Bill: Hello and welcome back to Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching. What we want to talk about today is the importance of agreements in business, and the importance of agreements in relationships. I brought this topic up today, honestly, because I have been promising an article that I will put in my blog and put in my newsletter about agreements because it keeps coming up in coaching. And as you and I, Marty, were discussing this prior to hitting record, you were looking through for some agreements that you and Leslie, you used to use. Maybe that's a good place to start. Even though you couldn't find those agreements, you know what they were.

Marty: I remember some of them, but they were, yeah, they were all of the sort, like I agree that I will be on time. I agree that I will let you know if I'm struggling. I agree that I will tell the truth. You know, these sorts of things. They're very, very basic, but it's amazing the difference they make. You know, we, we actually had people raise their right hand and agree and say, yes, I do agree to that. And it creates a container in which you now know what you can count on, and that's, that's very, very important.

Bill: Well, it creates safety. It creates, it sets up what can be expected, and it eliminates assumptions.

Marty: Which I say is important because you're entering into at least a coaching agreement in order to pursue some things that you don't normally get to pursue. So you need to know certain things are going to be safe, right?

Marty: Because this, I don't know where this is going to go. I don't know how I'm going to feel about, I don't know what you're going to, you know, we're going to decide I need to go do out of this. It's, it's all rather threatening. And so. If we got these agreements. Okay, then at least that you know like there's something to hold on to

Bill: kind of like a structure.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: Whenever I think of the word structure I also. You get this image of metal, piping that are, that's put together for scaffolding for people that are putting siding on the side of a house or washing windows or whatever that. So, yeah, so it provides a structure, something solid to stand on and climb around on so that you can increase safety while you're trying to get something done.

Bill: And what we're trying to get something done is usually communication, effective communication.

Marty: And it's so different from, you know, like, when I would come to the dinner table as a boy, we didn't have these sorts of agreements about communication that didn't happen. And you never knew what was going to happen.

Marty: It was not safe.

Marty: So I really, I really appreciate, like, at first it seemed a little trivial to me, like, do we have to say all this stuff? I feel so much safer and able to be productive in the context of agreements than I used to be, at home growing up. So I get it. I get why it's really important.

Bill: Safe. That word, you and I both have used it already a few times here in this very short conversation so far.

Bill: Safe to or safe from what? Safe.

Marty: Being taken advantage of, being made fun of. Belittled being being misunderstood or misspoken to , being on prevent being treated unprofessionally, things like that. Also freedom from being constrained.

Bill: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to add the freedom from being blamed. And I loved your list. Misunderstood. I'm making some notes over here. This is good stuff. So safety and then safety too. What if it's safe enough, then what is possible?

Marty: Yeah. To explore, to express, to play, to not know.

Bill: Yeah. To be, that learner's mind.

Bill: Yeah, that's great. And so look at those two lists. We've got the danger possibly of being bullied, misunderstood, blamed, belittled, or constrained. We could make a much bigger list than that. That's the threat. That's the danger that agreements can help manage. And if it is well managed, if we can make authentic and sincere agreements that come with commitment, Then that creates safety, safety to explore, to express, to play, to not know, to be authentic, to be vulnerable.

Marty: Yeah, well, I'm just thinking it even, maybe this is too basic, but it also creates safety to agree. Something like that is missing in Congress right now. we don't have agreement everything.

Marty: It's all up for grabs. And so we can't, there's no movement. We can't even agree on how to proceed, you know, at times at times, it's just it's crippling. It's crippling to so the part of what you get out of agreements, what it's for, it's not just about you or me.

Marty: It's about the purpose that we're in this conversation or the, we're in this relationship that that can be forwarded. If we don't have agreements, that's never that might never get forwarded. We're just going to disagree, disagree, disagree. I mean look at the conflict in the Middle East, like no agreements.

Marty: Anything goes. And so how long have they been at it?

Marty: Agreements help us get somewhere.

