The One You FeedHow to Build Better Relationships (Work and Personal) with Michael Bungay Stanier
In this episode, Michael Bungay Stanier explains keystone conversations and why this is vitally important in building the best possible relationships, both at work and in your personal life. Discover how these seemingly small conversations can lead to stronger, more collaborative, and more fulfilling connections. You’ll also learn:
- How any working or personal relationship can be made better
- Why it takes courage to initiate the invitation to work on a relationship that is important to you
- The 3 core elements of a relationship: safety, vitality, repairability
- Defining keystone conversations and why they’re so important in improving relationships
- How there is an important tension between safety and vitality
- How to look at problems in growth made instead of problem mode
- Why it’s important to make it safe to ask questions
- The importance of actively engaging in relationships so it doesn’t stagnate
To learn more, click here.
Hi everyone, I just wanted to share a quick note that Eric will be live on Instagram this Friday, July seventh at five pm Eastern time. He'll be joined by former guest and friend of the show, Ralph de la Rosa, and they'll be discussing the powerful effects that spending time in nature has on our mental health, how to connect mindfulness and nature and more. Be sure you are following us at one Underscore you underscore feed so that you can connect with Eric and Ralph live on Instagram this Friday, July seventh at five pm Eastern. We hope to see you there.
There's glory and routine and comfort and familiarity. It's like one of the great things of working relationships, which is just how comfortable that feels. And well, I know both of you might need more than that.
Wow, Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Bungay Stanier, whose book The Coaching Habit is the best selling coaching book of the century, with over a million copies sold. In twenty nineteen, he was named the number one thought leader in coaching. Michael found a Box of Krans, a learning and development company that helps organizations transform from advice driven to curiosity lead. He's the author of many books, including the one discussed here, How to Work with Almost Anyone. Five Questions for building the best possible Relationships.
Hi, Michael, Welcome to the show.
Eric, it's nice to be back. Thanks for having me.
I am happy to have you back, and we've actually been talking some in between interviews, so it feels like a conversation with a friend, which is always the best kind I was telling you before. Listeners, if you're watching this I'm wearing the brightest shirt I've ever worn in my life in honor of Michael, who's a pretty bright guy.
I'm wearing the dullest shirt I've ever worn in my life just to kind of fit with you, Eric exactly.
You're like, that guy is pretty bland. I better tear it down.
It's like, can I have something gray, please?
Now?
Even gray that please?
Literally, if I walked into my mom's hospital room right now and she saw me in this shirt, she might fall out of her bed because my color palette is like dark blue, gray, black, white. Yeah, I'll go skyblue a little bit.
If you're feeling really kind of punchy, well, you know, you're wearing a purple shirt, and purple is my favorite color. As a thirteen year old joining a high school, we were assigned houses and we were put into the purple house, and I'm like purple. It was a particularly ugly purple they had. But a mother of a friend of mine taught me how purple was the color of royalty in Romana. You know, they used to line the togas with this color, which was much rarer than gold because it was made by crushing tiny, tiny, tiny marine snails. So since that day, I'm like, okay, I'm just trying to, you know, make a buger feature. I don't like purple. It's now my favorite color, so I'm all in on the purple and you nailed it. So thank you for that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did you have a sorting hat for being put in these houses?
It was kind of it was kind of like that. We didn't have a sorting hat exactly, but it was a very kind of Empire school. I now realized our school uniform was kind of this muddy brown, but we had light blue and dark blue stripes around the socks and other places, in homage to Oxford and Cambridge. It was like it was a very colonial Oh. You know, we're Australian, but you know we look to England for all the wisdom we have. So it wasn't quite Harry Potter, but they aspired to do it in their own Australian way.
I'm reading a book by an Australian writer right now. We haven't even gotten to the parable yet, We're totally off topic. It's called The Long Road to the Dark North. Perhaps that is not correct, but it's a great book. It won a pullets are a number of years ago, and right I should know the title of.
It is that Peter Carey perhaps or no, no, There are some wonderful Australian writers. David Mloof was such a big influence on me growing up and imagining life. A really short book, but this exploration of a journey out of the head, into the heart and into the body through the story of Ovid and his exile. Peter Carey, who's most famous for a book called Oscar and Lucinda from years ago, but his new book is called Amnesia. I've just read and it is such a brilliant piece of writing. And then there's an Australian author who I think might be your guy whose name has gone on my head. But he writes about the loneliness and the isolation and the pain of an Australian man in a way that is just amazing. His best book is called Breath.
This guy is called Richard Flanagan The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
I read it. He's also a Rhodes scholar like I am. So you know Richard and I buddies. Not really. All of his stuff is fantastic, so I'm glad you're reading that. Yeah, yeah, let's turn this into a book podcast. I know people are expecting something else completely, but we'll just do literary criticism.
Well, you have a book podcast which I was on What a great podcast idea?
Oh thank you. It's called for people who don't know it, which is everybody, because not many people listen to it. It's called two pages with MBS. So people like Eric read the best two pages from a book that has moved them and a book that has shaped them, and then the conversation springs out of those two pages, and it's like a different doorway you enter into conversation with people. I love the conversations.
