The Focus Issue In Your Winning Recipe – How To Reduce Its Impact

AS INTROVERTS WE each created a winning recipe in childhood to compensate for not being outgoing enough. It allows us to hide inside of a socially acceptable way to be – clever, doubtful, forgiving, organized, or thrifty. Or any of the thousands of other personas introverts adopt to win in an extroverted world. My recipe is being process-driven, building step by step procedures to cope with life events.

Your winning recipe and your relationships do not mix well. You have designed the recipe to reduce the noise level around you.  Most often that involves putting distance between yourself and other people.

Why Winning Recipes Are So Damaging To Relationships

THE RECIPE MAY always feel like a safe bet, but it is bad for being related:

It can prevent you from being authentic with others. Who you are is an introvert. Because the persona of a diplomat, philosopher, stoic or some other way of being in your recipe is not the authentic you, it can attract the wrong kind of life partner. We will look at this in Post #5.

It can cause you to become unreliable. When you are under stress the recipe becomes relentless, urging you to retreat into its comfort as a default position. Unfortunately this can make people think that you have changed so much that they no longer want to be around you. This discussion will take place in Post #6.

It can prevent you from focusing on the other person. The recipe creates a focus issue – it calls you to focus on it instead of on the person in front of you. Even though the recipe is comfortable it is still not you, and you have to pay attention to make sure you are doing it right.  You have to be diplomatic, philosophical, stoic, or however your recipe insists that you be. This can prevent you from seeing why the relationship could never work. The rest of this post talks about this.

How I Discovered The Focus Issue

I MET SANDY, the love of my life, when I was 38. Years earlier I had gotten close to five other women, and in researching my memoir I saw that with two of them I focused more on running my winning recipe – pursuing some kind of a process – than at looking closely at who the women were.

Anabela. In high school this gorgeous girl from Portugal was so far out of my league that I had no hope of attracting her. So before she learned English I taught myself Portuguese. She responded, but I paid so much attention to the language that I missed seeing that her controlling behavioral style was never going to change. Initially I believed she was bossy only as her way of getting a grip on life in America. But she was so overbearing that I left after a year. 

Months later she began working as a professional model, and to my complete surprise she approached me. She was now the most ravishing young woman I had ever seen. I responded and she was passionate, but she was wrong for me. Had I not been blinded by the focus issue, I could have seen that she was trying to reassert control over me as probably the only man who had ever walked away from her.

Ana Maria. She was the sultry daughter of a university president in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was the sponsor of a seven-week cultural exchange between his college and Stanford that I was on. I boarded at their house and did not dare approach her – I could have blown up the program. So instead I focused on her offer to teach me to play bossa nova on the guitar. 

In paying close attention to learning the music I did not see how acutely lonely she was. Towards me she was friendly but reserved, then utterly surprised me the night before I left for America when she held me and wept. Had I known how isolated she felt herself to be I might have laid the groundwork for a future relationship. But was just as well that I did not. I had not looked at her closely enough to realize that she would always expect to live a high-class lifestyle with servants, something I would never have wanted.

Unpacking the Focus Issue Failures

I PAID FAR more attention to two processes – to learning Portuguese and to learning Brazilian music – than I did to either of the women I was with. My winning recipe got most of the attention instead, leading me to consider women who at bottom were not appropriate for me.

That is how a winning recipe operates. It is so much a part of you that most of the time you are not even aware that you are living it. It hijacks your attention away from a relationship with a potential or actual significant other to the point where you lose focus on them – and in the end can be surprised when things do not work out.

How to Get Your Winning Recipe To Be Quiet

YOU WILL NEVER get completely free of your winning recipe. By now it is as much a part of you as an arm or a leg.

But you can get it to quiet down. By that I mean you can bring it out into the daylight and consciously turn down its volume so you can address the focus issue by paying close attention to the person in front of you. Doing this is simple, but it takes repeated practice:

1. Step outside of your mind. The power of the recipe is that it runs unobserved in the background as if it actually were you. You are not it; you are the person who has it. To experience this, sit quietly and take up a vantage point outside of your body. Look inside your head and watch the recipe in action. What is it telling you to do with regard to the person you want to get close to?

2. Notice the pattern. In the relationship likely it is urging you to be relentless, or careful, or inspirational, or whatever way your recipe normally operates (mine told me to be process-driven).

3. Tell The recipe to be quiet. You, not the recipe, are in control – at least when you are watching from the outside. Acknowledge that it wants you to be X, and tell it that instead you are going to be an introvert so you can learn about the other person. Banish interruptions; listen; think; write; concentrate; do not speak until you are finished observing; then talk one on one. Those actions come naturally to you and will give you new insight into the other person.

This works, as Sandy and I have proven many times in the past four decades.

Sandy. I met her in 1981 a year and a half after my divorce. We both had recently completed the est Training, a personal development course. One of the key takeaways was that we could avoid being on automatic pilot in our behavior by observing our own minds at work. This gave both of us, and especially me – I had reflex behavior regularly flowing out of my winning recipe – the ability to stop, think, and choose how to act. It was an invaluable skill that allowed me to focus on her instead of on my recipe. It has empowered our relationship ever since.

I Invite You To Focus On Your Relationships, Not Your Winning Recipe

• What is your winning recipe? How has its focus issue been a negative impact on the significant others in your life? If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you learn to observe your own mind? Please enter your questions on the Contact page. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email. Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission.  A new post appears every two weeks. Coming up next: “The Authenticity Issue In Your Winning Recipe – How To Lower Its Effect.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the clarity that comes from quieting

your winning recipe down, and simply being

an introvert as you interact with the

person in front of you

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC