Deeply Connected Relationships - Gay Hendricks

Chris Williamson 0:00 I wanted to explain, actually before we got started, why I'm so interested in this stuff now, and it maybe sort of frames it in the broader context of what I've been interested in over the last sort of three or four years. So, I got kind of interested in mating dynamics, um, probably about four years ago or so, and I started off where lots of people do, which is macro trends, so, uh, rates of coupling, birth rates, uh, sat- levels of satisfaction, uh, what's happening socioeconomically, how many people are single, so on and so forth. It's these sort of big trends, right? It's the big stuff that's happening up top. And as soon as you've found out that, wow, there's some real changes going on here and it seems like we're in a, uh, a- a turbulent time, you then ask, "Okay, well, what are the sort of underlying principles that drive human attraction?" And that led me down the path of evolutionary psychology. So, what are we looking at from a- a- a- an adaptive standpoint? We're looking at hypergamy and mate guarding and jealousy and male parental uncertainty and intrasexual competition and kind of that suite of things, which I guess are kind of some of our psychological source code. And then the next stage that I went on to was, okay, well, modern culture. How is the macro trend and the underlying sort of ancestral programming, how is that... What- what's happening in the modern world, changes that have happened that have sort of led us to some of this- this turbulence maybe occurring? So you're talking about sexual revolution and- and the creation of the pill and dating apps and- and technology and distraction and so on and so forth. And all of that was really interesting, and it kind of starts to form a- a perspective, right, about the world. But what I've sort of... This is my current working theory. I... All of that stuff's very interesting, but every person's actual day-to-day, the mechanism with which they interact with their relationship, is none of those things, right? They are all very highly contributing background noise. The mechanism that everybody's experience of their relationship is mediated through is how they relate. It is the way that they show up. It's their emotional state when there is a disagreement. It's how they communicate with their partner. It's whether they have unspoken expectations and premeditated resentments. So, for all of this stuff, I'm kind of like the worst Sherlock Holmes in history, looking around at all of these different places. "Oh, it's the trends. Oh, it's the ancestral programming. Oh, it might be the sexual revolution and what's happening with dating apps." But ultimately, everybody's experience of their relationship is how they show up, how consciously they are, what the sort of commitments and agreements are that they make. Like, what- what are the nuts and bolts and the- the mechanism through which their entire relationship is mediated? And, um, that has sort of led me to get interested in your work, in, uh, people like Stan Tatkin as well, uh, in an attempt to try and understand the actual mechanism of relating. And I just thought that might be, uh, a- a- an interesting little story arc to give you some- some background and lore to- to me and how I arrived at this stuff.

Gay Hendricks 3:15 Well, I appreciate the background. Well, Katy and I have been together now for 45 years, and we have, in that time, made our own discoveries that made our own relationship work, and then one day, a rising young self-help TV person named Oprah called us and invited her- invited us on her show, uh, with our book Conscious Loving, and at that point, my life kind of went into the spin cycle on the, uh, washing machine, and, uh, has just recently slowed down a little bit. Um, but, um, during all of that time, Katy and I not only had our own relationship, but we also worked with about 4,500 couples, and- and more probably in our seminars. But so my perspective is going to be kind of down in the trenches rather than up at the evolutionary level. Okay.

Chris Williamson 4:14 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 4:14 So, there are really three big things that you have to do reliably over and over again thousands of times to have a good relationship, certainly with your beloved, but pretty much anybody. And those three things are, you've got to get good at feeling your own feelings. You've got to get good at knowing how you feel, because somebody's gonna ask you, a lot of times, "What are you feeling right now?" And we should be taught this in the first grade, but I didn't learn it until I was in graduate school, (laughs) but there's a whole vocabulary of inner experience. There's, "I'm angry." There's, "I'm sad." There's, "I'm scared." There's, "I'm sexually attracted to you." There's, "I don't know what I'm feeling." But there's a whole suite of things that can be said and tuned into in the realm of feeling. So the first thing is both people, and if there's more, people have to get good at making this inner move where you kind of go inside and say, "Hmm, what's going on in me right now?" If you can't do that, well, (laughs) you know, we've had people in here in this very office who have been unable to do that, and they're suddenly, at retirement, now facing problems with their spouse or- or partner that they put off through all those years of being successful and everything. And they always boil down to starting with, "How are we feeling inside?" The second thing that's absolutely essential to have a good relationship is telling the truth.... that being honest, like I was saying, you know, if somebody asks you, "How are you feeling?" being able to say, "I feel sad right now." But you'd be surprised at how few people are that conversant with their feelings that somebody can ask them that. A third one... I'm on the one, two, and three. So feeling your feelings, telling the truth. Big third one though, which is the ability to take responsibility for things that come up every day in relationships. There's, uh, such a tendency in relationship to get into the blame game. I mean, (laughs) we've literally had couples here who have been having the same argument basically for 30 years 'cause they get locked into a flaw of responsibility, which is thinking responsibility involves fixing blame. But that's not what responsibility is at all. It's ownership. It's saying, "I'm scared right now," or, "Oh, I don't know what's going on right now." It's ownership. It's, it's getting out of the blame game and taking responsibility for things not as a burden, but as really a celebration of who you are at that particular point.

Chris Williamson 7:19 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 7:19 Well, I could go on for several days about this, but let me just, uh, pause there and take a breath.

Chris Williamson 7:24 No, that's, that's fantastic. Is that then, um, those three principles that we've gone through, that feeling of feelings, telling truths even if they're small, and taking responsibility, is that fundamentally what differentiates conscious from unconscious loving, or is there more to say on that?

Gay Hendricks 7:43 That's a good bit of it right there. And in fact, uh, when people graduate from our relationship seminars, we have a little, uh, silicon band on it that says, "Breathe. Love." And then the third one is about appreciation. So appreciation is a missing complement to relationships through those big three things-

Chris Williamson 8:10 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 8:11 ... that one of the things that's missing from people's lives is having a rich sense of appreciation of other people and being richly appreciated themselves. And I don't know where it went out of fashion. I remember when I was a kid, there was this, um, thought that if you praise children, it would go to their heads and they'd become, um, narcissistic or something. Well, pretty much the exact opposite is true, because there was a study some years ago where they... The psychologists took little voice-activated microphones and hung them around the, the necks of, um, children so that everything that would be said to the kid during the week would be recorded. And these were all, like, four or five-year-old kids. And so in the course of the week, all of the recordings, once they got sorted through, 85% of the stuff that was said to the children was negative. Like, "Stop doing that," or, "Quit that," or, "You..." (laughs) You know-

Chris Williamson 9:12 Wow.

Gay Hendricks 9:12 ... something that involved a negative prescription rather than a positive appreciation.

Chris Williamson 9:18 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 9:18 And so that lets you know that you probably can't go too far wrong by appreciating, (laughs) you know, your children and appreciating other people. Don't worry about it going to their heads.

Chris Williamson 9:29 Oh, yeah, yeah. Even if you did it 100% of the time, the other people, all of the, the experiences they have that aren't in the household and they aren't with you, they're going to offset that. So the, the likelihood of your child becoming a narcissist with a massive ego is still pretty low.

Gay Hendricks 9:42 Especially if they've ever been through junior high school. 'Cause I, I don't remember anybody ever... of my friends saying a single negati- or positive word for about three years there. It was all ragging on each other, and put-downs, and sarcasm, and all of those kind of stuff that are ruining relationships.

Chris Williamson 9:59 While you're talk- you're talking to... You're talking to someone who's British, so taking the piss is actually our national sport.

Gay Hendricks 10:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 10:03 Uh, you know, like, there's... (laughs) The... I, I, I think, uh... One of my friends has this thing, he says, uh, "An American introvert is a British extrovert." Um, the... That level-

Gay Hendricks 10:15 Well, I find it... I, I've... When I'm in the UK, most of my good conversations come after two Guinnesses.

Chris Williamson 10:23 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 10:23 Up until then, I don't... I write off pretty much any conversation I have.

Chris Williamson 10:27 This is all just formality. It's like foreplay. It's the... Yeah, it's the, the pre-coital pillow talk before anything's actually happened. Yeah, that's, that's-

Gay Hendricks 10:35 Unless I'm in Ireland, and it takes three or four, but they, the... Two i- two in Ireland doesn't do it.

Chris Williamson 10:40 That's true. That is very true. They're a different breed. Um, what about the role... So looking at those, those are commitments, right? Those are three very important commitments that we've got there. What about agreements? Like, wh- wh- wh- what's the role of agreements? How do they differ from commitments? What, what does that mean?

Gay Hendricks 10:56 Yes, once you get through the big three, then you open up a few more things that are really important. So if you're getting good at noticing how you feel, speaking honestly, and taking responsibility, there's a plethora of things to focus on. One of them is keeping agreements that, um... You know, when people split up, they often give them surveys of what went wrong in the relationship. And one of the things that a lot of people say... Well, two things that really pop out is, "The other person would never tell me how they feel." So that's one thing. Uh, second thing is, "I got tired of picking up after the person," you know, in the, in the li- literal and metaphorical sense. You know, monitoring somebody else's agreements, trying to get them to keep their agreements.

