Esther Perel | The INBOUND Studio

all right we are good hi everyone welcome to the inbound studio I'm Laura Moran your host joined by a sterol an author and therapist notable for exploring the tension between the need for security and the need for freedom in human relationships career fair thank you so much for being I wanted to start with the podcast that you host called where should we begin and just if you could explain to people a little bit about what that is and why podcast is the medium is it like working are you and why you've chosen that so may I ask how many of you know of where should we begin quite a bit so it's the first time that one is invited into a therapist's office to listen in on live anonymous unscripted raw couples therapy sessions and while you are listening in to the nitty gritty details of other people's lives what begins to happen is that you realize that you're in fact standing in front of your own mirror and the reason I wanted to do it is because I have been a couples therapist for 35 years and I am witnessing the rapid changes of relationships every day I mean there is has nothing in common with the relationship of today with the one that was when I started but couples are more isolated than ever and have unprecedented expectations of each other more than ever and if in the village you used to hear everybody's fights and everybody's lovemaking sessions these days your friends can pretty much separate and you didn't even see it coming so it was also a way of tackling the subject of isolation of fake news which social media is when it comes to personal life and the fact that more and more we have an Olympus we can't reach with a reality that feels very very far from it and of which we have no real sense of how is this happening with others am I alone other people going through this and it kind of unfolded into a public health campaign of relationships which is now coming out season 3 on October 5 exciting you know you were talking a lot with couples but do you think that expectation in terms of expectation in relationship is true outside of romantic absolutely I mean that's my whole talk here today there is a phenomenal crossing of parallel tracks that is happening currently on the one hand a matching set of expectations you know when you come to personal life romantic life the expectations that you would have with one person what once an entire community used to provide the same person is going to give a security and stability and dependability and reliability and predictability and the same person is going to give us all in mystery and passion and novelty and excitement and danger and fill in the bucket this dual set of needs like that that you know for most of history marriage was for survival then we brought in the companionship romantic element and now we want relationships for self-actualization well the same thing is happening at work you know you don't just end you know you go to work and you don't plan to spend 20 years there and work your way up step by step you know The Wall Street Journal had an article I just read yesterday which called quitters are winners it's like the more you leave the faster you grow kind of thing and the more you're going to get better jobs and this notion that after two years something has to happen and if you you know used to say that you leave your left marriages if you were very unhappy and today you leave them if you think you could be happier but the same thing happens with a job you don't leave the job you know because they closed the factory you leave the job because you don't feel that you have been promoted properly and fast enough and that rising on the Maslow ladder of needs you know that notion that it's about self-actualization about identity formation about belonging the fact that we bring to love market economy and we talked about having a good deal in our relationships but we bring to relations to work a language in a vocabulary of relationships we talk about authenticity belonging empathy trust when was that the bottom line language of business yeah it hasn't been so because of that there's like it's I think there's like a dual thing happening people are bringing that but sometimes workplaces aren't really like built for it or the organism adjuster isn't built for it so what how do you think that in the office people can better talk about emotions as a part of all of this right I think first of all you learn a language it's a vocabulary the same way that you learn the language of productivity of efficiency of performance of KPIs it's a language and you learn a language you know when you practice it at first you're clunky you repeat it doesn't really sound well it's kind of but not really and gradually like all learning first you imitate then you identify and then you internalize and gradually it starts to become part of the relationship culture but for that I also think you know that it's important to have a sense of how how do we map relationships I think sometimes the word is kind of mystifying and in fact relationships are quite structured systems you know in which you straddle two main axes structure hierarchy power discipline all the way down to chaos and relatedness from very close to very far distant and disengaged pretty much most relationships can be tracked there but now you take your team and you look how are we working here is this a very hierarchical very set system nothing can happen you have to go to ten different people changes impossibility etc but it's very warm because we have a lot of closeness and it's it's camaraderie but very inefficient or is it very distant rather cold but actually very structured and very efficient but not very loving you can map that and then you begin to see what are the attributes that we have ample of and what are the ones that need to be reinforced and who can do that who can bring the pieces that the other people may not necessarily have so that you create a real diversity that isn't only about gender and and background but it is actually about relational capacities as we've worked with all different people through these relationships is there a sort of like common mark or common marks of successful relationships yeah come up time and time again yeah yeah yeah you know I'm a couples therapist and I don't know if you know but in couples therapy rarely do people come to tell