How to Flourish (with Daniel Coyle)

Daniel Coyle: I’m happy to be here with you, Russ.

Daniel Coyle: Well, I started with what flourishing is not. Right? It’s not a machine, it’s not a result of a machine. It’s not the optimizable, maximizable process that you can predict. It’s an idea from the natural world, and the natural world is really about how living systems develop. And, living systems aren’t machines. We often talk about them as if they were, but actually, they’re much stranger than that. Right? They’re things where they find roots and they grow from the inside out, not from the outside in. They can’t be planned or predicted precisely. They’re not controlled from the top down; they’re generated from the bottom up. So, this is how living systems develop.

And, with human beings, our substrate, if we’re an ecosystem, is meaning. Is meaning. You can have all types of different kinds of living, but they all, as human beings, that is where we put our roots down. And, so, this idea is that–and joy is kind of an offshoot of it. When you visit flourishing people, they are often kind of creating the sense of surprise.

And, I guess the word ‘aliveness’ is one that recurred again and again in my reporting, in the science, but also in this of what flourishing is. It’s from the natural world, it’s not predictable. It is something that–and the fun part is when you ask people to reflect on a time where they felt it, everybody kind of gets a smile on their face, and they start telling stories that have got kind of very similar elements to them. And so, that was the fun part of the research, to take all these diverse places and say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a natural process going on here that has got some basic building blocks to it.’

It’s a process that we don’t have good language for necessarily. Oftentimes, we use machine-like language to talk about things. We want to be planned, we want to execute, we want things to be predictable. And, I get to these places, wondering what they’d be like; and a lot of them ended up being kind of messier than I thought. And, flourishing is a messy process. If everything is totally neat, then you’re probably not doing it.

Daniel Coyle: Well, all flourishing is ultimately mutual. These are independent ecosystems. These aren’t little machines toiling away to get some result. All flourishing is interdependent growth. It’s shared growth.

And we’ve gone through–I think if there’s a lesson that modernity has taught us, it’s kind of that these straight line solutions, these planned, executed, information-based–modernity has assumed that human beings are these computational beings, and we should decide our way forward on this straight line path. And I think the lesson the last few years has been, A), that’s kind of a bummer. Self-improvement is a lonely slog. We know a lot of people that are climbing mountains of self-improvement, and they don’t seem super-joyful. They seem like the goal is to automate yourself in some weird way, machine thinking again. And, the other thing is that it doesn’t actually work very well.

And, there’s this thing that happens–and I think a lot of the people you’ve had on your podcast, their lives would map onto this concept–where when you talk about a good life, or you talk about a good career, you talk about a good project, or you talk about a good conversation, they are not straight lines. Right? They are always these squiggly lines.

Now, why is that, and why are we so resistant to this squiggly path? I think it has something to do with a misunderstanding of the difference between complicated systems and complex ones. There’s two kinds of systems in the world: there’s complicated and there’s complex. Complicated ones are ones that are put together the same every time. If I have an assembly line to build a Ferrari, and I do all the right things at the right time, and I put that on a piece of paper, that’s how to build a Ferrari. You won’t get a different result. Complex systems are a lot–

Daniel Coyle: It’s complicated, it’s extremely complicated. You need expertise. Like, you can’t just do it: you need expertise. But, that expertise is about putting A to B to C to D.

Complex systems are like raising a teenager. Like, they change. What you do changes the system. And it changes you, too.

So, our misunderstanding–the reason I think this yellow door concept seems kind of strange and counterintuitive, I think, is that we have a fundamental–we’re trained on this idea that the world is complicated, when in fact, what we’re in is this giant complexity game, where we are trying to navigate these new possibilities. And these yellow doors–which, of course, to go back to what you were talking about–the green doors that we encounter are a clear signal to go forward, the red doors are a clear signal to stop, and the interesting stuff in life is at these curves where you actually have a choice and there’s a yellow door, and you go through.

And sometimes that feels miraculous. When you look back on people’s life story, they will often tell you a yellow-door story of, ‘Oh, I didn’t get into the school I wanted to get into, and then I was at a bar, and I met this person, and they changed my life.’ Well, that’s the way the world actually is. It’s liberating to realize that the problem that you’re facing is not one that the world has. The world is filled with yellow doors. The problem is that the model you have in your head is a straight-line model in a squiggly world.