Bill: And agreements also require, in order to really have commitment behind an agreement, I need to really understand what it is that I'm agreeing to. And I also need to be willing to know what, how much I can compromise, am I giving something up if I make an agreement?

Bill: And clarity about what, what is it I'm really committed to if I make this agreement.

Marty: There's one in particular that I'm thinking about right now. In my contract, which I call an agreement for a coaching partnership agreement form. That's my title on all my contracts with my clients and the last agreement in there says that, you know, if you, the client don't get what you came for, you get your money back.

Marty: When you sign the contract, you're agreeing to that, if the end of, let's say the six months we work together, that's what the normal first contract is for. If we agreed in our opening sessions that you're going to double your business and for some reason, we didn't accomplish that.

Marty: Then that's what you paid for you to get your money back. And so that's an agreement that I make with people on it. That allows them to take the the pressure off, they know that if they don't get results. That they don't have to pay for this that allows them like to dismiss that concern and just playful out right and it and it encourages me to be at my best and empower the heck out of them because I don't want to lose out on this.

Marty: Contract the money that's coming to me for doing so, you know, I don't want to just sit here and have a conversation. Then the end, you say, well, I didn't produce any results. So you give me my money back. I want to make sure that you get those results. So that you stay around. I don't know if those

Marty: results of the agreement or outcomes of the agreement fit anything that we said, but I was just thinking about what that does for the relationship to have that agreement.

Bill: You're pointing to something you're offering a guarantee when there's an agreement between 2 people. And that agreement is breached by either of the parties.

Bill: We've got a breakdown, possibly even a rupture to the relationship. I think part of an agreement can be. What happens if I don't keep my end of the agreement?

Marty: Right. You don't

Bill: keep your end of the agreement. Example of that might be, if we're staying with a coaching agreement, a coaching contract, would be that if we are at odds, you and I, I'm your coach, you're the client, And if we are at odds and we have a dispute that we can't seem to work out between each other, we go to mediation.

Bill: We agree in advance that if something happens and we aren't able to work it out, we go to mediation.

Marty: This reminded me, Leslie and I have an agreement between us. We wrote it when we were working to when we were working for our own same company that we created. So it's just between us. This wasn't with clients.

Marty: And I remember, among lots of sort of household agreements, we agreed in that we both signed it happily that our friendship would always come before any business disagreements that, that if, if there was something was going on the business, that we could not. agree on that we would, that we would just have to leave that and go back to being friends, you know, and it has, it has held.

Marty: I mean, she's been my, she's been a friend of mine for 25 years now.

Bill: That's great. And that was an explicit agreement.

Marty: It was an explicit agreement tied to what you're talking about, which is, well, what if things don't work out? We're going to be friends anyway.

Bill: No matter what, we will be friends.

Marty: That's what we wrote.

Bill: That's a commitment. So at the top of the conversation, I said, we're going to be talking about or exploring at least, what does it look like? What do, what's the importance of, and maybe what difference does it make to have good solid agreements in leadership, in business and in personal relationships?

Bill: Can we visit each one of those?

Marty: Sure.

Bill: Yeah. So let's start with leadership. Not your typical leadership coaching. What's typical? What's typical in leadership when it comes to agreements?

Marty: Well, that they're weighted or one sided.

Bill: Like it's an, for example, it might be implied that because I have the title of CEO, That what I have to say is more important than what you have to say, is that right?

Marty: If we have any, whatever conversation we might have, you get the final decision

Bill: and that can be either implied or explicit,

Marty: right. All agreements are either implied or explicit.

Bill: Yeah. And if the agreements are implied, that's asking for trouble. Do we really have an agreement if it's just implied?

Marty: It could be asking for trouble, we can't write down everything that we agree on or to, there's a bunch of stuff that just, it's fine.

Marty: We don't have to write it down.

Bill: I have a client whose homework was to write down the agreements that he had with his partner. Let me restate it. To and to ask his partner to do the same thing separately to write down the agreements that they thought that they had and then get together and compare them. There were some surprises. Oh, really? You thought we had this agreement. And I thought I had that we had these agreements and then the next step, of course, was to either formalize.

