Geoffrey here in this video,
I'm going to show you the one shift in perspective that will allow you to become
a much better communicator in your relationship.
And I really want you to stick around until the end because it's one shift in
perspective has really made a massive difference in my own life and also a
massive difference in the lives of all my students, all my clients as well.
And I'm sure it will do the same for you. And in case we haven't met,
my name is Jeffrey and I help men in longterm relationships or marriages and
empower them with the right skills and knowledge and mindsets to be able to
design and lead a thriving relationship.
So if you want more content that can empower you with the right skills and
knowledge,
and I want you to subscribe to this channel and click the bell bone as well,
to be notified when I post new videos three times every single week.
[inaudible]
real quick. Before we begin this video,
I want to let you know that a few spots have opened up for my free masterclass
on the five proven steps to rebuilding your relationship from the ground up.
So if you want internet masterclass,
be sure to stick around until the end to get the announcement on how you can get
in on that.
So the perspective shift that I want you to make here is that you need to think
about farming for safety and not hunting for results.
And what do we mean by this?
So I think when you talk to a lot of people here and look at the way they
communicate,
what they're trying to do here is they're just trying to hunt for results.
And this is how you communicate usually at work or in any discourse of life.
So for example,
what they are trying to do is to get the conversation straight into the brass
tacks, into the solutions, into let's get to the nitty gritty,
let's get it done. And if they're facing some resistance in their conversation,
let's say so maybe their partner is stonewalling them shutting down,
or maybe their partner is reacting to them in an angry way,
in a more active form. They got pretty impatient at that and say, Hey, you know,
if you don't express it to me, we kind of work things out. So again,
they're trying to hunt for that result,
whether that result is their partner coming down,
their partner expressing themselves or their partner coming to a solution
together and getting the conversation over with really, really quickly. In fact,
if you asked a lot of people on how they define a successful conversation,
they will define it as a conversation that is efficient. That is fast,
that gets to the root core of the issue much quicker.
But what ends up happening here is that you end up rushing the conversation,
adds pressure to that conversation.
And if you're hunting for solutions like this,
what you're doing is you're often misunderstanding the problem or you're not
getting the full picture of what the problem actually is.
And you misunderstand each other.
You often make the wrong assumptions about what your partner is really saying or
what the problem actually is.
And your partner may actually make the wrong assumptions as well about what
you're trying to say as well.
And this causes a lot of butting heads and both of you will feel stifled,
will feel pressured, and it just doesn't create an environment,
a culture where a good communication can happen. And why is this bad? Well,
for one, it makes it more difficult for you in the longterm.
So understand that the pressure that stifling, that misunderstandings,
the misinterpretations they're making the wrong assumptions and so on is the one
thing that will destroy that safety in the relationship,
which if you've been following me for a while is really the number one
ingredient.
And you have to really master it to build a strong foundation for your
relationship. And when that safety goes down,
communication breaks down as well because communication at its essence is to
people who are willing to share and willing to receive each other's messages.
And so if you destroy safety here in the future,
communication would be like pulling teeth,
trying to get your partner to express something to you,
to talk to you about something we'd be like pulling teeth.
They'd be a lot more repressed feelings, more oppressed thoughts,
more oppressive emotions, and it'll just make it hard,
much harder for you in the long term.
So when you are in the perspective of hunting for solutions,
hunting for results in your communication,
then what you're doing here is you're trying to get this short term gain,
right? You're trying to get the gain right now, the benefit right now,
but what you're doing here is you're not seeing that trough at the end where it
actually makes it harder for you in the longterm. It's almost like getting debt,
you know, in a financial terms where,
you know, when you get debt in the financial terms,
you are trying to use the longterm to fund something in the short term,
you're trying to hunt for results in the short term.
So you're borrowing from the long term,
but the couples I've noticed who are very successful in communicating properly
in their relationship. They're not hunting for that result.
They're not looking for that short term gain. Instead,
what they're looking for is to farm. So what do I mean by farming here?
This is when you're approaching every conversation and whenever you approach a
conversation, you're not interested in getting the results today.
So you're not getting for example, or,
or wanting your partner to express herself,
to open herself up today or to calm down today for you both to come up with a
resolution or a solution together, a win, win solution together today.