Yep, it's a really great show. Speaking of shows, this show actually has a format which we are now going to honor. Yes, And it starts with a parable, and the parable goes like this. There's a grandparent who's talking to the grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that pair of what means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Well. In my life, some of the most powerful work I've done has been turning towards the bad wolf, which is counterintuitive. It's kind of you know, JUNGI in shadow work. I came to it through a book called The Dark Side of the Light Chases, which is like one of the worst book titles ever by Debra Fort, and it is my first introduction to this type of work. And as I understand it, shadow work is, we are made up of light and dark. As children, we are taught to be good, you know, behave well, and so we shove a bunch of stuff into our shadow, into I imagine a big sack behind us, and that shadow. The stuff in our sack drives us, triggers us, makes us reactive. And it's only in integrating between the good and the bad that we become whole. And Jung says, I'd rather be whole than be good. Jung says, the gold in the dark. So I want to feed both the wolves, not to favor one over the other, but to realize they're both the same wolf. It's the same wolf. And you know, I'm the eldest son. I'm brought up to be a good boy and a high achieving boy, and I've had some of that success, and my journey is to integrate so that I'm trying to be the richest, most complex, most nuanced, most whole person I can be, and that means I need both of these wolves.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about our journey with those because as you were talking, I was thinking about, I mean, one advantage of just letting all hell break loose in your life like I did for a good number of years, is your shadow is pretty well expressed. I mean, it's it's out and surprise, you know, it's right there, got to the point where it was running the show. And so then in an attempt to correct that, right then you start doing the at least in my case, shoving the impulses that aren't good kind of back underneath. And then there's a period of sort of you know, reckoning with those again and going okay, well, geez, that energy is still there or if I do that. You know, for me, the biggest downside I think of pushing all that shadow stuff down is that it pushes my energy level down right. It takes away my zest, my word that will get to in your book, my vitality. So I do think it is this integration of those two things and really knowing how to work with them when and in what levels and situations. And you know, because I think it's obvious we know enough about psychology now from young and for many other people to know like, you can't repress things that doesn't work. I mean you can, actually, but it's not going to work out well. So to me, it's the question of the nuance is when to lean into what.
Part of the gear and shadow work is what annoys you and other people, It is part of what is not yet integrated in yourself. So when I think of like a former boss I had, I'm like, he is power hungry, napoleonic, status obsessed, money driven, drives me nuts. And then when I own up to that in myself, which is like I am status driven and I am money obsessed, and I have napoleonic qualities and not the good ones you know, it's when I own that in me that actually I spend less time being angry at him, and so it's less about energy levels for me. It's more around contentment and a willingness not to be kind of wound up by other people.
Yeah. Does that mean that the fact that other people chewing annoys me so much means that I just want to be able to chew like a cow?
Well, I'm not sure what that means.
I don't know what it means either, but it's a bigger problem than it really should be.
That's noted when we hang out in person, I'm like, eat with your mouth shut, Michaeler, take small mouthfuls. Don't you like a because you.
Just stick to liquids and don't crunch your ice.
By the way, Okay, yeah, don't go to it. I do notice like when little things like that drive me nuts. Sometimes I'm like, I just have standards and I think people should behave and be nice and be good. Yeah. So what's interesting is just rather than just reacting and responding in a way that you don't fully be mindful with. It's a classic. It's like just you notice your irritation and go, this is irritating to me, I wonder why that's curious, isn't it? How will I choose to respond to that? Do I actually want to go and say to that person, you know, we're in a movie theater here, if you could eat with your mouth shut and not crunch the ice, that would be great because that would be my preference. You know, ask for what you want. You know, you may get no, They may go now I'm going to chew my ice, and you're like, okay. But part of it is understanding your response and then deciding your reaction to it. Sometimes it's I'm just take it, Michael, and sometimes it's how about you do something about that? Yeah?
And I think one of the things that this isn't only young, but I attribute it to him often is this idea of bringing what's kind of submerged into consciousness, right. And I think it's the essential step in any sort of development. And we're going to talk about relationships in a minute. It's critical in relationships, it's critical in our own self awareness. We've got to take these things that are driving us and make them conscious and then we can choose what to do with them. Like I don't know how to turn off that irritation. I think it's technically called mesophonia. It means that you're emotionally overreactive to very common sounds. Oh yeah, it's a disorder. I suppose, like I need another. But by being conscious like, oh that's what's happening, you know, I can ideally react a little bit less. I can be a little bit nicer to myself instead of thinking like what a shallow, awful person you are, Eric like, come on, there are big problems in this world, like what are you getting up? You know, and just be like, well, that's kind of what happens sometimes. And no, I'm not going to say anything to anybody because that's just kind of a crappy thing to do.
Yeah, it is men search for meaning, you know. In between stimulus and response, life's freedom life choice and choice is freedom, yep. Because sometimes the thing to do is not to act, and sometimes the thing to do is to act. It's being mindful about why would I make the choice? And whom I being is just the best version of myself making this choice. Yeah. All right.
So you've got a new book out and it is called How to Work with Almost Anyone. I love that title. Five questions to building the best possible relationships. Yeah, that almost in parentheses is a stroke of genius. And I do think it's the sort of title that almost anybody, I would think would stop and be like, hang on, I need to read that. So do they actually mean I could work with my power hungry boss that you just described, like is there a way? And your point is, well, almost anyone. But there is a point that you make that I think is really important, and you talk about in the book. We're going to get to this in more detail, you know, best possible relationship, And it points to this idea that I really love, which is that nearly any relationship can be made better. It's a core philosophy I have, which is nearly any situation, anything that's happening with us, there's a positive move You may not build it eliminated, that there may be just a small window of movement, but there's always somewhere to go. And I love that idea because it comes through in this book a lot too. And that qualification like the best possible relationship. Say a little bit more about.
