rethink PERFECT

It seems to me that agreements comprise of  at least two promises or personal pledges.
The agreement is the ultimate connection between the two people making the agreed promises. And of course the agreed promises are only as good as the information available at the time for the forming of the agreement so having it open and available for both parties to learn new information is a no-brainer, for healthy business or personal relationships, in my view.

The more detailed information included in the promises or personal pledges the better. That is, explicit detail verses implicit. Unfortunately, most failed agreements, seem to have surprises embedded in them.

One agreement that I am interested in is the boy friend or girl friend agreement.
Usually implicit by its nature, it seems to me to be defined as someone we are seeing while we’re seeing if someone else (better) comes along. Of course this is not commonly expressed in the BF or GF agreement but I don’t think anyone can deny that this is the thinking behind such a relationship or as a mate of mine refers to it as “upgrading”.
In fact I get accused of being a cynic for even making such an observation.

But imagine if we were more explicit in our promises for these agreements?
Surely the quality of the agreement would be improved by such information being expressed. I know that personally I would rather be the first to know that this upgrading was about to take place rather than the last to know, which is usually the case, in general.

You see, the only thing that is usually explicit about being in a BF or GF relationship is that sex is with that person only. But participating in the setting up other relationship opportunities, in the event of ditching the other or being ditched, is open to be abused.

This is probably why, to date I have never participated in such an antiquated process,
ie technically I have never had a GF, (or a BF for that matter).
It would also explain, to me, why so many personal relationships fail if they are built on such flimsy foundations of implicit promises rather than explicit ones, when forming agreements.

As I mentioned in my previous post, in my view it is disagreements and the lack of preparedness for them, that are the biggest cause of sadness and anger in business and personal relationships and ultimately lead to their breakup. So it makes sense that we not only try to understand more what causes disagreements but also agree beforehand, on what they are and most importantly, how to prevent them.

What Are Disagreements
The state of disagreeing and a lack of preparedness (agreements) to prevent them from occurring.

What Causes Disagreements
Well this is pretty obvious, disagreements are caused by dissent and differences of opinion and maybe egos that are more focused on their individual selves (personal pledges) rather than the team (agreements).

How to Resolve Disagreements
By understanding them enough and where they come from and why they occur first and foremost, can allow us to prevent them occurring in the first place by having agreements in place.

If an agreement is made up of two personal pledges or promises and we already have agreed to value the state of agreement more than the components (the pledges), then whenever we feel that we are disagreeing and heading for a disagreement we can focus on rearranging the agreement by altering the individual pledges.

Of course once again we would need to have discussed this and made our personal pledges and there by formed the agreement around this premise.

I believe a disagreement or the state of disagreeing occurs when we do not have a process already prepared (an agreement) to deal with disagreeing in the first place and the disagreeing escalates into an unresolved disagreement as we part ways.

One way to prepare for this is to have in place an agreement that if we ever about to end a conversation or discussion and we both were disagreeing that instead of ending up with a disagreement, we agree to continue to consider the issues raised, to be  followed up at a later date. So in effect they are agreeing to disagree, for now.

This seems to be especially true for when the two people already have existing agreements that this new disagreement will effect. However if they have little or no previous agreements then there really should be no reason to have a “disagreement” as such just differ and like ships in the night, move on.

To be continued….

My favorite question at the moment is “what is the difference between a promise and an agreement?”, in an attempt and hope to get two definitions that will satisfy me . It has not been easy and I have not been satisfied to date, with the feeling that I am strange for asking and that I should just take them for granted.

Sir Ken Robinson talks about taking things for granted in his book The Element:
“One of the key principles of “The Element” is that we need to challenge what we take for granted about our abilities and the abilities of other people. This isn’t as easy as one might imagine. Part of the problem with identifying the things we take for granted is that we don’t know what they are because we take them for granted in the first place. They become basic assumptions that we don’t question, part of the fabric of our logic. We don’t question them because we see them as fundamental, as an internal part of our lives. Like air. Or gravity. Or Oprah.”