Chris Williamson 11:53 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 11:54 Uh, as if by magic, a lot of relationships will end up with a very tidy person and a very sloppy person, and a very logical person and a very dizzyingly emotional person. And having those two things-... Finally come into harmony with each other takes a major life commitment. You know, that's gotta be one of the things you're really committed to is to have good close personal relationships. If you don't do that, ooh, you know ... (sighs) I've had deathbed experiences where people told me things like, "I sure wish I'd been able to tell this person that I loved them while they were still alive," you know? And, oh, that gives me a very deep sense of ill at ease when I hear somebody talk about something that would be so easily fixable in what I call 10 seconds of sweaty conversation. At-

Chris Williamson 12:52 Okay, tell me about-

Gay Hendricks 12:53 ... most 10 minutes-

Chris Williamson 12:53 ... tell

Chris Williamson 12:54 me about 10, tell me about 10 seconds or 10 minutes of sweaty conversation.

Gay Hendricks 12:58 Okay, let me give you a 10-second version of it and then I'll tell you a 10-minute version.

Chris Williamson 13:03 Okay.

Gay Hendricks 13:04 We had a woman in, um, from another country and a fairly conservative country, and she was married to a man, a kind of a highly placed man, and she had an affair with her, with his best friend, okay? And this was a one-night stand with his best friend when they were both at some conference or something like that. Well, she justified that for seven years because it was no big deal. It didn't really... Nothing happened, you know? (laughs) Uh, we weren't in love or anything like that. It was just one of those things. And so, that's the way she justified not telling her partner, but when she came here, we didn't know this at first, by the way. What she came here about was that she had not had an orgasm in seven years, and so as we were working on this, one of the things that happens, I- I sh- I just hate to tell everybody, but, eh, eh, one of the reasons people stop having sexual pleasure is because they stuff some truth that should've been said in a 10-second sweaty conversation. The 10-second sweaty conversation was, "Honey, I had sex with your best friend on October 13th, '18 or 1986."

Chris Williamson 14:36 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 14:36 Okay, so that was the flat-out truth of the matter, okay? And why do most people resist the 10-second sweaty conversation? (laughs) Because they're afraid of what's gonna happen from second 11 on.

Chris Williamson 14:50 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 14:50 Okay? They don't want to deal with the person's reaction. Okay, so guess what we had her do? Hmm, Mr. Sherlock, guess what-

Chris Williamson 15:01 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 15:01 ... we had her pick up the phone and do?

Chris Williamson 15:03 A 10-second sweaty conversation.

Gay Hendricks 15:05 Ten-second sweaty conversation. Uh, actually, I'm sorry, I misspoke. We'd, uh, we'd had him on the phone, but he happened to be here. Uh, so the, the 10-second sweaty conversation was, "I had sex with your best friend seven years ago." Oh, boy, the next 10 or 20 minutes were pretty sweaty, too, but the thing is, she felt such a sense of relief-

Chris Williamson 15:29 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 15:29 ... that guess what happened that night? She went home and had her first orgasm in seven years. So that's why I say that your voice box is really the only six inches of sexual, uh, apparatus that you need to worry about. (laughs) That-

Chris Williamson 15:49 Ah.

Gay Hendricks 15:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 15:50 That's so great. (claps once) That's fantastic.

Gay Hendricks 15:54 So keep that voice box open and watch what happens with your sexuality.

Chris Williamson 15:58 Very good. Yeah, I, um,

Chris Williamson 16:02 I think it was Peterson that was the first person who kind of identified, "Hey, telling the truth is something that's important," and then I read, uh, Sam Harris's extended essay called Lying, which is kind of like a, uh, a treatise on why you should never lie, and he takes a quite, um, ruthless, unequivocating, like, philosophy view of it, but both of those things, it's so easy to just obfuscate a little bit to try and play some persona, to say what you think the other person wants to hear. You tend to not actually say what you feel, and then after long enough, what I noticed in my life, especially in my 20s, was I'd played personas and obfuscated and, and, um, like, manipulated what I thought when I said it to other people so much, mostly because I was worried about people not liking me and I really wanted to be accepted and I had this concern about validation and all the rest of it and being seen, "Ooh, am I worthy as who I am?" So, I'm not, and what I'll do is I'll try and show up as a version of me that I think they will like, which obviously is totally self-defeating because even if they do like you, you never actually feel the praise because you know that they don't like you, they just like this role that you were playing all along. But the dangerous thing is that if you continue to do that for sufficient, uh, a, a sufficiently extended amount of time, you actually don't know what you believe anymore because you, you ha- have buried your own feelings and opinions so far down that you can't see them, and then you have to go on this big journey of excavating them with mindfulness practice and journaling and, like, releasing and actually- And you're like, "Okay, what is my truth? Like, what do I think about this thing?" Not, "What have I said that I think about this thing for 5 or 10 or 30 years?" Like, "What do I actually think about this thing?" And then it takes all of the time to, to dig it out. So yeah, I suppose, um, people would sooner have a lifetime of misery than a few seconds of pain, and the longer that you leave the misery to be dug out, the further... It's like getting on the wrong train. If you get on a train that's going in the wrong direction, the further that you go, the longer that you leave it, the longer it's going to take to get back on the right train and come back in the sa- in the opposite direction.

Gay Hendricks 18:18 Yeah, I- it's so amazing to me how prevalent it is to hide who you really are, and for no really good reason. I just had a memory listening to your, uh, British accent. I was getting a haircut in a hair salon once in London, and, um, I became so acutely aware, there was this one little interaction that happened that reminded me about how acutely aware many British people are about fear of embarrassment, not being embarrassed. And-

Chris Williamson 18:50 Oh, massive. Massive.

Gay Hendricks 18:52 Yes. And, um, so, uh, I was getting my haircut and the front door opened and a fellow started in, and the hairstylist put down her thing and picked up her appointment book and started toward the, uh, front door to where her appointment was gonna be made. And, um, then the guy kind of walked past her and said, "Oh, excuse me, I'm just here checking the plumbing," or something like that. He wasn't there for a haircut.

Chris Williamson 19:21 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 19:21 And she said, "Oh, that's okay. I was just taking my book up to the front, uh, anyway." And, uh, you know, it was just how quickly the lie covered-

Chris Williamson 19:30 Oh, yeah.

Gay Hendricks 19:30 I mean, it would be ... to say, "Oh, I'm embarrassed. You know, I thought you wanted a haircut." That's-

Chris Williamson 19:35 How silly of me.

Gay Hendricks 19:36 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 19:36 I thought that, I thought that you came in to get your haircut. Let me give you, let me, let me give you one that, that speaks to that as well. So, uh, I was in Bali about seven years ago. I was traveling on my own, and I was going out there and I was training and just, uh, taking a little bit of a break from work for maybe four weeks. And I was one week into this four-week trip, and I was on a moped, uh, that I'd rented from the hotel that I was staying in, driving with a couple of friends, and we were gonna go to this beach club. And a truck, classic Balinese road, truck pulls out, it's only 20 yards in front of me, and I'm going at a pretty quick clip. And I pull both of the brakes. I'd rented this moped for 50p a day from the hotel. It's not exactly in their interests to keep it in t- tip-top Formula One shape. So I pulled it. The back brake didn't go, but the front brake did, which meant that the bike slid out from underneath me. And I had a little, it's like sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of swim shorts on, and I lost most of the skin from my left arm, from my left shoulder, from the outside of my left leg, and the whole top of my foot just was eviscerated by Balinese road. And the first sensation that I had, I had a helmet on, but the first sensation I had was, wasn't anger at the guy in the truck that had pulled out in front of me. It wasn't concern for my injuries. It wasn't, uh, worry about whether there was another car that was gonna come behind me. The first thing I felt was social shame.

Gay Hendricks 21:06 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:06 I was like, "Oh, what a cringe thing to do. All my f- the two guys that I'm with, the two Australian dudes I'm with that I just made friends with, they're gonna think that I'm so stupid for coming off this bi-"

Gay Hendricks 21:16 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 21:16 Like, I've just, I've just lost like 50% of the skin from my two left limbs.

Gay Hendricks 21:23 Ah.

Chris Williamson 21:23 I'm in the middle of a Balinese road with this bike on the floor and all of this stuff, and the f- the most salient thing that my brain decided-

Gay Hendricks 21:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:29 ... that it was gonna attach itself to was the social embarrassment of having just done something that wasn't my fault.

Gay Hendricks 21:37 Well, it reminds me of that, um, old saying that there are so many people that are afraid of public speaking, that at a given funeral, more people would prefer to be in the casket-

Chris Williamson 21:48 (laughs) .

Gay Hendricks 21:48 ... than giving the eulogy.