That, sure, you know when we're going through titles of the book, Originally it's going to be called the Operating Manual, and then I'm like, I can come up with a better title than that. Then it went to how to Work with Anyone. I'm like, that may be over promised it. I'm not sure I can pull that one off. But when we came up with how to Work with almost Anyone, else like, oh, that is such a good That's like the best book title I've ever come up with, because I've not met a single person who I've told that title too, who hasn't laughed, who hasn't kind of immediately recognized something that is true about that. And it's just as you said, I think there are some people where you like it's probably impossible or it's just not worth the effort to try and improve that. But when you think back on the working relationships you have or you've had, they will kind of map out on a bell curve. You'll have some up one end where you're like, this is so delightful. Somehow there was magic in the air. We brought out the best in each other. We did work, we cared about, We navigated the hard things with grace and ease. There's definitely some down the other end, which is like, you know what, this was a grind sand in the gears a whole way. We just couldn't click, We couldn't make it work. And then most of them are probably somewhere in the middle being they're good enough most of the time. And the idea is that every working relationship can be better, you know, asterisks except for the one that you're thinking about. But yeah, let's work with. Every working relationship can be better, as lovely as it is to go. How do we keep the good ones being brilliant and even more brilliant? Consider taking your five most irritating or difficult or troublesome working relationships and making those ten percent better so that they're workable and they're bearable and that they're good enough. That is such a big win because our happiness and our success is so dependent on our working relationships, and yet most of the time we kind of back away and we just cross our fingers and we hope for the best, particularly for the hard ones, which is like, ah, I'm just going to endure this until it falls apart or we're moved apart for whatever reason. What if you go, look, look great, don't like this person, particularly, we don't click, but let's make this as good as we can, so we maintain our sanity, we maintain respect for each other, and we get what needs to be done done.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's such an important point because I know with coaching clients over the years, I've experienced this a lot. And the general way of thinking of it is do I just need to accept this person the way they are or do I need to leave? Right? And those are fairly binary options, right, And what you're proposing is a third way, which is like, before I get stuck into one of those two, maybe there's some work I can do that's going to make this a little bit better, and that works not all inside me. I think that's the thing your book is pointing to. And I think a lot of relationship stuff rightfully, so we have to look inside, you know, but we also have to be willing to be courageous enough to try and cross some sort of imaginary barrier that is there, and that's really what your book kind of helps us to do.
Yeah. I think if there's a singular call to action that's at the heart of this book is be the person who reaches out and says, hey, how do we make this a little bit better? Yeah? I heard the other day a saying which I love. Nobody likes to be the first person to say hello. Everybody likes to be greeted. And this willingness to say this is not the work for me to do. But what if we did this work together? So the work for you to do is to make the invitation. The work for the two of you to do is go, could we create something that is a little bit better, a little bit safer, a little bit more vital, a little bit more reparable in terms of working on this because just as you said, Eric, those two binary things, which is like to endure it as it is or to walk away from it. There's other things you can do. Yeah, and it may not even work all the time. It probably won't work all the time, but it will work some of the time.
Yeah, And I think, as you said, some of it is this courage to actually be willing to address the fact that there is a relationship with somebody at work and that you actually want to work on that. And what I like about the book is it makes tangible how you might do that. You know, even if I somehow became convinced it's a good idea, which might take some convincing, right right, I still don't have a foggiest idea what to do, like what this.
Is good in theory? Now? Yeah?
Yeah, And so the book, you know, kind of breaks that down. So we've kind of covered this idea of best possible relationship, right that nearly any relationship can be made better. And you talk about that. In the best possible relationship, they have sort of three kind of core elements to them. Who we talk through what those are?
Sure, I think the best possible relationship is safe, vital, and repairable. So I'll go through those one by one. Safe is the one that most people already have cottoned on too, because for ten years or more we've been talking about the importance of psychological safety in the way we work with other people. Amy Edmondson from Harvard kind of really popularized this, and you know, people like Google have done a ton of research around effective teams and effective managers, Project Oxygen and Aristotle, and constantly there's a sense of we've got to make this safe. People feel safe in terms of what they say. People feel safe so they can say what needs to be said without negative consequences, and safe to kind of show up more wholly as they are.
A couple quick thoughts of there. One is before we go further. We're talking about work, but I assume these principles apply kind of to any kind of relationship.
I think.
So you actually you have a story I meant to have a start with, but I got distracted by discussing Australian authors about your mother and father. Yeah, can we hit that real quick before we jump back in, because I think it's a beautiful story that illustrates how this is more than just how to talk with your coworker.
Yeah. I mean I write for a specific audience, which is often people at work, but I try and write in a way that it's useful for humanity, because honestly, if you interact with other human beings, there's stuff here that might be helpful for you. About three years ago, my dad was dying and he had come home from hospital, which was miraculous in itself because he got sick pretty quickly, ended up in the intensive care unit, and he came very close to dying in the ICU there, and we kind of assumed that was going to happen, but somehow he came back, and he came back and he ended up living for another couple of months living at home, so we had a hospital bed set up. He at Oxygen and I was back in Australia. I live in Canada most of the time, and I was living in the house in my childhood house as well, where I grew up childhood bedroom, which was great and weird at the same time. And you could tell that Mum and dad were both delighted that he was home, and also that the relationship was under stress for all the really obvious reasons. They knew my dad had a terminal illness, they knew that he was dying. He was also stuck in a hospital bed so not able to do a whole lot kind of Mum was having to be the primary caregiver, and for all the reasons you can guess, a relationship that had been very successful and very happy for fifty five years was understrain, and parts of me were screaming, don't do this. I went, let's have a conversation about how you would like to be with each other in the remaining weeks or months that you have so that, particularly for my mom, I was like, I want your memory to be as good as it can be, because you know, through psychology, we know about the recency effect and how the most recent thing influences your sense, your memory of the whole thing, And I'm like, I want this to be as good a memory as it can be, so that you remember how good this relationship was for fifty five years. So I sat down and I kind of facilitated a conversation similar to the five questions that I set out in the book, this kind of keystone conversation, which is a conversation about how they would like to be with each other over the remaining time and what it meant when they were doing certain things and what it didn't mean. And it was definitely a bit of an awkward conversation. Mum thoroughly didn't want to do it. Dad was pretty resistant to it as well, but they kind of said, well, okay, why not. And it created a freedom and a lightness in that relationship because it meant that they kind of named and owned their stress and the anxiety and what kind of drove each other crazy about each other in this kind of new dynamic of working together. And I've been thinking about this book for quite a few years, because I've been practicing this on and off for about twenty five years. But suddenly I was like, this feels like a really important type of conversation that people kind of know about, but nobody really knows how to do it, and I think I can help with that.
