The Reliability Issue In Your Winning Recipe – How To Shrink Its Power

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AS INTROVERTS WE each have a winning recipe that we created specifically to compensate for not being outgoing enough. It allows us to hide inside of a socially acceptable way to be – accountable, cute, intense, precise, or stoic.  Or any other 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.

In the last two posts we discussed a design flaw in your winning recipe.  It prevents you from focusing on other people and from being authentic with them. The recipe constantly calls you to direct your attention towards it.  Instead your attention needs to be on two key places that are essential for healthy relationships – other people and authenticity.

Besides these two aspects of the defect there is a third one: It can cause you to become unreliable. The recipe does this when you are under extreme stress. It causes the recipe to mushroom to the point where your partner can think that they no longer want to be around you.

That happened to me and cost me my first marriage.

How I Discovered The Reliability Issue

IT IS DOUBLY hard to appreciate what stress can do to your recipe. For one thing, the recipe is your second skin, something so natural that you act it out almost without thinking. For another, it is the cavalry that you automatically call on whenever things get to be extremely difficult. So when you face a crisis you tend throw your recipe at it with all you’ve got.

My First Wife. I met her in New York when I was 22 and was drawn to her sweet, quiet nature. After a bad experience with a young woman who had bipolar disorder I was extremely wary. I became focused on the process of analyzing whether this young woman was healthy and normal.  Despite being a California guy, I was so taken with her that I ignored the midwestern values with which she was raised. We fell in love, got married, and had some good years.  We raised a little girl  and a little boy.

I got far closer to her than any of the others.  She was a fellow introvert who understood the need for alone time. I could be my quiet self around her and that caused my winning recipe to become less compelling. But as the years passed the commitments of raising two small children intruded on both of us.  When we became desperately short of money my recipe roared back. I redoubled my efforts at running business processes in the hope that one venture or another would succeed. Nothing ever did.

Our different value systems – and my inattention to her while I pursued my recipe – pulled us apart. I became so driven that she no longer recognized me and eventually filed for divorce.

Sandy. I met Sandy in 1981 a year and a half after my divorce and soon found myself in an utterly magical relationship. We both were recent graduates of the est Training so we shared a number of core values.  High among them were integrity, commitment, self-awareness, communication and reliability. In addition I had become far more aware of the mechanics of my winning recipe, which in est they called a “winning formula.” They said it was something that everyone used to succeed in life. I had not yet discovered how winning recipes impacted introverts.  But for the first time I was able to watch myself running my own.

After the divorce and the Training I became temporarily more outgoing and went into computer sales. Sandy and I got married in 1983, but by the late 80s I was on to other things and again was struggling financially. My new ventures failed and in 1992 we had to file for personal bankruptcy. But I had learned my lesson with my first wife. I never for a day let the recipe be senior to my commitment to Sandy.  She was always first in my attention and my affections. We got through the tough times together.  Starting the year after we went broke we began to turn things around.

Unpacking the Reliability Failures

I WAS NOT reliable with my first wife because I had allowed my winning recipe to trump my relationship with her. When we met I was a recipe-suppressed person.  She was an introvert so to win her over I felt no need to run the recipe.  But towards the end I became a recipe-obsessed fanatic that she did not recognize.

With Sandy I had been constant. I was recipe-suppressed at the start due to having the distinctions of the est Training in common with her.  I remained that way through our terribly stressful financial crunch because I consciously prioritized her above all else.

How to Increase Reliability During a Stressful Crisis

A crisis will probably bring out the worst in your winning recipe. It can hit you with an irresistible urge to pursue it to the exclusion of everything else.  You are sure it is the only way for you to survive. Yet doing so may demote your primary relationship to a low priority.  That can make you appear to be unreliable and no longer worthy of your partner.

Here is how to avoid having this happen:

Step 1: Observe your mind at work.
As we saw in Post #4, sit quietly and imagine that you are an observer looking into your mind. Watch the recipe as it howls and screams, urgently calling you to double down on whatever it is telling you to do. Notice that you are not the recipe, you are the person who has the recipe.

Step 2: Get in touch with your commitment.
Still sitting quietly, notice the thoughts and feelings swirling around in your brain about whatever crisis you are in. Acknowledge them, then consciously set them aside.  Recall what you are committed to in your primary relationship. How much do you love him or her? What lengths would you go to to rescue your beloved from a burning building or a car sinking in a river? What is it about that person’s humanity that touches you so deeply that you want to cry whenever you think about it?

Step 3: Dilute the power of your recipe.
Declare now that at this moment there is nothing in the world more important to you than this relationship. See that your recipe pales in comparison, that it is just a shopworn imitation of who you really are. See that it makes no sense to think that chasing it is worth imperiling the wonderful connection that you have with your partner.

Avoid making that person a casualty of the crisis.  Do not go flat-out with your recipe.  Instead, see that person as your key asset. How can you rely on him or her and the relationship you both have to face the emergency together? To come up with solutions? To deal with the stress not by a knee-jerk reaction to put on your recipe like a Superman suit, but by embracing your partner as the most valuable thing in your life?

That is how two decades after graduating from the Harvard Business School I got through a bankruptcy at age 49. It is how Sandy and I picked ourselves up and dealt with it.  We endured the humiliation, the embarrassment, the emotional devastation of it all.  And that gave us room to create a whole new life for ourselves. This time I was reliable in my commitment to my partner, not to a winning recipe, and it made all the difference in the world.

I Invite You To Focus On Being Reliable, Not On Being Your Winning Recipe

• What crisis is driving you deeply into your winning recipe? How has being reliable worked for you? 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 increase your reliability in your relationship? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
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Welcome to the peace that comes from recognizing what

 

is most important to you in life, and allowing that to

 

move your winning recipe into the background

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