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The Reload with Sean Hansen
The Reload with Sean Hansen
The Impact of Appreciation on Professional and Personal Bonds - 210
Can the simple act of showing appreciation transform your relationships? Discover the profound impact of gratitude as we unpack the often overlooked habit of taking others for granted. We explore how our biases and double standards can lead to misunderstandings and erode trust. Learn how aligning your actions with your intentions can build stronger, more reliable connections both personally and professionally.
Unlock the secrets to nurturing relationships with consistent appreciation. Find out why fatigue, not laziness, often prevents us from expressing gratitude and how this oversight can negatively impact our connections. As we move from initial excitement to more established dynamics, we'll share actionable tips for reducing fatigue and maintaining conscious efforts to recognize and appreciate the contributions of those around us. Avoid dissatisfaction and foster a more positive environment by addressing unspoken expectations and roles.
Maintaining relationships requires regular, genuine expressions of gratitude. We highlight the importance of small, consistent gestures over grand, infrequent ones, and examine how the effort itself is what truly matters. From handwritten notes acknowledging employee birthdays to structured appreciation methods, learn why it's essential to water your relationship "plants" regularly. Simplify your life for better relationship maintenance and see how small, consistent efforts can have a lasting impact on your personal and professional life. Tune in and transform how you nurture the connections that matter most!
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the Reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high-performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. Okay, welcome back. Okay, welcome back. And today I thought it would be useful for us to look at continued expressions of appreciation. Now, why is that? Well, largely because in a lot of my coaching sessions of late, a number of my clients have expressed concerns about being taken for granted or feeling like that, and, in more limited instances, recognizing where they might be doing the same. Now, so frequently, when we look at this notion of being taken for granted, we are very apt to identify where we are the recipient of that, and we are generally quite challenged to recognize where we are doing that to other people.
Speaker 1:By and large, humans tend to regard themselves in a more virtuous way than they do other people. There's this expression in coaching that we judge ourselves by our intentions and we judge others by their actions. Why is that? Well, because quite frequently we are very myopic and also we are filtering our world through our own perceptive lenses and just in a more point-blank way, we know what our intention is, or at least we think we know, and we don't generally know what the other person's intention is. Or if we do know, then we don't necessarily believe. Somebody tells us they have a good intention, but the action that they are engaging in feels hurtful to us or slighting to us in some way. Then we are very quick to challenge the veracity of that person's stated intention Because to us it feels harmful in some way. Now, whether a little or a lot, that varies. But ultimately this general principle of oh well, you said you had good intention, but I don't know that doesn't feel good to me what you're doing and so therefore your intention must actually not be good, and then we immediately write off or discount the fact that maybe they're trying and they're just flubbing it somehow or potentially we don't recognize the benefit that they see in the action that they're committing, because we're not seeing the full picture.
Speaker 1:So there is often this sort of one-sided approach that individuals take, and part of my job, part of the job, is to help people effectively recognize where it is that they are also engaging in behavior that they would criticize, so that we can begin to recognize where double standards exist and we can begin to eliminate those double standards, so that we actually show up with greater alignment, greater integrity between what we say is important, or what we say we're going to do, and how we actually go about doing it. Why is that important? Well, one, it builds trust in self and reliability in self. Secondly, it also builds trust in other people. There are very few things that kill leadership authority like hypocrisy or double standards of any kind, whether those are applied internally or they're applied externally. So to me, it's often very important for people to recognize that whenever they lodge a complaint about somebody else, that we do turn that pointing finger back around and start to recognize okay, well, where are you doing the same thing and not acknowledging it.
Speaker 1:So for today's conversation discussion presentation I don't know what you call it, it's a one-sided conversation. What do you want me to say? Let's try to keep in mind that anything that I say can be applied in both directions. Additionally, what are we looking at today? Well, we're looking at relationships, and oftentimes I think people kind of get stuck on. Well, is this podcast aimed at business leaders, or is it aimed at everyday people and sort of the family or romantic relationships that they have? The answer is yes, all the above, and the reason for that is because the principles and the concepts are broadly applicable. Now is it going to be the case that everything that comes out of my mouth is going to be universally applicable to both the professional setting and the personal setting? No, of course not. But I strive, both in these episodes and in my coaching sessions, to help people begin to recognize where there is commonality of the concept and how it is. They might go about extrapolating or cross-referencing the conceptual elements so that they can apply them effectively in whatever the setting might be. So again, let's try to keep that also as context for how this particular discussion unfolds.