Yeah, it's a beautiful story. We talked to earlier about having the courage to do these things, like it takes courage to do this stuff, and yet it turns out to be really positive. So we were on safety, and safety is one of the most influential books on me over the years about having conversations is something called Crucial Conversations, which has been a great book, and it really to me introduced that idea of safety quite some time ago and became clear to me in certain very difficult relationships, relationships that ultimately were not repair able even with a fair amount of effort, was how quickly we went out of safety. I mean, we did be like four words and it'd be like, well, nobody fell safe. And the thing that I learned, though, was that to carry on beyond that was always ruinous, right always, it never was productive. Once we didn't feel safe. We may not get anywhere by terminating the conversation when we don't feel safe, but we don't do further injury.
Right. So part of what I'm suggesting in the book is this idea of a keystone conversation, which in a sentence is, let's have a chat about how we should work together before we have a chat about what we should be working on. And most of the time we're just pulled immediately into the stuff. Let's fix this, solve this, get going on this. There's always something to crack on with, you know, and this is at work. But you know, let's say you're having this conversation with your partner, like let's talk about my parents, and let's talk about the kids, and let's talk about the holiday, and let's talk about the house, and let's talk about the money, and let's talk about the careers. And there's always the things that you can put your attention to. But this is the way you stop and go, hoh, should we be together to bring out our best and avoid the things that might bring out our worst. And there's a few benefits to it. The first is you're having the conversation before the moment of stress, and that classic saying we don't rise to the challenge, we fall to the level of our preparation or the level of our systems, whatever it might be. You're trying to set up systems, you're trying to prepare for this. So when you fall out of safety, and it happens all the time to all relationships, you go, oh, we've done that thing that we said we'd do. The second is when you have that conversation, you actually get some clues as to what will make it unsafe for that other person or what will make it safe unsafe for you. So there's a sense of going, oh, we have a sense of how to negotiate this and manage this. But the reparability, so say vital and repaarable. The reparability is this recognition that the relationships that last are ones where there's an understanding and a commitment that we're going to need to fix it at some stage because everything gets a bit dented and cracked and broken. And when I read the people who are the classic writers in this space, so people like Esther Perrell or Terry Reel, or Dan Siegel or John Gottman, these people who just specialize in trying to figure out how to make relationships work at a kind of more classic intimate partnership relationships, they're like reparability is everything in terms of longevity. Most of us are terrible at repairing because they haven't figured out how to do it. So part of really the biggest win from having a keystone conversation is it allows you to talk about the health of the relationship. It's become a topic that is part of what you talk about. So what I would hope, what I dream of, Eric, is when you're in those conversations and you lose the safety, you're able to go, we've lost the safety, what will it take to get this back? Not every relationship then gets to be magically repaired, but many more do because you've both got a shared commitment to this best possible relationship.
It's really astounding how in relationships we don't tend to think of the processes that happen in them very much. We tend to think of the people, and that's what we focus on. But my experience has been and I think the experience of reading lots of different things like you have, is that the ability to talk about how we're going to talk is foundational and that if that can be figured out, there's so many things that can happen that are really positive. And if that thing can't be figured out, You're in trouble.
Yeah. I mean on a related note, you know, for quite a while my wife lecture in the business with me, and it was terrible to start with because she's like, I hate having a boss that I was her boss, I was married to her. She's like, down with the man, and I'm like, Marcella, I am the man. I'm literally the man. And then it was really good in the middle, and then it was bad at the end again, but we figured our way through that. But the thing that moved us from bad at the start into a really good period of working together is that our coach went, look what you're seeing here is not Michael versus Marcella. It is actually a visionary somebody who has a certain role and a way of showing up in the business, versus an operator somebody who has another role. I'm Michael, visionary, big picture, make it all happen, kind of loose relationship to reality in terms of how how much time and effort everything takes, always thinking that there's more available, always wanting to go faster. Operator, I'm going to make this stuff happen. I'm worried about the details. I'm practical. I care about the people doing the work, and there's just a natural tension between that. When we discovered language that allowed us to talk about the processes between us, it became less personal. I'm like Masilla railing against me. As a boss, I could take that personally, but if I'm like it is the operator going it's really hard to work with a visionary because it always is. Then it's like slightly less personal and slightly more solvable.
Yeah, Ginny and I work together and we find our way through it. By and large, it goes incredibly smoothly, but there are those moments and it is that weird thing where you're like, well, but I'm the boss, but I'm mostly your partner. And yeah, you know, it's shape because those roles can get mixed up if we're not careful. But that repair ability piece is really important. It's the knowing that, Okay, when we get off track, we can talk about it. Yeah, we've sort of hinted it this keystone conversation a little bit.
Well, let me talk about the remaining two factors of the best possible relationships. So safety we kind of covered and then kind of went into interesting conversation about the two that are remaining of vitality, more vital, and more apparable, a repaarability we've kind of talked about as well. So I just want to just touch on what vital means. First of all, I love that it has two meanings. One is that it's essential, but also that it's full of life. And that's really what I want to talk to. And after I'd written the book, I came across a phrase that I'm now using to describe it, which is psychological bravery. I really love this idea that you're looking to create a relationship where you find the right balance for you and another person of psychological safety and psychological bravery. So it is both a place where people feel that they've had the fear removed, but it's also a place where they can amplify the good, amplify the adventure, push each other, challenge each other, step out to the edge, being competent, try new things. There's a way that I've experienced relationships where I'm like they were very very safe, and they were a bit dead, a bit kind of bored by it. Also, I had relationships which we are full of Indiana Jones, full of adventures and I'm like, but when it went wrong, it went really badly wrong, and it wasn't It didn't feel like it was fixable because it didn't feel safe. And what you're looking for is this tension between safety and vitality with this idea that repaarability lies underneath that, so that when it does go off the rails, whether that's from one or the other, there's a way of fixing it. So that's just to describe the three core attributes of the best possible relationship.
I love that idea of psychological bravery.
It's good, isn't it. I can't remember even who I heard it from, but I'm like, I will just steal that immediately, thank you very much.
