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LOVE SAFETY
NET
Transcript
of October 12, 2009, program
“What Is Security?”
STEVE: Hi everyone.
Welcome to the Love Safety Net.
KIM: I’m Kim.
STEVE: And I’m Steve. And
today’s show is titled, “What is Security?”
KIM: In today’s uncertain
world, security is a bigger issue than ever. People always want
to feel more secure, I think. But what makes us feel secure and
how can we help our family feel secure?
STEVE: Yeah, I think that’s
an important question, Kim. And it’s really at the heart of our
relationship cure we talk about.
KIM: Yes. I am going to
give a list in a moment of the five things I think are important
to work on if you want to feel more secure and if you want your
family to feel more secure. So you might actually want to go
and get a pen and paper to write those down. I think you may
find they come in handy, and it might be you can’t remember them
if you don’t. But first I just want to apologize that our
launch for our new products has been delayed—again—by a
week. But we will definitely be releasing the design of the
site and the new product I have been working on and I am so
excited about next week, and we are really looking forward to
that.
STEVE: Yeah, I can’t wait,
Kim. I think your new pdf and audio production really are going
to start changing the world. I already want to be giving it to
everyone that contacts us at the help desk. I can’t wait
to give it to them!
KIM: (laughing) That’s been
actually our biggest rush on this new product is it really has
been devised to help the people that are our audience. You
know, we really feel so much for what you are going through and
the letters we receive really do move us. And, yeah, it’s been
nearly two years now we have been working doing this. I had
someone write to me right at the very beginning, Steve, and they
said to me back when I put out the very, very first version of
Back From the Looking Glass, and they said wow and
congratulations and it was great what we had done, but they said
‘you are just going to work so hard now trying to explain this
to everybody. And it doesn’t matter how many times you explain
it or how good you get at explaining it, there is just going to
be some people who don’t understand and you are just going to
have to live with that’. And I remember that email so many
times because they were just so right. But I hope this
time I have come as close as I can to hitting the nail on the
head with really what you need to do.
STEVE: Well there is a lot
to learn. And the steps that are in our Back From the
Looking Glass book are very straightforward and they are
very much the urgent steps you need to take.
KIM: Well, the Ten
Steps to Codependence or Overcoming Codependency
won’t replace our other products. Our other eBooks and our
other audios are still really important, but I think it does get
right to the heart of solving maybe some of the things people
have the most trouble with or the people that are having
difficulty really making that change in their marriage work.
STEVE: Well, they are steps
I think everyone needs to take—anybody that has been in a
difficult relationship where it feels like they have been the
victim in some respect really needs to have a look at these 10
steps. Perhaps they have taken one or two, but there are 10
that you really need to take to make sure you are on the path to
getting your life back together.
KIM: And I think it’s
important also, Steve, because with this new product we have
slightly taken the focus off the narcissist and onto the type of
behavior patterns of somebody who regularly finds themselves in
abusive relationships go through. This can be one of the most
painful questions for people, ‘Why do I end up repeating this
over and over?’ They will get away from one abusive partner and
they will only find themselves in another relationship, which is
abusive. And then they will start looking back and they will
go, ‘Hey but I suffered abuse from family members or from my
mother or my father and this has been going on my whole life’.
And what was painful in the beginning becomes all the more
intolerable and awful when you see this as something that has
stretched out through your whole history. And you start really
asking, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But when you get to that
point, that is the point where you can start reempowering
yourself with some answers of saying, ‘Well, maybe there are
some things that I can do differently that are going to change
this pattern.’
STEVE: Sure and even though
we’ve said this before in the past, there is a little bit of
uncertainty you have to face, and it’s not easy. But we are
making it as easy as we possibly can for you. This is a
reinforcing product for the rest of our material. Again, it is
going to be a relatively short read.
KIM: Ah, yes.
STEVE: Kim writes to the
point.
KIM: Another 10-page book.
(laughing)
STEVE: Another 10-page book.
You have done a really, really amazing job. I am just astounded
every time I read it, and I really am telling the truth.
KIM: Oh, well thank you.
Well, like with all of our books I do try and keep it short and
to the point. I feel like that’s what we have that is
different. There are plenty of academic books out there that
write about the same stuff that we do, but my experience is the
tend to be very long and you need to read and read and read, and
take notes, and cross reference.
STEVE: It can be quite
draining, can’t it? I have read a couple books about abusive
relationships and they are really long. And they absolutely
suck the life out of you.
KIM: And they are not always
that compelling. You don’t sort of go, ‘Oh, wow, okay, what
comes next?’
STEVE: Certainly you can
get a lot of good out of them, but I find them very draining.
KIM: I was always a big fan
of Hardy Boys when I was a kid. I wasn’t into being
Nancy Drew. I was a girl, but I was a bit of a tomboy.
STEVE: You’re still into the
Hardy Boys.
KIM: Yeah, for the kids, I
am. But I can’t say there are many books as exciting as a
Hardy Boy novel. But I did try and sort of keep that in
mind.
STEVE: Keep the suspense.
KIM: Yeah, keep the suspense,
keep a bit of an edge, and keep the story short and simple.
STEVE: It has some energy in
it. It’s a serious topic and we have really had a lot of
material and a lot of market research to draw on. Our list is
quite big now. So we have a lot of material we can draw on, a
lot of reader’s responses.
KIM: And experiences.
STEVE: And experiences. A
lot of stuff that has been humbling to us to help people with.
So this book has really boiled a lot of that down into something
straightforward. So I am looking forward to getting it out
there, whenever that may be.
KIM: Well, it will be next
week, I promise. But for today, back to security. I hope you
have that pen and paper. We just had a bit of a chat to give
you a chance to go get it. Here are the five points I think are
really important. This you won’t find in any of our books or
anywhere, so do write this down now and make note of it.
-
The first I am always talking about, and I
hate to be a broken record—but it is goals. Your goals are
your security. To me, I see my goals as the mast to my
ship. And the more troubled the waters get and the more
bumpy the ride, the more you just need to cling to that mast
and say okay, what are my goals and where am I going. And,
as always—another plug for Simple.ology—but we
really recommend Simple.ology as the process or
the program to use for helping you set those goals and
helping you stick to them. And the link to sign up for
Simple.ology -which their basic account is
free—is on our radio show page.
-
The next is the ability to self-sooth, which
is another thing we talk about all the time. But this is
vitally important to your security. Being somebody who no
matter how much people provoke you, no matter how much
people try and knock you off your game, no matter how rude
and upsetting and unfair and unreliable and irrational as
the people around you might be, the more you are able to
acknowledge your emotional response to what is happening to
you, but also to calm down and get yourself back to a state
of being calm and centered. The faster you can do that,
this is called a vagus nerve response, and the ability to do
this has been shown to be the biggest indicator for
success.
STEVE: So what if I hear
people writing to us and saying, ‘He won’t let me
self-sooth’.
KIM: (laughing)
STEVE: Or ‘She won’t
let me self-sooth.’ So it’s pointless to be tried.
KIM: Well, how can someone
not let you calm down?
STEVE: Okay, so maybe
that’s a little bit too rough. But I am trying to highlight the
real message behind the term self-sooth. And that is that it
has to happen regardless of what is going on around you.
KIM: Yeah, you can’t
control what someone else is doing, but you can control your
reaction to it.
STEVE: So this can turn into
a very ugly arm wrestle, in terms of an argument with somebody,
but really if you look at it from the point of view we are
trying to get across to you now, is the ability to self-sooth
regardless of what is going on in the immediate vicinity of
where you are living, where you are working, or wherever it is.
Being able to do that really comes down to you. And we really
don’t want to hear about anybody else until you at least have
the idea to self-sooth, or you have the ability to self-sooth.
KIM: And this doesn’t mean
you are never going to lose your temper or you are never going
to lose it. Of course you are still going to lose your temper
sometimes and you are still going to flip out. But it’s really
not a matter of not having emotional reactions or not being
reactive, but it’s just decreasing that amount of time that
it takes between you having that reaction and when you are
calm again. And maybe eventually you become so good at it that
you learn to just can keep your mouth shut.
STEVE: Until you get to
that point. Where you can say, ‘Wow, that just slipped through
me really quickly’. No more jealousy or whatever.
KIM: Yeah, but if you
look at the world around you, it is people in positions of
authority that are able to do that. I think many times it’s
been said in the presidential elections and what lead up to the
elections, often it’s the candidate that is judged to have the
coolest temper and is the least easily ruffled that is usually
the winner.
STEVE: Sure. That makes a
lot of sense.
KIM: That is actually one
of the most primary things we look for in people in saying, ‘Is
this somebody who is strong? Is this somebody who is secure in
themselves? Is this somebody that I feel safe and secure
around?’
STEVE: That’s right. And
we are not trying to coach you to become the president.
KIM: No. (laughing) I
think we have one too many of them already.
STEVE: That’s true. We are
coaching you to become in charge—of your own life. Of the play
that is happening in your life with all the players. Okay so,
Kim, what’s the next one?
KIM: The next one:
-
Have the courage to set boundaries. Okay,
this is a really important one. We talk about boundaries a
lot, Steve. So let’s get right past the psychobabble today
and just get down to okay, real speak. What are we talking
about when we say setting boundaries? Give me an example of
the courage to set a boundary.
STEVE: Ah, the courage to
set a boundary…maybe around a belief system.
KIM: Yep, so how would you
do that?
STEVE: If you know in
yourself what you want, if you know what the boundary is you
need to set—
KIM: Mmm-hmm.
STEVE: And that you are
able and confident enough. Just taking a quick step back your
having your own goals, being able to take a step back and calm
yourself are the first two steps to be able to have that
courage to set that boundary.
KIM: You have forgotten the
one we went through before the show, haven’t you?
STEVE: I have. It was about
beliefs, wasn’t it?
KIM: No, it was about with
your work.
STEVE: Oh, that’s right.
KIM: That’s a simpler one.
People will understand that one better.
STEVE: Thank goodness you
remind me of these things.
KIM: I will remind you.
(laughing)
STEVE: (laughing) So the
courage to set boundaries. Thank goodness you can help me
because that’s something I haven’t been very good at in the
past, but you have been very good at it. When you have work to
do, often you need to set a boundary around how many
interruptions you are going to be able to handle while finishing
the goal or hitting the deadline.
KIM: And what would be
the courage to set a boundary around that? What would be the
thing you would do?
STEVE: Well, I know a story
of a friend who just told me a good example. She worked in an
office that was an open-plan office. When she had a deadline
she was working to, she would constantly get interrupted because
she was the manager. So what she did is she got this great kind
of self-standing picture frame she could put on her desk. And
it said in big, bold letters, “working
to deadline. Do not INTERRUPT”.
KIM: Okay, that’s good.
STEVE: Well, she very much
set a boundary with her workplace.
KIM: Tim Ferriss has a
great one for that. He says if you are in an open plan office
and someone comes in and disturbs you, you say, ‘Okay, great.
I’ve got about a minute I can give you before I have a scheduled
appointment I have to do on the phone. How can I help you?’
STEVE: Ahhh.
KIM: And if they say,
‘Well, it doesn’t matter’. Then you say, ‘No, no, no. It’s
important. I do have time for you. I have a couple minutes.
What is it?’ And then if they were just going to waste your
time and they were just there because they didn’t have anything
better to do, they suddenly feel uncomfortable and they are not
going to come and do it again.
STEVE: Sure, and I think
that’s setting a boundary.
KIM: Absolutely.
STEVE: That is definitely
setting the tone.
KIM: Or if you are working
from home, you can just go and turn your phone off or say while
I am working I am going to turn off my email and I’m going to
tell people I’m not available.
STEVE: Sometimes when we do
recordings or are working in our office, Kim, I have a sign in
our office that I tack to the front door to the children, and I
say, ‘In case of emergency, dial 000’, which is our version of
911, for emergency. So the kids get the idea there, that we
really can’t be disturbed.
KIM: Yeah, and they know
that they can count on us so they laugh. We are saying don’t
have an emergency.
STEVE: So this is all about
work, and that’s slightly different than setting boundaries
within a relationship. But the same principles apply. And with
all those three examples we just gave with my emergency sign,
and our friends working to deadline sign, and Tim Ferriss’
example of you have a minute of my time, let’s do it. They are
all proactive, conscious decisions that were made to find the
courage, and that’s what we were talking about. Find the
courage to set that boundary.
KIM: It’s really important
that you mention that, Steve. Just because you find yourself in
a situation where you don’t know how to set a boundary doesn’t
mean you are some kind of a dumbo.
STEVE: Yeah, sure.
KIM: It really doesn’t.
Most of us don’t know how to handle these things or we find
situations come up in our lives where we are left going, ‘uh’
and stumbling for words. We feel upset and we feel distress but
a boundary has been crossed and we don’t really know quite what
to do about that. The important thing is, however, after you
calm down you go back and look at it and say, ‘Okay, what will I
do next time? The next time something similar to this happens,
what will I do?’ And come up with a really good solution. This
is what having the courage to set a boundary is. It’s when you
are calm and rational and you are in a really clear state of
mind, at that point you work through it and say, ‘Okay, what is
my strategy for next time?’ And that may be you coming up with
certain lines you are going to use, words that you need. You
are going to practice them and you may have practice them in
front of a mirror.
STEVE: Sure.
KIM: So you have practiced
it enough that the next time it happens you are ready.
STEVE: I think what I wanted
to add here, with the examples we gave and talking about
language, Kim, that you brought up, is it has to be unequivocal
language. It really can’t be anything funny. It is not a good
time to employ humor. When you are setting a boundary, it has
to be unequivocal. Like with my son, ‘call in emergency’, or
our friend’s sign ‘working to deadline’. It is not drawing the
other people into any kind of discussion. It’s a boundary.
It’s saying ‘you have hit a brick wall now…don’t mess with it’.
KIM: Yeah. There is just
so much to be said for setting boundaries. And again, I am
going to get back to Simple.ology here. Because
with the Simple.ology program, there is this
fantastic thing where in the beginning there are all these
questions to answer, movies to watch and it’s so big and
daunting. It really isn’t. A week into it and it’s only going
to be taking you 10-15 minutes a day on your computer in the
morning. It creates your to-do list. And you can do it right
on your computer. It’s a great program. But what it does is it
will come up and it will ask you, ‘What happened yesterday that
wasted your time? What happened yesterday that wasted your
energy? What did you do yesterday that deflected your goals and
took you off track?’ And it will give you a chance to come up
with strategies and say, ‘Okay, let’s come up with some
strategies how we are not going to let that happen today’.
STEVE: Right.
KIM: And those strategies
actually become part of your to-do list. So these might be new
things you have never thought of. And it’s hard to do new
things. You can sit there and say, ‘Oh, am I really going to do
that?’ And that’s why I say the courage to set boundaries,
because it does take courage.
STEVE: Sure, it’s something
new, isn’t it?
KIM: And I really felt
Simple.ology helped me have that courage. And we do
talk about it a lot and we do plug it, and they are sponsors of
the show, but that’s because—and you reminded me of this last
night, Steve, we talked about this—it is really what helped me
through when I was going through this myself. I have written all
of these books and we have come up with all sorts of ideas how
to support and help people, but I really don’t know how to tell
you to do that without Simple.ology because it was
something that was really my mast through those times. It
helped me find my goals, helped me find the courage to set
boundaries.
Okay, so the next one is:
-
Healthy habits. That gets onto one of the
other sponsors of our show, which is PACE. Dr. Sears. You
will see the link for that also on our radio show page. He
has a fantastic program with only 10 minutes a day—and this
is the example of a healthy habit—you can really increase
your fitness and your health and you will lose weight. They
have actually done a lot of research studies—they did it
with identical twins—to show that the people doing PACE for
10 minutes a day lost a lot more weight than the twin who
did 1-1/2 hours of cardio and weights a day. So it doesn’t
sound like it would be more effective, but that has been my
experience. We have swapped from doing three 1-1/2 sessions
of cardio and weight training exercises a week to just doing
10 minutes a day. And I have never felt better.
STEVE: It’s been really
good for me too.
KIM: And I must admit I am
cheating a little bit more what I eat these days. And it’s not
like exercise is a chore. But this is an example of healthy
habits. Again, I can’t say enough about healthy habits in terms
of improving your security and your feeling of stability,
because habits are great. It means they are there and you have
done them for long enough you don’t think about them anymore.
STEVE: That’s right.
Looking back since I have been an adult officially—living out of
the home—for about 20 years now, and I think it’s been a long
time developing healthy habits. If somebody said why don’t you
Google this 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have existed. But now we
are at the point where you can start learning healthy habits.
You have so much information at your fingertips. And you don’t
have to do it all at once.
KIM: Yeah.
STEVE: Make another healthy
habit and just check something on the internet once in a while
about anything you don’t feel easy about. Let’s just say your
tap water. Do a bit of research on tap water and think about if
you want to keep drinking your tap water. Or if it’s organic
fruits and vegetables. Or if it’s the quality of anything.
Anything you are just not sure about, check it out on the web.
Do your own research. That’s a healthy habit in itself, and then
build your own healthy habits on top of that. You know, don’t
bother Googl-ing tap water, you can just listen to me and don’t
drink it. But you know, do your own research.
KIM: Be concerned even
about showering in it.
STEVE: Yeah, indeed.
KIM: I have a bath and pour
the bath really hot next to an open window. And then I let all
the chlorine, gas and all that stuff go out the window before I
get in the bath. And that’s my habit. And because I work from
home I’ve got my certain time of day I have my bath. And that’s
it . At that time of day it’s just bath time for me. And
that’s just a healthy habit. And I think with a healthy habit
it gets back also to Simple.ology again, because
with Simple.ology it makes it so easy because you
can schedule these things into your day. And I will give a
little bit of advice here that I think really helps me. One of
the biggest time wasters for me or one of the biggest things
that used to drag me down, Steve, was me not knowing how to
prioritize, or having a problem I didn’t know how to solve that
was this open-ended problem. For example, like how to come up
with healthy things to put in the kids’ lunch.
STEVE: Sure.
KIM: And I would never
really solve it. And it would go on and on and on and on. And
then you would go on to two or three or four problems like
this. What do I do about my exercise? What do I do about the
kids’ lunches? What do I do about my weight? All this and
that. And it’s really easy to get bogged down in all these
open-ended problems in your life you have going on that you
can’t solve. And we talked a little bit about this last week
about tackling them one-by-one, but I also want to mention today
another tactic that I find spectacular. I will schedule time to
solve a problem.
STEVE: Sure.
KIM: I will look and I will
say, okay what is the biggest problem I have in my life at the
moment that is draining my energy, draining my time, draining my
money, that is making me worry, that is making it difficult for
me to prioritize what I am doing. And I will come up with that,
like we did that recently with food—shopping and the food for
all of us in the house now with kids growing up. It was just an
enormous drain on our money, and an enormous drain
on our time. And really it’s just never ending.
STEVE: That’s for sure.
KIM: So I scheduled it.
And I said, okay, I’m going to schedule a time today and this
afternoon I am going to give myself 40 minutes to do some
research, to look at some other people’s ideas and in that 30-40
minutes I am coming up with a solution. It might not be the
best solution in the world, but I am going to come up with a
solution that we are going to try. I did that a few weeks ago,
didn’t I?
STEVE: Yes.
KIM: And now we go to the
wholesale fruit and vegetable market near here once a week and
we take � day out to do that. And it’s been great. It has
opened up a whole new—
STEVE: And it’s a different
set of healthy habits that has opened up from that too. Now we
have large amounts of fresh foods that we have to come up with
ideas for—you know the idea is to eat them. But how to prepare
them, how to serve them, and how to get the kids into the idea
that it’s good to eat lots and lots and lots of avocado. But
they like that.
KIM: Yeah, and last week we
had bananas because bananas were cheap. And we got a couple
boxes of bananas. And we ended up freezing them and then we had
these great teenage kids visiting us—they are just lovely
kids—and they saw all these frozen bananas in our freezer,
friends of our kids, and they said, ‘Oh, look, you have this
juicer. You can make sorbet with this juicer’. And we had no
idea. And the next thing the kids were making this beautiful
banana sorbet for us.
STEVE: It was this
beautiful gelato kind of banana flavored gelato.
KIM: Yeah, and it’s
actually faster to make with our juicer than it is to make juice
in our juicer. So we can have banana sorbet for breakfast if we
want.
STEVE: The idea is to
take the skin off the bananas before you throw them in the
freezer.
KIM: Definitely. But we
never would have discovered that if we didn’t have the problem
of too many bananas.
STEVE: Yes.
KIM: It was because we
had too many bananas we froze them. And then because we froze
them. It’s amazing the way things happen. But this is about
good habits. And deciding that every week you are going to
start two or three new habits. Maybe they will end up sticking
and maybe they won’t. Just keep working at it. These healthy
habits are the most powerful thing in transforming your
life. Because a habit is a habit, you don’t have to think about
it. It’s something you just fall back on when times are tough
and it’s going to cushion you through that.
Okay, well we better keep
going, Steve. The next one is:
-
Useful skills.
STEVE: This is the final
of the five.
KIM: Yes, the final of the
five.
STEVE: Let’s just quickly
recap them if you have just gotten your pen. We have:
-
Goals.
-
The ability to self-sooth.
-
Courage to set boundaries.
-
Healthy habits.
-
Useful skills.
KIM: Yeah, and I just love
this one, useful skills. And we don’t talk about this very
often at all, unlike some of the other things we talk about a
lot. Useful skills is where you transcend ego in your work.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: Okay, well that’s
psychobabble. Let’s take in on the simple level.
STEVE: Yeah, talk to me
about how that transcends ego in a more plain language.
KIM: Okay, well I like
talking about my dad. I use him as an example a lot, so we will
talk about him again for a minute. He was a doctor, but he
didn’t actually make a lot out of being a doctor. He didn’t
actually have lot of his identity invested in that, because I
think he really would have rather been some electronic engineer
or something. He had all these crazy radios.
STEVE: Yeah, he was a geek
doctor.
KIM: (laughing) No, you’re
looking at me. I’m a geek too, I admit it. But he just loved
all that stuff. He taught me Morse code when I was about 5. I
mean, how daggy is that? But dad was still a good doctor, but
he was a good doctor because he knew what he was good at and he
knew what he was useful at from the patient’s point of
view, so he had a very successful practice, even in a very small
town that had too way many doctors.
STEVE: Yep.
KIM: And that was because
he was good with old people and he understood old people’s
fears. And that was something that he was really good at. And
it was simple. He knew they were scared to go to the hospital.
He knew they were scared of dying in the hospital. He knew the
things that really concerned them so he was able to just be
straight with them and say, ‘If I thought you were going to die
I wouldn’t be putting you in the hospital. I would let you stay
at home and die. You are going to the hospital because you are
going to get better and I am going to get you out of there as
fast as we can’. And that was a useful skill that he had, so
word got around actually and he was very, very popular. He
actually had to put a couple other doctors on in his practice
because he was so busy, even though the town we lived in
statistically had more doctors per population than anywhere else
in Australia. But this is where we transcend ego. Because
there are a lot of people out there that have their identity
invested in being a professional or what they do. And the world
really doesn’t care about that. At the end of the day, they
really don’t. But if you are focused on other people’s needs,
if you are focused on you having a skill that meets that need,
you are always going to be in demand.
STEVE: That’s right .That’s
one of the reasons why we try and reinforce with our kids the
useful skills of just doing chores around the house. That’s why
it’s so important not to neglect teaching your kids basic chores
because those simple skills are so useful. You don’t have to do
it to a military standard with your shirts pressed and
everything tidy and neat as a pin, but just the skills to
realize it needs to be done, the skills to be self-starting
enough to look after your own stuff, particularly within the
house you are living in.
KIM: Well, if someone has a
habit, it becomes quicker for them to just pick up a broom, or
just lend a hand or to just get in and get the job done, while
at the same time being friendly and amicable. They are going to
be somebody that is always welcome, and somebody people are
always going to like having around. And there is a lot of
security in this. You are always going to be welcome.
STEVE: That’s right. If you
have got that healthy habit of pitching in and being prepared to
help, then this is slightly different than the skills. The
skills you have developed over the years are going to compliment
that healthy habit of pitching in too. You know, it’s important
to get the job done.
KIM: And for people who are
starting out a business, perhaps, I think there is a really good
tip I have here. That is: Don’t invest your identity in the
profession of what you are doing. Because these days it’s all
just changing so fast. Honestly, what do they say? Something
like 70% of the jobs that will be out there in five years
haven’t even been invented yet? Or something like that?
STEVE: That sounds like a
good guess.
KIM: But it gives me the
example that yes, new jobs are coming up all the time and change
is really happening so fast these days. You are much better to
focus on who you are serving and what need you are serving in
the community.
STEVE: And what skills you
can offer.
KIM: Yeah, and then think
about what skills you can offer, but those skills may change as
time goes on. What you are providing people today might change,
and in three years there might be something better you can
provide them.
STEVE: That’s right. So,
Kim, I don’t know if we are going to have a chance to get back
to them. But I think we really need to get back to them, but I
have a question I would like to ask.
KIM: Okay.
STEVE: What is the line
between setting a boundary and imposing a will.
KIM: Okay, so moving away
from our five points. That is a really good question. Okay, the
difference between…ask me that again?
STEVE: Well, it’s a really
tough issue and it’s a really tough question. I will give you a
chance to think about it….where is the line between setting a
boundary and imposing our will on somebody?
KIM: Okay, yeah, that’s a
really tough question, and I think it’s sort of what we have
been talking about. The solution is in there, but we will
tackle this one, okay?
STEVE: Absolutely.
KIM: Okay. So there are
people who will say that because I had threatened you with jail
and that was part of you getting better that I was actually just
a bigger bully than you.
STEVE: (laughing) Well,
let’s look at this. Let’s use a different example. What about
with a couple where one person is a smoker and one person isn’t?
KIM: Yep.
STEVE: So in that situation,
the nonsmoker in the relationship has a right to some basic
human rights. You know, we have a right to clean air, clean
food, and clean water.
KIM: Yep.
STEVE: So this
person—before we get into any kind of topic of smoking or the
cost of smoking or the time involved with smoking or any of
those things. You know, there is a basic human right we need to
talk about there, and that is we have a right to clean air. And
that person, the nonsmoker in the relationship really needs to
set a boundary. Or is this person setting a boundary or
imposing his or her will by saying that I want to have clean air
in my house. I think—
KIM: Well—
STEVE: Oh, well, you answer
that question. I was just going to answer it myself.
KIM: Oh, well, you answer
it.
STEVE: Okay. Well, I think
it’s not imposing the will. I think you are able to strip back
the topic, and we are using smoking as an example here, but it’s
really easy to not get into the details of it when it’s “I just
need to be able to have clean air to breathe.” And I would say
that is not imposing your will. That is just setting a boundary
and standing up for your rights.
KIM: Yeah. Or if the person
is smoking and spending $100 a week on it, which is pretty easy
to do when you smoke, and that is really coming out of the
household budget of money they can’t afford, then I think that
would be a boundary that needed to be set.
STEVE: That is definitely
crossing a boundary isn’t it?
KIM: Yes, because their
habit is affecting their family financially.
STEVE: And it’s not giving
any value to the family.
KIM: Yeah, but in terms of
them actually saying I forbid you to smoke because I disapprove
of smoking, that would be imposing your will.
STEVE: You know, I remember
being a smoker and a lot of people used to say, ‘You know, you
should quit because it’s a filthy habit’.
KIM: Yeah.
STEVE: And I would say ‘yeah,
that’s right’. And keep smoking. You know, there was no
substance to that argument. And really, like you were saying,
it hasn’t anything to do with boundaries or anything personal,
but can take a stand and say ‘I have a right to clean air to
breathe in my house, in my car, wherever it is’.
KIM: Right. And it’s
about responsibility really, isn’t it? And I think an opposite
case is often with one partner who belongs to a certain religion
or have certain religious beliefs, and they feel they have the
right to impose those beliefs on the rest of their family, on
their children and on their spouse. And I don’t think that is
okay. You know, I have my own beliefs, but I think belief is a
matter of conscience.