you what they have done wrong they don't really come to tell you what's the matter with them they come to a drop-off center and they come to tell me this is my partner you know I will be the expert on what's wrong with that person and fix it I think by definition relationships that do well are relationships where people take responsibility for their share without being mired in shame for it and it's so it's safe to take responsibility safe to own your stuff and people have a sense that you know if you want to change the other you change yourself I would say number one number two relationships that work well are relationships that really straddle the two fundamental sets of human needs it's the need for connection and the need for freedom it's that relatedness thing you need to be able to have a base but you also need and you have to you need to be able to have belonging but you also need a space for becoming so that's the place where you can express yourself where you can change where you can grow if you can straddle the anchor and the waves you have a very good system same thing on the vertical you need stability but you also need change you need hierarchy order discipline any parent knows that you manage discipline and love you need a structure you need organization but if you have too much of it nothing can move and you get rigid and you fossilize and if you have too little of it you go into this regulation and you go chaotic it is that dance between these polarities where people find their bliss can we talk or can you just give some of your thoughts on differences in relationships and how people interact with each other as a it goes by generations and cultures and and you know we might be very used to something at a certain age here in the United States but somebody older or younger or on the other side of the world in China might have a completely different experience with that so this there's actually really two very interesting ways to answer this first if you go China and the West if you go collectivist societies versus individualistic societies this is where the biggest changed occurred the realm of relationships for all of history was actually very clear everybody knew in the little town who they were what was expected of them how they needed to behave you know parents knew how to talk to their children husbands know what to say to their wives why don't know what not to say to their husbands everybody knew it was clear lots of certainty zero freedom we in the West have replaced rules and obligation and duty with choice and options and at the heart of relationships today is negotiation everything is a freakin negotiation you know you start with a two-year-old and you ask them what they want to eat what they want to wear you know and then you and then you worry that those very same people later on a hard to manage I know there are children for god sakes you know we raised them you know yeah so that's that's the first thing I would say that is really fundamentally shifted in terms of people of different cultures in different eras but I think what you can all ask yourself is this and this is a question that also goes with collectivist and individualistic what were some of the main messages that you grew up with around relationships at home in school in your community where you told relationships are central they matter they nurture you people are trustworthy they want to help you if you have a problem reach out where you raised for loyalty or where you raised with the messages that say you haven't only yourself to rely on you don't go to other people people will never help you people that will take advantage of you you count on yourself and you were raised for autonomy and if you were raised for loyalty or for autonomy and that still is your primary core you will have a different way of dealing with collaboration versus competition you will have a different experience versus letting people know when you have a difficulty or hiding from other people that you're struggling with a project you know all these things are emotional Valerie we bring to work we don't become different people when we enter the door of our office building and to have a clear sense of the map we grew up with gives you and if you look at your teams and you start to ask those kinds of questions you get a good sense who are the people who are leaders who people who are the people who follow who are the people who are good at seeing how everybody else is doing versus those who are very good at checking with themselves etc etc I was going to ask you exact sense yes I just see a few like this we can all do to better understand each other but then having hearing you say that I'm almost wondering if the question is really first like how can we best understand ourselves first to then figure out that is absolutely correct I would say relational intelligence starts with relational self-awareness if you don't have it visibly you it's very hard to suddenly start to listen to others if you are self-critical it's going to be hard to listen to other people say things without hearing them criticizing you I mean it's an extension so that doesn't mean it's just you know this concept of you should love yourself first and no we learn to love ourselves because we are loved by others this doesn't happen out of context it's a both/and but there is something about a certain kind of whales you know one of the great levels of awareness has to do with two major distortions I'm sure now some of you have never done this but I have so one of them is this confirmation bias I have a view right I could be here and say this woman is here to have a great conversation with me and I am in there with her and I'm gonna enjoy this or I can have this notion this woman and all the people who interview you they're always out to get you you they just want to make you look stupid and I am going to interpret every one of your questions with my confirmation bias yeah I'm going to look for evidence that reinforces how I see myself and how I see the world relating to me that is a major trap and the second one is if you're if I'm in a bad mood I will think that it's because you know there was traffic and and I the circumstances of my day made me in a bad mood but if you are in a bad mood it's because you're a nasty person you know a man is circumstantial yours is characterological