But you're simply coming from approach of being curious and coming from a
place of wanting to discover things from your partners from point of view and
for your partner to slowly discover things from your point of view as well,
by coming you both down and sort of rewarding your partner to say,
whenever you express something to me,
I'm not going to shut you down. I'm not going to judge it.
I'm not going to correct you instead.
I'm going to simply understand you understand you so deep into why you're
feeling this problem or why you're feeling the way you're feeling.
And this might be slower in the short term.
So it might be more difficult in the short term because you're not going to get
to a solution today.
And the conversations might take a bit longer for you to complete.
But what it does is your farming safety. Every single time you do this,
you're planting those seeds of safety.
And the seeds of safety you're planting is that, you know,
if your partner can really express something to you and you can just listen to
it without correcting it without judging it without, you know,
saying how wrong or how unjustified she is for thinking or feeling that,
then you're allowing a part to say, wow,
every single time I express something to my partner,
it's actually a good experience. My partner understands it.
My partner listens to me and I feel acknowledged.
And I feel like I can express anything that I want to express.
And as you build the safety in the long term,
what happens is the natural flow of communication of expression will flow a
lot better.
Your partner will feel less of a need to repress or to keep things to herself
because she no longer has that fear of wanting to express something to you.
And likewise, as she feels more free and more open,
you will find that she'll also become less defensive.
Will she also increase your ability to express something to your partner?
So going back to this chart here,
where we talked about hunting is really you get the short term spike,
short term results at the expense of the longterm results.
Well, if you're farming, it might be harder for you in the short term,
but your yields are gains. As you create,
the safety will continue to increase over time.
And eventually you reach this peak where all you're doing is simply harvesting.
And the great thing about farming here is that unlike hunting your results,
the outcome that you want will be a lot more sustainable.
So if you look at couples who are focused on creating the safety first and not
focused on the short term gain of getting the results in the short term,
what happens is they,
they can use the safety to really harvest a lot of good conversations.
A lot of win-win conversations together.
And those win-win conversations will come a lot more naturally.
So how do we actually start farming in our conversations and stop hunting? Like,
what does it actually look like in the context of a real life conversation or
real life relationship here? So the first thing is that when you're farming,
you are asking more questions than you are making statements.
And if you are making a lot of statements,
that means that you're still in this mindset of trying to hunt for an outcome
for something to happen. So if you look at the way, most people communicate.
For example, their idea of communicating is that okay,
when you start this communication session, it's I make a statement.
And then my partner makes this statement back about my statement.
And then I make a statement back about my partners statement.
So it's statements back and forth. Or if they ask a question,
the questions they ask are already filled with assumptions.
And these are what I call leading questions. Where there questions. Yes,
but they're really statements these guys as questions because you're trying to
control or trying to direct the conversation to a specific outcome.
So you're asking questions for,
you're still hunting for specific answer for your partner.
And if you've been following my work for a while as well,
you'll also know that making statements is really the worst thing you can do
when it comes to creating safety. In fact, the more statements you make,
the more,
the likelihood that you're going to destroy safety in your relationship.
Why for many, many reasons, I mean, I can list a few here,
which is that without questions, your statements have no power.
It's like going to a dealership, for example,
and this car salesman is really making all these statements about why this car
is amazing. Why this car, you know, all these features of this car,
why you should buy this car and so on. But you know,
she hasn't even asked you one question about what your needs are,
what you want and what you're looking for. And so, you know, whatever he says,
it's great. It's right. That all these features are great.
All these benefits are great for this car. And perhaps you should buy that car,
but his statements no longer have power because you're to think, dude,
you don't even understand my problems.
You don't even understand what I'm looking for. Why should I listen to you?
And number two here is that without question, your statement will be irrelevant.
So often when ever something happens in a relationship,
whether it's a misunderstanding or a,
you guys are having a conflict about something in life,
you're already making a lot of assumptions about what you know is true.
But understanding here that your partner has a completely different perspective
than you do. And so while your statements or your suggestions make sense to you,
it doesn't always make perfect sense to your partner.
And without that question stage first,
without farming for that safety and asking those questions,
you're going to struggle in that your statements are going to often seem
irrelevant. And that is actually how you often butt heads.
And when your partner tells you, you just don't understand.
Or when they shut down and say, nevermind, because they're really thinking,
what's the point of really expressing anything to my partner here.