Speaker 1:Now all right on to the main event Taking people for granted. Over time, why do the people who we say matter most to us often get the least from us? The end result is often connected to taking someone for granted. Now, if we look at that phrase and again we're going to the dictionary why? Because we want to define terms so that we can actually have clarity in what we mean and we have a foundational understanding of what is this conceptual exploration going to entail? Now, if we look at take for granted, it is defined as to assume something as true, real, unquestionable or to be expected. And the second definition to value something or someone too lightly, to fail to properly notice or appreciate someone or something that should be valued. So those are our two working definitions here, right, assuming that something is real, unquestionable or to be expected, and then valuing something too lightly, really failing to notice or appreciate properly. Now, where does that come from? Is it because we're lazy? Is it because we're tired? Is it because we are habituated to a certain condition or a certain environment? Is it because we're distracted? Is it all the above?
Speaker 1:Now, generally, the types of folks that I work with are real go-getters. They're always attempting to do more, do more, do more, do more. You get the idea. And so, yes, there is a high degree of distraction, and one of the elements that we try to work on in our sessions and over the course of the engagement is this concept of, or this theme of, less but better. I may be doing less or trying to accomplish less, but I am driving more things to completion, or I'm having a greater sense of quality in the objectives and features heavily in in the lives of every single one of my clients, and I believe that in today's culture, especially with various apps and having our mobile devices on us 24 7 and you know, there is no shortage for distraction and we have to actively work against what has become normal in our modern day environment and that's where you get things like notification, silencing. You have focus hours or deep work hours or various apps that control access to other apps, like social media apps and just basic media apps.
Speaker 1:We often kind of in some circles, vilify social media as being this giant time suck and distraction source and yet we fail to recognize that the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, or I'm blanking out on other key periodicals at the moment but some of these other sources for news are equally distracting and that are also equally capable of hijacking our emotions. You know, at this point it's no surprise to many people that when we speak about newspapers or, you know, news sources, there is this saying if it bleeds, it leads, meaning that anything that is attempting to get your attention is quite likely going to do so by tapping into some sort of emotional response and conflict or tragedy. Those things tend to grab human attention the most because they are connected to sense of scarcity, the fear of missing out, the sense that you have to pay attention to this, otherwise it's going to turn into an emergency for you. And so, generally, organisms across the globe are much more focused on where they might be harmed rather than where they might gain. It's not that they don't want to gain, it's that, disproportionately, we are motivated by avoiding punishment or loss of some sort. So we're in this place of great distraction, and we have to work to actively counter that if we're going to have relationships that have genuine appreciation and where we maintain a quality level of continued expression of appreciation for one another.
Speaker 1:What about habituation? Habituation, I think, really lends itself towards that second definition to value too lightly, to fail to properly notice someone or something that should be valued, and so it's not even a matter of are we failing to act. It's we're failing to even notice. And just as you can become habituated to a repetitive noise, just as you can become habituated to the smells of your household. For instance, when people have pets, they often lose sight of the fact that their home smells a certain way. And I'm not saying it's bad. I'm also not saying it's good. I'm just saying that there is a certain type of smell. Or, if you tend to use certain spices in your cooking, over time, your olfactory senses tend to just lose sight of this, fail to notice that there is a particular scent signature in your home because you have become habituated to it, and this is true for any number of environmental stimuli.
Speaker 1:Part of the ancestral reasoning behind that, at least as far as I've been able to discern in my research, is that if you are an organism that is still in the wild and you are still a party to the sort of predator and prey cycles, what you are attempting to do is you are attempting to identify changes in your environment, because it's the changes in your environment that most likely indicate the presence of a predator, for instance, that you might need to evade, or that might indicate that food sources are dwindling or water sources are dwindling, and so it's the change from status quo that most often gathers our attention or holds our attention. So, when it comes to a relationship, you might be wondering okay, well, how does that apply? Well, quite often, if we're thinking about how you know, why is it that I'm taking somebody for granted. Or, you know, we can just flip that around and also say why do I feel like I'm being taken for granted? Oftentimes it's because the environment has sort of stabilized into some sort of status quo, and that also happens.