Daniel Coyle: Well, what we’re really talking about here is the way our attention systems work. And, one of the things that the book really showed me, and the research for the book taught me, was that we tend to think about attention as a single thing. And we all know we’re in this attentional crisis, right? Like, we all acknowledge this: we’re in an attentional crisis.

But, what we lack is a clear model of what attentional health is, what it looks like. It’s like we’re trying to eat well, but we don’t understand the building blocks: we don’t understand proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

So, the way attention actually works–and it’s kind of an interesting backstory why we got off on the wrong track–attention isn’t just this narrow focus thing that we usually think of. There’s actually two systems in play. One of them is task attention: It’s narrow, it’s focused. It’s built on controlling things, it’s built on predicting things. It treats the world as kind of a flat puzzle piece to be manipulated.

But then, the other type of attention is relational attention–relational–and that means connecting it to your whole wide world around you, paying attention to everything. And evolutionarily, this exists for some really powerful reasons. All of our ancestors had to do two contradictory things: they had to eat–which was focus narrowly on a target, identify it, categorize it, grab it–and pay attention to this vast fabric of reality–to storms coming in, to family, to nuanced interaction, to relationships.

And, the modern world has kind of privileged this narrow task attention over–and that’s where presence comes in. Presence is the activation of relational attention that creates connected[?connective?] energy. It’s the stuff that relationships are made of. We don’t get relationships by treating people as objects and tasks to be accomplished. We get them by stopping. And it happens in a moment of receptive stillness that occurs again and again. And, when we have those moments of receptive stillness–when we stop trying to do and we simply pay attention to what’s around us–we see yellow doors. We see things, and we come into relationship with things in a different way.

And the places that I visited, from–there was a little deli in Michigan that’s grown into this giant business, to a pro baseball team, to a school–they’re all creating this attentional architecture that fuels and boosts relational attention to create shared presence, to create those moments of presence. And, that moment of presence is where we get meaning: it’s where we get the meaning in our lives. And it treats meaning as this renewable resource where you’re fueling up on meaning and then doing some tasks.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, that’s right.

Daniel Coyle: It’s not. And, the thing that’s the hardest about it is you have to do something that we’re allergic to, which is you have to surrender. It’s not enough just to say, ‘Well, what’s this other focus thing over here?’ No, you actually have to let go. And that feels crazy vulnerable, especially when you’re learning to do it.

There’s a couple of things that are really helpful here. One is to actually understand what’s happening in your brain. This is, as Iain says–Iain McGilchrist has, I think, in my mind, shown that our brain, the most connected entity on the planet, has this serious division, two unique centers of consciousness. You’re literally turning off one and lighting up the other when you have that moment that feels wrong, like: I’m surrendering, this feels weird. But, you know what? I’m actually activating this other slower, warmer, connective attention, and it’s a muscle. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. And, I would say your experience probably has been that as you’ve gotten better at doing this, you’ve found yourself, ‘Oh, that’s good feedback.’

And, the other thing to remember is that focus makes you blind. There’s that famous experiment with the gorilla, where they have people counting basketball passes, and a gorilla walks in the middle–it’s unmistakable–and pounds their chest and then walks off; and 50% of people miss the gorilla. Well, we’re going through life counting passes and missing gorillas. And, when you realize, when you have that little hint to say, ‘Am I really focused right now? Am I really certain right now? Do I have my armor of certainty on?’ That, I think, over time, can become a tell, a little self-nudge to say, ‘If I’m this certain, something’s up. Maybe I should dial back, just take a step back and be curious.’ And, that curiosity comes out over and over again as the most powerful immediate tool to ask, ‘What’s going on here that I don’t understand? Am I really that certain?’

We talk about the quality of your life being the quality of your relationships. Well, the quality of your relationships is the quality of your conversations. The quality of your conversations is the quality of your questions. Period. So, those moments of curiosity, where you surrender control and step into that curiosity, step into that uncertainty, as you’ve said–I’ve had the same experience–it’s really, really addictively neat.

