5 Business Strategies that Can Strengthen Your Marriage (#2)
April 30th, 2012 // 10:00 am @ Janine and Alane
PRINCIPLE #2: Think four-to-one.
If you want someone to change their behavior, focus on the positives, says Scott Blanchard, executive vice president at the Ken Blanchard Companies, a top leadership development firm. (His dad, Ken, cowrote the classic biz book The One Minute Manager.) “Harping on bad behavior might cause someone to comply out of fear, but they won’t thrive,” he says. The “magic formula,” according to Blanchard, is to deliver four positive messages for every negative one. “I find that when I do this in my work and in my marriage, everyone is happier.”
CASE STUDY: Amanda knows that her sex drive is stronger than her husband John’s, but her emotions get the best of her when he’s not up for intimacy. “When I get denied, I feel rejected and negative, so I act negative,” she admits. “I say kind of awful things, like, ‘Something must be wrong with you.'” Amanda feared she was seriously damaging her marriage, so she agreed to test-drive the 4:1 approach. “When he said he wasn’t in the mood, I ignored my impulse to complain and instead asked if there was anything I could do for him” (positive one). John rattled off a long list of exhausting stressors, and Amanda realized he just needed to vent — so she let him (positive two). “I think just getting all of that off his chest made the idea of sex way more appealing,” says Amanda, who didn’t stop there. Positives three and four involved a little arm-stroking and dirty talk, after which he initiated sex, which Amanda raves “was wonderful; he was relaxed, focused, and confident.” In fact, it was “so good that he brought it up the next day, saying it was in our top 10.” Since that night, she’s become committed to shining a more positive light on all of their interactions and to really listening when he tells her what he needs. “I wasn’t just negative in the bedroom. Saying hurtful things was my knee-jerk reaction whenever I didn’t like something,” Amanda says. “This approach takes enormous discipline for me, but it’s definitely worth it.”
courtesy of http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/advice/marriage-as-business#ixzz1rR6VzxHM
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