If he doesn't even want to take the time to listen,
if you already thinks that he knows everything about the story,
about both sides of the story.
And the other thing is that you're already assuming that you understand why your
partner is doing the things they are doing for example.
And it requires you to assume that you already understand the need,
the want that your partner has. For example, if you make a statement,
Hey partner, Hey wifey, please don't do X, Y, and Z.
You are assuming for example,
that she was already going to do that thing that you told her not to do.
You're assuming that you understand why she was going to do it in the first
place. You are assuming the intention behind it. And you're also assuming that,
you know, the impacts of whatever she was going to do on the future, right?
So you have your idea of what ha what this action will do it to the future,
but she has another idea.
What you don't know is that she might actually have a better reason that you're
not thinking of behind that action in the first place. And again,
whenever those assumptions are wrong,
that's how you butt heads in a relationship.
And so understanding all these factors,
what you need to understand here is that whenever you are making statements in a
relationship,
you are not only more prone to misunderstanding each other butting heads,
but it often rushes that conversation gives each other,
that feeling of being stifled, being pressured. And when people feel this,
when the people feel misunderstood, or when people feel rushed,
the guards go up,
their defenses go up and worsening this problem of budding heads.
But when I discovered how damaging this is how damaging hunting for that outcome
is.
And when I discovered this alternative of actually trying to farm safety with
every conversation that you have,
not only did it shift my perspective completely,
but my conversation started to become a lot better.
And that is when I wasn't really concerned about getting to an outcome or
getting somewhere in a conversation.
But this was when I approach every single conversation that I had with the
intent to simply discover and to understand something from my partner's
perspective before even thinking about any solution. So I think a lot of people,
when they're starting a conversation,
they're thinking about solutions already when their partner is talking,
they're thinking about the solution they're hunting for that solution.
But if you're trying to farm safety in your conversations,
you're not thinking about the solutions.
You're not preplanning the solutions instead.
You're simply trying to understand for the sake of,
and in fact,
when you look at how successful couples really communicate and how they talk to
each other, you realize that you can actually get to a win,
win solution here without ever making a single statement in yourself.
So how this goes is usually you begin the conversation by asking a bunch of
questions to your partner.
So let's say here that your partner misunderstands you misunderstand something
you did, for example,
she was texting you and you didn't pick up the phone until that night.
And she was mad at you because, Hey,
how come you don't respond to my texts when it's so urgent?
Don't you care about me? So there,
she was making the wrong assumptions about your intention. And a lot of people,
what they do is they try to counter this with another statement to say, Oh no,
you misunderstood me. Here's what I was trying to do.
But instead, take a step back and ask the question, okay.
It seems like you misunderstood me when I said this.
Can you tell me more about how you feel?
Can you tell me more about why you concluded that or how you concluded that?
Tell me more about that. I want to hear your thoughts,
and they're constantly asking these very open ended questions to simply discover
things from her perspective and discover the reasoning behind the
misunderstandings and so on. And if you look at the way,
a lot of successful couples talk after they ask all these series of questions to
discover things from their partner's perspective, the end,
the conversation by simply repeating a paraphrasing or recapping what their
partner said. Okay. So if I understand you correctly,
you're saying that you felt X, Y, Z, and X, Y, Z led you to do ABC.
And you did ABC because of Def, does that sound right? And your partner says,
yes. And then you go, okay. I understand.
And so for a lot of people who are hunting in the conversations,
their definition of success here is not really I understand,
but really here's the solution.
But for a lot of couples who are successful in their communication,
their idea of success in a conversation is okay.
I think I understand from your perspective, period,
that alone, that realization alone, if a successful conversation,
it means that you have built safety.
It means that you've rewarded your partner to express more to you in the future.
And the other question I always get to is what if I ask all these questions to
my partner and my partner says, no, I don't want to hear it.
Or she shuts me down or stonewalls me.
So understand that this is where your mindset of coming from a place of farming,
not hunting really matters here,
because if she shuts down and tells you that she didn't want to answer a
questions and you'll keep having the desire to really tell her, Hey,
you need to express yourself.
That desire is your desire to hunt. You're trying to get an outcome.
You're trying to get somewhere in the conversation instead of simply
discovering.
