Making relationships work rather than putting them into an early grave takes thoughtfulness and intention.
If you’ve ever found yourself entangled in a less than ideal relationship with someone in your personal or professional life this will help you make sense of it all rather than throwing it all away.
Let me share a recent story that perfectly illustrates this…
A client told me he was so mad at his boss he was thinking of quitting and leaving without any notice. “Yes,” he said, “The jerk doesn’t deserve even an extra day of my time.”
“And then what?” I asked.
He shrugged and said he didn’t care what happened next. He was fried and furious and just salivated at the thought of revenge.
It took me a bit of time to help him calm down and listen to my questions that were not about destroying, rather about salvaging.
“What would be a possible good ending to the anger and frustration?” only led to more whining and upset.
I finally sparked some real attention when I asked what his ultimate intention was.
Ah, intention.
That changed not only the subject in a positive direction, but it also led to a powerful discussion about intending to make relationships work rather than putting them into an early grave.
Here is some of the research we talked about as ‘Mr. Furious’ decided to look at his anger and his decision to leave his boss high and dry before making his final decision on what to do.
Science explains the power of intention using quantum physics and the idea of information entanglement.
Entanglement occurs when two particles (or people) are deeply linked (boss and employee) and one particle (employee) can instantaneously influence the other (boss). Subtle energies can travel faster than electromagnetic light.
Okay, enough about the science. Back to the two men.
I asked Mr. Furious to think about what he could do to help his boss. He would have none of it. That is until I asked him if he knew anything about his boss outside of work.
The only thing he had ever talked about with his boss, and it was a minimal conversation, was that the man he reported to has a disabled child who was causing a lot of stress and turmoil at home.
It was, he reported to me, a short conversation that was quickly shoved to the back of the agenda and never discussed again.
I asked if he could keep an open mind and take a few minutes to look through his boss’s eyes. It was an uphill battle. However, soon he seemed to calm down and I watched as the vitriol lessened and he was ready for a new look at what made him so angry and yearning for revenge.
He took a big picture approach and did a deep dive into the possibility of staying at his job and changing the way he viewed his boss (who, he said reminded him of his very, very annoying grandfather). The direction of his thoughts began to change. He made a major shift and became clear about how he wanted his relationship with his boss to be.
He admitted he expected the other man to change and suddenly saw the arc of a possibility that if he changed, perhaps his boss could change also.
I don’t have the final answer to this. All I know is that Mr. Furious became Mr. Curious. He became willing to change his intention from the negative to the positive and see his boss as a human being with all the pains and fears and creativity and caring that he saw at that moment when he talked about his disabled son.
Today, he reported they had a long and successful conversation about job responsibilities. He decided to stay. And his comment right before we clicked off Zoom was, “I see my situation at work with a whole new sense of possibility. My intention changed the conversation and it was far better than I ever expected.”
Next time you think about throwing away instead of making relationships work…keep this in mind, it takes intention to make the choice to step out of entanglement and seeing things in a new way.
And I said to myself, “Now if I can only do the same with my ex-husband.”