Yeah, that's an area I think for me is an interesting place to explore a little bit because having had the number of bad relationships I've had in my life. Right, I'm divorced twice my growing up, it was just the number of them, right, I'm just like, oh, it's safe, okay, good, then that's it. Like keep it safe enough is enough?
Right? Right?
And it's that you know, knowing that it's safe, and it's repair terrible to say okay, it is okay. Then to lean a little bit more into this idea of bravery, or this idea that things tend to stagnate if the same sort of thing happens again and again and again again and again.
And look at you, You're wearing a purple shirt, like great things are happening even as we speak.
Oh yeah, I mean I've taken up surfing over the last year and a half, rock climbing, all kinds of stuff because I felt that actually that need for some degree of vitality that those activities seem to give me.
Well, I think there's two things to look at. One is just what it means to keep growing. Like you and I are both roughly the same age, I'm not sure. Like I'm mid fifties, you're probably roughly the.
Same early thirties.
Yeah, exactly. I have to say for somebody in their early thirties, you're looking pretty terrible, Eric, I mean, if you look like your mid fifties.
Yeah, it's been a rough life. I'm early fifties, fifty three, mid early fifties.
And there's a way, which is like a commitment to our own lives, which is, how do we not stagnate in the processes of our own lives. I think very specifically, you can say, what does it take for this relationship between you and me to have a vitality and a freshness. There's glory in routine and comfort and familiarity. It's like one of the great things of working relationships, which is just how comfortable that feels, and why or both of you might need more than that, you might need some degree of that, And that's what you get to talk about. That's what you get to kind of co create together.
Yeah, so let's talk about the keystone conversation. Yeah, we've sort of hinted at it, but describe it a little more fully. What are we talking about?
Yeah, the idea to walk away with is what if we had a conversation about how we be together, how we work together, and figure that out so we know how to bring out the best in each other, and we know how to avoid the worst in each other, and we know how to fix it when things go wrong. You know. In the book, I say, look, here are five questions you can use to structure or spark a conversation, And with each question comes two or three exercises so that you can deepen your own self knowledge, so you have more nuanced language, and you're better able to articulate who you are and what helps you thrive. But you don't even need those five questions. It can be simple as what's a good relationship for you? Let me tell you what a good relationship is for me, what's a bad relationship for you? Let me tell you what a bad relationship is for me. What should we do about that? But, as I say in the book five Broad Questions, there's the amplify question, there's the steady question, there's the good and the bad date question, and then there's the repair question.
So as you were talking, I just had a thought or question, which is, let's say I've got a coworker that falls right in the middle of that bell curve. It's pretty good. We generally have a pretty good relationship.
Right.
It feels to me like if I go to that person and I say, let's have a conversation about our relationship, it's the equivalent to me of like when your partner says to you, well we need to talk.
And you're, oh, boy, right, no good comes from this.
Which actually very often much good comes from it. But still I shy away. But how do we set that up? With somebody so it doesn't feel like we're saying we have a bad relationship or I have a problem with you. You know, like, how do we put this in a growth mode not a there's something wrong mode?
Yeah, I think you try and be obvious about it. Like if I was talking to you, Eric, I'd go, look, Eric, I would love for us to take a beat and just say, I mean, I'm really enjoying working with you right now, but I wonder if what we could do to make it even better. And I'm wondering if you and I could have a conversation around that, just to kind of explore what else could we do to make this relationship stronger and better and really flourish. And it could be as simple as that. You know. The book I'm known for is The Coaching Habit, and I think the power of that book is that kind of Unweird's coaching for people. A lot of people go, Okay, now if that's what they're talking about, well, I can do that. And what I'm hoping with this book is it Unweirds this idea of having this type of conversation and with there was this inclination to make a big deal out of it Eric, come into my office. It's our monthly coaching call. I'm going to coach you for an hour. The person is being someone is like that sounds terrible to me, and it is terrible because I come in and like, okay, we've got to act differently. We were to be differently. We had to have a conversation where I'm clearly coaching you, and somehow it feels awkward and weird and broken and fake all of that. And I'm trying to find the way to give people the language to do something similar in terms of how they calm this down, which is just to say, hey, look, this is great. But I would really value a conversation just where we take a moment and go, is there anything else that we can be doing to make this working relationship even stronger? Yeah.
I think that's a really good point by comparing it to coaching, because there is an assumption, rightly or wrongly, that many of us have, which is, if I need coach, there's something wrong with me. And the same thing here, even when you sort of teed up our relationship conversation as nicely as you just did, there's a part of me hearing that going, well, what did I do wrong?
Yeah?
What did they do wrong? So? I guess, like most things in life, it's a matter of saying. You know, I found it very often to be like, what I'm not saying is x. Exactly what I am saying is why?
Right?
So to name that thing like this is not a hidden way for me to bring up a problem.
Yeah, I agree. So this isn't me being sneaky and about to launch an attack on your integrity and anything else. Behind this conversation lays a great cloud around power and structure and expectations and who do you have these type of conversations with because, for instance, and we're talking working situations but kind of the same things echoing beyond work. But if you're the boss, it's easier to go to the people on your team let's have this conversation than if you're wanting to have the conversation with the boss. But it's still possible if you've got a working relationship that's been going for six years. In some ways, it's easier. In some ways, it's harder to have this conversation if you're about to start working with In some ways that's easier. But they're like, Okay, I've never done this before, but it can be a really powerful way to kind of kickstart a working relationship. And then with different types of relationships, you have a choice about how deep you want to go with this, like, for instance, I've just recently hired somebody to help me with my website and we had a version of this or I went, ok, I'm excited to talk to about the website because we need to update it and all of that. But tell me about when you've worked with a client like me and it's been really great, what do they do? And tell me when you've worked with a client like me and it's kind of been pretty sucky. What happened? What did you do? What did they do? Why did it fall apart? And then I go, well, let me tell you about vendors, the best I've worked with, the most frustrating I've worked with, and just what they did and what they didn't do. And the first time I do that, you can see the vendor's eyes going, what what are we doing here? Nobody's ever asked me that before.
