See Before You Solve - Episode: 034
Guys have an innate desire to solve. Especially when our wife is struggling. The problem is, she doesn't need our solutions. She needs us to see her. Connect with her. Today's podcast will teach you why our initial reaction is to fix her problems, and exactly how to change that reaction so we can understand and support her instead. Tune in to learn about the power of 'seeing before solving' and why it will strengthen your bond with your spouse.
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. Alright, what's up guys? Episode number 34. Happy Halloween. Hope you guys are having a joyful, celebratory Halloween.
Speaker 1
Our daughter has changed costumes three times in the last five days, so we've been rolling with that and Halloween has a special place in our story, and by our I mean mine and Brenda's story. We met on Halloween in Vale. You can picture Ski Town Bar on Halloween, our mid-twenties Pretty different scene than what our Halloween is going to look like this year with kids. But yeah, we met on Halloween. I was Marty McFly, brenda was Green Grapes. Everyone wants to know what we were. My Marty McFly costume was spot on. Brenda doesn't even really know about Back to the Future at that point and she still got the costume, so that says something. Yeah, I'm not going to get into it too much, but I think one important thing to note is that I have caught Brenda up on the importance of Back to the Future and that's one of my favorite movies One, two and Three. You can kind of debate. If Three was good, but I think it wrapped up the series really well.
Speaker 1
Okay, this is part two of our three-part series on relationships, and I said this last time. I'm going to use the words wife and marriage, but the concepts apply to any kind of partnership. Whatever type of relationship you're in, use the information, the strategies that I'm going to share for your situation. I'm in this workout group called F3, and it's actually more than a workout group. There's a leadership component to it and the leadership program that they have is really dialed and there's some funny words in it and sometimes it's confusing, but the content, how they bring you through the leadership journey to being a virtuous leader is what they call. It is pretty solid and the first part is getting yourself right physically, mentally, understanding yourself, making sure you're fit, ready to take on the day. The second part that we work on is our relationship with our wife, and they have this concentrica it's what they call it and you can picture it target, like an archery target, and in the middle of that target is our relationship with our wife, and then the next relationships are our kids, and then outside of that is work, and then community. Community might go first, then work? I don't really know. But the most important thing is wife is in the center and that relationship, the quality of it, ripples out into the rest of our life. So this is a relationship we really wanna work on and that's why we're doing three episodes on it.
Speaker 1
And how we communicate in our relationship is going to make a big difference in the success and the health of the relationship. And last week we talked about how to care. When we wanna communicate that we love our wife, that we care for our wife, are we doing it in a way that lands with them? And we talked about love languages. You don't have to go back and listen or have heard that episode to hear what I'm gonna talk about today. But that was a communication thing.
Speaker 1
And this week we're gonna talk about something else that breaks down in communication. And why we break down in communication is usually how our brain works on default. So by default, most guys don't think they're good at communicating and a lot goes unsaid because of that. We'll hold a lot in our brain, we'll hold a lot of emotions in our body without trying to communicate them out to our wife. That's one reason why we break down in communication because we don't communicate.
Speaker 1
Another reason is that we make a lot of assumptions and we're in a relationship that we've been in for many years. We've been through multiple situations that are very similar. We've had conversations over and over that are very similar. So we assume that our wife is gonna feel or think a certain way about a scenario. So, for example, a lot of husbands have wives that struggle with their relationship with their in-laws, so the husband's parents. So anytime there's a conversation to be had about planning something with the husband's family, the husband comes into that conversation with all the past baggage of these are difficult conversations, because she doesn't like hanging out with these people and she would rather be doing something else. And how am I gonna navigate this conversation, all of those thoughts and assumptions? When a husband brings that to the table, he's gonna start off on this defensive side and he needs to get ahead and he needs to prove something or finagle this, and you're not on the same team In that situation. So our assumptions that our brain makes, that our brain holds on to, can get in the way of communicating well, and one of the assumptions that the brain likes to make a lot is that we need to solve our wife's problem or our wife's issue. So the problem with that is that if we go right into solving mode, it doesn't work. We're not going to solve the issue in the moment.
Speaker 1
And if you go back and listen to episode number five, I talk about how guys go into fix-it mode. So it's a good episode to listen to again. But a big thing here is that when we solve right away, we think our solution, we got it, we know what they should do. 99% of the time it's not the solution that our wife is going to need, and it's the same for us. If we come home from work and we're pissed off about something that happened with an email and an employee whatever and our wife right away says, well, next time you could email this way, or maybe you should have emailed it this way and dives right into trying to fix not helpful, that's not what we want to hear in the moment. So it's the same thing with our wife. When we try to solve right away, it disconnects us from our wife, and I said this in the last episode. People want to be seen and they want to be heard.
