Mastering Communication to Transform Your Relationships | Mark Manson EP 938

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:39Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:51What's the key to having powerful communication? I think the most important thing in communicating within relationships is distinguishing between, and this ties into the feedback thing and the criticism and the judgment and everything, is like distinguishing your comments about a person's thoughts or actions versus the person themselves. I think many people's, it's instinctual for us. Like, let's say you say something that I completely disagree with, right? It is a human instinct for me to be like, Lewis, you're wrong. You're an idiot. You're all this and that. And we have to teach ourselves to separate the idea from the person, right?

1:34The behavior that you're doing. Or the behavior from the person. And instead say, hey, Lewis, I don't like, I disagree with that idea and I don't really like it. And this is why. And maintaining respect for the person while disagreeing about the idea. So when someone has like a belief or a statement, instead of saying, you're a horrible person for thinking that. Yes, exactly. Don't say like, how despicable are you for having this opinion? Exactly. Instead, say something like, that opinion doesn't resonate with me. Yeah. Or why do you think that? I disagree, but why do you think that, right? Like lead into it with, with curiosity and it's, and understanding that it's okay to disagree about things, even like relatively important or even ethical things without necessarily hating or disrespecting the person.

2:25And I think this, this is particularly important in, in romantic relationships, right? Like my wife and I, we have extremely different standards when it comes to cleanliness. are you the clean one or is she oh she is definitely the clean one and it probably drives her nuts if you don't live to some standard right absolutely right and it's you know and then she's brazilian and so we have different standards when it comes to punctuality and and she's three hours late yeah exactly it's like she starts getting ready when it's time to be there and uh and it's it's funny because a lot of us we we tie up things like cleanliness organization punctuality like a lot of a lot of us we often attach these things to moral judgments like we it is very natural and normal to assume if somebody's 45 minutes late like if i showed up 45 minutes late to this podcast it's a total natural reaction to be like wow mark's kind of an asshole yeah that's really disrespect like i don't like him right right or uh if you know somebody just like leaves all their dirty dishes out everywhere it's like wow what a mess of a person like what kind of person does this you know and it we jump immediately to the judgment of the character of the person without understanding that you can have different viewpoints prioritizations or or just perceptions of what is clean, what's not clean, what is on time, what's not on time.

3:54And again, it's love the sinner, hate the sin. Separate the action from the person and try to refrain as much as possible not letting the distaste of the behavior seep into your respect and your trust and your judgment of the individual. Have you ever done any therapy for yourself? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. What's the biggest lesson you've learned from therapy? You know, it was funny. So I did therapy for most of my 20s. And it was really funny. I went in. So earlier I was talking about how I blew up a bunch of relationships for no good reason. And it was as soon as I had awareness around that, like I think it was after the third or fourth relationship that I ruined.

4:45I started, I'm like, huh, I think I'm the problem. and as soon as I realized that I I signed up for therapy wow and I was probably 23 or something that's like young yeah like therapy wasn't cool 17 years ago no no for men especially for men yeah that's that's a very self-aware thing of you at 23 to sign up for therapy yeah yeah I was really I was really in the meditation at the time so I was doing a lot of meditation retreats and I was really in the buddhism and stuff and uh and so I think therapy was just kind of seemed like a natural extension of that. But so I remember I went to therapy and I intentionally chose a male therapist and because I want to talk about girls, right?

5:26Like that was in my head, that was my issue. It's like, oh, all these girls, they're crazy. You know, I can't keep a girlfriend around, you know, there's all this drama going on. And I remember I sat down with him and we started talking and I was like, I have all these girl problems. I really want to like sort through with somebody and we spent the next two months talking about my parents like we never like the girlfriends never even came up it was just all childhood parents the entire time and there was just so much stuff back there like down there like stuff i never thought about there were so many times where like i would describe something to him and he would just look at me and he'd be like yeah that sounds like trauma you know and i'm like really and he's like yeah that's not normal you know and it like i had no idea no idea because we all grow up assuming that our childhood is normal we assume that it's everybody's childhood that everybody's family operates the way our family operated everybody's mother is the way our mother was right like we never consider that it could be different or that the way we grew up was unusual in some way and um so coming back to the self-awareness piece like that's incredibly powerful when you realize like hey the water i've been swimming in since I was a child is not normal water.

6:41Like this is, this is Rocky waters. Yeah, this is, this is all splashing around and messed up. Like I'm not seeing, seeing clearly. So that, that was very, uh, very powerful for me.

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7:50Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

8:02Thank you.