There are over 300 road rules in Australia and they are generally pretty standard across the country. Obviously the most important rules are that we drive on the left side of the road, stop at red lights and travel at 60km on unsigned roads. Imagine a world without road rules?
Probably the closest to this is on Indian inner city roads, where it looks more like a free for all with cows getting right of way and as a result the efficiency of traveling on their roads is diminished with very slow traffic. speeds

Now imagine a friendship, partnership or relationship without any rules of engagement. It would be like everything was hit and miss. Where we would consider ourselves very lucky to have a single lifelong friend or partner. Where disputes and complaints would be the norm not the exception. Where relationships are continuously failing by more than 50% at a cost to society in the hundreds of billions annually. Welcome to the real world.

So why do we not have explicit rules of engagement that we all agree to use? I guess it is pretty simple in that whatever rules we did have there would always be someone that would try exploit them and us. Alas , we seem to have thrown out the baby with the bath water. There was one bloke that apparently stated one basic rule of engagement referred to as the Golden Rule where we treat others as we would have others treat us. Not bad. Now all we have to work out is how we would like to be treated.

Most people have their own set of standards or values and spend the rest of their lives trying to hook up with people that have similar values and execution of them. Rarely can a person succulently explain what these values consist of. But what if there was a set of standards that the big man was alluding to that could simple be explained and shared. That we all wish to be treated in a similar set of values, even though we may not wish to treat others with the same high standards.

Well I am guessing that they exist and am proposing them as part of this thesis or my “treaty”. That there are at least six rules of engagement that encompass our value structure and offer the listener far more power than he has ever had before. Which I think is very important considering that we do not have an on-off switch for our ears. They include 3 rules for speaking and 3 for responding and can be found in chapter 2.