Outside of work. Friends, Family, and Significant Others.
Friends, family and significant others
Your inner circle of people is a gift and a privilege.
Prior to any attempt to mould or direct them,
show them unconditional, graceful and persistent acceptance.
This course is mostly about your performance and leadership at work, but it would seem odd not to discuss your close relationships at least to some extent. The reason is that these relationships are intensely important, potentially the most important in the happiness and contentment of many people, high performing or not. However, such relationships are a world in themselves, so this course is not enough to address all of the ins and outs. Take it as a summary.
You have the same brain with you wherever you go, but for your close relationships, the mindset that works best is significantly different than the one you take to work.
For success with your inner circle, if there was one principle that would help you more than any other, it is this: Accept the way they are, in particular their Egos. This is a conscious, charitable, wilful act, and may not return the patience and forgiveness it demands, but it is nonetheless highly recommended.
If they are grown up, be mostly uninterested in influencing them, teaching them or correcting their errors. For children too, teaching and learning should be done without condition or emotional manipulation: give with great warmth, without reserve. Accept, like and even love them precisely because of their combination of faults and strengths. Make their faults seem either invisible or charming. Welcome who they are.
This is obviously not easy. It may be helpful to understand people’s faults like this. Their faults are often:
- Very useful in certain situations, perhaps yet unknown to them.
- Difficult for them to change
- A source of insecurity for them, which they don’t like to be reminded about
- From the Ego, therefore unavailable or very difficult for them to change, and will remain so despite you trying to teach them.
- Your subjective opinion. They or others don’t see the fault.
- Embarrassing, so if you gloss over the faults or perhaps illustrate positive sides to their quirks, it raises their self belief and resilience.
If some people truly matter to you, and they’re part of your inner, intimate life, your most polished approach is to gracefully overlook their more embarrassing quirks or failures, without begrudging them. If it irritates you, try not to show it. Accept the irritation with grace. Don’t apply ‘performance rules’ to these inner circles. Don’t deal with them in ways that might motivate colleagues or clients; these paradigms are not appropriate and will only lead to failed connection.
Be that one person who, over and above the whole outside world, doesn’t jump to judge them for whatever failures or quirks they have. The reason for this advice is simple. The inner circle exists through bonds of flesh, blood and/or extreme proximity. It thrives through mutual love, and it is a place of sanctuary and replenishment, without which the soul is left empty and bewildered, ready for the outside world to remorselessly scoop away.
You have no choice in your family. Most bitter high-performing execs talk in hushed or embarrassed tones about how some errant family member, or some dinosaur of a parent, ruins things for them. This is not helpful, nor is it necessary. You can, and should, aim for being polished at work and at home.
Because you have no choice in your family, you are bound by ties of extreme vulnerability. You develop expectations of them that you would not have of other people. Your blood bond overrides the need to be pleasant or personable. Some people mindlessly abuse that. They seem entitled to behave especially unpleasantly towards their family because they’re effectively a captive audience, and they see it as their right to educate or otherwise ‘correct’ their family members according to whatever values they want. This doesn’t work.
The real privilege of family is within the opportunity that its conflicts, dramas and trials present. You have the one chance to simply accept the reality of your family’s characteristics without any expectations whatsoever. No need to persistently educate them, beyond guidance for the younger ones. No need to react negatively emotionally to unpleasantness. Show positive love, ignoring the unpleasantness and rewarding the good. Seek the good, and point it out. Their ways are their ways. The only way to get them on side, truly on side, is to make them feel valued and loved by being gracefully blind to all but the most harmful or destructive faults.
If you do that for them, they will at the very least feel less judged, less embarrassed and less coerced (feelings which seem to have a hair trigger in families). If you go on to only remind them of their strengths, in the face of any kind of actions they commit (especially the things you don’t like) then you have pulled off the ultimate trick: you have made them feel unconditionally like they belong. This is immensely enabling; it is perhaps the first and most vital duty of a good family. It sets them up for being confidently exceptional in future, ready for a world which is increasingly receptive to what differences a person makes rather than how much they conform.
Friends
People are known by the friends that they have. Select your friends carefully, and choose people other than those who have a negative impact on you. Prefer to be alone and unhappy, than to be unhappy with unpleasant people. Your Ego will be helpful in telling you about who is a worthy friend. If you find yourself mentally exhausted or somehow strangely empty around someone who is meant to be a close friend, then your Ego is telling you that something is wrong.
We succeed socially when we balance Intellectual demands with Ego demands. In yourself, prioritise the Intellect over the Ego, but in others, consider their Ego first. Always consider how people are feeling, and always consider how people make you feel. Do they engender a feeling of trust and contentment? Are their words and actions consistent with the way they make you feel? If there is a big chasm between the two, that is a red flag.
You should limit the amount that you disclose to friends: trust friends in moderation only. Friends might take you for granted, or if your friendship with them breaks, they might be tempted to talk badly of you if you have entrusted them with things that might be damaging to you if revealed to others.
You might feel that this is a strangely cautionary place from which to talk about friendship. My words are not so much about the ideal world as it is about the real one, with its hazards and joys as they are. True friends are an important part of your life, a great asset and a great source of support, but you must be patient and understanding if, by some accident of your circumstances, you don’t have the kind of friends that you seek.
The Ego in its extreme would have you associate with people who are there for good times alone, being as it is driven by the quest for pleasure. Quick thrills and temptations are not a good base for true friendship; true friends emerge who are happy to be bored alongside you; and they are especially attentive when you are having a difficult time. If a friend is a gambler, an addict, or someone who routinely talks ill of others, or lives in a way that is fundamentally unhappy with themselves and the people around them, you should be clear as to what your boundaries are, and if you are already emotionally at your limit, know to keep your distance. Their friendship is a difficult vortex, not a comforting jersey.
Success in close relationships is also about how much people can put the other peoples’ needs ahead of your own, forming a roughly equal picture of give and take all round. Attend to your role as best you can: your family will be there for you when others are long gone.
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