Managing Yourself in Relationships: Part 3 – Shifting Demands to Healthy Relationship Requests
In this four part series, leadership and relationship expert Susan MacKenty Brady offers some hard-won advice about how best to manage yourself for optimal relationship success – at home and at work.
Now that you have taken a breath or ten (link to Time Out! Part 1) and returned to compassion for yourself and others (link to Mastering the Return to Center – Part 2), you’re ready to get clear about your request. What do you need from your partner or the person you’re in a relationship with? I’m not talking about stating a big vision (like more love) that leaves the other making up their recipe for what you mean. Instead, your request needs to be 1) behavioral (action-based) and 2) specific.
I should pause here and address the overwhelming temptation not to make a request at all and just expect the person you are in a relationship with to know what you want and how to give it to you. This is a losing strategy. If we don’t make healthy requests of the people in our life so that we can enjoy being in a relationship, that’s on us, not them.
Turning again to the example I have used in this series about being triggered by a messy kitchen (left for me after a long day of work by my “busy” teens) the overwhelming temptation for me is always to take action in the moment and feel pissed about it later. The old Susan would have cleaned the entire kitchen while grumbling under my breath how entitled and sloppy my kids are and how I suck as a mother for raising and tolerating such entitled and sloppy kids. But I hung up my martyr hat a long time ago (thankfully for me and my kids) and learned this important next step (this is also an alternative to “sucking it up”) – shifting a demand to a healthy request.
Shift Your Demand to a Healthy Request: Relationship Wellness Advice
Here’s what a healthy request looks like: A camera would need to be able to see the person doing what you’re asking. A sample request might be, “I’d love it if you asked me at the end of the day how my day was and listened without distraction.” Or “can we carve out one hour over the weekend to plan the week ahead?” Or “when we are in a meeting, and knowing that I can be reluctant to speak up with all the extroversion, would you bring me into the conversation by asking for my opinion?” You get the point.
Your requests need to be clear and asked for so that you own what you need as your need and want. Of course, there is no guarantee the other will honor your request but staying clean in your own words and actions is also your secret weapon.
What I wanted and needed from my kids is to clean the kitchen and also be aware that when they don’t it feels super disrespectful to me. Find out in part 4 – Making the Ask from Respect – how it all went down.
Your turn: reflect on a time when you got triggered and either “sucked it up” and didn’t think of what you need and want (the prerequisite to healthy request making) or when you allowed yourself to speak in anger or hurt by making demands. How did that go for you?
Susan MacKenty Brady is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University in Boston and the CEO of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. She was previously president of the Relational Life Institute, where she worked closely with some of the brightest and most innovative minds in relationship and behavioral science. She currently serves as emeritus board member for Strong Women, Strong Girls and as board chair for Our.Love Company. The author of two well received books, Susan is the mother of two awesome teenage daughters who are learning about love and relationships just like she is.