Doing a little Java script here and Michael, relax.
Yeah, And I don't do this with every vendor. I need you to do thirty minutes work. I'm not going to spend an hour and a conversation to set that up. But I hope this is going to be a long standing working relationship. So I'm like, I want this to be good, and I don't want you to piss me off inadvertently because I haven't told you what annoys me. So you have that conversation, and that's a certain type of conversation. If I'm sitting down with somebody who I've just hired on my team, I'm like, let me tell you what it's like to work with me. Here's the good, here's the bad, here's the ugly, because I got all of that because I want to give you every chance to delight me, and I don't want to give me every chance to delight you. Yeah.
It's interesting because as we're having this conversation and as I'm reading the book, ideally one would be reflecting on their own life, right, that's the point. And I'm reflecting on certain working relationships where I'm like, they're pretty good, and this inclination in my mind, like do I need to do that? I mean, things seem to be going pretty good, right, But it's back to that idea of we're trying to say, is this the bat possible and is just working okay? Or do we want it to be better than that? And so I just noticed that bias like so sort of right in the fabric of me.
I feel you. I would say that I've noticed entropy in relationships, which is things decline over time, Things get a bit rote, things get a bit broken, things just get a bit chipped at the edge, and there's a slow deterioration because that is the nature of the universe. And even if I'm like looking at a relationship and I'm like it's pretty good, part of what having an initial keystone conversation does is it gives you permission to keep talking about the relationship. So you're like, look, it's pretty good, but let's check in. I'm wondering if it could be better. I'm wondering what would make you happier, What might me be happier? Is there anything that I kind of haven't really been talking about, But it's just it's a minor niggle, but I wouldn't mind bringing it up. A little adjustment in terms of our processes and maybe they're not much comes out of that initial conversation, But then you get to go every three months, Hey, checking in, how are we doing? Am I still the best client you can be? Am? I still the best employee you can be? Am I still the best podcast host that you're producing a show with. What would it take for me to be the best podcast host that you're producing the show on? What else would I need to do? And they may not have an answer for you, But what an invitation? What a commitment to say, I'm really committed to try and make this the best possible relationship with you.
I probably about to get a long list of things from Chris our editor.
Actually, Chris, Chris, slip me twenty bucks to kind of.
Talk about exactly at the very top of it is just be mildly coherent.
Just just aim in the direction. Just step up to mildly coherent.
I'd be so happy. Okay, So this keystone conversation has these five essential questions which you sort.
Of tease them.
Yeah, you tease them. Yes, very good. So now that you have teased us, what is the amplify question?
So the amplified question is what's your best? And I know that's actually just slightly awkward question, as I think about it and keep saying it. But I didn't want to say what are you good at? I didn't say what are your strengths? And I didn't want to say what are your values? Because those all take me in directions that aren't quite the answer I'm looking for. I want to know when you shine and when you flow. That feels to me the essence of this, When do you shine and when do you flow? This idea, this concept of flow from Michael Chuck sent me Hiqi, the Hungarian psychologist that talks about the flow state, where you're in that right balance between work that matters and work you know how to do, and work you're learning how to do, and kind of time speeds up and slows down. What's that for you? What brings out your very best? And when do you shine? When do people look at you and go oh man? Eric is lit up at the moment. He is in his happy place. I can see it. And this idea of right, let me tell you when I'm at my best. You tell me when you're at your best. And that is already so helpful because I'm like, right, I need to do what I can to give Eric more of that. So he's at his best more often. And then also it's a great place to start because it is not what's broken, why do you screw up? Or where is it hard? It's like, let me just tell you what my best is, because the best possible relationship is two of us at our best. Within the context of this working relationship.
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So the way you described it, what is my best is it sounds task related?
I think it can be more than that.
Okay, so yeah, explain to me ways that it can be more than that.
Yeah. So I'm going to steal a modal from the coaching habit book the three P Model. The three P modal says a coaching conversation can kind of three doorways into it. It's the projects, the people or the patterns. Projects are the tasks? What's the stuff? So in this context, what's your best? It's like, what's the work that likes you? What what gets you super excited? Where are you kind of in the flow around that? The people is what are you at your best at in relationship? What does it look like when you're working with people and you're at your best? What does that look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? What's going on that allows your best to be there? And then patterns is the kind of inner stuff which it's like, how are you showing up? And that gets more into what are your essential qualities? What is the core of who you are? You know, what are your values if you want to put it like that, But what's like the most important statements about this is me on this planet, when I'm showing up as me on this planet, And so it can be a mix of those three different things.
I think you make an important point multiple times through the book, which is that the answers are useful, but it's the asking of the question that is the primary purpose. And I would assume that has to do with us getting to know about each other, right and also in just making it safe to talk.
I think it's about making it safe to talk because you're like, oh, we've just this is an act of trust and vulnerability and building an adult to adult relationship by having the conversation. Yeah, the answer is you're going to remember some of them. You're going to forget some of them. When you're tell meling me what you're like at your best, I'm seeing you at your best because you're light up, so I'm like, oh, like one of that, please. So it is this understanding that you've started something important in having this conversation.
Does it make sense to know how you're going to answer those questions before you have one of these conversations, because part of my hesitancy to do this. If I'm putting myself in the spot of doing it would be like I don't know how to answer those questions.
Yeah, I think that's a great insight. You know, in the book, I suggest there is this kind of structure to how you have this conversation. One is you prepare, two as you have the conversation. Three is you actively maintain the working relationship. So the keystone conversation is not a one and done thing. It's like it needs you constantly going back and you know, adjusting a little bit and amplifying a bit as needed. I think most people can come up with some answers on the moment, on the spot, but I really noticed that if they have had time to think about it and prepare for it, that can be really helpful. So you asked before around how you might start this. You can make it a little more formal. You can say, look, I'd love to have us a conversation around how we can work better together. I'm using this idea of a keystone conversation, and there are five questions. Here are the five questions. I'm going to do some thinking about what my answers are before we get there. You know, it's up to you, but I'd love you to do some thinking as well, just so we've got the best possible chance of a useful exchange. Got it.
