a verbatim account of her remark. Unwilling to lose her wager, Lucy comes clean, shocking her old friend. Next Lucy grapples with the arrival of Marian, the bridge game’s fourth, who is sporting a hideous new hat. Goaded once again by Ethel to express her true thoughts, Lucy confesses that she thinks the hat “is the silliest I’ve ever seen” and, when pressed further, “horrible.”
The truth-telling stakes quickly advance from the dangers of offending others to that of self-exposure. The three women gang up on Lucy and try to force her into losing the bet by demanding to know her age, weight, and true hair color. Cornered, an identity crisis upon her, Lucy is momentarily frozen, agape at the cruelty of her friends’ opportunism. Then something releases inside Lucy and she fires off the answers to all three questions, “33, 129, and mousy brown,” suddenly converting her vulnerability into strength. The cozy bridge club gasps at Lucy’s daring in revealing such closely guarded feminine secrets (episode year: 1953). Briskly dealing out cards to her stunned friends, Lucy declares, “I feel very relieved. It’s wonderful to tell the truth! You should try it sometime; we’d all be much better friends!” Exhilarated by her newfound freedom to speak her mind, Lucy clears the air of old business by calling out her bridge partners for cheating, excessive yakking, and being too cheap to replace a filthy deck of playing cards. As Marian laughs uncontrollably at the truths meted to others, Lucy exclaims, “Stop that cackling, Marian. I’ve been waiting ten years for you to lay that egg.”
While Lucy’s bet is a situational device designed to create comedic opportunities, it does share some of a microresolution’s attributes. Lucy’s resolution is a specific and measurable action, limited to a single day, and Lucy believes that it’s an easy resolution that can be executed with no excuses.
How does Lucy’s proto-microresolution stack up to rule 3, “A microresolution pays off up front”? Although Lucy ultimately loses the bet when she lies in order to compete for a showbiz opportunity, she has clearly gained something invaluable through her resolution. The audience witnesses a liberated Lucy discovering the power of communicating honestly, rather than artfully, with her friends (and later that evening with her husband). Although her resolution to tell the truth ends after a day, it’s impossible to believe that Lucy hasn’t changed for the better forever. By treating her loved ones to the “Full Lucy,” she comes in closer contact with her authentic power as a human being. Breaking the tired pattern of deceptive communication changes the dynamic of the bridge club for more than just a day, since the four women have discovered that it is possible to deal honestly with one another, reveal personal secrets, and still remain friends.
I’m not suggesting that you tell your friend you hate her hat; we don’t have to go as far as Lucy to learn how to communicate more honestly. A microresolution that results in being more truthful in a circumstance where we habitually shade or avoid the truth can create new opportunities to connect genuinely with friends, family, and coworkers. Like Lucy, we may begin with fear of revealing too much, but as we get the hang of more authentic communication, we too may find ourselves “relieved” to deal more truthfully with others and exhilarated to come in contact with a truer and more powerful self.
• • •
Relationships that run into serious trouble may require professional attention, but for the most part you don’t need a high summit, professional arbitration, or a come-to-Jesus meeting to make a relationship breakthrough. Focusing on your own behavior rather than on the behavioral issues of others builds maturity and integrity and promotes personal growth. Resolving to disrupt just one negative behavior pattern in a relationship will have a positive effect on both the relationship and your sense of self. While many of our good and bad qualities have psychological roots that could take a lifetime to fully understand, resolving to change a single behavior, even in a narrow context, can prove revelatory and personally transforming. When we improve the way we habitually respond to others, we advance ourselves as human beings. Over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece, Aristotle taught that character results not from being but doing:
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way. . . . You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.