Speaker 1:You know, when I look at professional teams, one of the things that I've noticed is that oftentimes there is a tacit level of acceptance for the person that's kind of grumpy and difficult to work with, and oftentimes what ends up happening is the person that's difficult to work with gets less and less work assigned to them. They're not, they're not coached up, they're not trained, they're not confronted or fired even, they're just kind of bypassed because the team, the group, has started to recognize oh okay, yeah, that's grumpy Gus or whatever. I mean no offense to the Gus's out in the world and we're just going to go around grumpy Gus, because grumpy Gus is a pain in the ass to work with and it just becomes a fixture in that team environment. And likewise, one of the examples that you could also look at is the star pupil in the family. Oh well, susan always gets straight A's. So then, if she ever brings home a B+, all of a sudden, we're shocked and there's this tone of failure. Why didn't you get an A? I mean, you always get A's. What's wrong with you? Whereas if you have a child that's sort of the C student and they bring home a B+, then all of a sudden it's like, wow, great job.
Speaker 1:So habituation really does serve to robustly, and often unconsciously, influence what it is that we notice and what stands out to us as either success or failure, what should be appreciated versus criticized, for instance. Now, what about lazy or tired? Very few of my clients are lazy, but many of them are tired, and they're usually tired because of the fact that they are taking on so much. And part of that work, then, is to try to take a look at where might you pare back so that you don't feel so overextended all the time, so that you don't feel so overextended all the time, and that this game of appreciation is often a game of little details, and I'll talk more about that later on. But, ultimately, if you are so busy and so fatigued all the time which most of my clients report that as their status quo then it's very unlikely that you are going to be going the extra mile, so to speak, to offer appreciation to the people around you. Now, why do we care? Why do we care about this effort of offering continued expression of appreciation? Well, for starters, the relationship really suffers when we fail to do this. Not at first, because oftentimes we're kind of coasting on inertia.
Speaker 1:Generally, if you look at the evolution of a relationship, you have two people that don't know each other. They get into a relationship and, whether that is a romantic relationship or whether that is, you just hired somebody new onto your team or you are the new hire on a team, and in the beginning everybody's sort of operating on first date behavior. And then, as people begin to get a greater understanding of one another and there's more history being laid down in the relationship, we start to have certain expectations being served up, sometimes met, sometimes not met. We have more and more water under the bridge, so to speak, and sometimes those experiences are going to be positive and sometimes they're going to be negative. And sometimes, you know, the vast majority of the experiences are just kind of neutral and forgotten about. But in either case, this relationship stops being on first date behavior.
Speaker 1:As we become more intimate with one another and that's not sexual, that's just, you know, we're getting to know each other better and we're establishing that track record and we're also starting to establish those expectations and those sort of identities, especially on a team, that are being filled. You know, this is my go-getter rock star. You may have more than one. This is my problem child. You may have more than one. These are my steady, consistent performers. That don't, you know, don't dazzle anybody, but they're solid. You know workhorses, so to speak, and you know. And same thing with families. We have certain roles that get fulfilled in a family, and it's not that the roles and identities can't shift, but recognizing, yeah, okay, this is how this relationship tends to evolve over time.
Speaker 1:Now, the issue here is that if we're not paying attention to how the relationship is evolving whether that's in a team setting or a one-on-one setting doesn't matter well then we often end up in a position that we never expected and that if we had been asked about it in the beginning, we would most likely have said no, I would prefer not to end up at that destination. But if we're not careful about how the relationship is unfolding and we're not careful about the care and watering and pruning of the relationship behaviors, well then we often end up in a pretty ineffective place, and that place is often characterized by resentment. The person in the context of today's theme, the person being taken for granted, starts to build up a lot of resentment, and then that resentment spills back into the relationship and then the person doing the taking for granted starts to recognize oh gosh, you know why is this person now giving me bad attitude? And then it goes from taking somebody for granted to then really having judgment about their negativity or their lack of quality, output and whatever right. So there's this unvirtuous cycle, this destructive cycle, where you start taking some person A takes person B for granted.
