On Listening, and Why Marriages and Businesses Fail for the Same Reasons
Ellyn: Underneath everything we teach is a simple skill that turns out to be hard: being able to stay quiet and actually hear your partner. Most people have sat through some version of active listening training, at work or in a workshop somewhere. But sitting still and taking in what your partner wants, really wants, depends on one thing. You have to know, in your bones, that hearing it does not obligate you to change. When someone feels that in their body, that listening and agreeing are two separate acts, the defensiveness drops away. And once the guard is down, more ideas show up, more possibilities get put on the table.
Erik: Wonderful, thank you for walking through that. People will get a lot out of it. We have a couple of minutes left, and I know you both wanted to touch on how marriage and business partnership compare, since the two of you happen to be partners in both. Before we close, what would you want people to take away?
Ellyn: One thing we point to is that marriages and businesses tend to collapse for three shared reasons. The first is a failure to learn from the past. Couples and companies run the same tired, negative loops over and over instead of asking what has really worked, what hasn't, and why.
The second is an inability to pivot. You have to read what is happening right now, admit when something isn't working, and shift. That might mean sitting down to negotiate, the way we were describing a minute ago, or just floating a different approach on the spot.
Peter: And the third is that they fail to look ahead. They don't anticipate the problems that are probably coming, so they never take corrective action early.
Ellyn: In a committed relationship, children are one of the clearest examples of that. The whole arrangement changes the moment kids arrive, yet plenty of couples assume they can keep living exactly as they did before. They don't plan for the shift. So we ask couples to make some real commitments: to step into the unknown and bring their best selves into it, to put their values and what they care about out in the open, and to go after the vision that actually matters to them.