Bill: Or throw them in the garbage.

Marty: It seems like Mike Johnson, he thinks that we've agreed and something that Donald Trump said the other night too, I saw on the news today, they seem to believe that we've agreed that our national religion is Christianity. I don't remember any agreement to that effect.

Bill: Yeah, and there, there are those that would disagree with you, that would say something like, well, if you read the original paperwork that was drawn up that, that made us a country and declared who we are, that it very explicitly says that we are a Christian country. And therefore,

Bill: if you're a citizen of the United States, therefore, then you agree to be Christian. I'm not saying that that's true.

Marty: Right.

Bill: There are those that would argue with that.

Marty: Yeah, there are. And exactly. And so we, and you know, that's, what's happening today is people are pulling those documents out and rereading them.

Marty: What was the agreement?

Bill: Exactly. And do I agree? Is it possible for me to be a US citizen and not agree to the original Agreements that were made by our founding fathers and probably mothers.

Marty: It's a really hard time right now. This is a great topic because this is a hard time for a green, the life and the life of an agreement.

Marty: The lifespan of an agreement is very short these days. You know, I mean, if somebody like Rudy Giuliani can get up in front of the nation and say, oh, truth. Well, the truth is not truth. So there's no, you can't agree on anything if truth is not truth. And so agreements are, you know, I think everybody feels like unspokenly.

Marty: We're on our own. We cannot agree. It's sort of an underlying fear or threat to our, to our relationships right now in this country. So it just shows you the importance of agreements and how we hold that.

Bill: It's a good example too of an agreement is when I sign up for an app, my phone or my computer, this just now happened, just that you might've heard the ringing telephone.

Bill: Did you hear that on there on your end? Oh, on my end, a pop up just came up from my WhatsApp and I'm sure it was spam. It was a picture of a young woman that's, and it just said, hi. And then, I Xed it so it would go away. I didn't want to be distracted by it. And then this, the person that is representing themselves as this young woman just now tried to call me through the WhatsApp app.

Bill: Apparently at some point in the past when I signed up for the WhatsApp app, I made an agreement. But I wasn't, but I wasn't very responsible about it.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: I just wanted the app.

Marty: Yeah. I

Bill: said yes to whatever they were saying, telling me that I needed to say yes to before I could have the app. The only thing I agreed to was to have notifications pop up on my computer and have people, random people that I don't even know, call me.

Bill: I don't agree with that. Now what do I want to do about that? My hope is that I can go into settings in the WhatsApp app because I like the app. Change it so that nobody can call me unless I am connected with them in some way. Nobody put notifications up on my computer. So those, that's an agreement that I wasn't even aware that I'd made because I wasn't responsible when I said, yes, yes, yes.

Bill: Just give me the app. We do that.

Marty: Going back to leadership and agreements, it's that common moment, that moment of commonality, agreeing. That makes it possible. I think at all these, maybe this is, this is probably true with all of the all forms of agreement. Don't you think that if we don't have that, then you're, you're a completely random thing in my world. I have no agreement with you.

Marty: You could be anywhere, anytime, do anything and we have no agreement about what, what's going to show up like that's dangerous.

Marty: With leadership, it makes possible that we know, I think, where we're going and how we're getting there, right? Whereas in a friendship, maybe we're not going anywhere. We're not trying to get any anywhere. So the agreement would be different. It was more more just about maintaining, a friendly space.

Marty: Does that make sense?

Bill: It makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking about one of my first, maybe what I would call my first real job. I had several jobs that, you know, I worked and was compensated for, but I, I didn't call them right. I didn't think of them as real jobs because, although I should have now that I think about it, because, I wasn't.

Bill: For example, one job I was paid to deliver groceries for Joe's Trading Post in Kansas City. Paid under the table. I didn't have a schedule. I just showed up after school and then on Saturdays and got paid tips and five bucks a week. So that was the agreement. I got five bucks a week and I got to keep the tips when I delivered groceries.