Speaker 1:Eventually, person B starts to notice that and instead of I mean obviously one of the solutions is to ask and say hey, you know, I've noticed that it doesn't seem like you appreciate some of the stuff that I'm doing. Am I seeing it correctly or am I misinterpreting what's going on here? That would be, you know, that would be a pretty mature and highly evolved thing to do. But in many instances we don't do that. First off, because we don't notice it right away. Secondly, because once we do start to notice it, we think, oh well, maybe it's just us and we're misperceiving things. But instead of asking whether we're misperceiving, we just kind of we don't address it because we're you know, we're worried that we're going to be the weird one out. And then you know, and then from there we do really notice a trend, but we still don't ask about it. We just then get pissed off.
Speaker 1:And so once person B is pissed off and then their performance starts to suffer or they start to offer some sort of passive, aggressive, retort behavior, then person A the person doing the taking for granted then all of a sudden is in this place of like well, yeah, they really aren't that good. It's really not that fun to be in a relationship with this person, whether it's a working relationship or a personal relationship. And then now the relationship is suffering even more. Additionally, when it comes to how the relationship can suffer, when we're taking somebody for granted, we are often pigeonholing them. And if you have been taken for granted, you may very much feel like you have been pigeonholed. And if you have been taken for granted, you may very much feel like you have been pigeonholed. This person doesn't see the value that I can offer. They only come to me for blank. There's more that I can give, more that I want to give.
Speaker 1:And likewise, if we flip that around and we look at you being the person who's doing the taking for granted. You're failing to maximize the potential of what can be accomplished. You're not seeing where it is that perhaps a team member or a subordinate or a partner can enrich the experience. Now that could be interpersonally, or it could also be, you know, in meeting market demands or customer inquiries, or you know what have you developing new product strategies? The list is endless.
Speaker 1:But when we disconnect ourselves from really truly appreciating someone else, we also were simultaneously disconnecting ourselves from the curiosity and the noticing of what this person is capable of and, furthermore, what they may have grown into over time. Maybe initially they didn't have a certain skill set, but because we sort of went on autopilot and stopped noticing them, we've failed to recognize that they've leveled up. So how do we begin to get ourselves back in touch with that? How do we begin to have questions based in curiosity? What's exciting for you? What's motivating, what's inspiring? How have your perspectives changed? What new skills for you? What's motivating, what's inspiring? How have your perspectives changed? What new skills have you added, maybe in your own time? Or what have some of these challenging experiences that we've gone through done to affect or inform your development, and the dreaded where do you see yourself in five years? Question right, but not from the perspective of this is going to affect your trajectory inside of the company and obviously that question is probably less germane on the personal side of things. But if you're asking a fellow team member, or even if you're asking a subordinate, this question about you know, where do you see yourself in the future? It doesn't have to be five years, but you know this notional version of tomorrow and getting the conversation oriented around, yeah, what's possible, not simply what we have come to expect.
Speaker 1:I want to talk a little bit more about this notion of falling short of potential. Successful endeavors require discretionary effort and without solid relationships we don't achieve the full potential of what we can build together. Going back to that, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. There's this notion that we humans have come together into tribes, clans, nations, teams, groups, whatever you want to call it from the beginning of our evolutionary pathway, because we were able to accomplish more. Because we were able to accomplish more, we were able to create generally more success for a greater number of individuals than if somebody was doing it alone.
Speaker 1:Power structures and authority structures that have been experimented with throughout the course of human history in terms of how much consolidation of power in one person is accepted in a group before the rest of the group thinks, oh, this is unfair, this is an inequitable structure, and then you have some sort of revolt against that. So it's not to say that we don't have leaders that sometimes take more of the benefits disproportionately, on sort of a case-by-case basis. That does exist, but typically those structures are still predicated on the fact that the majority perceives itself to be better off working together than everybody being out for themselves alone. So when you're looking at this continued expression of appreciation, and where that serves as a real benefit, is that when we pepper in this expression of appreciation on a regular basis, what we're doing is we're creating goodwill, and this wave of goodwill leads towards people feeling appreciated, duh, and that in turn creates a more likely setting for discretionary effort. Moreover, what it also does is it creates, it greases the channels of communication, especially in relationships that are going to have some challenges, whether it's because the incentives are misaligned.
