Council Post: How Alchemizing Your Personal Relationships Can Help Your Business

Founder and CEO of Relationship Alchemy, helping high achievers be as successful in their relationships as they are at their work.

It’s happened to you, too, right? You’ve had a fight with your spouse, and now you’re in your office trying to concentrate on work, but you keep rehashing the conversation.

You’re distracted and ineffective for most of the day.

How many times per week does this happen? Per month? Per quarter?

The hidden factor boosting or sapping your and your employees’ productivity could be the state of your personal relationships.

In the past, we’ve been told to compartmentalize. To leave work at the office and home at home. But with so many of us working from home now, this advice no longer holds.

And I posit that it never worked in the first place.

To meet the challenges we’re currently facing, we now have to learn how to bring our whole selves to work and our whole selves to our relationships. Compartmentalizing is a relic of the past.

We’ve put years into education and training, learning how to do our work well, but how many of us have spent years learning how to do relationship well?

Some of the skills that we’ve developed to be successful in business serve us at home, like project management, but many don’t. No one wants a shark running around the house.

Conversely, the skills we develop at home serve us very well in our businesses. Here are three skills that you can work on developing at home, which may translate into becoming a better leader in your business:

Listening

A leader listens not for the next chance to insert a response but to understand.

Honing your listening skills at home by staying curious about what your partner is expressing and asking questions to draw out their thinking will help you draw out the best thinking from your team.

If your default is to tune out at home, or think you know all the answers, or talk over your partner, those habits are likely to follow you into your workplace. You may stress yourself out thinking everything is on your shoulders and your business will suffer as a result.

I find that the best leaders I work with know that listening with focused attention yields surprising and useful wisdom and also builds real connections, which we need in our lives to be happy.

Start From The ‘Same Team’

Notice if you have a default setting that says you have to do everything yourself or fight to be heard or get support. That default setting hurts you both at home and in your business.

Starting from the “same team” at home means pausing when you’re having a disagreement and asking, “If we approached this issue from the perspective of being on the same team, what would that look like?”

At this point, when my partner and I are fighting, one of us will stop and say, “Same team.” It’s become our shorthand to pause and look at the situation from the perspective of being on the same team instead of being adversaries. Doing so softens our conflicts and strengthens our bond.

By alchemizing our tendency to pick a position and fight to the death for it, we have the best chance of finding the most creative solution that serves the situation.

Fostering collaboration at home serves you in more effectively creating a climate of collaboration at work, where the best solutions win instead of the most dominant people.

Ask Directly For What You Want

It can be hard to ask for what you want in your relationship. It’s a very vulnerable position.

Instead, we tend to try to get what we want in covert and backdoor ways, which can create a resentful and mistrusting environment. Pretty soon, you start to grow apart.

Relationships usually work much better when each partner asks directly for what they want and sticks around to negotiate. It’s the foundation for truly adult relationships in which each partner is responsible for their own boundaries and for showing up ready to support one another in having what they want.

I find that if someone has trouble asking directly for what they want at home, they also have a hard time asking directly for a sale. Lack of skill in this arena directly impacts your bottom line.

Being able to ask directly for what you want, without apology or shame, also makes you much more likely to get it. You may become more trustworthy because you’re no longer trying to manipulate outcomes behind the scenes. Trustworthy people are able to build better business relationships, not just better personal ones.

Listening, starting from the same team and asking directly for what you want are three ways to practice alchemizing the challenges that typically arise in personal relationships that will serve you in your business.

Building a culture of collaboration and transparency in business is necessary for the next phase of our evolution. This kind of alchemy may start at home, but it changes the world.


Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?


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