How to Build Trust and Communication for a Successful Relationship | Michael Bungay Stanier EP 525

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:14I've been with my wife for 30 years. We had both arrived in England to study, and we had both left pretty bad relationships behind. She was going through a divorce. I'd made a mess of the previous relationship I had, and we ended up sitting next to each other on a bus from Oxford to Stratford-upon-Avon to go see some Shakespeare play. And it's a long and windy road, and we'd been dating like maybe two or three days. It was really, really early on. And we just somehow fell into this conversation about, what are we up for? I was 25, she was 36. So we were kind of old enough to go, we want to figure this out.

0:51We're not kids anymore. We've got a bit of experience. Let's actually try and do this. So we actually had this conversation. But we're like, here's what I've learned from the relationships that I've screwed up. I have a way of disappearing into my own head and taking that other person for granted. And she's like, great, because I will kill you if that happens. And I'm like, that's really helpful to understand. She's like, that just won't happen on my watch. And that is true. Very hard to pull that off with Marcella. But before we had any of this structure, before I'd figured any of this out, I just kind of got lucky or maybe desperate because I really fancied her.

1:26I'm like, I don't want to screw this one up. I screwed up the last few. I want this to be great. We actually had this conversation kind of tapping into the good date and the bad date questions that you're talking about, which is like, what can we learn from the past? Because both the good and the bad dates, those patterns will repeat. They'll keep showing up again in the future. So why don't you be explicit about it with each other so that you can navigate around it, so you can know where the hotspots are going to be, so you can give yourself the best preparation to say this is how we can recover from this this is how we'll repair this as i was writing this book two things became really clear the relationships that last are the ones that get repaired and most of us are not very good at repairing relationships you know most of us we break far easier than we think and so many of us either do fight or flight terry will said it was freeze and flee are two options but the third one that he suggests which I really like is fix.

2:26Fight, fight, fix. Interesting. Which is kind of moving into rescuer mode. Right. When you're like in the first two years of marriage really and all the years leading up to it it's like this is amazing. She's amazing, I'm amazing, we're amazing, this is any kind of hiccups you're like minor stuff that we get over that because everything else is going on for us, it's fantastic. But after two years, it's like, okay, the veil drops a little bit, you kind of get clear on other things, and it will go off the rails somewhere. It might be an explosion, it might be a dent or a crack or a bend or something, but something will happen.

3:03So I would say, how will we fix it when things go wrong? How will we fight? You know, how will we fight in a way that will not break us, but will kind of be a source of learning and growth and clearing and kind of resetting. The challenge is asking this prayer question, how will you fix it when things go wrong? It might be easy to say, oh, when things go wrong, I'm going to be fine. I'm going to apologize. I'm going to do all these things. But then when that time comes two years later, you're like, screw you. You're horrible. And I'm not talking to you for a week. But you may not remember what you said.

3:42You probably won't. But that's not the magic of that question. The magic of that question is it says things will go wrong. It's an acknowledgement that the honeymoon moment is going to pass and that things will get hard and you get a chance to revisit it. So I think getting people's best guesses about how they're going to fix it when they go wrong, that's helpful. And if they can pull some of that off, then everybody benefits. But what I think is the real hidden power of that question is it says it will go wrong. And we're acknowledging that now. and when we say how will we fix it when things go wrong we're acknowledging a shared commitment to wanting to fix it and when it does go wrong it's something that you can say is going wrong but we can actually talk about it going wrong because it's been raised before and I think it's that permission and shared commitment that actually can be part of the real magic of that question.

4:45Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

5:35Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.