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Complaint or Compliant?
In every lasting relationship, where there’s conflict you’ll find concession. You can't control what happens in a relationship. You can control how you are perceived in a relationship.
Human interactions are often complex and nuanced. But when it comes to disagreement in a relationship, it’s binary. People think you are difficult or reasonable. That’s because everyone wants every aspect of life to go their way. Do anything to disrupt that unspoken expectation and you are difficult.
Here’s the bad news. Even if you let your partner / friend / relative / colleague have their way 100% of the time, they still won’t think you’re reasonable. You have to earn the title of reasonable, and letting your partner do whatever they want isn't enough.
Here’s the worse news. There are two paths to being labeled difficult and only one way that leads to reasonable. Follow me.
The path of frequency
When you disagree or challenge someone's opinions frequently, they will consider you to be difficult.
Colleague: I think we should go nextdoor for lunch. I’m in the mood for Massaman Curry!
You: Hmmmm. Nah, Jimmy’s has a two-for-one today. Let’s go there!
Colleague: [as they make a mental note that you are difficult] Yeah, okay.
It doesn’t take much. And it doesn’t have to happen too often. For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll define “a regular basis” as 20% of the time. Yup. If you disagree with someone two out of every ten times they put forward a suggestion, you are difficult.
Why 20%? We tend to exaggerate anything negative that happens to us. When it comes to our memories, most of use lose a lot of detail in our recollections over time (leveling). To compensate our brain does something called sharpening - exaggerating the significance of other details to make up for those lost through leveling!
We forget the good and exaggerate the bad. I apply a 3x weighting to any perceived negative to account for leveling and sharpening.
[3x] [20% disagreement] = [60% disagreement]
That’s all it takes to bump the perceived amount of disagreement up to 60%. You are now mostly disagreeable. You are difficult.
The path of recency
Your propensity to disagree doesn’t need to be at 20% or more for you to be considered difficult. Not if the disagreement happened recently.
We’re all influenced by the Availability Bias:
“… a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.”
We are more likely to make our assessments based on memories that happened recently. Yup. You don’t need to disagree a lot. You just need to have disagreed recently and you are more likely to be considered difficult!
How recent is recent? I use a sliding scale to define recency, based on the emotional intelligence of your partner / friend / relative / colleague. I call it Misdemeanour Memory, and it’s simple to calculate:
Start by ranking your partner / friend / relative / colleague with an emotional intelligence score between 1 and 100. The least emotionally intelligent will score 1, the most 100.
Assume that the least emotionally intelligent person will hang on to your last misdemeanour for 100 days.
For every additional point of emotional intelligence, you will deduct 1 day from the 100-days.
Someone with an emotional intelligence score of 60 will remember your last disagreement for 40 days (100-60), and an emotional genius on a score of 99 will only hold it against you for 1 day (100-99).
It’s very useful to know just how long your disagreement will be held against you.
Of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect makes it impossible for you to use the sliding scale. Dunning-Kruger identifies “the tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.”
Since birds of a feather flock together, you are likely to connect with people of a similar emotional intelligence. If you are low-emo-intel then you will over-estimate your partner’s ability to forgive and forget. High-emo-intels will under-estimate.
The narrow path of reason
The only way to be considered reasonable is to frequently assert your reasonability.
Letting something go through to the catcher isn’t being reasonable.
You: [Quietly dreaming of ice cream all day]
Partner: Let’s skip dessert and go for a healthy walk instead.
You: [I hate you] Cool.
Your partner / friend / relative / colleague needs constant reminders that you are reasonable. When they state a position, you need to let them know that you disagree before you let it go and agree with them so that they can appreciate your compliance.
Remember, people are people, so they won’t consider you agreeing with them to be a win. They’ll just view it as you being reasonable.
It sounds simple, but it's so easy to misstep your way through this process. Thankfully, I have a tested method for navigating people’s narcissism and the heuristics I've mentioned. I give you The Compliance Stack.
CONFIRM their view to show understanding. If there’s one thing people like more than hearing themselves speak, it’s hearing people quote them back to themselves.
This should take up approximately 50% of the total disagreement discussion time.
CONSIDER why you might have an issue with their view. Be sure to frame it as thinking aloud. This will give you the greatest flexibility to change direction if things go pear-shaped.