Daniel Coyle: Uncertainty and vitality are directly related–uncertainty and vitality. The more certain you are, the less vital it seems. When you were saying that bike thing, I mean, one of the most vivid memories of my life was biking from the base of my parents’ street to my house–which is, like, a half a mile–with no hands, make it all the way. I’ve had a lot of memories of my life; that one is top, right up there. There’s something about that vitality, that aliveness, that that uncertainty gives you.

And similarly, meaning and mystery are also related. We’re talking so far about these moments of surrender, which are really important. But there’s a different type of presence, too, where you’re leaning into something mysterious. And I’ll use the word ‘sacred,’ but more in the sense of: sacred things are things that are endlessly a source of insight. Like, every time I go to the forest, I have an insight. Every time I have this conversation with this person, I have an insight. I think that down deep is what sacredness is. And, having these moments where you really lean into something mysterious together.

In the book, I start with the story of those Chilean miners who were down at the bottom of the mine–not a position anybody would want to be in, 2,000 feet down. It’s like Lord of the Flies for the first half an hour. And then, we know what happened: They eventually came together and got a ton of camaraderie and formed a little civilization down there and survived in these unsurvivable conditions. But, what turned them around wasn’t some leader saying, ‘Okay, guys, I have a plan.’ They weren’t going certainty. What turned them around were these moments of surrender and leaning into this mystery together, like, ‘Why are we here? Why are there 33 of us?’ And, the leader at one point–the supervisor everybody was scared of–walked to the center of the circle, took off his white helmet, and said, ‘There are no bosses and no employees.’

Now, that’s a really mysterious and meaningful thing to say.

But, leaning into that mystery together, along with these momentary, organic acts of surrender, there can also be these moments of, you can call it ritual, you can call it presence, you can call it whatever you want, but you’re still lighting up that relational attention, letting go of your normal to-do list and your sense of control and leaning into something that’s way bigger than you. And, the world’s filled with possibilities and opportunities to do that.

Daniel Coyle: And, in all the cases, the cool part is that we kind of disappear, which is kind of wild. Right? Like, in all those moments that we’re talking about, there are moments where our ego shrinks and vanishes, and poof, we’re gone. And that feels fabulous. It’s not just that it feels fabulous: it creates that meaningful connection. And, I think too often, we understand meaning as information: like, meaning as I’m learning something or I’m seeing some literal explicit thing there. Well, really, I think what we’re talking about in all these cases is this experience of connected[?connective?] energy, where there is a mystery that we’re connected to, and we’re trying to lean into that and have this experience of aliveness.

And going through the world like a machine–being productive, getting results–that’s part of life. But, where I think it becomes powerful is when you nest one of those intelligences within the other–when you are being controlling in the service of those higher relationships. I think that’s one way to think about the two attentional models and the way this works the best: it’s when–I think when that narrow–because all these flourishing places are controlling a lot of things. All these places I write about–the deli and the team–they’re accomplishing a lot in the world. They’re not just blissing out on meaning. But, I think the way to think about them is they are using control in the service of these larger relationships.

So, to Iain McGilchrist’s point, it’s the master and his emissary. The master would be–the foundational piece–is relational awareness and relational attention. And the servant of that is controlling attention. Not how we often flip it around in the modern world.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. It’s the story of–Ellen Langer is a professor at Harvard, and she went–as certain professors could only do–did this kind of wild experiment in the 1970s. And, she took an old monastery and retrofitted it so that everything in it was from 1959. As if–the Dean Martin records and a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint and all the furnishings and the TV was swapped out for a black and white. And she invited people in their 70s to come and live there for a week. And, the people showed up, and at the time–one of them had a cane, they were shuffling in there. And they spent–and she didn’t give them any constraints at all. It was just, ‘Come live here and see what happens.’

And, she did another group where she asked them, ‘Pretend like you’re living in 1959.’ That’s your only instruction: pretend.

And after a week–and they measured all of the physical characteristics coming and going, their psychological characters coming and going–and what they saw as they left was this extraordinary bloom of vigor, energy, possibility, humor, comaraderie. At the very end, a couple of members of the group–

Daniel Coyle: That’s right.