Speaker 1:For instance, if you look at, oftentimes, the arguments between a sales department and an operations department. One of the very common critiques is that sales writes checks that ops has to deliver on, and so then there's all these squabbles back and forth between the sales department and the ops department about. You know well, sales is making promises that are too big and ops, well, all you need to do is just, you know, work more efficiently to meet the demands of the customer, and if you want us to stay in business, then you're going to do what sales has to say. You know it's a sort of a very common argument in many organizations, but if we recognize that a relationship is going to have some baked in difficulties and misalignments, it becomes even more important to have expressions of appreciation so that that goodwill can be maintained and that everybody continues to want to work together to achieve the grander vision. Now, additionally, if we are not doing this appreciation expression, we often have churn People leave, and especially generally, the people that leave are the ones that you want to leave the least.
Speaker 1:They are your high performers, they are the ones with options, and if they begin to feel like they're being taken for granted or they're underappreciated, they are generally the ones that have other places to go. Now, when we look at, I guess, on a more individual level. One of the things that costs an individual in this scenario where they have taken others for granted and then all of a sudden find themselves with relationships that have been severely corroded is you lose time trying to patch things up corroded is you lose time trying to patch things up. So, instead of investing a little bit of time as you go, you end up typically having to spend disproportionately more time trying to make things right. But by then there is often not always, not always, but there is often a permanent shift in the other party's perspective. It's soured them and they are no longer as willing to work together and there's often, I guess you would say, a lack of a lack of trust, because then they're going to start to look for when the other shoe is going to drop or when you're going to revert back to the way that you were previously.
Speaker 1:So there is some, I guess, residual relationship cost and oftentimes reputational cost that comes with failing to express appreciation for people on an ongoing basis and generally. You know, as one of my friends from the military used to say, it's easier to stay in shape than get in shape, and while he meant that from a physical readiness perspective. I think that that expression is pretty applicable here as well. And where is it that we can engage in little expressions of gratitude, little expressions of well, I've said it over and over again appreciation, right? Instead of having to make these sort of colossal big gestures? And the funny thing about the person that focuses on big gestures is that those big gestures often feel much more labor intensive and, oddly enough, we do them less because we feel like it's going to be harder or it's going to take more time, even though we might think that the impact will be greater.
Speaker 1:And what's interesting for me to observe is that in many of the sessions where I've worked with clients who have received some of these scarce or sparse but large demonstrations of appreciation is, it often doesn't land the way that the giver of that expression of appreciation intended. So here it is the, you know the, the person that was formerly taking person B for granted. So person A taking person B for granted, and person A is like oh God, I have. You know, it's been a long time since I've expressed any appreciation. I'm going to do something big and they're they're going to just be dazzled by what I'm, but by this expression of appreciation and quite frequently the person B is kind of like eh, yeah, okay, thanks, but it doesn't make up for the months or I mean in certain cases, years of lacking appreciation.
Speaker 1:You might be thinking to yourself years. What are you talking about, sean? Who's going to hang around in a relationship for years? Feeling unappreciated Happens more than you think, and if it's not you congratulations. Hopefully that means that you're standing up for yourself and your value and that you're also communicating in a mature and collegial way where it is that you see gaps that you would like to address and, of course, that you're also open to the other person or the other party expressing back to you where maybe they feel like they're being taken for granted. But I digress. So what are we going to do about this taking people for granted thing or being taken for granted?
Speaker 1:Well, for starters, continue to express appreciation for what you see going well, especially if it's the little things. Noticing the little things shows that you are paying attention and, as I just went through, there are far more opportunities to appreciate the little things than waiting for the big things to come along, and that creates a virtuous cycle. It brings it more to the forefront of our attention. Going back to that whole distraction, habituation thing that I was talking about earlier, when you make an effort and in the beginning it will most likely feel like an effort to notice little things and to express appreciation for those little things. But if you make that effort and you continue to make the effort, it will turn into your quote, unquote new normal and then you will start to think oh well, this is just. You know how much I love that word, but in this case I think it's appropriate. This is just how we do things.