So here is my latest definition that I think is making inroads into our simplistic or basic assumptions for these words.

A promise:
A personal pledge that something will or will not get done.
(Takes one person)

An agreement:
An arranging of our personal pledges/promises (to test, for now).
(Takes at least two people).

To some people, the personal pledge or promise (the components of the agreement) are more important than the actual Agreement.
“…but you promised!”
Whereas with my brother and I,  the Agreement (what pledges we arrange, for now) is more important than the actual personal pledge or promise.
“…let’s rearrange the pledges”‏

‎Constantly upgrading of my pledge of ‘I could be wrong’, for the last 30 years, and also the incorporation of it into the agreement with my brother (using the ‘for now’ caveat), has brought me down to this point, “the microscopic”, as a friend of mine has put it.‏

‎So now I can pledge that I always make the Agreement more important than the pledge or promise, and get an agreement with anyone, for now. It’s the agreement stupid‏!

‎To me the actual arrangement or connecting of the promises in the agreement is done by the “for now” part of the agreement, because we are agreeing to try it out. So instead of taking a person and their pledge on the road to see what they are like I am talking about taking the agreement on the road and see what it is like.‏

Ultimately, I am not getting to know the other person so much, as I am getting to know how well WE make agreements (the arranging and rearranging of our pledges), together.

…and why is the understanding of agreements so important?
Well maybe, just maybe I can learn to understand “disagreements”. As it is the disagreements that are the biggest cause of breakups in personal and business relationships, in my view. This is my next post.

We all know or should know that a relationship is made up of thousands of agreements
and disagreements in its lifetime. So, one would think that if we are going to form such an arrangement that we would have a common agreement for what an agreement actually means to us.  A no-brainer, one would think.

To me, this should be the first question we should ask a potential partner/friend/lover or all of the above. ie to get an explicit agreement as to what an agreement means to us.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht said that as soon as something seems the most obvious thing in the world, it means that we have abandoned all attempts to understand it.

Try it yourself. Ask someone close to you what an agreement means to them (get the to write it down) but beforehand write down what you think an agreement means to you. And see how close you are and if you can sign off on a single agreement. ie like you have 2 minutes to come up with a single sentence for what an agreement is and it needs to be sent to the publishers.
Make sure they know the context of the experiment and have some fun.
Please don’t blame me though, if you end up getting divorced during the process.

I assumed that I had an agreement with my brother but while writing this post I asked him and I was quite surprised by the results (see below).
My bet is that if I try get it with a potential mate it may well be much harder again. The surprise is how quickly the ego kicks in. Obviously one statement is going to be better than the other and so one will have to be willing to swallow ones pride  if one is to get this agreement. Or you could do what most men seem to do and simply acquiesce. (sorry guys)

An agreement to me means that:
“We form an idea that we can say stands for that moment but is open to be reworked at anytime after.”

My brother came up with:
“Putting into words a relatively in-common understanding‏”

After much debate on Skype Chat (over 40 minutes)
we finally settled on:

We agree that an agreement is when:
“We form an idea that we can say stands, for now.”

PS The next question to ask is what we think an disagreement is?

Why does the term “It’s your fault” exist? It’s as if we are accused of owning errors.

It is not my fault or your fault, it is a fault. It is just a flaw that has occurred during the process. It doesn’t have an owner,  per se. But it does have a person or persons that are responsible for avoiding or rectifying this fault.

Flaws occur and faults happen, and they will always happen but attributing blame for this occurrence only serves to drive the cause or causes of the fault underground.

People don’t cause faults, faulty thinking creates them. Blaming someone for faulty thinking, is faulty thinking in my view. Helping each other out of our faulty thinking is why I believe we exist.

Rethink, retry!