So preparation can be helpful, and you can not just prepare yourself so that you prepared, but actually set the other person up so they're prepared.
Yeah, the more preparation you do, the less you'll be doing kind of sweeping generalities and jazz hands and more. Going, let me give you some really specifics about me at my best.
I was going to say I am all about jazz hands, but that's a lesson about preparation. That is a good one.
Yeah.
It's funny the way, like the thing I prepare for most in the world are these conversations, right, And it's amazing what that preparation does. And as I'm saying this, I'm having an AHA moment in my mind, like you might want to try that with some other things.
Yeah, because like I'm a transitory person in your working relationship. I'm a guest, which I love on your podcast, but it's like, you know, the people you work more closely with, It's like, what if you did the same preparation for that, and really, Eric, I'm trying to be sneaky because I'm really getting people to do self development work, no know myself by doing the work to prepare for this so that you're ready for the conversations. But you're just more attuned to who you are are in this world. I mean, it comes all the way back to where we started around shadow work and the Two Wolves, which is like, know who you are in the light, know who you are in the dark. And the better and more granular and more metaphorical or more specific the languages around that, the more helpful for you and the more helpful for other people as well.
So the next question is the steady question. Yeah, you know, what are your practices and preferences? And when I first read that, I was like, well, okay, what do you mean? So can you give me some examples of like the sort of questions we might ask in relation to this question. And again we're primarily talking about working relationships, so we can keep it there, but you could take any of these sort of they all apply in their own way to whatever relationship.
It's kind of the preferred logistics and mechanics of life. So this can be if you're starting a working relationship, just even understanding somebody's name and their pronouns. Like, for instance, my name is Michael Bungay Stanya. It's a located name. When I got married, I took my wife's name, she took mine as well. We became the bungay Staniers, the only existent ones in the entire universe as far as we're aware. But there's no hyphen in between Bungay Stanya. So there's a way that like that gets complicated and people are not quite sure what my surname is. But what really drives me nuts is when people unilaterally decide my name is Mike, and I'm like, it's truly not Mike. Mike is what I'm speaking into at the moment as part of this interview. My name is Michael, so I'd be like, let me just tell you my name. I prefer to be called Michael, not Mike or Mick.
How often do you get called Mike? I'm curious how often like these just really obnoxious things happen, because that just strikes me as obnoxious, Like, yeah, to not even figure out the.
Thing is, I don't think people are being obnoxious when they're doing it. They're like this is my active friendship. By shortening your name like this, I see. I assume it's done with the best possible intent. You're probably right, Yeah, it's like, hey, I shorten all my friend's names. I'm gonna call you Mick or Mike's Yeah exactly. I might call you easy or eas or something. And I'm like, you, like, nah, my name is Eric, never call me that. I'm like, great, So it could be that. But here's a domestic example. I quite like vacuuming. I hate mopping. My wife really doesn't like vacuuming at all, but she loves to run a wet thing around the floor and kind of And it honestly took us twenty years to discover this. We're like, ah, well, then we figured this out a lot earlier, not that it was causing a great amount of pain, because you know, we only clean our house once every six months or something.
But your wife might be an outlier too, if I just I bet if we pulled one hundred people, most of them are going to prefer the vacuum to the wet thing.
But I know I don't understand it. But I'm like, I don't mind washing up because I washed up for years in restaurants, so I reckon I do a good washing up. I know how to stack something drives me nuts the way that I mean, you know, I stack the kitchen sink like a Scandinavian architect. I'm like, I'm brilliant at it, and like maximum amount of stuff per squerience. This actually like some drug crazed maniac just throw stuff on the thing of it. It's like a disaster.
Somebody trying to do domino structures on LSD.
That's right exactly. So it's such a small thing, and yet we can get really irritated by these small differences. So a conversation about just what how do you tend what is common sense for you is a really clarifying conversation. So, you know, I work. It's like I'm a slack person. I'm an email person. I tend to work in the mornings. I tend not to have meetings before ten o'clock. I love to send emails late at night. Doesn't mean I expect a response. I work over the weekend. I don't work over the weekend. I orient my working life around childcare. I pick up my kid from school at four o'clock. So that's a period of time where I'm not going to be available. It's kind of that back and forth on just some of the practicalities about how you work. Often it kind of confirms that you mostly do things the same way. Sometimes it uncovers things where you're like, oh, we're quite different around that.
Yeah, I love this question of what feedback tends to be most helpful to you, and how do you prefer it to be expressed? Like, right, that's a really good question. Like knowing that we're going to need to give each other feedback if we want to have a vital relationship, how do we do it.
Yeah, Like Ainsley, who's on my team, she generally prefers feedback. Well, I sat with me first. I like my feedback as blunt as possible. I'm like, look, I've got a very healthy self esteem, and beating around the bus drives me nuts. Actually, just give it to me really clearly, really straightly. A deearly is in as fewer words as possible, so I really get it because I'm a little slow. Ainsley is not psychologically fragile or anything, but there's a way that she likes us softer in root into the feedback conversation and like, that's really helpful for me to know, because otherwise we tend to go this is how I like it. I'll just project it onto the other people and assume that that's how they like it as well. Ye, let me give you the three remaining questions really quickly. Okay, the good date and the bad date questions. They are sister questions. The first is what can you learn from successful past relationships? That's the good date question? And then what can you learn from frustrating past relationships? That's the bad day questions? Because patterns from the past repeat again in the future. So do some forensic exercise around what was done and not done, and said and not said by both parties in the good and the bad relationships, and then bring that forward and say share that with the other person so that they know how to do more of the good stuff and how to avoid the bad stuff. And then the repair question, and we kind of talked about this in some depth already, which is how will we fix it when things go wrong? And there's different ways you can think about how you'll repair it, but the power of this question is it says things are going to go wrong, there's not going to be you know, Honeymoon and unicorn farts for the whole time is going to have an impact at some stage. How will we do that? And it's really a statement of intent around we are both willing and potentially able to repair this when things do go wrong.