Bill: I agreed to that. But on top of that, there was also agreements like I needed to sweep the sawdust floors and I needed to rack bottles when I'm in my downtime and I needed to do whatever Joe asked me to do during the time that I was on shift. The other, the next job that I had that I would consider a real job was in Great Falls, Montana, working for Rozar's as a box boy.

Bill: The initial agreement was you show up for work and we train you on what we want you to do. And you will be compensated at this hourly rate for the number of hours that you work every week. And then once I accepted the job, and showed up at work, There were, hundreds and hundreds of new agreements that were being made, that were presented in the form of training.

Bill: In order to move a pallet of groceries, we use this thing called a pallet jack. That's part of your job. I didn't feel like I had the choice to say, no, I don't want to do that job. That's not part, that's not part of what I wanted to do. So by, by being trained. And shown how to do it and then demonstrating and practicing it myself.

Bill: I had a new agreement that I, number one, I had, I had the privilege of using a pallet jack and I had the knowledge of using a pallet jack. And I was, I understood what was being expected of me, and that is that if a pallet needed to be moved, I would move it, and I would use a pallet jack to do so.

Marty: Now, all of that was explicit or implicit?

Bill: Well, it was explicit in that's what it was expected of me. Those were, you might even think of them as rules. The rules of employment, of continued employment, is that you do these things in these particular ways. I've been working there two or three months. I, I certainly wasn't shown how to use a pallet jack.

Bill: That's a very advanced training right there. As a box boy, I was shown how to put groceries in a bag in such a way that the groceries weren't damaged. So I knew better than to put bread at the bottom of the bag or to put eggs at the bottom of the bag, to not mix soap with vegetables, that sort of thing.

Bill: I was trained on how to do that sort of thing and I was probably, I don't know, maybe two, three, four weeks into the job before all of the other employees at the front end of the store recognized that I never made eye contact with anybody. And I never smiled. And I never had conversations with the customers.

Bill: The reason for that was because I was scared shitless and, making eye contact for me was too scary. And certainly having conversations with people was too scary. The store manager, Jim Ledbetter, he jumped out of an airplane and his parachute didn't open up, which was really sad.

Bill: Yeah. But he'd been around for years, and he was the guy that hired me, and he was the guy that trained me to be a box boy at Rozar's. And he called me into his office, which was terrifying to be called into the manager's office as the box. But I just knew he was going to fire me and he didn't fire me.

Bill: No, he said, Bill, part of your job is here. We are another agreement. Now, part of your job is to make eye contact with the customers to smile. Then to say something to them like, hi, or How are you? Or would you like me? I right, right. I carry your bags out for you. Something like that, right? Yeah. Did you find everything that you needed?

Bill: And he gave me two or three things that I could say. He said, so I want you to go downstairs. His office was upstairs by the break room. I want you to go downstairs and go back to the check stands, and I want you to make eye contact with every customer that comes into the check stand that you're working.

Bill: Well, I was working every check stand. I was the only box boy there.

Marty: Were you given a chance to agree or not agree to that?

Bill: Oh, he just told me what I, I guess I agreed by just, by not quitting at that point.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just tracking, you know, where is the agreement or, or just the, see, that's, that's a difference in this, in the style of leadership,

Bill: right?

Marty: You just tell people and assume that it's agreed. That's, that's one. That's one way to get it done, but it's not nearly as secure as if you get a response. Yes, I agree.

Bill: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So he could have, he didn't, but he could have said, now, does this make sense to you? And do you have any questions?

Bill: Is this going to be hard for you to do? Do you need any more support for me to be able to do this? What are your concerns about this? He didn't ask any of those things. He just sent me on my way and told me to go do it. Had he asked me any of those things and then asked me explicitly, and so do you agree now to meet eyes, to make eye contact with every customer that you run across?

Bill: And I would have said, yes, I agree. Then we would have had an explicit agreement. This was almost an explicit agreement. It was just a rule, a condition of continued employment for me. I agreed by continuing to be employed by expecting to. To be picking up the paycheck every week.