As we all know there is no manual on how the mating cycle works and not always does the greatest number rule. So, I thought I would share my mating cycle or call with you to get some feedback on it.

As I am getting older and I look around at women, I notice that most, that might be still of the age to have a child (it would be nice to have that option), would suit me for looks and around my height, being the other criteria.

So, all I require is that “she” would be interested in finding out what my personality criteria are and like them or if not explain why and we can see what we come up with.
And vollah! We have a match made in heaven.

However, one important criteria for me is that she would initiate. Now in 2015, I would have thought that this would not be an issue, but I still get from most people, that I will be waiting a long time (which I have). Ah well, each to their own, as I said, there is no manual.

One of my favorite songs at the moment is by Sia, Fair Game 

http://www.directlyrics.com/sia-fair-game-lyrics.html

 But, in my view, if we to want to play a fair game or fairer game, we are going to have to make some, explicitly agreed to, rules of engagement.

At present it is not a “fair game”,  with an arms race of both sexes striving for the upper hand and in my view, us men are losing, badly.

How do I make such a call? Well, the suicide rate between males and females is some four times more in “favor” of males. Statistically we are obviously the weaker sex and some things in this “game” have got to change.

If the figures were reversed and women were killing themselves four times more than men, I believe that there would be an uproar, with all sorts of campaigns and flags being flown, by women’s networks, to rectify this imbalance. But I hear nothing, not a peep, with no one seeming to know or care that men are losing the game.

So, what is the solution? I don’t really know only that we are going to need some more women to do some batting for us as well as men needing to wake up from our slunber and start to prepare and train for a fairer game.

I think I now know why I so hate the use of words like absolutely.

When people use “I totally understand”, “exactly”, “you are absolutely right”, “perfect”, etc they are overly agreeing and then, when they are not really in agreement they just stay silent or say “yes” or “okay”, with very little outward sign of the negative or non agreement.

It is a bit like it is a scale that is out of whack.

So when someone says that they “very much agree” their opposite to this state is more like “just agree”, with rarely
a disagree in sight, until their overly agreeing catches up with them down the track and then, you guessed it, WHAM! they overly disagree with dangerous consequences for all participants.

I mean, what is wrong with a simple “Yes, I agree” or “No, I disagree”?
Why do we need to add the bells and whistles to our affirmatives?

How do we tell the difference between our “intuition” and our “Ego”, if in fact there is one?

Well, I need to be cautions here, as now I need to consider which part of me has asked this question and which part is now about to answer it. Hmmm!

I think that I can be assured that my ego will try dress itself up to be legitimate, so my guess is that what I consider to be my intuition is really my ego in disguise. Who said that?

And when I hear someone else expound something that I disagree with, I (my ego) will probably consider that they are using their “ego”, even though they may well consider that they are using their intuition and most likely think that I am using my ego. No I didn’t!

This error in our thinking or cognitive bias, has been given a name even.
The Bias Blind Spot, of recognizing the impact of biases on the judgement of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one’s own judgement.

Anyway, I guess it just shows that I need to be careful about all of the Cognitive Biases List and Descriptions of which there are over a hundred listed here.

How about this for an agreement proposal?

“Whoever assumes something AND then expects the other to assume also, loses the conversation.”

I think this single sentence embodies everything that is in Rethink Perfect.

For example:
When someone states “You should know!” or “You should do this…” or “don’t do that…”, what they are doing, in my view, is assuming that they “know”, and that you should assume their “knowledge” is valid for you also.

To me, without an explicit agreement to moderate this type of thinking and behavior, it would mean either the end of the conversation, the beginning of a heated dispute but possibly the end of the relationship as we knew it. Better to get an agreement before hand.

How many times have we allowed such statements from parents, teachers, husbands or wives that assume that, on specific subjects they know better and can dictate to us, their intended expectations, of us.

Well I believe that I get what I deserve
But now I can ask for an explicit agreement to counter the double assumptions.

Any takers?