How we interact with other people is fraught with dangers and complications, which actually cause relationships to fail far more than they success. We have a common perception that our relationships, be they personal or organisational, should work in a particular way. Most often, they don’t. And this begs the question of “why?”
Relationships only work if the parties to them are congruent from a values perspective. That is, each individual within a relationship has common Values – values that match in a way which provides acceptance and common direction. The less Values in common, the more issues we have and the faster the relationship fails.
Now you may have noticed that I have capitalised the “V” in Values. This is for a particular reason that must be understood to understand the basics of the Neuro-Com Relationship model.
The word value typically denotes something of higher demand or perceived financial importance or that attracts a higher level of moral or ethical interest. In some ways this is true, but the Values (with a capital “V”) that I refer to are the parts of the emotional memory that respond with higher levels of reactive activity or energy when triggered by events or circumstance we find ourselves embroiled in. These Values are memory groups that have been programmed with a higher level of importance or emotional energy, almost always during our first 5 years. Unless we change these deliberately during our lives these Values drive our behaviours, thoughts and emotional reactions for the rest of our lives – including the relationships we are attracted to.
For a relationship to work at all we need at least 50% of these core Values in common. This level of overlap will allow a typical relationship to last 5-7 years before it runs out of another critical element – tolerance. A relationship with 80% Values overlap tends to last a long time. It is perhaps not perfect, but it is comfortable most of the time.
Unfortunately the 80% scenario only occurs in less than 10% of relationships.
So in this we find a key to designing and maintaining great relationships. For more info watch our short video series at http://www.liverelationships.info. It’s FREE!