And the discovery you're making here is that your partner does not want to talk
to you at this very moment, either. That's due to a lack of safety,
lack of trust. You know,
the four core reasons of why people Stonewall is because we talked about in many
of my videos here. So if you were coming from a place of farming,
and even if your punter shuts you down and you end the conversation with simply
your partner shutting you down,
and all you can do is really just tell her that the door is always open,
reassure her of that safety, right? If you're coming from a place of farming,
you will see that as more of a successful accommodation.
But if you are in this mindset of hunting,
then you always see that conversation as a failure.
But understand that what we're trying to do here is we're trying to farm for
safety over time.
So even if your conversation doesn't end the way you want today,
it's still going to be a very successful conversation.
If you simply plant the right seeds and leave the door open and give her that
reassurance, that things are going to be safe,
that she doesn't have to express things today that all you're trying to do here,
simply to discover. And after they understand,
after they understand things from both perspectives,
then do they go into their suggestions.
But even when they're making suggestions,
they're not presenting their suggestions as a statement,
they're presenting their suggestions as more of a dialogue.
So here's how it usually goes. So once they understand this whole piece,
they'll say, okay, I think I understand where you're coming from.
Do you want to hear something from my perspective that they let their partner
say sure, and asking for permission,
like this gives weight to what you're saying next it's not a beta thing to do is
on a weekday to do is a very strong and smart thing to do.
And then when they're presenting their suggestions,
they're presenting it as a question. So they're saying, for example, okay, well,
my perspective is XYZ.
You know, the reason why I did this was really XYZ. What do you think?
And if their partner says, no, I don't agree with that.
They go back to the questioning stage and go, okay.
It seems like you don't agree with that. Tell me more.
They would loop back around in the conversation to eventually give another
suggestion based on what they discover in that next round of questioning.
And then at the end, once they say, what do you think? And their partner says,
that makes sense.
That's how they come into an agreement.
But notice here the way they come into an agreement,
the win win agreement has nothing to do with them, making statements. In fact,
they made zero statements along this whole journey of conversation. And again,
this takes a lot more time to, for you to get through that conversation.
But like we charted here, it's going to be difficult in the short term,
but it's going to be much easier for you to longterm because you're training and
conditioning, your partner and encouraging her to share more and more with you.
And to experience the joy of communicating with you and creates a sense of how
effortless a woodwind conversation with you is. And over time,
as she learns this, there's going to be a lot less resistance.
And with less resistance, as you ask your partner, these questions,
the less likely she'll start to shut down,
start to shut you out and say things like, I don't know,
I don't want to talk about it,
but the expression of their thoughts and their communication and their emotions
will flow a lot more freely.
And they'll make every conversation you have into something that's much more
effortless for you in the long term.
And if you want to learn more about what it means to farm for safety and how you
can use that safety,
that you've grown to start rebuilding your relationship from the ground up here,
then you want to join me in my free masterclass in the five proven steps to
rebuilding your relationship from the ground up. And in that masterclass,
I'll show you the exact process that myself and all my students have used to
rebuild our relationship from the ground up to something that's, you know,
going from the brink of a divorce,
to something that is thriving beyond what we have imagined before,
and also show you some important mindset shifts that you can take away with you
during this master class,
so that you can start to more naturally play out the right tactics and play out
the right things in a relationship without having to use so much of your
willpower or the fake it till you make it approach to make it happen.
And so this master class sounds interesting to you.
Then I want you to click the link above my head or in the comments below,
or the description box below this video.
And if you're looking for a free resource that can help you guide conversations
better, you know,
the conversations have actually planted the seeds of safety over time.
Prevents arguments never escalates into arguments and so on.
Then you also want to download the free guide I have for you up above my head or
down in the comments or the description box below this video as well.
And if you're looking for a group or community where you can post your questions
and actually get good advice from other members of the community or myself on
your problems, then you want to join my free Facebook group.
And the link to that is also down below this video. In the meantime,
do leave a comment below on what did you find most insightful or most eyeopening
for you in this video? And if you found this video helpful, then give it a like,
and subscribe to this channel for more content like this one in the meantime,
I will leave you with this two other videos here that will equip you with more
skills and knowledge and mindsets,
to be able to design this thriving relationship, starting with yourself.
In the meantime, I will see you in the next video.