Speaker 1:But what's interesting is the teams or the individuals that have made these transitions. They had another status quo that was in that place originally and it had to be replaced consciously and with real effort. But then, once that transition was made, they began to recognize oh yeah, this feels way better. And when I express appreciation for somebody and granted, sometimes we do actually have to have a clarifying conversation saying, hey, I've noticed that I haven't really expressed a lot of appreciation for the things that you do around here. I'm going to make a conscious effort to do more of this. If you want to join me in this, that would be great, because even though I may be the boss, or I may be your partner like romantic partner, or I may be the parent in this relationship, whatever, it also feels good and it is reaffirming and enforcing or reinforcing for me to hear the same from you. Can we work together to create a relationship dynamic where we are more tuned into expressing little bits of appreciation for each other? So it may require that clarifying conversation, but when you have that and then that becomes the new normal, it feels good and people have a greater sense of enthusiasm for showing up to that relationship and for taking care of the relationship and taking care of each other, so that when discretionary effort is required it doesn't feel burdensome. The person isn't grating their teeth, thinking I have to watch out for this person's back again. I really don't like this person very much. They're always taking me for granted because they're filled with resentment, right, but instead they're filled with a sense of gratitude for the relationship. They're happy to do us a favor because they know that you would be, that we would be happy to do a favor for them. So it does create this virtuous cycle. You know there's this.
Speaker 1:If you want to think about it from a metaphorical perspective, expressing appreciation for the little things is like the mortar in between the bricks in a brick wall. The mortar is actually a very small part of the brick wall in comparison to the big bricks, but it's actually what holds the wall together. If all you had was a wall of big bricks stacked on top of one another, it would fall over very, very easily because the bricks aren't being held together by the little things, in this case, appreciation, or you could also a common phrase, phrase in coaching is little hinges, swing, big doors and all of these. You know these, these two different metaphors are really there to help us put our attention on the fact that little things can be very, very important, but they're easy to overlook because they are so small and they, at face value, seem insignificant, but in reality, they are the roots of how a relationship is held together.
Speaker 1:Now, what else can we do in terms of expressing appreciation? Make specific comments instead of generalized ones. Hey, you're great. Okay, cool, I mean, I guess most people would rather hear that than you suck, but in either case, actually it's not that helpful a comment I'm great. Why, in what context? How do you know what made you say that?
Speaker 1:You know and oftentimes I reflect on my experience as a husband and there have been many instances where I've told my wife, you look great and she turns and looks at me and says, oh, why? And many a time, I hate to admit, but many a time, I was just trying to say something nice. Now I actually do believe that she looks great, but I didn't, I didn't put enough forethought into saying, oh well, you look great because I don't know, uh, that that dress really suits your curvature, or I really like the way the color of your your top brings out the color of your eyes or whatever. I mean you get the idea. So when we make comments again, whether it's a critique comment, especially relevant in a critique comment, or whether it's in a complimentary fashion, being specific, tying it to something specific how has that something specific impacted us or is impacting us? And if it's going to be in a negative or critique comment vein, how do you see it being improved? Don't just flip a negative comment at somebody or critique at someone without also expressing what the impact has been and how you could see it potentially playing out differently. And for a lot of you you might think gosh dang. You know this is, this is a lot, sean, you know like I'm busy. You even talked about how busy we are at the beginning of the show. Yeah, I did, and you are busy.
Speaker 1:And I coached a CEO once, you know years ago, and part of his appreciation strategy was and this was just part of it but he would have his assistant remind him of people's birthdays in his department or in his company and he would send them short handwritten notes. And it was interesting. He was very critical of himself for doing that because he felt that he should somehow know it on his own. He should just somehow natively be paying attention to people's birthdays. And I asked him well, the people that you're writing these notes for and the people you know who are receiving these notes, do they seem happy about getting the notes? And he said yes. And so then I asked well, do you feel like if they knew that your assistant helps you stay on top of these things and to keep track of these things, do you think that they would care? Do you think it would mean less to them Because you're still taking the time to write the note? Right? And he said, yeah, I guess they wouldn't care. I mean, a few people know that this is how things get done and they don't seem to care.
Speaker 1:I was like, okay, well, so then scheduling it or having it in your task manager or having your assistant help you stay on top of this? I don't know. That doesn't seem like cheating to me of this. I don't know. That doesn't seem like cheating to me. That seems like you're taking it seriously and you're making sure that you don't drop the ball. Now you may disagree, in which case feel free.
Speaker 1:I certainly do not have all the answers here, and nor am I attempting to create a show that just tells you what to do. I'm ultimately trying to present thoughts that you can work through on your own and decide what fits best for you. But if you recognize that there is value in this notion of continued appreciation, and to the extent that it's not an ingrained habit yet, well then it might be really effective to have some sort of structure that helps you stay on top of it. Now, why is it that some people don't express appreciation?
