Tim Arrigo, a mental health program director, argues that marriages fail when men don't lead and take responsibility. He says modeling the behavior you want, building intrinsic motivation, holding people accountable, and developing their potential can save them.
It wasn't always like this with you and your wife, was it? I was talking to a client earlier and he told me, 25 years of marriage, Tim, and I just can't believe that I'm on the brink of divorce. You know, and he had a lot of things that he considered to be the cause of why things were the way they were inside his marriage. But you know, the one thing that we sometimes don't consider is that it's our lack of leadership. It's amazing that as men we would blame every other external circumstance as to why our relationship is failing other than our own leadership. So what that tells us when we blame everything other than our own leadership is that either A, we don't believe in the power of leadership, B, we've never experienced real leadership, or C, we have a hard time taking responsibility which is also a lack of leadership in and of itself. See, our lack of leadership is what really deteriorates relationships. Our lack of leadership— leaders bring out the best in people around them. And I know for me, in my experience, in my life, a lot of years of my life, I brought out the worst in people around me. And so I understood the power of bringing out the worst in people around me, but I had never truly experienced the power of bringing out the best in people around And, you know, over a decade working in a clinical setting, being a program director, creating programs and working at mental health facilities with the most broken of individuals, I got to see for myself the power and the example of when you model the behavior that you want to see in the world, when you model the change. So many guys are sitting back and they're waiting for their wife to change. They're telling themselves a story. 'If my wife loved me, then she would change for me.' But see, people don't change for other people, and if they do, it doesn't last very long. You can't do something for somebody else. You need to do it for you. We can't be extrinsically motivated. We have to be intrinsically motivated, internally motivated to make those changes. And see, when you step into a position of real leadership You understand that leaders, they see potential in people. Leaders can see people's behavior as a reflection of their own pain. They see deeper into the problem. Average ordinary people, they see people's problems for what they are or what they appear to be on the surface. But see, leaders, they see positive potential within people. They see who people could be. Call me crazy. I don't see you for who you are. I see you for who you could be. And if you're around me long enough, I'm going to see your potential and I'm going to hold you accountable to it. So we need to stop blaming every external circumstance and situation for why things in our life are falling apart. And we need to take extreme accountability and be honest about the fact that sometimes, most of the time, it's because of our lack of real leadership.
