Aspire Magazine: Inspiration for a Woman's Soul.(TM) Feb/Mar 2020 Aspire Magazine FULL Issue | Page 62

You But when you
COLLABORATE,
you come together
with your different
perspectives and truly
listen to each other.
No one ever taught us how to collaborate
in marriage. We were just taught to
COMPROMISE (this time YOU get Your Way
and next time your spouse gets His Way).
We all have expectations for our partners.
But if you don’t talk about them or give your
partner a chance to contribute, it WILL lead
to conflict.
This happens a lot with stay-at-home parents.
You decide together that one of you needs to
stay home with the baby. But what you don’t
create alignment about is how that’s actually
going to work.
The partner who stays at home wants the
working partner to come home and help with
the baby, while the working partner views
that as the stay-at-home parent’s job.
It’s not that either person is “right.” The
problem is that they never aligned their
expectations. They have no way of seeing
the other person’s perspective until it starts
to play itself out.
Convincing Versus
Collaborating
That’s still a “My Way” vs “Your Way” model.
It’s still Demand Relationship™. It still leaves
us with kerfuffles when we don’t want to
compromise.
For instance, one of you wants to be a
disciplinarian with your kids and the other
one wants to take a more gentle approach.
Now what? No one wants to compromise and
it starts to feel like there’s just no solution.
There is absolutely a solution. It’s just a skill
set that was never taught.
Marriage, family, households…we need to
design alignment in all of these areas through
collaboration.
Intentional Alignment
Alignment doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t
matter how great your relationship is—you
have to deliberately design alignment.
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Here’s the problem with convincing...it’s
about YOU wanting to win (and if you’re
winning and your partner is losing, ultimately
EVERYONE is going to lose).
But when you COLLABORATE, you come
together with your different perspectives and
truly listen to each other. Everyone wins. You
create an outcome that was greater than
what either of you envisioned by yourself!
When you face conflict with your partner,
there are two major false beliefs that make
it hard to let go.
The first is the belief that ‘your way” is the
only right way and that everyone should see
it that way. That is simply untrue. There are a
million ways to get to “happy.”
www.AspireMAG.net | February / March 2020