I enjoyed the recent mini-series of emails by Art of Accomplishment about connection. My first course taken with them was called the Connection Course. And these emails were great reminders of the importance of connection in our lives. Hence I saved a few quotes and stories.
Connection and wonder
Two young fish are swimming along in the ocean. They meet an older fish swimming in the other direction who nods at them and says:
“Morning, boys, how’s the water?”
The two young fish swim on for a bit, until eventually one of them stops, looks over at the other and asks:
“What in the world is water?”
Connection surrounds us so ubiquitously that many of us don’t even realize we are “in the water” — we spend our entire lives swimming through it, yet are hardly conscious of its impact on our lives.
It is so unseen and so unverbalized, that we don’t take the time to understand what connection really is and how to get the connection that we really want.
This personal marriage episode by Joe Hudson is such a gem for me!
Twenty years ago, early on in my marriage, my wife invited me to an event that was really important to her.
I hadn’t realized how important it was, and I also hadn’t wanted to go, so she ended up going to the event without me.
When she came back, she was furious at me. She walked back in through the front door and just started letting me have it. I remember seeing her—and she was looking incredibly beautiful coming from the event—and thinking: “I really don’t want her to punish me.”
I desperately wanted her to stop being angry and to know that I loved her, which was the typical mode I would go into back then when we fought. And when I did that, we would spiral into a back and forth of who was right and who was wrong, both of us getting angrier and angrier.
But that night, something new clicked in me: I began to wonder.
I saw that part of me that needed her to change, that needed her to stop being angry, and I realized that I could do something else. I could simply let her be angry, and love her for it.
And so I let her be angry, and she let it out for maybe three minutes (and then she got mad at me for not reacting for maybe another minute), and then that was it. Soon, we were holding each other.
In that moment, something completely new opened up in my marriage. It wasn’t a quick fix, but it was the beginning of freedom. All of a sudden, there was new space for me to be myself, and for her to be herself.
It was this sense of wonder that allowed me to see my wife more fully, even in her anger. It allowed me to appreciate the complexity and the richness of her inner world, and set down my need to not be punished, and for her not to be angry.
How to have productive conflict
Most people shy away from tension or conflict, but tension is essential to life.
Tension is necessary for systems—including the relationships in our life—to function properly. Trust isn’t ever established until a relationship has gone through a conflict and come out better on the other side.
The mistake we often make is attempting to eliminate these tensions and smooth them over without connecting to the deeper wisdom underneath them. We try to solve it instead of connect with it.
Connecting with tension means listening deeply, seeking to understand the needs and wisdom in each viewpoint, and then using that information to build understanding.
A story by Joe Hudson:
When I was pretty young and just starting out as a VC, I found myself at a yacht club event with a guy named Brad — a successful lawyer transitioning into a career in venture capital.
It was a beautiful day and the water along the boat was sparkling, but none of us were quite able to enjoy ourselves out there.
A major disagreement had just erupted within the board of a company we invested in, and accusations were flying left and right. It seemed like certain disaster.
What Brad did next is something I will never forget.
Over the course of an hour, I watched him call up every single person on the board and do nothing but ask questions: “What do you see about the conflict? What would you do? How would you handle it?”
He listened carefully to each person’s responses and said nothing. Outside of asking a few more questions when he was curious about something, he would simply let them talk and tell their point of view.
Then, when he had made sure that he had spoken to everyone, he called everybody up a second time, and said: “Okay, based on what I’ve learned, this is the potential course of action that I see meets everybody’s needs. What might I be missing or overlooking?”
Within two rounds of phone calls around the table, Brad had successfully steered the company away from the brink of disaster.
How to solve problems with connection
Another story by Joe Hudson:
A few years ago, I was part of a men’s group with one important rule: No giving advice.
Towards the end of one of our sessions, I shared a personal problem I had been grappling with.
An old friendship I had was on the brink of collapse. Every time I tried to ask him to talk things out, he would brush it off and tell me that everything was fine. Our interactions were growing more and more tense and awkward, and I didn’t know what to do.
I shared this predicament with the group, and afterwards, asked them to ask me questions about the situation.
Going around the circle, each person took turns asking me one or two questions. By the end of the exercise, no one had shared any advice… yet I was looking at the problem with completely new eyes. I saw through many of the assumptions I had held, and I was looking at twenty new possibilities for action.
In the age of ChatGPT, having an answer is not nearly as important as asking the right question.
It’s not about how you solve it — it’s whether you’re solving the right “problem” in the first place. Getting to the right problem statement requires wonder.
Denys' Harbor