So I agree one hundred percent that the heart of that question is the recognition it's going to need to occur and the permission to do it. But what are some examples of a response to that question? What are some examples of ways that people systematize repair.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that, and I think there are three great gifts you can bring to the act of repair. The first is speaking when you've been hurt. You know, so often damage gets done and you swallow it and you hold on to it and you feel resentful about it, or you feel sad about it, or you feel something about it, but you don't tell anybody that this has happened. And sometimes it's like I don't know how to tell them. Sometimes it's like they know, but they're just like they're just terrible people. So I think there's something to say. Can you name it when you've been hurt? The second is can you notice it when something's not quite right. And this is something that I'm trying to get good at because occasionally I just stomp on people's toes in a way that's unintentional, but I hurt feelings or something happens. Not least because in the companies I work, I'm the senior person. I started the company, so I have that status and authority and that power. And so there it's about that curiosity where you go, something feels not quite right, let me check in with you, how you're doing. You know what needs to be said that hasn't yet been said, So it's an opportunity to allow that to be spoken. And then the third thing is a generosity in apologizing or making it better, because we've all met people who are weasels and how they apologize I'm sorry you decided to feel like that. It's like it's not an apology at all, it's just an insult. But that ability to say, I see that that was a mistake, I shouldn't have done that, I'm sorry, sorry, I'll try not to do that again. That is a really powerful act.
We've only got a few minutes left, but I want to talk about a chapter in the book around orienting, around knowing what's going on, will you put it in context kind of where that fits. Yeah, I'd like to go into a couple pieces of it.
Yeah, sure, after you have that conversation. First of all, celebrating you for having had that conversation, because having the keystone conversation is already such a powerful start. But what I hope is that people don't go, that's great. I've done my relationship work for this person for now forever I never have. It's going to be just great from now on. There's this ongoing process where you want to keep thinking to yourself, how do I keep making sure that this is the best possible expression of the best possible relationship between us as a facilitator, As a teacher, you're worrying about the content. You're worrying about the audience, and you're worried about the energy and the experience in the room. You're worrying about all these things all at once. So too, in this working relationships, you're worrying about how you work together. You're worrying about yourself, or you're worrying about the other person, and you're worrying about the two of you and how you work together, and so This idea of actively orienting and kind of noticing what is going on feels like a really powerful commitment to the working relationship. And in the book, I talk about the famous Ouda loop, which developed by a US fighter pilot as a way of this is the best way to decide what to do when you're in the stress of a fighting situation. Ooda orient, observe, decide, and act so orient. I think of it as like pulling yourself out of the hurly burley, so you can see what's going on. You get yourself in a position where you can notice it, and that is such a powerful act in itself. I think of it kind of almost as a secret to emotional intelligence as well, which is like, can you observe? Can you get into a position where you're not got blood in your ears and blood in your eye and you're in the hurly burly of it? Can you pull yourself out of that moment? Once you're an orient you can actually observe and you're like, what am I noticing here? What am I seeing? What's true? What am I assuming to be true? What are my judgments around the facts that I have? How are you interpreting what's going on. Once you decide and make an interpretation, then you go through those next steps, which is deciding what needs to be done and then acting on what needs to be done, and that kind of moves you into the kind of more of the maintenance piece. But this ongoing piece where you keep pulling back and going what's actually happening here and is there anything we need to do about it is a really powerful commitment to the ongoing health of the working relationships.
In that section, you talk about what are the facts? And I love the way you sort of break this down because I think the other thing that goes into emotional intelligence is a first like you said, actually trying to look around, but also tweezing apart like Oh, I'm feeling acts in my body, I'm feeling X emotionally, I'm having these thoughts, I'm having these urges.
I love this model. Yeah, it comes from non violent communication. I think that's its origin, and basically it says all the stuff that's swirling around in your head as you experience something can be teased apart. That's a great verb that you're using. Eric into one of four different buckets. It's either the facts, the data. It can be your feelings, how are you feeling about the facts? Mad, sad, glad, as shamed, and afraid of might kind of go to five main feelings. Then there's the judgments. How are you interpreting the facts and how you're feeling. There's a relentless, endless amount of judgments you have about the situation, about them and about you and about the situation. There's lots of judgments. And then there's about what you want or what you need. And part of what you're doing in this observation thing is, particularly when you're doing this work, you're like, what are the acts or facts here? There are always fewer facts than you think. How am I feeling around this? And this somatic wisdom? I'm not that good at this one. I'm trying to get better, which is like, what am I noticing in my body? You know, how is this actually making me feel? What are the judgments that are feeding the feelings? And what are the feelings feeding the judgments? Because those two danced together. I'm furious because Eric's let me down again. Feelings and judgments. I'm sad because I've lost control of the podcast. Feelings and judgments. None of those are the truth it's just my interpretation of the truth. And then there's what you want or what you need, which is really what allows you to decide and act really powerful if you can get clear on this is what I think is needed from here.
You know, it's so hard to tweeze apart that fact and judgment piece, like if you can really do that, like what's actually real?
Yeah?
And what is my what I'm making it mean?
Because your judgments sound really convincingly like the truth to you totally, and they're not the truth the it's just your interpretation of the data.
Yeah. Well, we are no surprise out of time again for a book that's as succinct as that, there's a lot in it, you know. It's one of the things I love about your work is that you are very to the point. Your things are easy to understand and internalize. You don't have to learn a ton of information. It gets quick and easy to put into action. But there's also a lot of depth there too, so you've done a great job with that in this book. It's called, as I said earlier, how to work with almost anyone. And thank you for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.
Eric it's been a delight. Thank you so much.
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