know the world is clear have you never done this you're here with us right now you're gonna be on the main stage giving what I'm sure after this is gonna be an incredible talk what is the one thing that you're really hoping to leave the inbound audience at large with after your time here today I think inbound is about innovation and about the future of the workplace right I would not have been here ten years ago they would not have been a keynote on relationships at a professional conference at a business conference it would have been about KPIs performance efficiency bottom line you name it it wouldn't have been about what is considered soft skills and the soft skills are now the bottom line and those soft skills for a long time were considered feminine skills which you know what happens to those they're idealized in principle and discarded in reality so this importance of saying you know relationships at this point are really a undergoing a change but they're also threatened they've become more and more polarized and people are less and less able to actually manage the complexities of relationships and pay attention to that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life pay attention to it in work don't think it's a side product don't just do it when there is a crisis and recognize the importance of relationships in your life it is a it's an interesting thing how because everybody seems to live it it's never actually treated like a proper topic of inquiry rather than just kind of you know we're all we're all doing it you know it's not true and that would be the first message including here talk to strangers leave your phone on the table when you go to the bathroom when you're at lunch with somebody you know call home and thank the people who actually made it possible for you to be here put this notion of my relationships and my accountability into my relationships really front and center it will make a huge difference in your life in your teams and in your workplace all together are there people out in the in the world or that you've worked with directly that you particularly admire in terms of how they approach relationships or life or the work that they do or they're the teams that they work with I'll tell you the first thing that comes to mind when you say this is there is no function called the CRO chief relationship officer and somebody named this in who did a start-up and they're doing deep web and the person who the two people running it somehow from the beginning understood that talking to people is not their skills they can talk to computers and from the beginning they brought me on as the person who sits in on meetings who helps them deal with conflict who helps them have difficult conversations that they've never had to have before and for some reason I find I think the fact that this person knew what she didn't know makes her more of an expert than the people who are there telling you everything they know it's a different way of looking at expertise right it is okay I have one final question you saw me ask you a little bit of an aunt oh yeah we can talk about that let's do that so co-founders have a unique relationship with each other and I know you've talked in the past about how there are like similarities to marriages within a co-founder relationship so can you talk a little bit about how you've worked with co-founders and how right you know helps them hone what they need in their relationships and I will say you know I think this the research says basically 65% of startups don't succeed because of the fallout between the co-founders this is in case anybody cares if relationship actually matters and you know it can be a tree people they sell they they still have to be five years two of them don't talk anymore the third one is watching this debacle how do they handle this five years is a long time to sit in such a rut or it can be you know two people who have started together one is constantly looking for expansion the other one is kind of you know slow slow you know we don't have to and some of them are partners in life and some of them are just partners in business but what you have in a co-founder thing is this at the beginning for sure it is passion for the project it is a love affair in which two people lose sense of time lose sense of boundaries everything is possible I mean it actually matches a little bit the story of nascent love and nascent passion and then you begin to hit reality and then you have to deal with the cycles of relationships harmony disharmony repair or passion disillusion reconnection however you want to name it the same thing happens you're dealing with issues of complementarity instead of polarizing why do you do it this way you realize that you actually need that person to do it this way because it's what gives you the opportunity to do your thing and that notion of working the complementarity is the the juice of a mature relationship and it's all of that that we work that we work with all right my final question was and I'll get to that now and we ask everybody and you answered it a little bit already but I'd love you to answer in full what does inbound mean to you what in bad means on a personal level to me this whole parallel track that you know that of looking at the changes in personal life and how they are now being mirrored in professional and public space I began to think from the moment I got this invitation it's actually it's ideas that are just percolating in my head now and I thought this is this is the world that I actually have never worked in [Music] but I think I'm I'm sensing something which is part of why I'm here and I am very excited about this dialogue including the one we just had excellent well we're incredibly excited to have you here thank you so much for stopping by the studio on your way to the main stage I can't wait to see the spotlight now thank you so much for joining thank you thank you very much thanks everybody [Applause] you

Channel: INBOUND

Views: 29,074

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Keywords: the inbound studio, inbound studio, inbound, innovative, leader, thought, inspiring, inbound19, inbound2019, marketing, sales, growth, esther perel, the state of affairs, psychotherapy, podcast, where should we begin

Id: JP5UWLwflQM

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019