[00:00:00] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

[00:00:09] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:00:11] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:13] Paul: Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, what's my goal?

[00:00:20] Karen: So very often when people approach us in our work, one of the questions might be, I'm really frustrated with this other person. How do I change their behavior? And, and so we want to tease out, what is the actual goal in that question, in that situation? Because very often, if the ultimate goal is, I want to change the other person's behavior, I'm not very optimistic that that's going to happen. Because I don't have very much control over anybody else's behavior in any kind of direct way. And people tend to be pretty resistant to being told to change their behavior or being manipulated or forced to change their behavior. So if the primary goal is I want your behavior to change, I'm going to advise you that's tough.

[00:01:08] Paul:Yeah. And and we often think that that's the only way to improve the working relationship, because that's often like the implicit or the unstated goal is like, I want to have a better relationship with this person. Right. Regardless of whether that's a personal relationship or a business relationship or community, like, however, it is your connection with the other person. Usually it's there's some point of tension. There's something that's difficult here. I want to be better at being in relationship with this person. And we very often reduce that to they need to do something different in order for us to have a better relationship with them. And and I think that that's not really true. So when we when we go, well, that's the only option for having a better relationship, we run into trouble. But I think that that is the larger goal of most of the work that we do with people is how do we have better relationships?

[00:02:01] Karen: Yeah, and I think that's why we started with the question of what's my goal, because if I can get clear that my goal is to have a better relationship, I've got a lot more levers to pull. I have a lot more options of things I might do. And one of them might be to ask for a behavior change from the other person, but it's likely to come from a very different place. And so this is the irony that I think we want to play with, which is if my goal is to change somebody else's behavior, I'm very unlikely to be successful. But if my goal is to make the relationship better and to change what I can change about what's going on with me and how I'm engaging and how I'm sharing in various ways, the likelihood that their behavior will change actually goes up.

[00:02:46] Paul: This is definitely one of the paradoxes of relational work. And but it's true. Right. And in fact, like when we I think part of that is I don't know if it's desperation or whatever it is, but like when we when we've decided that the only way that things are going to improve is if somebody else changes, that they do something different and we lock on to that. we do things that make it less likely that they're going to change. 

[00:03:13] Paul:Often we land in that place of certainty, we may become self-righteous, we may become frustrated. There's all kinds of things that we do that make… 

[00:03:21] Karen: Judgment. 

[00:03:22] Paul: Yeah, judgment. Any of those things. And that leak out because that our behavior shifts in response to those things that we're telling ourselves about the other person, about how they're inconsiderate, about how they're irresponsible. And what we end up doing in a lot of ways is we do things that reinforce whatever behavior it is that they're doing right now. Plus, we reinforce the story in our own head, so that no matter what they do, we reinterpret that as furthering what we think about them. And so that doesn't help us to actually have a different experience of them.

[00:04:03] Karen: I start with the premise that when there's conflict of any sort, there's likely defensiveness in the behavior. And so if we just keep trying to make the other person change, they keep feeling more and more attacked and more and more need to be defended. Whereas if we can approach it from how do I make the relationship better? Very often the things that I can do are things that will help the other person feel safer. 

[00:04:30] Karen: And that's a really broad frame that applies in microcosmic ways. I mean, safety and danger and attacking may seem like too big of words for your situation. So whatever the really muted down version of that might be, might be applying. But I think the overall dynamic of the less I feel safe, the more I feel like I need to defend, the more I feel like I need to keep doing things the way that I'm comfortable with. the harder it is to have relationship because you just can't get away from the basic reality that people are different. And if I'm trying to be in relationship with you, I'm trying to be in relationship with someone who has different needs, different ideas, different perspectives than I do. 

[00:05:12] Karen: And if I'm going to meet them, I got to be able to bend. And of course they do too, but I can mostly be responsible for my side of that. And so I think that that's another dynamic that makes this paradox happen, is that if I feel like you want me to change, that feels really dangerous and I clamp down and get more stuck. Whereas if I feel like you're trying to meet me halfway or you're trying to connect with me or you're trying to engage with me, then I can be, it's way easier for me than to be curious about what is it that you need from me and how do I meet you halfway and all that kind of thing.

[00:05:45] Paul: And there's a piece to recognize that whatever the other person is doing, like, again, when we're in a difficult relationship, when it's not going well and when there are there are high levels of reactivity, whatever it is, like the thing that the other person is doing is at least partly in response to whatever it is we're doing. And so part of it is being able to step back and go, what's my piece of this puzzle? Right. What's the what's the thing that I'm doing? 