Speaker 1:And this is something I've run into numerous times, especially in coaching leadership individuals, and there are two main cases I guess that I've seen. One is there's a stance that the person who is doing the taking for granted. They have this idea that, well, this is table stakes. They have this idea that, well, this is table stakes. What my employee is doing or, in some cases, what my spouse is doing or it usually shows up in those two contexts is the minimum. And so it's interesting because there again, they're taking something for granted. You know that what the person is contributing to the relationship is the bare minimum that they should be doing anyway.
Speaker 1:And so there's this baked in expectation that, well, of course, this person is going to behave this way. If they weren't, they'd be gone. And that may be true, whether it's in a personal context or a professional context. There may be a minimum expectation of performance, otherwise that person is going to be exited from your life. Like, for instance, in a romantic setting. I think most people have a baseline expectation that their partner is not going to physically harm them on a daily basis and that if the person was physically harming them on a daily basis, then the relationship would end. I think that's a pretty blatant example that nobody's going to disagree with, or very few people are going to disagree with.
Speaker 1:And so, yes, there can be these baseline expectations, and it doesn't mean that we can't show appreciation that the baseline has been met, because think about all the relationships that you've had over the course of your life where the baseline wasn't met. Does that then maybe foster a little bit more appreciation for when it is met? You know, I've had a lot of conversations with my clients about how hard it is for them to find quote unquote good help these days, and I don't know if it's and I don't know if there's ever been a day where it was easy to find good help. But I mean, that sort of addresses the point. Then, this notion of okay, well, if the baseline is being met and we put it in the frame of reference of how many times the baseline is not met, well then then yeah, I think I would want to show appreciation for that, because there are a lot of cases in which it doesn't happen and we end up experiencing a lot of frustration because the baseline is not even met. So that's the first instance.
Speaker 1:And then the second instance that I've seen the most is there's a perception that the recipient of our appreciation will start to slack off in some way. Can that happen? Of course, yes, it can happen, and we might have to have a conversation with that person about expectation management. However, from what I have observed in my own relationships and from what individuals have relayed back to me, it seems that this, you know, oh well, they'll just slack off if I show my appreciation doesn't happen that frequently and that more likely that virtuous cycle that I was talking about before does happen, that I was talking about before does happen. Now again, you may need to say, hey, I really appreciate how you've been behaving or how you've been getting things in on time, or whatever the behavior is that you want to appreciate, and I've noticed that it seems like it's started to slack off a little bit. What's going on? So we may be in a position where we do have to do a little bit of a check-in, do a little bit of a status check and again, those cycles of habituation, distraction, tiredness, laziness can happen with the other party as well. And I think that takes me to my final point.
Speaker 1:Here is this notion that you know what is the expression? Relationships are like plants If you want them to grow or to stay healthy, you have to water them, which means you have to maintain them. So anything that you have in your life that you take for granted and don't maintain will most likely suffer. Now, it may take a while for it to suffer. Like we're using metaphors here, if all you have are succulents, they can go a long time without water, but eventually they need water too. Can go a long time without water, but eventually they need water too.
Speaker 1:And so, looking at your relationships, where is it that you are not maintaining them? Do all relationships need the same degree of maintenance? Probably not. So you get to take a look at the rubric of your relationships and you get to make a decision about how much maintenance. And what does that maintenance look like from person to person or group to group, and you can create different periodicity in terms of how frequently you check in, how frequently you express appreciation, how frequently you physically connect, over dinner, over drinks, whatever.
Speaker 1:But recognizing that the more that you have in your life, the more challenging it is to make sure that you are staying up on these care and maintenance and quote-unquote watering cycles, which again takes us back to that notion of less but better. Notice I say less, not zero. Oftentimes, when I work with someone, they seem to think that what I'm advocating for is to live some sort of monastic lifestyle, and then you should go from being completely overscheduled and oversaturated to nothing, and that's not at all what I'm saying. But how can you pare it back to something that is more effective and healthier and less distracting and less fractured? Challenges for you to answer. If you wish so, if you've been enjoying the show, I would love it. If you would like, subscribe, follow, do all of the you know thumbs up type stuff on the internet and because obviously that's how the show grows and then share it with somebody that you think will benefit and dare I say, even maybe discuss it or don't. It's totally up to you. Until next time, take care of each other.