STEVE: We talked about
belief systems and virtues a couple weeks ago.
KIM: Yeah, and you hope that
you can educate your children in what you believe, obviously.
But really when it comes down to it, the choice of what they
believe is a matter of their own conscience. And I don’t think
that it’s okay for people to impose that on their family just
for the sake of it being what they believe, because I believe
they have to believe it. That would be imposing your will.
STEVE: Yeah. That’s an
example of imposing your will.
KIM: And I think it’s good
to get really clear about that, I think it’s a good question,
Steve. It’s good to be clear about this in your mind, about
what you have the right to ask for and what you don’t have the
right to ask for. And if somebody truly is crossing a
boundary. Say for instance the smoking is affecting the other
people in your family’s health, and your money or whatever, it’s
going to be easier to gain support and gain help from people in
limiting that. I was only able to get the support from the
police because what you were doing was against the law, and I
had them on my side. So that wasn’t really me being a bully,
that was just me defending myself.
STEVE: Yeah, and using the
appropriate resources to defend yourself too.
KIM: So it’s about
responsibility. But I think it eventually comes down to how you
design your life and the way you are going to live your life.
Because how the responsibilities are worked out between two
people can be different in all sorts of situations.
STEVE: Sure.
KIM: And the stereotypes
don’t always work.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: You know, our life isn’t
organized in the way traditional to stereotypes. You take care
of the kids now a lot more than I do. I am always around for
the kids, but you make their lunches and you do a lot of stuff.
I am doing more professional work that is bringing in money.
And got settled into that after we got to know each other and
that wouldn’t be right for everybody.
STEVE: Yeah, after lots of
arguments. (laughing)
KIM: (laughing) Yeah,
with us getting to know each other better. But this leads to
another issue and that is the problem starts when you are not
able to discuss this and come up with this design for your
life. And I remember we had so many arguments about this,
Steve, back when I wasn’t able to discuss that with you. And
you would just say, ‘oh it doesn’t matter, you just do
whatever’.
STEVE: Yeah, ‘I haven’t got
time to talk about it. Sure, you do whatever’.
KIM: You just do whatever
you want and I will go along with it. And you pretended you
were really easygoing. But when it got down to it, whatever
plans I made you would just completely ignore and do what you
would like and be upset with any of it if it wasn’t what you
wanted or what you liked. And I would say, well, why didn’t you
talk to me about it. And I remember reading marriage books back
then and one that just clearly illustrated that whole situation
for negotiation and if one person isn’t prepared to sit down and
take the time to negotiate, really they are the person that is
the aggressor.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: And you used to always
point the finger and say, ‘Look, you are having all these ideas
and you are more assertive than me anyway. There is no point in
talking to you because you will always win’. And in a
negotiation the person who does that and refuses to negotiate is
actually the aggressive party. But that really won’t help you
very much, and it didn’t help me back then. I could go and I
could say, ‘Hey, look, this book says you are the problem here
and you are the aggressor’.
STEVE: Right.
KIM: But it really didn’t
help me.
STEVE: No. So what helped
you in that situation.
KIM: Well, what helped me
is this list of things that help build your security that we
just went through, because in that situation it wasn’t an easy
fix, it wasn’t something I could do overnight. But what I had
to learn—and I think I will just mention this first before I get
back to that list—is that I felt very insecure when you would
talk to me that way because you would claim I was too assertive
and you couldn’t talk to me because I was always going to impose
my will and get my way and that was the reason you couldn’t talk
to me.
STEVE: Yeah.
KIM: Now, you were trying to
destabilize me, though, by saying that?
STEVE: Well, it was just a
way to try and take advantage.
KIM: To get your
way.
STEVE: Yeah, to get my way
and get an advantage over you.
KIM: But at that point, your
way really wasn’t considering any of us.
STEVE: No, my way was just
about me gaining advantage for myself.
KIM: Yeah, and I did have
in mind the kids, myself, and you and everyone in my plan. So
what I really eventually discovered is rather than being scared
of me being too powerful, too strong, or too pushy—which is how
you had made me feel for a really long time—I was too pushy, I
was too assertive, I had to actually wake up and realize that
was just a complete ploy on your part to keep me weak.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: And the answer wasn’t
that I had to be less pushy or less assertive, but I actually
had to sort of really fight fire with fire. And I had to become
much more assertive and much more determined that I was going to
set my own goals and agenda.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: And because you weren’t
willing to negotiate with me, I could say, ‘Well fine, we are
doing it my way until you are prepared to sit down and talk to
me about this reasonably. And the day you are willing to sit
down and talk with me about this reasonably, calmly and
effectively, and we come up with a plan together, I am
completely prepared to compromise and come up with something
that suits you better, but until then I am doing it like this.