Allow no more than 20% of the discussion to share your own ideas, opinions and beliefs.
CONCEDE with clear reasoning. Be specific about why some of their reasons trump yours. No one wants a pushover - it makes them feel bad. Give your interlocutor the opportunity to further explain the superiority of their position.
30% of the disagreement discussion is enough of a positive hat tip to your partner’s original position.
Part of the genius of the The Compliance Stack is the 80:20 allocation in favour of your partner / friend / relative / colleague. By spending 50% of the time, energy and passion reasserting their views at the outset, you’ve then earned the right to consider your own views (20%), before retreating back to the safety of their superior opinion (30%).
Don’t forget, they are 3x-ing the 20% of time you use to consider your views. To them you're dominating the conversation! Thankfully, the return to a concession causes the Availability Bias to kick in, and they'll forget your earlier indulgence.
Master Class
What if you don’t want to be a pushover? What if you want to safely disagree more frequently! More recently! There’s a simple hack to the model.
Treat everything as an issue.
Which Netflix special to watch. Best burger sauce to use. Whose parents to visit on holidays. Best cocktail to serve first weekend of Summer. Issues, all of them.
The more issues there are, the more concessions you can make. The more disagreements you can have without being difficult.
Flood the courts with countless issues and your disagreement percentage will shrink before your eyes.
Won’t that be excruciatingly painful for them, and you? Nope. You just need to match your time, energy and passion to the importance of the issue. To support that matching, I like to rank every issue on a scale from 1 - 10.
Place to eat: 2/10
Matching costumes for Halloween Party: 6/10
Name of child: 9/10
The maximum time you should spend discussing ANY issue is 18 minutes!
TED Talks are built around the idea that 18 minutes was long enough to present something meaningful, and about as long as an adult can stay focused. As someone who can never make it further than 3 minutes into any TED Talk, I consider 18 minutes a ridiculously generous allotment.
Divide 18 minutes (1,080 seconds) by the maximum score on the importance scale (10) and you get 108 seconds. That’s your baseline. For every point of importance, you get 108 seconds to discuss it.
Place to eat: 2/10 ⇒ [2 x 108 seconds] = 00:03:36
Matching costumes for Halloween Party: 6/10 ⇒ [6 x 108 seconds] = 00:10:48
Name of child: 9/10 ⇒ [9 x 108 seconds] = 00:16:12
With those time restrictions in mind, here’s a quick look at the Compliance Stack in action:
Confirm: Okay, so you feel like a juicy burrito. You love their service, the borderline criminal dose of cheese and think we have a morale obligation to support local restaurants.
Consider: I did feel really unwell after our last visit.
Concede: But I agree the service is the best, and the pills my doctor gave me last week should be able to deal with a few handfuls of cheese!
A deeper look
Let’s pause for a moment of introspection. Anything from 1 - 5 on the issue scale should be a no-brainer to let go. If you’re not leaving those for the catcher more often than not, you need to take a look at yourself.
If you’re in a new relationship and your partner isn’t letting those go too, you should gaze long and hard into the future and consider what a life of endless compliance looks like.
When you lay out your concerns, you’re giving your partner / friend / relative / colleague an opportunity to understand your position and flip the script. If you don’t see that happening frequently or recently, it’s time to Craigslist yourself some new friends.
Why bother with any of this? It’s called the Halo Effect.
“The tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them.”
When people see you as reasonable they feel safe. They feel understood. They feel loved. That spills over into every other perception they have of you.
Being reasonable is the best thing you can do for your relationships!
Quration
📚 Must read: The musical friendship between Dave Grohl and Nandi Bushell is THE feel-good story of the week. (Open it in an incognito window if you need to get past the NY Times paywall - just this once!) Link
♫ Must hear: This masterpiece from Ólafur Arnalds and Josin will be the most serene part of your day. Link
📺 Must watch: Exceptional documentary from the BBC - The Secret History of Writing - Words on a page. I’m writing about it, in the context of tech disruption, for next week’s Quration. Link
🎨 Must see: I’m not a car guy, but I love the design of this BMW Camper! Pity they didn’t show the interior, what a wasted opportunity. Link
🍎 Must consider: I liked Nicholas A. Christakis’ analogy, The Swiss Cheese Respiratory Virus Defence. I much prefer this explanation to the one where people are peeing on each other. Link
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