Chad Silverstein discusses the Gottmans' research showing 66% of relationship problems don't go away, arguing you need repair skills like apologies and empathy instead. These emotional intelligence practices matter for both your marriage and your leadership at work.
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I remember when Chet first taught me about the Gottmans, the couple that studies human beings. They're psychologists, and he told me how they hook these couples up who are coming to therapy to some machines and wires, and they put them in a room and they watch them dealing with conflict. And upon watching a couple dealing with conflict, they can predict accurately. And I forgot exactly what the percentage was.90%, 95%. They can predict with, with almost perfect accuracy who's going to be divorced within five years, just based on what they see, on how the individuals deal with conflict with each other. I guess that can make sense. If you see someone angry and they're just cruel, you know, it's hard to see that they're going to be together five years from now. But they come out with these statistics and they Talk about how 66% of your relationships with anybody will be dealing with conflict. 66% won't go away. That conflict won't get resolved. So how you deal with it, it tells you how successful you're going to be able to be with this person. And that's the case with a spouse or anyone. And it's just easy to kind of relate to this if you're. If you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or you're married means you can't change other people. You can only work on yourself and trying to change the other person when you know that 66% of your issues are going to go unresolved, it's insane. And it's probably what creates more than 66% of the conflict that exists in your relationships. So stop focusing on yourself and start taking more responsibility for everything that you're involved in. And even if you don't do anything wrong but you made someone feel bad, you know, there's a good reason to always be that master repairman, to always take responsibility for having some empathy about how you make other people feel. You're not in control of that, but you certainly have something to do with it since you're involved. And so whether it requires you to apologize, whether it requires you to do a check in or requires you to just see how someone's doing, ask them if it's okay. You can play back what you heard, make sure you're on the same page. There's no point in instigating conflict if it's not necessary and nobody wants it, but it's going to be there in your relationships. It exists. It's a fact. And so you know what you need to focus on and what we all need to focus on. Is how we deal with the conflict, how we respond. I always say when people get angry, it's such a crazy thing if you think about being so emotional that someone gets you angry. And you literally, you can't control other people's behaviors, but you punish yourself by emotionally just punishing yourself by being so upset, where it creates anxiety and stress. And I don't want to give that kind of control over to someone else. Hopefully you don't want to either. And having some emotional intelligence, which we're going to get to in the book later on, is going to be key for you to be a leader, because you're going to always have people around you who are going to drive you nuts, who are going to create conflict. And whether it's at home or whether it's work, it's a fact, and it's going to happen. So how you deal with that conflict and how you take responsibility and own it says everything about you as a leader. And it's probably better for you to assess that yourself before other people are assessing it for you. And that's a hard thing to do, to take responsibility for everything you're involved in, whether you think you did something wrong or not. You got to own it. If you're a leader, sometimes you got to own it, even if it's not yours.