Bill: By the way, that was very hard for me to do. I was very awkward about it. It was, as you can imagine, it was not an authentic smile. I was forcing my face to smile. So those are others, other examples of agreements.

Marty: It's good because it starts to point to the difference between implicit and explicit, where that gets us. I think just a very basic example is like when you play a sport. There are agreements, you can't touch if it's football, you can't touch the, sorry, soccer.

Marty: You can't I'm thinking food spot. You can't touch the ball. Right. And we, and you agree that the has to be within these see that chalk line and all the play has to be. There are lots of agreements that make it possible. To have a game game

Bill: That's right. To know how to win or lose, to know what's fair or not fair when there's gonna be penalties. Those are great examples of rules. And while there were, there may not ever have been an explicit agreement to those rules. A player that goes onto the field has agreed to the rules. Yeah, and abides by them. They can be penalized. They can get a point if they get it in the net. If they do touch it with their hands, there's some sort of penalty. I'm sure like a turnover to the other side.

Marty: I wonder, I'm just starting to drift a little in my thinking here and because recognizing it takes a certain level of intelligence. It takes a certain, capacity to, for attention.

Marty: There are some biological physiological components to making an agreement. And if somebody is not capable of that, then it's hard to make an, it's hard to make an agreement with them and therefore unsafe.

Bill: Really interesting point. If someone's under duress and makes an agreement, have they made an agreement? Good question. They don't have the capacity to keep the commitment that it is required to keep that commitment.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: So you think about people that have been traumatized. And then go through their lives, interacting in relationships and making agreements. They make those agreements from under duress, for fear of being abandoned, for fear of being hurt, humiliated.

Bill: Yeah. Those are certainly different.

Marty: Like people in an institution for the mentally ill, they agree to deal with people who can't make agreements.

Bill: Yeah, that's right.

Bill: Let's switch to personal relationships. I'm not sure how much of a let me reverse that. I'm not sure that we did a very good job of talking about agreements and leadership. We did touch on that, there are the kinds of agreements where the CEO says, or just assumes that what he has to say or she has to say is more important than anybody else.

Bill: That we can talk about it, but CEO. That's an agreement that may be implied or not actually stated. And agree to but also from a leadership position I'm thinking of coaching as a coach with a client coaching works best when both the client and I are clear on the purpose for the coaching.

Bill: What is the overarching coaching objective? Why does the client, why has the client come to coaching? Now, the way that would show up in leadership is whether, whether that leadership position is one that's been, that comes with a title and extra pay, or it just turns out that this is the particular person that people follow.

Bill: That in that particular moment, there can be agreements that, that will make that leadership more effective just like in coaching, what's the overall coaching objective? Uh, that will help us to determine what it is we're going to talk about today and how you're going to be supported. As a leader, what is our overall objective?

Bill: What am I leading? If even if I'm aware, I may not even be aware that I'm in the leader, not consciously but I find myself in a position where I look around and realize leadership is required and I provide it. That's going to be far more effective if the people that I'm leading, number one, agree that I'm the leader.

Bill: Number two, and this isn't in any particular order, just as I'm thinking about them, that we agree to our purpose. What are we trying to accomplish together here? If there's not agreement that I am the leader or that whoever the leader is going to be as the leader, we're going to have chaos.

Bill: We're going to have as many people are involved going in that many different directions. If we don't agree on our purpose. We're it's going to be chaos again, it's going to be active and

Marty: dysfunctional. It's I just wrote a I'm just inserting a comment here. Don't lose your track. Don't lose track of where you're going.

Marty: I just wrote a curriculum. I was asked to submit a proposal for curriculum for a leadership team. That's all over the map and the 1st things I said is, we're going to have to. I'll take a survey of each individual, and then we need to have a conversation about whether they see. Each individual sees that the team is keeping its agreements, do we know what our purpose is?

Marty: Do we know how we're going to get there and is that been agreed to? And some people will say yes, and some people will say no, but that's the number one. That's right at the top of my curriculum.