[00:06:10] Paul: Because if I double down on that, It's going back to your thing around whenever there's conflict, there is some defensiveness. It's like, what am I doing that's making the other person defensive? How do I back off from that? How do I give them room to maneuver? because what they do is at least in response partly to what I'm doing and how they're experiencing me. So the only chance we really have for them to do something different is for them to meet, for me to do something different, for them to experience me differently. 

[00:06:42] Paul: And so I have to start from that point. I have to recognize that that is likely to be necessary, but also recognizing that even if I do something different, I still might not get what I want. I still the other person still might not change. And I need to be OK with that. Right. If we think about the idea of improving our relationships as the real goal, then part of it can just be I improve my experience of the relationship. I'm not so reactive about it. even if I'm not getting what I want, that I'm in a better place with this, and that that's better for me, that I'm not so anxious, that I'm not so angry, that I'm not so whatever it is, even if they continue to do what they're doing. 

[00:07:28] Paul:The irony there is when I get to that spot, that's the spot where their behavior is likely to change.

[00:07:34] Karen: Yeah. And I think this is the… We think that the problem is the other person's behavior. But the actual problem is the impact of the other person's behavior. And what we need to change is the impact. So maybe we can do something to get the other person's behavior to change, like, oh, say, ask them to change it, for example. But maybe we can't, but we can change how we respond to it. We can change, you know, every morning I come in and they're parked in my parking place and I end up having a terrible day. Well, okay. I can change my story and say, all right, they're parked in my parking place again. And it's just a parking place and look, I'm getting extra exercise and I'm not going to let it bother me and I can have a better day. And that's obviously a super simplistic kind of example, but it just demonstrates how there's. 

[00:08:25] Karen: There's the behavior and there's how I respond to the behavior and both of those contribute to the impact that it has. And so if you can't change the behavior. changing the response to the behavior may very well change the impact.

[00:08:39] Paul: And then changing your response to it is much more likely to change your behavior as a result. If, you know, if you keep parking in my parking spot and I come in and I want to ask you about it, if I'm in that place of of you parked in my parking spot again, right, and I'm angry and I'm reacted and whatever have you, I'm I'm going to come to it that way. And you're likely to get defensive and like that's that's not likely to go well. 

[00:09:03] Paul: On the other hand, if I can laugh about it, this is the third time this week you've parked in my parking spot. Like, I really wonder what's going on. If I can come to the conversation and say, "Hey, I noticed you parked in my parking spot again. What's up with that right if I can come to it that way you're much less likely to have that same defensive reaction to it you might right you still might feel attacked regardless of how how lightly I'm and playfully i might try to hold it you might still feel attacked and I can't You know, I can't control that. I need to be ready for it. But I'm way more likely to to respond less negatively to it if I can come to it from a better space.

[00:09:44] Paul: And then then we see where we go. Right. My goal there. Right. I can't tell myself my goal is to get my parking spot back. Right. My goal is I want to I want to have a better relationship with you and work more effectively. So I'm not you know, angry all day while I'm working, what can we do about that? And so there's a lot of different routes through this, but I think a lot of them start with recognizing what's our role in this whole thing.

[00:10:12] Karen: So tracking where we've been, we sort of started with this, what's my goal? And this is what's my goal within the frame of a conflictual relationship of whatever sort. And if we start from the premise that my goal is to change somebody else's behavior, we think what that does is make us pretty stuck. The only solution to my problem is for somebody else to change. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm just in this terrible spot. 

[00:10:35] Karen: Well, probably nothing's going to change because they're probably not going to just magically shift what they've been doing for however many months, years, or decades. But if my goal is, as it usually is, to have a better working relationship, to be less impacted by their behavior, to stay happy and peaceful and productive through my workday, if the goal is in that kind of space, that gives me more levers to pull. 

[00:11:03] Karen: That gives me more options to say, these are things that I can do. I can change my thinking and change what story I'm telling myself about them. Lots of that in the last episode, which was 198. We talked about that a good bit. Or I can change my response to their behavior. I can engage with them in a different way. So by paying attention to my actual goal, and looking for the many options that I have with that goal, I can get out of the certainty trap and into the curiosity place where I actually may be able to come up with solutions. And paradoxically, the likelihood of their behavior changing goes up because their defensiveness probably comes down. 

[00:11:43] Karen: As I become more workable with them, they're going to be able or more likely to shift with me. And if I can measure my success by what did I learn? How did I change? How successful was I in my goal for my own behavior? That's going to work a lot better than if I measure my success based on whether their behavior changes.

[00:12:06] Paul: Well, that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

[00:12:09] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.