Chris Williamson 21:53 Yeah, that's a good point.

Chris Williamson 21:54 Um, I'm, I'm interested, just so we don't go too far ahead, what are, what are the most common obstacles, uh, uh, just practically, feeling feelings, telling truth, taking responsibility, what are the most practical obstacles that people need to come over for each of those? Or what are the ways that you say, "Hey, you haven't tried feeling your feelings all that much. You haven't tried telling the tr- you haven't tried taking respon-" Like, what are the foundational principles of the principles when, when we get these into practice?

Gay Hendricks 22:27 One of my colleagues, my relationship research colleagues up in Washington, John Gottman, um, came up some years ago with what he called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which are things that spell doom in a relationship. And I have a couple of my own riffs, but I'll tell you what his four horsemen were. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and withdrawal or sulking. Um, and so criticism is kind of the chronic slayer of good feeling in relationship.

Chris Williamson 23:10 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 23:10 When you interview people who are coming out of relationships after a divorce, "What was it that made you leave?" "I just got sick of being criticized, of being wrong all the time." And, you know, that's a very unpleasant feeling, being wrong and being made to feel wrong all of the time. And so, um, I know I had that in a close relationship before I met Katie. I grew up in a very critical family, where, where people (laughs) were, you know, high achievers but incredibly critical about each other. And I don't ever remember anybody ever saying anything like, "I'm proud of you," or, "I love you," or, "Great job," or anything like that. But it was very quick to point out flaws. So, when I got into my first big deal relationship as a, uh, growing up in, or, you know, latter part of college, I connected up with a woman who was incredibly critical, and I didn't even think much about it, but sh- she basically found fault with just about everything I did. But I just was so into that mode of assuming that was the way relationships went that it took me a while to have it dawn on me. And we were visiting...... another couple, and they were very positive with each other. And I remember going home afterwards thinking, "Wow, I haven't had 10 minutes of that in this relationship so far," and we'd been together, you know, like, five or six months or something like that. So, I began to wake up to my own pattern in that regard. So, instead of focusing on getting rid of the other person's criticism, what I focused on, I came over here and said, "What do I have to do in myself so I'm not a constant criticism attractor?"

Chris Williamson 25:05 Hmm.

Gay Hendricks 25:05 So that I'm not a living, listening for criticism.

Chris Williamson 25:09 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 25:10 Big question shift there. Rather than, "What's wrong with them? Why don't they get fixed over here?" Rather than saying, "Hmm, what am I doing to attract this kind of thing?"

Chris Williamson 25:21 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 25:21 And so, that was a big moment for me. And in fact, I ended that relationship, and the next one I got into was so much more pleasant. She, you know, she wasn't that kind of person, since I didn't require that kind of person, and I'm really, really happy that I've had 45 years, more than that slightly now, of our relationship of the most beautiful flow of love and connection that I could have ever imagined.

Chris Williamson 25:50 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 25:50 And it's because we practice what we preach.

Chris Williamson 25:53 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 25:53 You know, when stuff comes up, I say, "I felt sad about that," or whatever. And so, it stays rebirthing. You can rebirth the passion in a relationship over and over again every day, and so, you know, I- I always tell people, "Until you've had sex in your 70s, you haven't had sex yet." You know?

Chris Williamson 26:11 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 26:11 Because (laughs) there's a quote I go, so-

Chris Williamson 26:16 There's gonna be a lot of s- There's gonna be a lot of single 70-year-olds out there that are thinking, "Yes, say more! Say more, Gabe. We need to (laughs) we need, we, we, we need, we need to be on it."

Gay Hendricks 26:24 Well, I just retired from writing books, but you cannot believe how many publishers have asked me to write a book about sex in, in your latter years, you know? 'Cause Katie and I, we need to go to conferences and we give speeches, and it's obviously we're having a great time with each other-

Chris Williamson 26:40 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 26:40 ... so people always want to know how we do it.

Chris Williamson 26:42 Wow.

Chris Williamson 26:43 What about, um, the other side of telling the truth? So-

Gay Hendricks 26:48 Yeah. Well-

Chris Williamson 26:50 It, it, it, it seem, it seems to me that, uh, the, like, co-commitment thing, th- this showing up for each other, um, in order for one person to feel safe in telling the truth, the other, the recipient has a role which is to make it safe for the truth to be told to them, right? So, a lot of the time, the truth that you're gonna hear, "Hey, um, you know when you sent me that text?" Or, "You know when you did that thing?" Or, "You know when you were talking to your coworker over there?" Like, ah, "I, it made me feel X. When you X, it made me feel Y," right? There's like, a good structure to this. But a lot of the time, that sentence, to the recipient, can feel like an attack. It can feel like a criticism. It can feel very personal. It can feel like our intentions are being, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, associated with that, and, and, um, accused. What does good receiving of, of truth and uncomfortable, uh, sentences, what does that look like?

Gay Hendricks 27:53 Ultimately, it looks like being able to hear whatever is, somebody is saying without flinching or without needing to defend in some way. Um, defensiveness kills a lot of relationships too. Like, uh, a classic example would be a couple we had in here a while back, a younger couple, but he was in the habit of, she would ask him, "How are you feeling right now?" And he would make a joke out of it. He'd kind of turn, "Oh, you don't wanna hear stuff like that," you know? And, but she was sincerely interested in that, and you don't have to do that too many times in a relationship to kind of, turn off the easeful flow of intimacy.

Chris Williamson 28:33 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 28:33 It's just like, if you ask a politician, not naming names, a bunch of times to tell you the truth, and they lie to you on every occasion they can, you kind of stop paying attention then. You say, "Hey, that's not exactly my president or my senator." So, but the real sad thing in relationships is, well, remember, the second horseman of the apocalypse, defensiveness, that gets on the problem of the listener a lot of times, because one of our, our dictums here at the Hendricks Institute is, don't have a 10-second sweaty conversation while the other person is driving, um, uh, because we've actually had people swerve off the freeway because the person told an untimely truth. As a matter of fact, (laughs) uh, even better, we had a farming couple one time that she got the urge to tell him the truth and walked about something, and walked out into the field and told him in his tractor, and he ended up swerving over and cutting a big swath through stuff that he didn't wanna-

Chris Williamson 29:40 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 29:41 ... cut down because he got so, uh, mad about that. But, um-

Chris Williamson 29:44 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 29:45 ... the, uh, the bottom line is-

Chris Williamson 29:47 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 29:48 ... choose your timing carefully, but also, "Would you like to hear..." This is what you ask the other person. "Would you like to... I've got something important. Would you be willing to hear that right now?" And you can even say, "Would you be willing to hear that in a open-minded, open-hearted way?"

Chris Williamson 30:09 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 30:10 And, you know, sometimes the person will say, "No," but most of the time they'll say, "Yes." That doesn't guarantee they will do that, of course, but it gets them online. It makes a contract. And what's missing in most, most truth communications is the lack of a contract of some sort with the listener. Like, "Do you want to hear this right now?" Because a lot of times if you just blurt out something that you've been-... holding on for a while, I call it dropping an 18-pound pearl of wisdom on the person. Bam! You know, because they don't ... They're not expecting it, they're not prepared for it.

Chris Williamson 30:49 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 30:50 That's why we say ... One of the things we teach in our books, especially for mid-life and beyond couples, we have a book called Conscious Loving Ever After for, um, mid-life and beyond, like couples in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, et cetera. One of the important things we teach them to do is have two little meetings a week, like 15-minute meetings, 10-minute meetings. Here, we do it on Tuesday and Thursday night but doesn't matter. One of 'em is for feelings and the other one is for stuff. One of 'em is called the heart talk, one of 'em is called the stuff talk, and stuff talk is, "Oh, you know, Kevin's soccer- soccer practice ends at 5:00 this week. Can you pick him up then rather than 5:30?" Boy, if that doesn't get done, I've seen people come here, in here in a storming fury because somebody was 30 minutes late picking up somebody at soccer practice.

Chris Williamson 31:44 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 31:45 So it's really important to get the nitty-gritty of your agreements covered. And so one thing that happens is little tiny things build up. It's not always things (laughs) like, "I'm having an affair."

Chris Williamson 31:59 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 32:00 It's little things like, "Oh, you know what? I forgot to pick up Kevin today" (laughs) , you know. That when you realize that, that 10-second sweaty communication, uh, goes a long way to i- to clearing up those kinds of things. So defensiveness, getting the other person to agree that they want to hear what you have to say, super important thing. Another type of defensiveness is people who not blow up when you tell them the truth, but they veer off and change the subject. And so they start to hear it, but they kind of shut the rest of it out. And, you know, there's ... If you're in good relationship counseling, all these things will get dealt with, but I found that a lot of relationship counseling that goes on today is, uh, what I call dusting the deck chairs on the Titanic, that you're trying to fix surface level things rather than finding out what the fundamental issues are-

Chris Williamson 33:01 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 33:01 ... below of those kind of big three things that we've talked about that aren't getting dealt with.