Bill: I don't know which book or books I've read this in, but it's certainly valid and true.

Bill: Every time I've read it, I've thought. Maybe I'm guilty of this as well. The question is when working for an organization. Do you know what the mission statement is agree to it. How many people do?

Marty: I wonder.

Bill: If there is a mission statement at all. There's other names for mission statements, but the essential idea of what is our purpose, what is it we stand for, what is it we're trying to accomplish.

Bill: If an employee in an organization doesn't know what the purpose, the mission of the company is, then they're going to be left with their own understanding of what they're being paid to do without the context of that mission, which may or may not really accurately reflect the culture and attitudes of the corporation and the business.

Marty: It should. I mean, if it doesn't, it needs to be updated, but I thought you were going to say, which may or may not be. Important to the employee like I know toward the end of her life, my grandmother, she, she worked for old national bank in Evansville, Indiana, but she didn't really care what their mission was.

Marty: She just wanted some place to go and be useful during the day and meet people. And she probably wasn't interested, but you know, somebody who's, who's there. ambitious and want and cares about the, you know, what the company's up to and wants to move up in the ranks. They're definitely going to want to know what the mission is and they agree to it.

Bill: All right. So how about we talk about personal relationships now and how agreements come into play there. I can tell you that when I began coaching people, the relationship that I developed with my clients was very similar to the relationship that I built with my family and my friends. Honestly, it lacked clarity around agreement.

Bill: What are we up to here? Well, I began to notice that. I began to notice that some clients would come into a session and they would pay me our agreed upon price for that session. It was my understanding that we had an agreement that I was going to help them accomplish something, but apparently it was their understanding that they were paying me to listen to them.

Bill: I started feeling this inner conflict and tension because I'd be watching time and we're 20 minutes into the session and I haven't had an opportunity to say anything. I'm not really clear at all about what it is that we're trying to do here. 30 minutes, more tension, 40 minutes, more tension.

Bill: And as a new coach, Now we got 20 minutes left in the session and nothing from my perspective has been accomplished. And the later it gets in the session, the harder it's going to be for me to speak up and say, So what did you want to accomplish today? And there would be times that the entire hour would go by.

Bill: And there never was any establishment of no agreement made about what we were there to accomplish together. Whoa. Yes. It didn't happen often. I needed to get that corrected and I got some coaching and some training around it right away. And what I got was the very first thing to establish in every coaching conversation is what are we trying to accomplish today?

Bill: Yeah. What is the outcome the client wants from this conversation? I learned that and I learned that well. And I have that show up now in my personal conversations with my family and my friends. And the trick is to not come across as a coach in personal relationships, while at the same time recognizing the value and importance of establishing agreements.

Marty: Which I think at the bottom of that, correct me if I'm wrong is Empowerment. You can't empower somebody if you're doing, you're pushing something that's not what they want or what they even thought of. If you want to get behind them as a coach and help forward their goals for empower them in their life, then.

Marty: You need to know what they want to, what they want to work on, what they want to talk about and same thing in, in a personal relationship, you know, it's structured differently and it comes out sounding differently. You're my friend because I want to empower who you are and what you're up to in the world. I want to know, I want to know, then let's agree on how you'd like me to do that and what you'd like me to say and how you'd like to be listened to.

Bill: Or even if you want that.

Marty: Right. Exactly. Yeah. We

Bill: have the kind of friendship that I would like to have with you. If you don't want me to empower you, then I'm not sure that I can be your friend might be a way to go about negotiating an agreement.

Bill: A good example of this is and I used to be a member of a 12 step program and I would sponsor a lot of men. Sponsorship just simply meant that I was their mentor and they would come to me to discuss the different important aspects of their lives and hopefully get some wisdom from me. And many times they would come and essentially they saw our relationship as Bill's the listener and I'm the complainer. And they would come and complain about their wives or their jobs or the quality of their recovery from a blaming and complaint perspective. And that was very hard to be with as the sponsor, as the mentor and I realized now that what was hard about that was that we didn't have an agreement.

