This is why the first three habits are so foundational. They enable you to develop the internal security that gives you the courage to live with this kind of risk. As paradoxical as it sounds, it takes a great deal of confidence to be humble. It takes a great deal of internal security to afford the risk of being vulnerable. But when people have the confidence and the kind of principle-based internal security that gives birth to humility and vulnerability, they then cease being a law unto themselves. Instead, they become conduits of exchanging insights. And in that very exchange is the dynamic that unleashes creative powers.
Truly, nothing is more exciting and bonding in relationships than creating together. And Habits 4 and 5 give you the mind-set and the skill-set to do it. You have to think win-win. You have to seek first to understand and then to be understood. In a sense you have to learn to listen with the third ear to create the third mind and the third alternative; in other words, you have to listen heart to heart in genuine respect and empathy. You have to reach the point where both parties are open to influence, teachable, humble, and vulnerable before the third mind that is the part between the two minds can become creative and produce alternatives and options that neither had considered initially. This level of interdependence requires two independent persons who recognize the interdependent nature of the circumstance, issue, problem, or need so that they can choose to exercise those interdependent muscles that enable synergy to happen.
Truly, Habit 6 is the summum bonum of all the habits. It’s not transactional cooperation where one plus one equals two. It’s not compromise cooperation where one plus one equals one and a half. And it’s not adversarial communication or negative synergy where more than half the energy is spent in fighting and defending so that one plus one equals less than one.
Synergy is a situation in which one plus one equals at least three. It is the highest, most productive and satisfying level of human interdependence. It represents the ultimate fruit on the tree. And there is no way to get that fruit unless the tree has been planted and nurtured and becomes mature enough to produce it.
The Key to Synergy: Celebrate the Difference
The key to creating synergy is in learning to value—even celebrate—the difference. Going back to the metaphor of the body, if the body were all hands or all heart or all feet, it could never work the way it does. The very differences enable it to accomplish so much.
A member of our extended family shared this powerful story of how she came to value the difference between her and her daughter:
When I turned eleven, my parents gave me a beautiful edition of a great classic. I read those pages lovingly, and when I turned the last one, I wept. I had lived through them.
Carefully, I kept the book for years, waiting to give it to my own daughter. When Cathy was eleven, I presented the book to her. Very pleased by her gift, she struggled through the first two chapters, then deposited it on her shelf where it remained unopened for months. I was deeply disappointed.
For some reason I had always supposed that my daughter would be like me, that she would like to read the same books I read as a girl, that she would have a temperament somewhat similar to mine, and that she would like what I liked.
“Cathy is a charming, bubbly, quick-to-laugh, slightly mischievous girl,” her teachers told me. “She’s fun to be around,” said her friends. “She’s excited about life, quick to seek humor everywhere, a sensitive soul,” said her father.
“This is really hard for me,” I said to my husband one day. “Her interminable zest for activities, her insatiable desire to ‘play,’ her ever-bubbling laughing and joking, are overwhelming to me. I’ve never been like that.”
Reading had been the singular joy of my preteen years. In my mind I knew I was wrong to be disappointed in the difference between us, but in the recesses of my heart I was. Cathy was something of an enigma to me, and I resented it.
Those unspoken feelings pass quickly to a child. I knew she would sense them and they would hurt her, if they hadn’t already. I agonized that I could be so uncharitable. I knew my disappointment was senseless, but as dearly as I loved this child, it did not change my heart.
Night after night when all were sleeping and the house was dark and quiet, I prayed for understanding. Then as I lay in bed one morning, very early, something happened. Quickly passing through my mind, in just seconds, I saw a picture of Cathy as an adult. We were two adult women, arms linked, smiling at each other. I thought of my own sister and how different we were. Yet I would never have wished that she be like me. I realized that Cathy and I would both be adults someday, just like my sister and me. And dearest friends do not have to be alike.
The words came to mind, “How dare you try to impose your personality on her. Rejoice in your differences!” Although it lasted but seconds, this flash, this reawakening, changed my heart when nothing else could.
My thankfulness, my gratitude, was renewed. And my relationship with my daughter took on a whole new dimension of richness and joy.
Notice how initially this woman assumed that her daughter would be like her. Notice how this assumption caused her frustration and blinded her to her daughter’s precious uniqueness. Only when she learned how to accept her daughter as she was and to rejoice in their differences was she able to create the rich, full relationship she wanted to have.
And this is the case in every relationship in the family.
One day I was presenting a seminar dealing with right and left brain differences to a company in Orlando, Florida. I called the seminar “Manage from the Left, Lead from the Right.” During the break, the president of the company came up to me and said, “Stephen, this is intriguing, but I have been thinking about this material more in terms of its application to my marriage than to my business. My wife and I have a real communication problem. I wonder if you would have lunch with the two of us and just kind of watch how we talk to each other.”
“Let’s do it,” I replied.
As the three of us sat down together, we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then this man turned to his wife and said, “Now, honey, I’ve invited Stephen to have lunch with us to see if he can help us in our communication with each other. I know you feel I should be a more sensitive, considerate husband. Can you give me something specific you think I ought to do?” His dominant left brain wanted facts, figures, specifics, parts.
“Well, as I’ve told you before, it’s nothing specific. It’s more of a general sense I have about priorities.” Her dominant right brain was dealing with sensing and with the gestalt, the whole, the relationship between the parts.
“What do you mean, ‘a general sense about priorities’? What is it you want me to do? Give me something specific that I can get a handle on.”
“Well, it’s just a feeling.” Her right brain was dealing in images, intuitive feelings. “I just don’t think our marriage is as important to you as you tell me it is.”
“What can I do to make it more important? Give me something concrete and specific to go on.”
“It’s hard to put into words.”
At that point, he just rolled his eyes and looked at me as if to say, Stephen, could you endure this kind of dumbness in your marriage?
“It’s just a feeling,” she said, “a very strong feeling.”
“Honey,” he said to her, “that’s your problem. And that’s the problem with your mother. In fact, it’s the problem with every woman I know.”
Then he began to interrogate her as though it were some kind of legal deposition.
“Do you live where you want to live?”
“That’s not it,” she said with a sigh. “That’s not it at all.”
“I know,” he replied with forced patience. “But since you won’t tell me exactly what it is, I figure the best way to find out what it is, is to find out what it is not. Do you live where you want to live?”
“I guess.”
“Honey, Stephen’s here for just a few minutes to try to help us. Just give me a quick ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Do you live where you want to live?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, that’s settled. Do you have the things you want to have?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Do you do the things you want to do?”