Chris Williamson 33:10 What about ... Just to linger on that for one more moment. Let's say that you're the recipient of the person telling the truth and you hear something which is uncomfortable. What is your advice for being receptive whe- to, um, not be as agitated, to not be as defensive? Like how- how can you be a good listener in that regard?

Gay Hendricks 33:30 The very best would be non-judgmental listening, report of how you're feeling, like letting the person finish, for example. Like interrupting is one of the worst relationship killers.

Chris Williamson 33:44 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 33:45 Whoever you are listening or watching this, do not interrupt your mate. (laughs) It's a bad idea. I've never seen it helpful in any kind of situation. So a lot of times, don't ... The ... We don't give the other person space to finish what they're saying. So number one, give space and then give an authentic response to that, unarguable response. "Oh, boy, I don't know how to handle that. Oh, jeez, I'm feeling scared right now. Oh, I feel so angry when you say that."

Chris Williamson 34:20 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 34:21 "Oh, I feel like crying." You know, those kind of things are an authentic response. What's defensive is, "Why did you tell me that now?" Katie and I were in the movies a while back and a very out of shape couple kind of wedged their way through and sat right in front of us and, you know, between the two of 'em, they were probably, you know, close to 100 kilos overweight (laughs) if you average both of 'em together. Well, he got up after a while and left, and he came back before the movie started with the giganticus tuff- uh, tub of popcorn. You know, like one of those $14 ones that's like a tub, and when he sat down next to her, she said, "Oh, did you have to do that? Why did you do that? You know I can't resist that." So immediately, instead of, "Oh my God, I wanna eat that whole bag of po- uh, bu- bucket of popcorn," instead she went into blaming him for what was obviously a challenge in herself of her own ability to control her popcorn consumption.

Chris Williamson 35:36 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 35:36 And so if you make it about the size of the tub or the partner, you miss out on the opportunity to actually have that sweaty 10-second conversation with yourself where you say, "Oh my God, I weigh 50 kilos too much and I almost ate some popcorn right there and felt miserable."

Chris Williamson 35:56 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 35:57 Those kind of moments, you know, like my ... One of my great heroes, Ken Hecht, he's a producer here in Hollywood. I only live about an hour and a half from Hollywood so a lot of people, uh ... We always have a saying, "Once you make it in Hollywood, you buy a place in Ojai or Santa Barbara," and I live in Ojai, so we have a lot of, uh, folks here who are, um, you know, entertainment kind of folks. And there's a producer named Ken Hecht who was 123 pounds overweight. One Saturday night, he was feeling lonely and he found himself, he kind of woke up and he was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking inside for something to eat, and it was like 10:30 at night.And he had this 10-second sweaty conversation with himself where he realized, "Oh, I'm not hungry. I'm lonely. I'm starting to eat something to make myself feel less lonely." Boom.

Chris Williamson 36:59 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 36:59 He lost 120 pounds starting at that moment. That changed everything.

Chris Williamson 37:05 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 37:06 So being able to just... It's like, I suppose... I've never seen this in person, but a person is... stands up at an Alcoholics Anonymous group for the very first time and says, "My name's John and I'm an alcoholic." They nail it, you know? They have that 10-second sweaty conversation. Yesterday they might have been telling their friends, "I can handle it. I can handle it okay." And then there's that moment of realization, full ownership, and things progress from there in a positive way.

Chris Williamson 37:41 Mm. So something I'm interested in, what we're talking about here is, uh, uh, a degree of compromise, a degree of sort of like a lot of understanding that needs to be done here. I'm interested in how much you should deliberately step in to adjust sort of your own approach to loving, versus just being yourself and showing up as you. I think this balance of union and individuation and navigating that i- is an area that people feel, they, "I feel like I'm losing my autonomy here," but then there's this sense, "Well, maybe this is me, but better. Maybe this is a, an, an insufficiency of mine. Maybe this is an area in which, it, it, it's not a part of my sense of self. My quickness to anger, right? Or my bitterness or my resentment or my inability to get over myself or my lack of ability to feel my feelings. Like, is that really the seat of your person?" Like, "Oh, that's where... Like, you shouldn't be changing me. I love my anger. I love..." Like, "Oh, this is an opportunity to alchemize something that I on my own couldn't do through the union of this relationship." And then there's other parts of us that we think, "Well, no, like, that is me. I'm sensi- I'm a sensitive person," or, "I'm a passionate person," or, "I'm an energetic person," or, "I'm a peaceful person, and this feels like I'm being told to lose some of my autonomy, to sort of lose some of my individuation in service of the union, and this is a, a compromise that I'm not prepared to do." So this balance between adjusting your own approach versus just being yourself, union, individuation. I'm interested in how people navigate that, if that makes sense.

Gay Hendricks 39:17 Oh, it makes perfect sense. In fact, I really appreciate you bringing up this subject, because, well, everybody here that's listening or watching this, including you and me, have been born and we've been six months old. And let me tell you what happens in that little period of time, because it gets replayed every day in close relationships. The first six months are about establishing trust, union with another person, being able to let go fully into your caregiver. Most of the time that's with your mother, but sometimes it's not, and sometimes that's not a good connection. Sometimes there's something going on, there's, with your mother or with the environment, that keeps that sense of trust from developing and that sense of ease with connection. So that needs to... Those tracks are laid down in the first six months of life. At six months, what happens is we start crawling and adventuring. So you start going out into the world. And what happens is you go out into the world, and then if you encounter obstacles, you go back to your caregiver and you clutch Mom or you s- you know, get nurtured again. If you go out crawling across the floor and a dog barks at you, you scurry back to mom and, you know, get a hug. And I was just watching a baby elephant, uh, yesterday. I, I love nature shows, and I was watching a nature show, a little nature clip on YouTube where it showed a baby elephant chasing some other animals around, um, y- you know, the, the, uh, the, the, um, place in Africa where all these were. And suddenly, the baby elephant fell over.

Chris Williamson 41:11 I saw this video.

Gay Hendricks 41:11 And what did it do?

Chris Williamson 41:12 I saw this video.

Gay Hendricks 41:12 It ran... Oh, you've seen it?

Chris Williamson 41:14 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 41:14 It ran back to its mom.

Chris Williamson 41:16 Yeah, me too.

Gay Hendricks 41:16 You know? Yeah. And so how that gets replayed in everyday life is we're constantly in the process of individuating ourselves, becoming more of who we are, and learning how to let go into relationship at the same time. So union and in... (laughs) Union and individuation doesn't happen every six months. It's happening every six seconds in a close relationship.

Chris Williamson 41:49 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 41:49 You're always connecting and also being yourself. That's why... I'm just looking, uh, our Oprah book, uh, Conscious Loving, from 35 years ago. Um, the first time we were on her show, we were on there with, with that book. I'm just looking over at my bookshelf, and the subtitle is How to Be Fully Yourself and in Relationship at the Same Time, how to be fully together without giving up yourself. And so this daily practice of knowing that your life is about getting more in touch with yourself-

Chris Williamson 42:29 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 42:29 ... and having more empathy and space for other people, that's what it's all about. And, you know, from having been at deathbeds over the years from people who were passing out of this, um, mortal thing we've got going here...I've heard of people say things like, "Oh, God. I wish I hadn't spent so much time at the office." (laughs) So... "Why didn't I ever say I love you," you know, to somebody that's dead. So there's- there's all these incompletions that people walk around with that are the things that need to be said in those ten second or ten minute conversations. They don't always need to be sweaty. You know, you could say, like... My wife and I have a question that we ask each other every week which is, "Is there anything that I could be doing or saying right now that might make you feel more loved and treasured in our relationship?"

Chris Williamson 43:28 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 43:28 And it's an invitation. If there is something, great, say it. If not, great, things are going along just fine. But living in that question means that I'm always, and she's always looking for, hmm, is there anything that I could be doing or saying that would make her light up?

Chris Williamson 43:47 Isn't it interesting that-

Gay Hendricks 43:47 It used to make... Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:49 J- just so- so interesting that, um, the openness from both parties here. "Hey, we're in this together. We're not just committed, we're co-committed. You see the best in me, I see the best in you. I have faith that your judgment is good, and I actually believe that you may, in some ways know me better than I know myself. Maybe in many ways." And the sort of ego-less-ness of it? Uh, uh, I'm not gripping too tightly to this sense of me and I'm not being rigid and I'm not seeing things as personal attacks. "Hey, we're building this thing together. We're building this partnership together." I think, um, it's- it's a kind of humility. It's like co-humility in that way. It seems pretty important.

Gay Hendricks 44:39 It... Yeah, because... Well, I'll- I'll just tell you from a practical standpoint, when people come in for relationship counseling, pretty much the first thing we have to do is get them to both agree that they want to have a great relationship.