Bill: We had an implied agreement from the perspective of the sponsor. We, I agreed to listen. Well, they complained. I hadn't explicitly I never would have explicitly agreed to that. Right. But I haven't hadn't also developed much in the way of interpersonal develop interpersonal skills, relationship skills, and had to begin to develop those over time where I would make agreements with my sponsors.

Bill: Sometimes I realize that it's important to be able to complain from time to time. And if you need to do that, I'm here for you for five minutes. No more than five minutes of complaining. So now we had an explicit agreement. I'll listen to your complaints for five minutes. And the other part of the agreement that I'm going to negotiate with you is that if you use those five minutes to complain, you'll give me twice that much time to talk to you about what you're going to do about what you're complaining about.

Bill: And now we had some substance. We had an agreement and, my sponsees often would come in and say, I need more than five minutes. Yeah, call your mother. I'm not here for that for you. Our agreement is that no more than five minutes and that worked very well. I've had I've had. Oh,

Marty: yeah, it's amazing.

Marty: It sounds absurd. Maybe to people listening, but I've had the experience when one of my first jobs. As a coach, that is it wasn't 1 of my 1st jobs, but when we finally got into my chosen field I was all complaining and having trouble with the boss and his policies. And he said, I'll give you 5 minutes to bitch and complain about this.

Marty: And then we need to move on because he understood, you don't agree. There's fire in you that needs to get burnt. Okay. You got 5 minutes and then we're getting back to work and it worked. I for 5 minutes I fumed and then it was over and we can proceed. That was an agreement.

Bill: Yeah,

Marty: it works. It actually works.

Marty: It sounds absurd when you say it, but it actually does work. I think that we were talking, there was some fuzziness about whether things need to be explicit, can't make it all explicit, but if you don't, then there's going to be unsafety or in that area. So better get as much explicit as possible.

Marty: And I think that it comes down. It sounds like. Where we're at now is that it's going to come down to, where are those areas where you're concerned about your safety? If you're like, we didn't have any agreement about how we would dress for this podcast because there's no threat to either of our safety around that.

Marty: But we do have agreements about what we're going to discuss and how we're going to do it and the time it's going to take and the language we're going to use to express it in all of that. It's been agreed to.

Bill: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And some of that by trial and error, but we negotiated and we made agreements and so that's part of making agreements is to recognize that.

Bill: Making an agreement should be negotiation. Just because I propose something doesn't mean that you have to either agree or disagree. Another option would be if I propose something that you come back and say, I can do this much of that agreement, but I also would need this accommodation if I were to do that.

Bill: Have it go back and forth until it's negotiated and fully agreed to if that negotiation is done in good faith. And by that, what I mean is honestly, in an absence of manipulation, which might include bullying and trying to overpower.

Marty: Or even sneakily cajoling.

Bill: Yes. Yes. And of course, a lot of that can happen.

Bill: And in the world of human beings, we are all, operating under a percentage of unconscious Internal strategies in order to get our ways or to prevent getting what we don't want. And so that's going to happen. And when that happens, what I've experienced is that, that when there is a manipulation, when there is a strategy, that dishonors or disrespects or ignores the needs, wants, desires, preferences, and rights of another person, there's a disconnection. And when that disconnection occurs, that needs to be acknowledged. In fact, that would be a really great agreement to have in a relationship between two people who wish to be vulnerable with each other. Yes.

Bill: When a disconnection occurs, when either one of us senses that we can aim it. We can say, what's going on right now? I don't connect it anymore. I, maybe it's all me, but maybe something else is going on over there. But at some point in the last five minutes, I don't know. I've experienced this sense of disconnection and I miss our connection.

Bill: So let me explore that and come back together again.

Marty: Yeah, exactly. I've been through that many times with people. That is the way it works.

Bill: If we have the courage to let it work that way.

Marty: It does take courage. Yeah. I think you're right. Most even live in relationships are just, they just, they're just all implicit until something goes wrong and then you go, wait, we never talked about that.