Daniel Coyle: Not the other group, that’s right. There was a control group that lived there without instructions. But, the group that said, ‘Look, pretend like you’re living there,’ those were the ones who had this bloom of vitality, energy, connection, humor. And there was a–one of the graduate students brought a football to throw around at the end, and a couple of the older people joined in the game. And, as Professor Langer said, nobody would mistake it for the NFL [National Football League], but at the start of the study, this would not be considered possible.

And, what that story really kind of captures is the fact that meaning and connective energy are not an increase of information, they’re an experience of reception. They’re an experience of stillness, where you’re activating your relational attention.

And the term awakening cues is what I saw in all of the places that I visited for the book: What I saw at places where they are intentionally creating these spaces, where people can drop their armor, where they spark a question, where they spark a mystery, and where people lean into it together. Much like in that time traveler house. What are we doing here? All this stuff is here. Let’s let go of our old habits. Let’s try this.

And, it’s a giant yellow door, you might say. And, when they step through it, it changes them.

And so, I think this concept of awakening cues, I think it speaks to attentional health, first of all: this idea that if you go through life like a machine–focus, focus, focus, produce, produce, produce–and never have these sort of cues and spaces around you, man, life goes by pretty quickly and pretty thinly. But, when you take the time to stop for a second and fire up that relational attention and really look at what’s going on you and live your way into it, that’s when life gets transformed.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. The way I understand it is that these things are kind of redolent with memory. Well, two things. They’re out of their old, old habits. Right? They’re leaving their apartment, they’re leaving their house where everything’s in a groove, all their behaviors in a groove. They’re thrown into this new place where they need to self-organize. Where they need to figure it out. So, that’s a different sort of–that’s a fresh kind of autonomy. Autonomy gives energy.

But, the other thing was that these things brought them back and sort of resurrected these memories that were there ready to be encountered again. Like my memory of making that bike ride, which I hadn’t thought about, and that energized me in some way.

And that idea, I think, where–she went on to study a lot of the health impacts. She really focused on the body and health and has quite a body of work on that kind of stuff. For the purposes of this connection, I think it made me see how that often meaning with relational attention–meaning is waiting for us. It’s–the same way in those people’s lives, those memories were there waiting to be sort of resurrected. What it took was that intentional yellow-door step to create a space where they could be awakened.

Daniel Coyle: Well, and I think it gets us into that second piece: The Group Flow. When you have to self-organize and navigate towards something, with some constraints. You unlock a lot of vitality. Which, again, sounds kind of woo-woo. It’s interesting how we lack clear scientific language to talk about some of this stuff. A shot of epinephrine to the heart is what it does feel like.

But, when I do talk to people about their flourishing experiences, a lot of times, the model that comes up in their head–and it doesn’t exist concretely as these things, but the underlying structure of what they describe is what you describe. Which is: I went to this place, with other people, and we kind of figured it out together. And, we didn’t know what was going to happen. There was a high degree of uncertainty. There was a high degree of challenge and difficulty. But almost like–I don’t know–like a flock of birds going through a forest, like, we self-organized. We figured it out. And we grew as a result of that. That’s the story they tell.

And, in some ways, that story, I think, has some powerful echoes with the way our–you know–our ancestors grew up from hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years: in small groups, navigating tough stuff, growing and figuring it out together. But, in some ways, it speaks to this idea from complexity science, really. You know. We’ve gone through the last, I don’t know, since the Enlightenment, basically, trying to imagine the world as a machine. But, this new wave of complex dynamical systems theory is showing us, I think, kind of clearly why these experiences–your experience, flourishing people’s experience. And it has to do with constraints, with gradients, with all this language that’s not that great.

But basically, it’s making the argument–if I can sum it up really clumsily–it’s life and our experiences are not machines, they’re rivers. They’re rivers.

And, for a river to go from being a puddle or a lake to being a river, a couple of things have to happen. You need a gradient. Like, you need to be moving towards some horizon. That’s good, you need a gradient.

And now, you need river banks. Right? You need something to say, ‘Go here, but not here.’ Like, don’t be–you can’t go anywhere. This is the gradient, here’s the riverbank.