Chris Williamson 44:58 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 44:59 You know, because a lot of times people come in and person one over here (laughs) has decided a long time ago that they're out of the relationship, but they haven't told number two (laughs) over here. You know, that it's a spiritual divorce that happened six months ago or six years ago, and they have never gotten back into the relationship. And so commitment is a key first step in any kind of clearing up any kind of relationship issue. Because if you can get both people to say, "I want to have a great relationship with you, that's what I'm here for," a lot of times though, the person is there for something different. And if they were telling the truth, they would say, "I'm not here to fix my relationship with you. I'm here to justify why I decided to leave."

Chris Williamson 45:55 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 45:56 Mm. Yes. And so, you know, I'm kind of peeking backstage in the therapist's office there to tell you that if you- if you're coming in to counseling with that kind of attitude, you know, let the person know right up there. And we can tell it with their- with their body language, we don't have to have it... You know, if the person says... We say, you know, "Are you committed to having a great relationship with Jane or John?" And they say, " (coughs) Whoa. Well, of course, I'm completely committed to that." "Well, I'm here, aren't I?" I- you know, that's a defense.

Chris Williamson 46:32 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 46:33 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 46:34 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 46:34 That's a summation of 50 years of defensive responses that I've heard (laughs) from people.

Chris Williamson 46:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 46:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What about co-commitment? What are the- what are the steps to co-commitment and what- what does that mean to you?

Gay Hendricks 46:49 It's choosing to be in the game. I was a very... (laughs) I played high school football for two years, and I was minimally athletic, but I- I- I thought it was the best way to please the girls. Uh, 'cause I noticed that the athletes always walked around with the cool girls in the high school and so that was a big motivation since I was a portly nerd that wore big thick glasses and-

Chris Williamson 47:16 Okay.

Gay Hendricks 47:16 ... uh, was sort of pear-shaped at the time. I was, um, I was, uh, a head being carried around by a body. And so, um, I decided to go out for junior hei- or junior varsity football in my 11th year. And I spent the entire year sitting on the bench. (laughs) They never let me in, except toward the end of the season. We were ahead 49 points at one point and so I think at that point, the coach said- said it was safe to send me and a couple of my unathletic partners in. So we got in there, and I remember distinctly though, the difference of something that happened the moment I stepped onto the field. Suddenly, I realized, "I have to be committed to being here. I have to play this game. No matter whether we're 49 points ahead, I have to play this game like I mean it." And so, you know, in- in a lot of relationships, that commitment has wandered off. You know, through-

Chris Williamson 48:15 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 48:15 ... different interests or just drifting apart or... You know, like, uh, one of my... (laughs) Actually, he's a therapist where I used to practice out in Colorado. He told me, um, just as a colleague, uh, we were talking about... Because we'd both been divorced. I got divorced after a couple of years of a really unconscious, loving marriage when I was 22 or 23 years old. And, um, and I learned a lot from it, but I was really good... And I asked him, you know, "How did you decide to leave your first marriage?" 'Cause he'd done the same thing. He'd been... Kind of gotten married to somebody right out of college and hadn't worked out, but he was in a great relationship now. And he said-Well, the day I decided to leave was, I came home from a three-day working trip and I was- I was so ready to see her. And she opened the door and the first thing she said was, "The upstairs toilet is broken."

Chris Williamson 49:17 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 49:17 "Thank God you're home." Yeah. And that did it, you know. He was so high and excited about connecting, and then boom.

Chris Williamson 49:29 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 49:30 And, yeah. Those kind of moments can make such a- you know, very few people leave a relationship for logical (laughs) reasons. You may have 42 logical reasons, but it's built in some kind of emotional moment.

Chris Williamson 49:43 I'll tell you what's really interesting. I imagine that you don't spend as much time on Instagram as I- I hope you don't spend as much time on Instagram as I do. But, um, because this has been emotions, relating, as the algorithm has reverse engineered where my interests are at the moment. So, I'm getting a lot of, um, Nest, uh, recording cam footage of- of stuff that's, like, real, um, loving things. It's this real famous video of what every man really wants, and it's this dude in his- maybe he's- maybe 40, 45, like, big guy in his garage, and he's deadlifting what looks like 500 pounds, maybe more, right? It's a big, big weight. And he's got maybe his son in front of him, and he's lifting this weight up, and his son's jumping up and down going, "Go, Daddy, go. Go, Daddy, go." And, uh, then another one, which is a dad opening the fridge and his daughter's there, um, in the- in the kitchen behind him, and she says, "Are you going to the gym, Daddy?" And he goes, "Yeah." And she went, "Wow. I'm so proud of you," and just walks off. And this dad, like, just breaks down crying, right?

Gay Hendricks 50:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:55 Another one that I've seen recently is a, uh, man getting home from work, and it's a- a montage of this outdoor camera facing the- the door of the house. And he pulls in, and it's every single day, and every single day that he pulls in, his wife's waiting at the door for him. And as soon as he gets out of the car, she, like, runs over and gives him a hug. And, like, that's the opposite of, "The toilet upstairs is broken and I need you to do the thing." Um, my point here is, I- I really do think for all the first three buckets that I talked about, the macro trends, the evolutionary psychology underpinnings, the modern culture, I think people are very despondent about what those are. Socioeconomically, guys aren't doing particularly well. It means there's a dearth of eligible partners for women who are doing the- the- the college and- and earning thing. Oh, not good. And they retreat and- and men going their own way and aggressive feminism and, you know, all of this stuff, that no, no, no, no. Evolutionary psychology, very sterile, not particularly great at sort of relating and showing and doing all the rest of the stuff. Uh, also can be a- a source of discomfort for people. "Ah, look at this programming that's, you know, marionetting me from thir- 300,000 years ago. Like, that's not very good." And then, the culture thing. "Oh, uh, the girl mags and incels and red pill and- and- and- and dating shows and all of this stuff, it's all really bad." And then there's this pocket for me, which is a much more conscious, mindful, uh, positive sum relational approach, and I- I really do think that if we can get people into this sort of perspective, if they can really understand, hey, you can have union with somebody and your life can be... It's not 50 and 50 makes 100. It's 100 and 100 makes 200. Together, you are better than you could be apart. But it takes work from both people. I just- I'm seeing, um, Rick Rubin calls them whispers. So he pays attention to- to whispers in the culture, to little conversations I'll hear at the pool at Soho House in- here in Austin or- or, um, just a headline that I see or a comment that I see on a YouTube video or whatever. And you sort of, like the Sherlock Holmes thing, uh, you start to piece these bits together, and I think there's a real fertile ground for a- a wonderful relational revolution. Um, it's just, it's scary for people to do, and I think in that co-commitment thing, the idea of 50/50 is so pervasive in modern romance. So it's a- a difficulty for helping people to trust that if they take 100% responsibility for everything, that their partner will do the same in the end. And, uh, yeah. I- I guess when it comes to the concept of that 200% responsibility in conscious relationships, what are the biggest obstacles that you face when convincing people that the only way to change their partner is by actually changing themselves? How do you overcome that obstacle? How do people get that faith?

Gay Hendricks 54:08 Well, you've touched on something incredibly important 'cause out in the culture, you know, like if I watch a television sitcom or something like that, you know, it presents such a completely standardized version of what male-female relationships are supposed to be, or any other kind of relationship for that matter. About 15% of the people we've worked with over the years are in same-sex relationships. So, what I want to say applies to people across the board. But one of the things that, um, you see in relationships a lot of times that destroys them early on is some sense of competitiveness.

Chris Williamson 54:46 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 54:46 Comparative, competitive kind of thing, where you're competing for favor among the children or competing in some way, um, with each other. And so, that comes from that 50/50 kind of responsibility, fighting over......whose 50% is it? The only solution for that is that taking 100% responsibility, one person, and the other person taking 100%. That's the (laughs) only way out. And as you well know, though, that's not the way many relationships are set up. In fact, out in the society, like if you watch politics, you know, if you watch the news every day, you see the victim/persecutor dynamic in action all the time. How many politicians speak every day about how they are being oppressed or somehow inconvenienced by the other party? You know, nobody stands up on the floor of the Senate and says, "I take responsibility for this." You know? And it's always, "The other guys are responsible for keeping me from doing what I wanna do." And so, I w- what my life has been about and what I, kind of my revolution is all about, is making it okay and safe for everybody to tell the truth. Like, I wanna vote for a politician that says, "We've got some serious problems. I don't have the slightest idea how to do, deal with a lot of 'em," (laughs) but I sure wanna be working on 'em with everybody else who wants to work on 'em-

Chris Williamson 56:25 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 56:25 ... and who wants to play. You know? That's the spirit in which we're going to get things done. But, (laughs) I don't see much of that conversation going on. In fact, it's usually, nowadays, if anybody tells the truth, they get fired.

