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The day I got an offer to be a consultant after college,
a good friend told me, girl, you're done.
The hardest part is getting the job.
That got me really excited.
But I also heard this anxious voice speaking inside my head.
That voice is my inner critic who I call Nancy.
>> [LAUGH] >> And Nancy kept telling me,
[SOUND] Renata, I don't think you should be that excited.
You have zero consulting skills.
>> [LAUGH] >> Nancy was right.
But she calmed down after all of the training
that every consultant has to get through.
A few years later, when I met my wonderful partner,
John, I had a strangely similar experience.
Although my friends tell me, you're done,
the hardest part is finding the right person.
>> [LAUGH] >> And I was really excited.
But Nancy came back screaming.
Renata, what do you know about relationships?
Clearly not much because so far 100% of them have ended.
Ouch >> [LAUGH]
>> I know.
>> But before I tell you what happened next, I want to take a quick poll.
Raise your hand if you think that love is a pretty important part of life.
Everyone, all of us, great.
Now, raise your hand if you feel like you've been really well
educated on how to love.
None of us.
Let's think about that for a second.
We all value our carriers.
And if you're relatively well educated on how to succeed, that's how we got here.
But when it comes to love, which overwhelming research
points as a top predictor of life satisfaction, health and
wealth, we kind of just wait or swipe until we find the right person.
We look at the couples around us, we watch what they do right and
wrong, and we assume we know how to do right.
But that's like hoping to become a doctor by watching Grey's Anatomy.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
that's what I was thinking about when I met John.
I felt like I finally met the right person.
But I didn't feel educated on how to be the right person.
And I started getting really scared that I would eventually mess everything up.
And I really didn't want to mess anything up.
So I started reading every piece of research, and
every book that I could find, about the science of love and relationships.
Luckily, John loves reading, so he followed me down that rabbit hole.
Which is very convenient but also a little weird.
>> [LAUGH] >> Now we talk about our relationship and
feelings in terms of stuff like attachment theory.
And the neurobiology of desire and emotions.
And we haven't even taken.
>> [LAUGH] >> Even though it might not be sexy to
talk about your relationship in scientific terms, it's kind of like having food
in your teeth, you really want to know so you can do something about it.
I have to say though, I try to be really discreet about my interest in relationship
topics for a long time.
I felt it was super controversial and
frankly too embarrassing to discuss with anyone else but John.
But then one day, my brother, Rodrigo, called me to ask.
Hey, is everything okay between you and John?
And I said, yeah, what's going on?
Well, my brother and
I happen to share an Amazon account, which sometimes gets awkward.
He was calling because he noticed the trend in my recent book orders.
Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
>> [LAUGH] >> Your Brain on Love,
Mating in Captivity.
>> [LAUGH] >> And many,
many other relationship books that John and I read together.
We don't do Netflix and chill, we read and chill.
>> [LAUGH] >> Now when my brother called me,
he was also getting an MBA.
So I told him, listen, we're both getting an MBA because it's valuable, but
it's not always been valuable.
When the MBA was created 100 years ago, people thought it was crazy that business
was being elevated to the same level of expertise as law and engineering.
Now it's the most popular degree in the US.
We finally see value in business education, and
we have to do the same for love.
Now am I suggesting you create a formal master's degree in love?
No, but
I am suggesting we all start seeing ourselves as CEOs of our own love lives.
We know from research, that couples who thrive and
couples who fail behave very differently.
We also know from research that just like in business,
there's no formula, but there are tools.
And just like great CEOs,
couples that thrive master tools that make them better everyday.
Today, I'm going to share my top three favorites, like a good consultant.
>> [LAUGH] >> Number one,
choose to see love as a skill.
By far the most important thing that I've learned from this journey
is that love is not something that happens to us.
It's a skill.
We can choose to learn, practice, and master over time.
It's not easy, and we'll never be perfect, but
seeing it as a skill is the first step to getting better.
Number two, choose generosity over judgment.
If you've been the parent of a child or a puppy, you know what it feels like
to see really unpleasant behavior with generosity, not judgment.
You understand that they're still growing up.
But if our partner does something we don't like, [SOUND] we judge we get offended.
They should be fully grown up by now.
But as long as we are live, we're all still growing up.
It's easy to love the wonderful about our partner, but the true love skill
is seeing what's not so wonderful about them with generosity, not judgment.
Number three, choose to become an expert on your partner.
We know from neuroscience that if you take couples who report to still be madly in
love after 25 years and put them through an MRI machine, when you show them a photo
of their partner, their brain lights up just like couples who just fell in love.
Which is crazy because that basically means that the honeymoon phase
doesn't have to be over at the honeymoon.
Couples who stay in love are couples who stay curious.
Every day they commit to learning about each other like an expert.
They never stop learning.
It's a bit ironic that we find a romantic to say things like,
my god, I know everything about my boyfriend.
Personally, I find it much more romantic to think about how much more I want to
know about my partner and how much more of an expert I want to become everyday.
Now these tools are not a checklist, they are a lifelong practice.
But it's easy to forget that when we get busy with life.
So I want to leave you with something that
remind myself of being accountable every day both in business and in life.
As CEOs in love, or business, we're all given two options every single day.
You can either blame external conditions for your performance, or you can
take radical responsibility for practicing the skills that make you better.
Now the question is, which one will you choose?
Thank you.
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