Essential Habits - Feb 3, 2024
The five questions to answer for the best possible relationship (BPR)
Hi friends,
I’m excited about this week’s Essential Habits because I’m going to share what I learned from one of my favourite authors: Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS for short). He wrote similarly great books including How to Begin, The Coaching Habit, The Advice Trap and others - and this week I’m going to cover what I learned from his latest book How to Work with (Almost) Anyone.
Even if you don’t read through this whole article, knowing the five questions/topics to cover can be extremely helpful:
What’s your best?
What are your practices and preferences?
What can you learn from successful past relationships?
What can you learn from frustrating past relationships?
How will you fit it when things go wrong?
Let’s get into the specifics, shall we?
The Amplify Question: What’s your best?
Marcus Buckingham also covers this in some of his books: it’s much better to focus on people’s strengths than to focus on improving their weaknesses. That’s what this question gets at: what are the things you are good at? What are your talents? What do you love to do? When do you shine?
Knowing these things (and MBS suggests you answer the questions yourself so you can come prepared for the conversation) will help you get the best possible relationship where everyone is focused on each other’s strengths.
The Steady Question: What are your practices and preferences?
This area covers the peculiar quirks we all have:
Your name and nicknames you don’t want to be called
Are you an introvert or extrovert and how is this expressed?
What time of day do you work best?
What communication quirks do you have? Channel preferences? Patterns of responding or not responding?
What do you consider to be a good or a bad meeting?
What feedback tends to be most helpful and how do you prefer the feedback to be expressed?
How do you manage deadlines and milestones?
Something I haven’t done yet but plan to work on is having a personal user manual. It’s essentially a user guide to Wang and it seems like a great way to get people that will be working with you to get up to speed on you (whereas without a manual, you learn by doing the right thing or more by making mistakes).
The Good Date Question: What can you learn from successful past relationships?
This question makes you reflect on what good relationships looked like for you in the past. MBS suggests starting with thinking about the other person:
What did they say (or not say)? What words made a difference?
What did they do (or not do)? What actions helped the relationship?
How did they ‘be’? What qualities did they exhibit that were helpful?
Then reflect on your role in the relationship:
What did you say (or not say)?
What did you do (or not do)?
How did you ‘be’?
And there might be other things outside of the relationship that helped:
What about the context gave this relationship the best chance to flourish? Who else played a role?
Which moment tested the relationship, a test that you successfully managed? What light does that shed?
The Bad Date Question: What can you learn from frustrating past relationships?
The bad date questions are done in reverse. First, reflect on yourself:
What did you say (or not say)? What words and silences caused damage?
What did you do (or not do)? What small and big actions undermined any good intentions?
How did you ‘be’? How did you show up in a way that soured dynamics?
Then on the other person:
What did they say (or not say)? What got you angry, frustrated or sad?
What did they do (or not do)? What actions set things back?
How did they ‘be’? What qualities did they exhibit?
And finally, there might have been other things outside of the relationship that contributed to frustration.
What about the context made this odds-against?
What other people played a role in this?
Which moment tested the relationship, a moment you failed to navigate and that was particularly damaging? What light does that shed?
The Repair Question: How will you fix it when things go wrong?
While the question is great to understand how to repair relationships when they go wrong, it's hard to do when conflicts do happen. When relationships need a repair, MBS suggests the following six steps:
Name what’s happening / what’s going on for you - sometimes it’s nothing, but when it is something, it’s helpful to call it out
Stay curious - there are lots of books written about how to navigate difficult conversations but the idea here is to breathe rather than react. Ask questions. I wrote about Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback which go deeper into how to do this.
Remember the goal - do you want the relationship to work? Or do you want to be right?
Seek understanding - I heard something from John and Julie Gottman about conflict - instead of talking about the other person, talk about the situation. For example: I’m frustrated with how messy the kitchen is. Can you please help me clean and organize?
De-escalate - one way is to focus on objective statements and how you feel without trying to judge the other person or assume how they feel.
Rebuild - reframe it away from a ‘you vs me’ conversation
Next week, thoughts on a personal user manual and why selling is a key skill everyone needs.