Speaker 1
So today we're going to talk about seeing before we solve, and an example is this one guy I was talking to. His wife missed a soccer game for his daughter. She had to work and she wasn't able to make it. And later that night she was just telling him how she was bummed about it and his first reaction was to fix the problem. Oh well, one, you don't have to be too worried about it. It wasn't that important of a game. I don't think she noticed. There'll be so many other games coming up and next time you can delegate work or here's another option of so you don't have to work on a Saturday. And when he goes right there to help the wife not feel disappointed anymore, it doesn't go well. The conversation doesn't go in a direction that connects them more, and this happens with so many guys, and I coach guys on this one-on-one all the time and when we're in groups we talk about it and commiserate with each other about it.
Speaker 1
Why do we have this innate desire to solve really quickly? And one guy even said when my wife tells me that something's wrong, it sounds like a cry for help and there's a big, maybe primal, part of us that doesn't want our wife to feel an uncomfortable emotion. They're having a hard time with something and we're a dude and we want to fix it right away. It's our quick reaction and it's something that doesn't create the relationship that we want. We want to start seeing before we solve.
Speaker 1
Two years ago, I was doing my year-end review. So every year I do a year-end review, I look back over the past 365 days and then I also look forward. What do I wanna keep doing? What do I wanna change to create a better year than the year I just had? And when I was doing this two years ago, one of the last questions I asked myself is what story do I wanna start believing this year? And my story was it's okay for Brenda to be unhappy sometimes and it sounds kind of funny, but that's the story I wanted to tell myself, because the year before, brenda's mom had some health issues. She was going through some work stuff that was difficult for her, and this story allowed me to let Brenda have uncomfortable emotions of frustration, of sadness, of disappointment, and giving her that space, I could see her before I solved any of that stuff. Some of it was stuff I really couldn't solve. I was there to be an ear and to be that person that validated the emotions that she was feeling. So how do we do it? How do we see before we solve?
Speaker 1
Our first reaction in any situation is usually an emotional reaction from our subconscious. Our subconscious is all about being automatic. It's about being efficient. It's taking past evidence and using it to predict what's about to happen to us. So in this case we have the temptation to solve our emotional subconscious reaction. When our wife is speaking to us about something that's a problem in her life, our emotional reaction is to solve. So the first thing we have to do if we're trying to get better at communicating and wanting to see before we solve, is to get really aware of the urge to solve. And that urge can feel like your jaw wanting to open and words wanting to come out of your mouth. It is noticing in your brain that I wanna fix this, that there's something wrong. First step, being aware of that and stopping yourself in the conversation and just letting there be silence. That's the first step to seeing, is noticing yourself wanting to solve, then stopping that.
Speaker 1
And then what is seeing mean? It means listening, and I don't know what grade your kids are in, but my daughter's in kindergarten and she's practicing whole body listening. So we listen with our ears. We listen with our eyes by making eye contact. We listen with our body, by keeping our body still and maybe facing who we're talking to, and maybe there's other parts of whole body listening.
Evolving Relationships and Communication
Speaker 1
But the point is that all your focus is on your wife. If you want to see somebody, you put your focus there and you can ask questions and you use words like I get it. You validate their experience. If we loop back to the example of the guy's wife that was disappointed for missing the soccer game, he went right into solve mode telling her that it wasn't that big of a deal and telling her how she might fix it later the next time, seeing his wife in that moment would have been staying quiet and just acknowledging that she was disappointed and saying back to her I get it, yeah, it wasn't that big of a game, but I understand it was a nice day out and you would have liked to have been there and you probably didn't want to work instead that kind of sucks. I'm sorry you missed it. That's validating her experience, her experience of disappointment. You're seeing her. This takes some practice. You can work on it.
Speaker 1
The first thing is becoming aware of all that's happening inside of you, becoming aware of that urge to solve and slowing that down and listening. Something that's worked really well for me is, if Brenda and I are talking and she presents something to me that she's having a hard time with, I'll just ask do you want to commiserate here and just want an ear to listen, or is this something you want to solve and work through? Asking that question upfront it helps, it creates this evolution in our relationship, because that's the big thing. This is a big one for guys. They try to solve before they see.
Speaker 1
Our relationship, the way it was when we were married, isn't the same as it is when we have kids. Our relationship is going to keep evolving and if our relationship is going to evolve, we need to evolve along with it. As a guy learning to allow our wife to have some uncomfortable emotions, see her, connect with her and then work together to solve on it, I want to say it's a game changer or it's really powerful, but the bottom line is it's just what it takes to create a solid relationship and a successful relationship. Try it out, guys. Try to see before you solve. I'm going to catch you on the next week's episode to wrap up this three-part series on relationships.
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