And, the third thing you need is freedom. Like, the river can’t be frozen. All the molecules have to be able to move around and go where they want to go.

And so, these places that I visited over and over again, we’re recreating those three elements. Like, we want people to have autonomy: you choose what you want to do. When you got to Jerusalem, nobody was saying, ‘This is where you do Monday, this is going to be Tuesday. Here’s where your breakfast is.’ You, like, being there and self-navigating with freedom is what created that vitality.

There’s a constraint: you’re not going to a different city every week. Like, you’re staying here in this place. And there’s kind of a horizon, kind of a gradient you’re flowing toward.

And I see this over and over again. Like, one of the most vivid examples for me is this crazy experiment that this guy named Peter Skillman did–I don’t know if somebody’s talked about it on your show before, but the Spaghetti Tower experiment.

Daniel Coyle: So, Peter Skillman got groups of four–the question was, who can build the tallest tower with the following materials? Like, twenty pieces of spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard-sized marshmallow.

Daniel Coyle: Uncooked. Excellent question. Yeah, the cooked one never works.

Daniel Coyle: Extremely difficult, that’s right. So, 20 raw [inaudible 00:34:09] spaghetti, and who can build the tallest tower? Go. Single standard sized marshmallow–has to go on the top. That’s the rule. Can’t go on the bottom, has to go on the top.

So, it is four-person teams of CEOs [Chief Executive Officers], of lawyers, of MBA [Masters of Business Administration] students, and of kindergartners. If you had to bet who is going to win, most of us would probably bet on one of the adult teams.

In fact, the kindergartners win, and it’s not close. And, the question is why? Well, because all the adult teams do this thing where they try to organize themselves: They try to plan, and they have roles, and they talk, and they do all this stuff to foul up the flow. The kindergartners, they eat all the marshmallows, and then they save one, and then they start just jamming stuff together in a chaotic way. It looks extremely messy. But, what better way to solve?

And, it’s actually a deceptively tricky problem, because, relatively, the marshmallow is really sort of heavy, and the spaghetti has no stability sideways. So it’s really sort of tricky. But, what better way to solve a tricky, complex problem than to try stuff. And then it tilts this way, put something in there; tilts this way–they’re arm-over-arm, they’re a perfect inflow group brain, solving problems as they emerge. Like, group flow is, like, shared agency in motion; and that’s what great teams do. And that’s what we see in the natural world with schools of fish and flocks of birds, and that’s what we feel in our own lives when we’re on great teams.

It feels like pickup basketball. It feels like, ‘Well, I’m not going to ask my boss if I should fix this piece of the tower. I see the problem; I’m going to fix it.’ And then you fix that, and you fix that. And, who had the great idea? Well, great teams, you always get that same answer–where it’s, like, you ask them where the great idea came from or where the great breakthrough; they’re like, ‘We don’t really know. It just bubbled up from what we were doing.’ That’s the state that I saw over and over in these groups, whether it was scientists or business people: like, they were good at getting in the flow.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

And it really spotlights a bunch of things. But one of them is that I think the modern world pulls us further from those kind of moments. I think most groups of people throughout the history of the world have spent a lot of time thinking about their ancestors and thinking about having moments like that where they’re routinely in there. There’s a beautiful one that the Maori use where they kind of picture themselves holding hands with every ancestor–the chain of their fathers and mothers all the way back. And they’re the ones who are in the sunshine right now. The others are in the shadow, but you’re still holding hands. It takes five seconds to describe. Everybody gets it. It’s this incredibly powerful thing.

And, we would call these things rituals, right? We would call–what you just did, we’d call what Fred did–a ritual. And, I think we sometimes have consigned ritual to the realms of superstition and the past and it’s magical thinking. But, when you look at it through this lens of relational attention, when you look it through this lens of flourishing and vitality, it’s the anything but. It animates us. These moments where you actually stop and you give up the usefulness. This is not a useful exercise. We get nothing measurable: no result comes from it, it’s not predictable. So, you’re operating in this relational space. And that’s why it’s effective.