Chris Williamson 56:40 Mm. Well, it's very unseductive. I suppose, at least in politics, uh, it's a, it is a competition, right? You need to beat the other person by any means necessary. And w- whatever's most compelling to most of the electorate is what ... But people will vote for what ... Politicians will give the policies that people will vote for, because if they voted for something else, the politicians would do that. It's the same reason that anybody who complains about clickbait on YouTube, you go, "Dude, well, if you didn't click on it, well, the, the creators, (laughs) the creators would stop creating it." Um, but yeah, I think a lot of the time, when we're talking about this sort of co-commitment thing, "I'm gonna give everything, I'm really gonna dedicate myself to this, and I want you to do the same," a lot of the time, both partners tend to dig their heels in, and they want the other person to go first. It's like-

Gay Hendricks 57:34 I'd be committed if you were.

Chris Williamson 57:36 Yeah, "I- I will take responsibility if they take responsibility too-"

Gay Hendricks 57:40 Right.

Chris Williamson 57:40 ... which sort of defeats the purpose entirely and creates this chicken or egg scenario. So, how, how do you overcome that?

Gay Hendricks 57:48 Well, you work with the person until they're able to see that taking responsibility feels so much better than arguing for the victim position. Most couples' arguments are a race to occupy the victim position. One person gets into the victim position, blames the other, and the other person says, "Wait a minute, I'm not the one that's ruining your life. You're the one that's ruining my life." And then, off they go. That's why one of my great elder mentors, the late Eric Berne, MD, used to say that most people don't experience 15 minutes of genuine intimacy in their entire lives, because they stay locked in that victim/persecutor dynamic and don't ever take e- enough responsibility to reali- oh, I'm creating my life the way it is. Oh, wow, that's a moment of power. That's a moment of genuine agency. And-

Chris Williamson 58:45 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 58:46 ... you know, it's pretty rare

Gay Hendricks 58:47 too.

Chris Williamson 58:48 What's a way to step in and pattern-interrupt? That, y- a couple is in this rhythm. They have got this race to the victimhood pedestal. What is a way that someone could interject and, and, and pattern-break that?

Gay Hendricks 59:02 Well, I used to do a lot of business consulting back in the '90s after my book, uh, The Corporate Mystic came out. And I used to go into companies like Dell and Motorola and Bell Labs and places like that. And I always called it parachuting into enemy territory, because a lot of times, a board would be stuck on a particular issue, and I would be the guy that was parachuting in to try to get the board unstuck about something. And what's interesting, it was never a business problem. It was always some emotional issue that somebody was stuck on. They were replaying some old anger issue, or they were playing some old fear issue or something, but they weren't dealing with the problem that was. And I, I remember, um, working with a company, a very famous company, that had a $100 million deal at stake with a big, um, Los Angeles entertainment company. And they were, they were stuck to the point where they weren't speaking to each other (laughs) . And so, they repaired to their respective hotel rooms and, you know, did some introspecting, and realized, "Oh, wait a minute. We have a whole bunch of fears that haven't been addressed." And so, through a little bit of coaching, one guy stood up and said, "I just wanna tell you some of the things I'm afraid of."

Chris Williamson 1:00:36 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 1:00:36 "I'm afraid that mixing with your culture, we're gonna lose some of the precious aspects of my culture here, 'cause we value," dot, dot, dot. "And I don't see you guys valuing." So, but once the fears got out there, the business problem took about 20 minutes to solve. You know, but, but it was be- it was three days of, mmm, you know, having the car stuck in the ditch. And then, it just took a little bit of authenticity to put things back on the right track.

Chris Williamson 1:01:11 Mm. Yeah. So that's how you inspire people to sort of be more proactively benevolent in their relationship and stop keeping score? Because we have a culture that teaches people to expect the 50/50 split at every level.

Gay Hendricks 1:01:28 Yeah. Well, lawyers have told me that I've had in my practice (laughs) that, you know, they've been told in law school, "A good settlement is when both people go away unhappy." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:01:38 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 1:01:39 And... (laughs) I was so pleased the other day. I saw a, uh... I don't know if you watch the Open. I'm a golfer, and so I watch the, the British Open. Um, anyway, I never miss it. I avidly watch the Open every year. And this year one of our guys, Scottie Scheffler from, uh, Texas, won it. But at the press conference, he said something-

Chris Williamson 1:02:01 Oh, my God.

Gay Hendricks 1:02:01 ... so valuable-

Chris Williamson 1:02:02 This is, this is-

Gay Hendricks 1:02:02 ... I cried.

Chris Williamson 1:02:04 It is one of the m- I- I've reached out to Scottie to try and bring him on the show just because... I've watched golf for a while. That one press conference thing, "What's the point of me doing this? Why am I doing this? Let me tell you, I've worked my entire life for a few moments of satisfaction." I... It, it's phenomenal. It is, it is so wonderful to see a high performer do the thing, win the thing, and then warn everybody else off of it.

Gay Hendricks 1:02:30 Totally. And, uh, you know, to not only say, "You know, I'm feeling this great feeling today," but he said, "Do you know, in a couple of days, I'll (laughs) be back to my normal state of dissatisfaction?" (laughs) And I thought, "Well, I've never heard anybody say anything remotely like that." And then the other thing he said was, "You know, it's great, you know, that I'm making a living playing golf. But the day it interferes with my relationship with my wife or my child is the last day I'll ever play golf for a living." Wow. You know, that's... Uh, 'cause he's at the peak of his career. And with that kind of attitude, he could go on for years and years and years. But I'm so... I was so grateful to hear somebody at that stature say that.

Chris Williamson 1:03:16 Uh, what I think is really wonderful about it is, as well, it must be difficult to be the wife of a, um, world champion golfer.

Gay Hendricks 1:03:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:23 He's away all the time. He's training all the time. Th- I mean, uh, actually golf probably one (laughs) of the, one of the pursuits that probably gets the least female attention, I guess.

Gay Hendricks 1:03:34 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:03:34 I mean, Tiger Wo- Tiger Woods aside, he kind of transcended the sport. But you think about, like, NBA stars on the road, or football players, or whatever, and you think, "Oh, there's going to be a lot of female groupies around them." You're like, "Golf? Really? Are they, like, the pinnacle of sort of sexiness when it comes to athletes?" But still, you're in a relationship with a guy, a lot of attention, a lot of, a lot of options always on the road, late nights in hotels, so on and so forth. And a lot of the time, especially as someone who has a mo- tiny micro amount of, of, of public attention, I'm thinking more and more about what is it like to be in a relation- to be on the other side of the relationship of the person that's the, the A player, right? That, that is the person that's out on stage. Because well, it is an incumbent on the person who has got all of this stuff going on, who has all of the attention to make the person who doesn't and is still there supporting them even more comfortable. You know, he finishes, he puts at the final thing, high fives his caddy, and looks around for where's my partner at, because she's...

Gay Hendricks 1:04:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:39 If I go and celebrate with everybody else first, what, what's the subtext of that? The subtext is, everything is a priority, and you are what pick, pi- you, you pick up the slack at the end. I was having a conversation with a friend recently who had dated a, a, a really, really famous singer for a while. And she would get off stage, and he would be the last person. After she's just had, you know, like, tens of thousands of adoring fans, and then they've all... It's, uh, the attention has been on her, and she's s- sexy and done up and beguiling and charming and all the rest of this stuff. And then she'd get off stage, and he's had to swallow his pride. He's had to, like, the fragile male ego of, "I am here supporting my partner doing her thing," and then he was the last person that was sort of greeted. And shock, horror, that relationship didn't last. And he is also, he's also public facing. And now when he does his thing and he's out on stage and he's, you know, the, the man, the pedestal, the, you know, the fucking savant that's up there, the first person he looks for when he comes off and finishes is his partner. And he runs over to her, gives her a big kiss. She's the fir- And she gets to be... Ah, he did all of that and everybody loves him but me, like, I am his priority. Th- that fits around me as opposed to me picking up the scraps afterward. And I think, yeah, th- that's... Everyone should go and check it out. I retweeted it last week on my, uh, on my, uh, Twitter account. Um, Scottie Sche- Like, what a boss. What an absolute legend.

Gay Hendricks 1:06:11 Well, um, golf is the only sport that I'm remotely skilled at. So, uh, I, uh, I watch carefully, um, utterances by my favorite golfers. And that was one that just really lit me up.

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 Talking... Going back to that 50/50 thing, I wonder whether there's an issue of trying to measure apples to apples in this competitive nature because one person does the dishes, one takes out the trash, one goes to work, one looks after the house. The nature of a heterosexual relationship is that we are always apples to oranges. Like, people are tracking what h- what each partner brings to the table based on an assumption of evenness. But that's impossible because we bring different things to the table. And I have to assume that that just flattens the polarity of the relationship which just leads to inevitable failure.