Marty: Most co-dependencies are not made explicit. .

Bill: I had an agreement with my first wife, Lori, who bless her heart. And I don't mean that in the Southern way. I really do mean bless her heart. She was a lovely person. I said that to someone earlier today.

Bill: Bless your heart. We were playing around a little bit. She's living in Louisiana. No, living in Atlanta, Georgia right now. And I was playing with my Southern drawl to see how close I could come to Atlanta. And I, and so I threw in a bless, bless your heart. And she said, don't use profanity with me.

Bill: And I said, what does that mean? And she says, in the South, where I'm from, bless your heart means the same as F you. And yeah, now I've lost track of what I was saying. Oh, Lori, Lori and I got married. She was very young. She was 18. I was very young. I was 22. So she was older than I was.

Bill: She was a lot more mature than I was at 18. When I was 22 and she was 18, she was the one that held the maturity. But we were both extremely dysfunctional. We both came from trauma. We came fresh out of the trauma and mixed it up with each other and began to blend our own special blend of trauma with each other.

Bill: And we'd been together for three years. I married her one month out of high school because I was so afraid that I was going to lose her. And we had some agreements and none of them were explicit. The only explicit agreements we had were the ones that we uttered at the in the wedding.

Bill: And I can't tell you what I agreed to. I really can't because they didn't mean, it didn't mean anything to me. I knew that I wasn't going to cheat on her. Beyond that, the agreements were, you take care of the kids if we have any, I'll go earn the money. Explicit, agreements like, before we do any budget for groceries, we've got to make sure I have plenty of beer and cigarettes.

Bill: And she understood that those were the rules too, but we never did talk about it. We never explained. One of the agreements that she didn't know that, that we had was that. I would do everything that I could to anticipate her every want and need and desire and meet them, do what I could to give her anything she might want, need, or desire in exchange for her doing the same for me.

Bill: That way, neither one of us had to take the risk of asking for what we wanted. More importantly, I never had to take the risk of asking for what I wanted. Yeah. I followed those rules. I followed, I kept to that agreement for years and years and years. Well into our marriage before we sat down with a marriage counselor.

Bill: Helped me to parse out that was the expectation, that's the strategy I'd been using. And the reason I sat there in that marriage counseling office so resentful was that she hadn't held her end of the agreement up. Turns out she never had agreed to it in the first place.

Marty: She didn't even

Bill: know it existed.

Marty: It runs really deep. You could see that, there's so much that is implicit and not explicit. Let's call that animal a horse.

Bill: We never

Marty: talked about this. But we use the, again, it's that coming together, there has to be a commonality for us to move forward.

Marty: That seems to be the real function of power of an agreement. If you use completely different words for things than I use, then we can't talk. That's right. That's right.

Bill: Because most of it is implicit, we make assumptions. And you know what they say about assumptions, it creates a lot of chaos.

Bill: That's the opposite of agreement, I would say, is assumption and assumptions just don't work well. We can agree to assumptions. Now it works well. But if we if we don't clear up those assumptions and make known what, what is being unsaid and what is just being assumed, we can expect to have some chaos, some dysfunction, some breakdown.

Bill: And for me, honestly most of the agreements that I have now are explicit and are the agreements that I, they are because of the breakdowns that occurred. By not having those agreements

Marty: And just to reiterate, I know we said this before, but I think it makes a different kind of sense now to reiterate that the point isn't to have everything agreed upon.

Marty: The point is to agree upon enough that we then can move. We can move freely inside of there. We don't have agreements. Then we can't get creative. We can't experiment. We can't explore or try new things or have a surprise

Bill: Speaking of surprises, I just looked at the clock and realized what time it is.

Bill: And I'm 2 minutes away from an agreement that I made. Okay. With a client. So on that note, let's go ahead and end for today. Thank you. Great conversation. When we lose track of time like this, that's a, that's pretty good indication that we've had a great, great conversation.

Bill: I've enjoyed it as always, Marty. You too. Bye. Bye.