And, I think even when you extend that to other cultures, like, you know, when you see these–when you go to Europe–I don’t know if you’re struck by this at all–but if you’re in Spain during siesta or it’s 5:00, all of a sudden, everybody is on the street. Everybody’s got this ritual. It doesn’t make sense: they’ve closed their shops, they could make way more money. But, they all go out and everybody does the same thing together in this common space, and it’s wonderful fellowship. And, I think a lot of Americans that visit these kind of places are really struck by how vitalizing it is and how bad we are at it. It doesn’t mean we have to be bad. It doesn’t mean that we’re locked into being this way. But, these small changes in creating these spaces, whether it’s through the rituals like Fred uses or whether it’s literal spaces for people to gather, has that same vitalizing effect.

Daniel Coyle: Amen. Yeah, no: incredible. I would say decency–when you were saying that, I was going to say, God, the courage it takes to be decent. I think these two qualities that he embodies was this curiosity about other people. He brought in–after Kennedy was assassinated, they talked about it on the show. He was really early on helping people work against racism. He was so curious and connective and always connecting to this fabric of people. Whenever there was a disaster, he would say, ‘Look for the helpers.’ Always that sense of curiosity. Combined with the courage.

And I just like that as a combination. It feels like curiosity opens up that space and lets you notice the door, but you have to be gutsy to step through it. You cannot just remain, ‘Oh, I’m so appreciative and curious about other people, aren’t they great?’ You actually have to do the scary thing, which you did: calling your friend. You didn’t just think of them, you called them. And, that is, I think, that action step that speaks to what that group flow piece feels like. It’s not just that you’re radiating with meaning and it feels good. In order to flourish, you actually have to step into the uncertainty, see what happens, navigate. Maybe the conversation with your friend doesn’t go great at first and you’ve got to kind of re-figure that out, or maybe it goes great and now you’ve got an opportunity to explore something else. So, it’s a great combo that I think he embodies that curiosity with incredible courage.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. It’s in this category of how do we turn on our relational attention? How do we let go of control? And, Julia Cameron was an interesting person. She was a journalist for Rolling Stone, screenwriter, suffered from alcoholism early in her life, and kind of had the rock-and roll-lifestyle, writing Rolling Stone cover stories. Things went sideways for her. She ended up, in her early 30s, washed up in New Mexico with an infant daughter, divorced and trying to get sober. And, a friend of hers–she was trying to write, she was trying to write, trying to write, having no luck–and a friend of hers gave her some advice, which was just, ‘Stop trying to be good. Stop trying to write good stuff. You should just worry about the quantity.’

And so, she put a Post-it note above her desk that said, ‘Okay, God, you handle the quality; I’ll handle the quantity. I’ll do three pages every day.’ And she did it. She didn’t even think. She just walked to her [inaudible 00:49:22] and started scribbling whatever was on her mind: ‘Oh, I have a headache and the cockroach is crawling across the porch,’ or whatever. And, what she found was that this process–three pages a day, no matter what, whatever you express–ended up being extraordinarily vitalizing and liberating for her, both as a person and as an artist. She started to teach some classes. All of a sudden, people are passing around her handouts like they’re the sacred writ. She, on a whim, publishes a book. It’s now sold millions and millions and millions of copies; it’s called The Artist’s Way, and it’s a series of exercises built on letting go of control and built on creating meaningful connection–in a creative sense.

But, it’s not just artists who have benefited from this book. When you look at the people who regularly do Morning Pages, it is a dazzling variety of skilled people who make this part of their routine. Why does it work? Well, there’s no task, there’s no control. You’re simply surrendering to whatever comes out, and it’s really powerful.

Daniel Coyle: This is my problem: I struggle with–I’m used to writing with a goal, and so it’s very hard for me to let go of that and stop. I catch myself, ‘Oh, I’m really trying to put the spin on that phrase. That’s a really nice one.’ I start judging. But, when I do, it really is powerful. I do it maybe half the time. But I need to make it every day.

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, yeah. We should do something else: morning pottery or morning dance or some other form that we’re not good at.

Daniel Coyle: Theirs is a good story. For many years, the relationship business–like, there have been a lot of different programs to improve relationships. Back in the 1930s, I think they had a scorecard, where you’d deduct or add points depending on how your partner behaved. And, a lot of these systems were built on this idea that a relationship is a machine that needs to be fixed, and when you fix machines, you find the broken part and you replace it. So, that’s the model around which a lot of relationship therapy used to be.