Gay Hendricks 1:07:00 Yeah. Well, um, John Gray is an old friend of ours, and, uh, you know, he made up that whole Mars is... Men are from Mars, women are from Venus things. And he was telling me one time about where he sort of got that idea. He was in India, and he was watching a group of people-... cook dinner for the village, and he noticed that all of the men were just sitting around, squatting, watching, smoking, not saying a word. And the women were cooking, and they were animatedly talking with each other and that kind of thing. So you know, if you go back in evolution, you're going to find that, for most of human evolution, we were hunter-gatherers. For just a wink of an eye of modern life, we've become something different but-

Chris Williamson 1:07:50 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 1:07:51 ... hunter-gatherers, the male element, they're out having to be very quiet and very terse with their communications, if they're on the hunt. Whereas back home, everybody that's left that's not out hunting is talking and chattering and making noise.

Chris Williamson 1:08:11 Gossiping and alloparenting and relating.

Gay Hendricks 1:08:13 Yeah, yeah. Yelling at kids to get away from the edge of the forest and all those kinds of things so it's been a much richer communication environment for females. And we should also remember, evolutionarily too, during the modern era, and I'm talking 10,000 years or so since we started moving into cities and living in cities and that kind of thing, almost all of us come from a background of having been slaves 'cause if you look at the who was actually in Greece and in Rome and in Middle Ages Europe and all that kind of thing, you know, 90% of the people were in virtual slavery of some kind and so slaves, one thing they get good at is having a separate inner life that the other people, their oppressors, don't know about and that's the reason (laughs) you know like the Russian guy got kinda surprised when the Iron Curtain went down and people knocked over the Berlin Wall because they hadn't perceived what was building out there in the 90% of the people that were essentially slaves and so all sorts of things happen because nobody's paying attention to what other people are feeling and so now in society what I want to promote is everybody having a rich inner contact, a rich inner life where they're unconditionally loving of themselves and having that be the foundation for unconditionally loving other people and being able to communicate with them in such a way that 10-second sweaty conversations aren't even necessary because you had so many rich conversations before anything dramatic happens.

Chris Williamson 1:10:01 Mm-hmm, yeah, I, a, an inverse of that, uh, a lot of my friends are, uh, having kids for the first time, first-time fathers, and this isn't a, a, a story that's secondhand from anyone but I- I've thought about this dynamic a lot. You can imagine a dynamic where, uh, the man is the breadwinner, mum is breastfeeding a newborn and wakes up 10 times per night but wants her partner to wake up with her so that things feel even, right? And, uh, not even taking into consideration that the guy has got to be at work the next day to provide and will be exhausted from li- all of the wake-ups, even though the woman is also gonna be exhausted 'cause she's got to care for the kids and all the rest of the stuff but there is just ... Yeah, I- I suppose a understanding where individuation and unique capacities have a place at the table and where union and collaborative projects have a place at the table and being able to know li- like I'm gonna do this thing and I'm not gonna resent the fact that they're not there suffering along with me because I know that there are other things that they do which are costs that only they incur that they're doing in service of me too and I suppose, I have to assume, that this is where trust and faith that the other person is committed is like foundationally toxic to this because as soon as that breaks down every cost that you incur doesn't feel like it's being reciprocated and this then begins to get the competitiveness and the- the point scoring. "Well, I did this for you. The reason that I'm telling you that I did this for you is because I don't feel like you're doing things for me and by me showing you how much stuff I'm doing for you I'm going to motivate you into doing things for me in return." Like that, it seems like a big Gordian Knot that just needs cutting through.

Gay Hendricks 1:11:52 Yeah. Yeah, and that's why it's so important to get the competitive thing out of relationship and, you know, one of the first questions we ask people in their first session is are you on the team or not, you know? Are- is this a team for you? You and the other person, are you in it together? Are you committed to being in it together as allies rather than enemies? Because it doesn't take much to make people enemies and once they've started, you know, going into that whole victim thing that's, you know, unravels the trust and connection in a relationship very quickly. So keep it simple though, come back to those three things all the time. Am I in touch with my feelings, my authentic feelings? Am I telling the truth and am I taking full joyful responsibility?

Chris Williamson 1:12:45 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 1:12:45 Not responsibility because somebody's making me take responsibility. Do I see generally that, oh, I'm in charge of my life, I can make it up however I want. If you get two people that are doing that like Kitty have been and I've been doing for the last 45 years, you can do lots of miracles like publish 61 books between us and be on 500 television shows and travel around the world, 2 million miles, teaching seminars. One of those things, none of those things would have happened if we were constantly ragging on each other and competing with each other.

Chris Williamson 1:13:20 And you also probably couldn't have done it on your own-

Gay Hendricks 1:13:23 I wouldn't have wanted to do it on my own, you know? Because I- before I met Katie, I was missing half of life because I'd been in umpteen different relationships, including one, um, longer one, and just ran up against the same... You know, (laughs) it's like, uh, realizing after a little while you're- you're- you're on the Titanic and you're blaming the iceberg, you know, which is a useful thing to do if you can do something about it. But at some point in a relationship, you have to realize, "Oh, I'm the iceberg. I'm the thing that keeps happening to me. I'm the thing that keeps happening and being- getting criticized or criticizing all the time." So, the moment we make that inner move, all it takes is once to try to really get the door open to seeing responsibility as on the same wavelength as creativity. Because if you are genuinely taking responsibility, you're saying, "I'm an equal here in this universe as you. I'm an equal to everything in the universe. I am the universe. I am part of the whole." And once you establish that feeling, creativity comes to you just, like, so fast because you're not in the way of the creative impulses of the universe itself, and this universe is an incredibly creative place. I was reading about a place in astronomy out in the universe where there's 32 suns, S-U-N-S, being born a second. They're spewing out out there somewhere, 32 new suns, just, uh, like our big, bright shiny one in the air, but 32 of them a second. You know, and we're part of 800 billion galaxies. And so-

Chris Williamson 1:15:18 Mm.

Gay Hendricks 1:15:18 ... if you're pretending you're different from all that, that you're special, (laughs) well, you're asking the universe to... You know, it's like putting a kick me sign on yourself. But then once-

Chris Williamson 1:15:28 (laughs) Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 1:15:28 ... you, once you-

Chris Williamson 1:15:29 You're gonna be humbled fast.

Gay Hendricks 1:15:30 (laughs) Yeah. You gotta be a member of the universe before you can take full advantage of it. If you're trying to prove that you're special, and different, and not like everybody else here, that's a awkward place to be.

Chris Williamson 1:15:44 Also,

Chris Williamson 1:15:45 if you are encountering similar situations regularly throughout your life, we're talking about relationships, so, "All of my exes- all of my exes are narcissists," or, "All of my exes, they're unable to f- to end a relationship in a- a charming way," or, "All of my exes are terrifyingly jealous," or whatever. You go, "All of them?"

Gay Hendricks 1:16:04 All of them, yes.

Chris Williamson 1:16:04 All of- all of them? Well, that's- y- that might be true. What's the common denominator between all of your... Oh, you are. You are-

Gay Hendricks 1:16:13 No.

Chris Williamson 1:16:13 ... the common denominator between all of the experiences in your life. So, when you see this thread that happen, "I'm often told that I'm X or Y. I'm often told that I'm too sensitive and emotional and I can't take responsibility. I'm often told that I'm cold and I need the..." Blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, maybe take some heed of that and consider that it might not- the other people might not be the problem.

Gay Hendricks 1:16:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:39 It might be you. In fact, it probably is you. (laughs) And even if it's not you, taking responsibility, uh, i- wherever you can is going to feel much more empowering than waving the victim flag and, like, raging at the sky.

Gay Hendricks 1:16:53 You know, it- you just reminded me of the very best one-liner any person has ever said to me in a therapy situation was when I was at university at, uh, uh... when I was a professor at the University of Colorado out in, uh, um... I worked at the branch in Colorado Springs. I was the head of the counseling department there, and we also were expected to have a private practice. So, you weren't just preaching stuff, you were practicing what you preached. So, one day a week, I spent seeing clients. And a fellow came in that was in his 30s, and he said that since the time he was 17 years old, he had been in a number of relationships, mostly a matter of months, but a couple of them that had been a matter of years. But they always ended the same way, where the woman betrayed him or left, or-

Chris Williamson 1:17:51 Wow.

Gay Hendricks 1:17:51 ... moved out of town or something that always looked like it was the other person's fault. And here's his one-liner. He said in this very innocent voice, he said, "Dr. Hendrix, I'm beginning to wonder if it has something to do with me." You think? Yeah. And it didn't take me 10 minutes of being a therapy wizard to find out something that he had never thought about, which is amazing in itself. He had never connected up the fact that he was an- one of four boys, and he was the baby of four boys. And after his mother had him, she decided she'd had enough and disappeared with another man, and just didn't come back. And so he grew up in this milieu where his father was ranting (laughs) on a pretty much daily basis, "If your mother were only here..." You know, blah, blah, blah. And-

Chris Williamson 1:18:51 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 1:18:51 ... you know, just couldn't adapt very well and was playing the victim card throughout my, um, clients. And- and it was so deeply ingrained that he'd never made the connection. He didn't until he was 35 or so years old say, "Oh, that horrible betrayal when I was a year old, I'm replaying the pattern." Wow. So, you know, I've been blessed in a way. I've been able to sit with people thousands of times now where they had that realization. But I never get tired of it. It's always the most beautiful thing to see, because when a person gets out of life happening to them and gets into, "Oh-Life is happening to woo me. That means I can do something about it. I can create a new dream, or I can create a new relationship. You can't do that when you're operating from the victim position.