STEVE: So, can I just quote
Mark Joyner here, who is the founder of Simple.ology?
He says the best thing for you to do is to understand the
battlefield ahead.
KIM: Yeah, see the
battlefield.
STEVE: See the battlefield
and understand the battlefield. For me and for Kim at that time
when things were at their worse, we thought the battlefield was
just the power struggle between us. And that really wasn’t
where we were going to lose the happiness we were both looking
for or the advantage we were both looking for. Really the
battlefield was having the right goals set. Seeing where it was
we were going to be going. Having those skills we needed and we
lacked at that stage. Seeing ourselves building those—that was
the real battlefield. Making strengthening decisions together
where we could make ourselves stronger. But the battlefield
that was just the argument we were having where I would try and
get a little bit underneath Kim and try and knock her off her
game, and she would get angry at me and say I was to blame, that
was just not where we were going to win. That was where we were
going to lose everything. That was not where we were going to
make any progress at all.
KIM: Yeah, and at this point
I was able to say telling you you were wrong wasn’t going to
work. And I just can’t say that more clearly to our listeners.
Telling your partner they are wrong and trying to prove to them
they are wrong is not going to work.
STEVE: And write that down
too.
KIM: It doesn’t matter how
wrong they are, it is still not going to work. Instead what I
did is I went no, I need to concentrate on my goals. I need to
just say, okay you don’t want to negotiate with me? Well this
is my plan and I’m going to stick to it. I’ve got my Simple.ology
account, I’ve got my day planned, and I have this planned for
the kids, and this is what is happening. And any time you tried
to disrupt me or interrupt that, I had those goals as my mast
and my pillar to hang onto and say, no I’m getting back to
that. I learned to self-sooth. I learned to be able to calm
down when you did upset me to get back focused on those goals as
quickly as I could. I learned the courage to set boundaries. I
learned to be able to say no to you. ‘No, darling, I am not
going to do that with you this afternoon because I am working on
this.’ And I set boundaries with you in a lot of other ways.
You know, I learned healthier habits and I got on top of my own
habits. And I also learned some useful skills. And by doing
all of those things, it suddenly brought you around to a point
where yeah, you were ready to negotiate with me.
STEVE: And on that point, we
are drawing the curtains, Kim. Thanks everyone at Global Talk
Radio.
KIM: Really, is it that time
already?
STEVE: 50 minutes.
KIM: Oh, I thought we had
another few minutes, Steve. No we have another few minutes, we
really do. Because we have to tell them about this.
If your partner is hurting
you, or they are breaking the law, this is really, really
important. We are jumping in on something different here, but
it’s very important—you are going to make them feel safe by
stopping protecting them. Protecting them from the consequences
of their own actions is not going to make them feel safe.
STEVE: Well, it’s not
actually protecting them.
KIM: It’s not protecting them
at all, isn’t that true?
STEVE: Absolutely.
KIM: Because if they are out
of control and if they are behaving in a way that is completely
not sustainable and is going to lead your family to destruction
or themselves into jail or whatever, you are better off to take
it in hand and organize that you bring in the authorities and
you have somebody help limit them and bring them back into a
place of security.
STEVE: That’s right.
KIM: And that’s actually what
is going to make them feel secure.
STEVE: So that’s not
protecting people from the natural consequences of their
actions. That’s really important. Don’t try to prevent natural
consequences from occurring to people who are particularly
breaking the law.
KIM: Yeah, if somebody is
hitting you, somebody is physically abusive to you, or somebody
is stealing money or embezzling money from the joint company
that you run, it’s very, very important that you actually
organize help and you limit this behavior. You are not
protecting your partner by protecting them from the consequences
of this behavior. If they need to go to jail, they need to go
to jail. And obviously after having been through something not
quite that serious, but having been through this yourself, did
me actually bringing in the authorities and saying you have to
stop make you feel safer or did it make you feel threatened.
STEVE: Well, again, it was
unequivocal. It made me feel safer because it was an
unequivocal message. It wasn’t maybe, it was I am going to get
the authorities in. It was a really direct message, so the
answer is yes, it made me feel safe. Because there wasn’t any
room for me to destabilize anymore.
KIM: Yeah, and you saw I
wasn’t going to let you rock the boat and tip it over.
STEVE: That’s right. So I
had a good option in front of me and that was to do the right
thing.
KIM: And suddenly I became
somebody you trusted more too, isn’t that right?
STEVE: Yes, absolutely. But
we really should wrap it up, Kim.
KIM: Okay, I’ll let you do
that, Steve.
STEVE: Thanks to everyone
on the team. Thanks to everyone at Global Talk Radio. We will
talk to you all next week.
KIM: Bye!
STEVE: Bye!
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