And, Gottman and Schwartz were kind of a unique couple. He was a scientist. He had something called a love lab in the University of Washington where he would track in real time–with video cameras and recorders–he had couples come in and talk. And then he would see what their patterns of behavior are. And Schwartz was a top clinician. And, they came together; and their insight was, ‘Well, what if relationships aren’t machines? What if they’re not machines? What if they’re, like, these living systems, and the whole thing is to get people to pay attention to each other in a different way, to stop controlling each other, and start responding in the relationship, responding?’

And so, they developed a series of sort of moves. They’re kind of like a yoga class. Like, one of them is, like, Turn Toward, which is: whenever your partner makes a bid for your attention–maybe they clear their throat, maybe they walk in the room and have a look on their face–do you turn toward them? When they share something difficult, do you turn toward them, are you neutral, or do you turn away?

And, Gottman’s research will show that turning toward is an incredible indicator of a healthy relationship. Turning away or being neutral is an indicator of a bad relationship.

And so, there’s a whole bunch of these different things that they talk about, figuring out the love maps of your people are–my favorite one is Scanning for Appreciation. Our task attention loves to scan for problems, like, ‘Oh, there it is again, there it is again. There’s that pattern.’ We’re really good pattern-finders, right? Pattern, pattern, pattern. And that can be death to a relationship. But, scanning for appreciation replaces that with curiosity. It clicks on your relational attention a little bit, so the lantern goes on, and all of a sudden, you’re looking around and go, ‘Oh, that was really nice. That was really thoughtful. Thank you.’ Right?

And, so it’s–all of their stuff can be viewed through the lens of these attentional systems, where instead of focusing and trying to control the other person, you’re actually in kind of a dance with them, responding to what they do, and they’re responding to what you do. And the track record shows that it actually works, unlike some of those other systems which are designed to fix and replace.

Daniel Coyle: Really interesting. And that rut–there’s a bunch of different ways we could take this: that’s the complexity dynamic system, these are how we respond to ruts. Let’s put up a new riverbank, let’s have a new constraint, let’s have a new horizon maybe is another one.

And, from an intentional point of view, there’s this other shift, I think: When we look narrowly at our partners, we do see those patterns. But when we scan for appreciation and really look at them–there was something somebody said; I’m going to butcher it because I don’t know who said it. But it was something along the lines of, ‘My wife now, my love for her is all about her becoming more mysterious as I get to know her.’ Like, ‘I’m so in love with her that I barely know her,’ was the takeaway. Like, ‘She’s such a mystery to me. I didn’t appreciate what a mystery that she really is.’

To your point earlier about how we’re all the product of these millions–this ocean of little interactions and people that we’ve had–that’s a really mysterious thing, to know a person. To really know a person is to lean into that mystery. And so, to almost flip that rut and say, ‘Okay, yeah, it can feel like a rut through this lens, but when I change the lens, like, holy cow, there’s so much here I don’t know.’ That’s energizing, I think.

Daniel Coyle: All these little flips, I mean, I don’t know: Is the parable of the long spoons, do people know that one?

Daniel Coyle: Is that a familiar parable to you?

Daniel Coyle: I didn’t know it, so I’ll share it, just because we’re–a guy goes to God and says he wants to see heaven and hell. So, God, ‘Okay, I’ll show you hell first.’ They go to open the door, and there’s a pot of delicious stew and all these people starving around it because the spoons are really long and they can’t reach the spoon back to their mouth. They can’t: the spoon will not–so they’re starving and they’re miserable, and the guy says, ‘All right, cool, I got it. Let’s go see heaven.’ Goes to see heaven, exact same situation. Long spoons, delicious stew: and people are feeding each other.

And so, it seems like we’re having–in our conversation, we’ve hit that over and over again. It’s not like some big mountain to climb or some giant new sport you have to learn. It’s more like: Oh, there are these little toggles, little flips. If you flip the thing you’re doing, if you flip from control to relationship, good things can happen.

Daniel Coyle: That’s good. [More to come, 59:13]