Chris Williamson 1:19:47 So good. Uh, one of my best friends is currently writing a book about agency and, uh, he summarizes agency as, "I happen to life, not life happens to me."

Gay Hendricks 1:19:59 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:19:59 And, uh, the- I suppose the elevated, ascended, spiritually enlightened version is, "Life happens through me," right? That's a- a sort of more heart-opening side of things. But I think the ground floor is like, "Hey, I happen to life. Like, I can impact my future. Holy shit, like, I can leave that relationship I don't like, or I can move out of that career that isn't enthusing me anymore. I can set a boundary with my family that's pissing me off, or I can lose 50 pounds, or I can change my habits." Like, fundamentally, you are not at the mercy of the things that are happening to you, and the same thing goes for your relationship. And I think... I've had this theory for a- a little while, I'd be interested to know what your opinion of this is, a lot of- a lot of relationship proselytizing that happens on the internet, m- a lot of the issues that people are trying to navigate are fundamentally incompatibility being intellectualized, uh, reverse engineered. I have a friend who has made a- a big deal out of the fact that your partner should challenge you. His wife of many decades is super disagreeable. It's like, well obviously, obviously you- the person that you fell in love with is the philosophy that you then bore out of that, because if not, you would've broken up. And the same thing goes for, like, all- all the way down, much of it is, um, "Well, you need to be able to do this within your rela-" or, "You must be able to navigate this with your partner." It's like, I- I get the sense that it is far easier to find a partner who compensates for our shortcomings and actually helps us get past them than it is to fix them. Like if you're like-

Gay Hendricks 1:21:42 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:21:42 ... like, I- I like to, um, uh, party three nights a week and my partner has a problem with that, it's like, because you chose a partner who doesn't like to party three nights a week. It's just an incompatibility problem that you're now trying, "Oh, well, it's my resistance. I must get over my resistance around jealousy," or whatever it is. Like, "My partner flirts with loads of people and I need to teach them that it's wrong." It's like, you chose a flirty partner. You chose a partner that flirts with everybody and you're the sort of person that feels uncomfortable with that. There is a- a man or a woman out there who would be absolutely fine with it and maybe even would actually quite like it because they know that they get the partner when they come home. And there is another partner out there for you who wouldn't flirt with anybody and would love the fact that you're really dedicated and that you pay attention and that you care about the fact... It's like, a lot of it is reverse engineering incompatibility and then forming some kind of philosophy out of it, and then on the other side, people, because they have their own idiosyncrasies and preferences, their mating philosophy is precisely the thing that they chose, because it's borne out of the thing that they committed to. If they were like, "Your partner should be really easygoing," you go, "You married a woman that was super disagreeable for 40 years. H- Will you square that circle for me?" It wouldn't, because it would be in discordance and it would cause a ton of- a ton of havoc. So yeah, I, um, that incompatibility thing, the way that philosophies are borne out, um, a- a lot of it is people just navigating wrong partner choice, as far as I can see.

Gay Hendricks 1:23:02 I- I agree, 'cause I, like I mentioned earlier, I had one of those really difficult relationships where I chose somebody unconsciously who was incredibly critical, and then I complained all the time about her being critical.

Chris Williamson 1:23:16 (laughs)

Gay Hendricks 1:23:16 (laughs) And, uh, so, um-

Chris Williamson 1:23:19 Yeah.

Gay Hendricks 1:23:19 ... I think we should all remember a quotation from that great marriage counselor, Sylvester Stallone, in Rocky, where he says about his girlfriend, he says, "I got gaps, she got gaps. We fill gaps." And so, look for somebody, not necessarily that's just like you, but has things that you need to learn.

Chris Williamson 1:23:47 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 1:23:47 You know, like, I remember when my wife corrected my Mr. Fix-It program way back in the early stages of our relationship, maybe in the first year of our relationship, she said something about she felt tired, and I went into fix-it mode and I said, "Oh, well, why don't you try, um, let's meditate for 15 minutes together," or something like that, and I try, "Uh..." And I tried two or three things and finally she said, "Wait a minute, when I tell you something like I'm sc- scared or I'm tired, I'm not looking for you to fix it. I'm just looking to tell you for the sake of letting you know what's going on in me." And I remember being just dumbfounded at that. I'm not supposed to fix it?

Chris Williamson 1:24:32 Mm-hmm.

Gay Hendricks 1:24:32 You know, that was news to me. I grew up in a family with a- some people who were addicted to substances and what- where I was sometimes called upon to take responsibility for parenting them rather than them parenting me. (laughs) And so I was, uh, you know, used to operating out of Mr. Fix-It mode, and Mr. Fix-It just didn't work in this relationship. And so I had to go for Mr. Resonance mode rather than Mr. Fix-It mode.

Chris Williamson 1:25:03 Mm. Well, there's a- a really famous meme that's floating around and, uh, it's a- a girlfriend texting her boyfriend and she says, um, "I dropped my burrito on the floor. I'm devastated." And, uh, his response to- to your situation is, um, "Are you- are you in the, uh, problem-solving mode or do you just want to talk about it for a while?"

Gay Hendricks 1:25:30 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:25:31 (laughs) And it's so true. It's- it's- it's so true, and I think, you know, for the women out there...Guys like to fix things. Vasopressin for us is a fucking hell of a drug. Like, I- I saw a-

Gay Hendricks 1:25:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:25:42 ... well, another great video from a while ago on, on Twitter said, um, it's a woman, sort of a Gen Z type woman talking to the camera, and she says, "I've just figured men out. I've just figured men out. Men love quests. They want quests. They're always looking for quests. They just want something-"

Gay Hendricks 1:26:00 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 1:26:00 "... they wanna go and fix this thing and come back and them to be the hero, and they just want quests. They want quests in the bedroom and they wanna get a pat on the back and a good boy and didn't you do well," and so on and so... Like, they just want quests. And that's why the failure of cross-sex mind reading is, I am communicating to you in the way that I would want to be communicated to.

Gay Hendricks 1:26:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:26:20 And it just takes a, a little bit of humility and, and understanding on both sides. And, you know, this is, these are things that are hard learned, and I think it's one of the reasons that relationships are training grounds, and often the first relationship you get into is probably not gonna be the one that you stay in because so many of these lessons are learned through discomfort and then they accumulate over time. You, you have this cumulative load of errors that have been made, and it gets too great, and the relationship catch, like, collapses under the weight of it. And then, oh, well, I run it back next time, but I take all of the learnings from the last one into this one, and then I go again and, "Oh, isn't that great? We didn't have to..." I didn't tell her, like, how to go and buy a new burrito. I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry that your burrito fell on the floor, honey. Isn't that da-da-da-da-da-da-da?"

Gay Hendricks 1:27:02 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:27:02 So yeah, Gay, uh, th- you are fantastic and, uh, I think your work is wonderful. Let's, let's bring it into land there. I've got enough to talk about for the, the rest of the day, um, but we can just do, we can just do another episode. So tell people where they should go to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing in the interim.

Gay Hendricks 1:27:20 Well, good. Well, we're everywhere. I have a whole team that does Facebook and all those kind of things. I do my own Instagram, my own personal hendricks.gay, uh, @hendricks.gay Instagram 'cause I kind of get a kick out of that and, uh, posting family stuff on there and stuff I do and that kind of thing. So you can find us just about everywhere. Hendricks.com is the jumping off place for everything we do. Uh, we have a new thing called The Coaches Portal that you can find, which is a way to get all your answer, professional answers for what you do with your clients and that kind of thing. So, um, and our books are everywhere, so, uh, we're, we're pretty hard to miss out there. Uh, I just thought something that I gotta tell you. Maybe you saw this on Instagram. There's the greatest cartoon I saw this week that I circulated all over the place. There's a old-fashioned cartoon of two women sitting in a room, kind of in a seance, and one of them is reading tarot cards for the other one. And the tarot card reader is saying to the other woman, "You know, your cards indicate that you're the cause of a lot of your own problems." And the other woman (laughs) says, "Bitch, reshuffle those cards." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:28:35 (laughs) Perfect. Gay, uh, I can't wait to speak to you again, mate. I'm so glad that I found your work and, uh, I, I really think that you're, you're moving everybody's world in a better direction. So I appreciate you very much.

Gay Hendricks 1:28:53 Well, thank you very much. You're clearly in your genius zone and blessings to you. (instrumental music plays)

Chris Williamson 1:28:58 Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you