Don't Punish Behavior You Want To See Repeated

There is a wrong way to respond to other people’s problems or questions. And it is by making them about you.

There is a wrong way to respond to the humility and trust of others. And it is by belittling their humility and betraying their trust.

Every once in a while, someone will apologize to you for something. And it’s tempting to say “yea, I told you so.” Or “yea, it’s about time.” Or someone will do something you’ve been waiting for them to do. The wrong thing to do is to make them feel stupid for doing so.

And I’m not just saying this because “better late than never.” I’m talking about keeping good, healthy relationships by making people feel good about being open and humble and curious.

If you’ve been fighting with your girlfriend for a week about some thing that you think she did wrong, it’s really easy to get vindictive about it. It’s really easy to get yourself into a nice aggressive stance and be ready to pounce like a lion out of the tall grass if and when she finally apologizes. It’s easy to turn the whole thing into an episode of “putting someone in their place” and becoming victorious.

But good relationships are not about being victorious. Being a good person is not about being victorious. These things are about trust and humility. And those are precisely the traits you want to see in others.

If your girlfriend apologizes to you and you make her feel stupid the rest of the night, do you think she’s going to be in a rush to apologize for the next thing? Not likely. She’ll probably be even more defensive next time. And it’ll be because of you, not her. You could have given her a hug and said “darling, that’s all I wanted.” But instead you’ve doubled down on selfishness and competitiveness.

What if you got angry at your girlfriend or wife every time she got all dressed up and pretty? What if, when your girlfriend looked good in public, instead of being proud and feeling lucky, you belittled her? And jealously snarled at her, “who exactly are you trying to look good for?”

Well, maybe eventually instead of a pretty girlfriend you’ll have an ugly one. Maybe she’ll put on some weight. Maybe she won’t dress up anymore. Because you actually punished her for looking good. Instead of rewarding her with positive attention.

Repeat these kinds of behaviors for a few months or a few years, and you might just find yourself in an awful relationship. And it’ll be entirely your own fault.

Imagine you’re a coach. And one of your mid-tier players finally shows off some skill that you’ve been trying to hammer into him during an important game. Now imagine your response is to play into the whole locker-room hazing thing and make fun of him in front of his teammates: “look everybody, little Tommy finally learned how to catch a football! It’s about time, huh? Ha ha ha.”

You think you’ve successfully mixed humor with praise, and you break your arm patting yourself on the back for a job well done. But little Tommy goes home that night and hates both you and the football team. Because you didn’t praise him. You took his episode of triumph, a defining moment in his high school life, and made it about you and your stupid joke. Not a great move, coach.

What would have been a great move is to take a moment in front of all of his teammates and actually praise him. Congratulate him and tell him that if he keeps that up you guys may just have an excellent season. What a difference. Here you send him home proud and tall, not deflated and discouraged.

What if a co-worker you dislike finally asks you for help with something? Or admits that he did something wrong on that last project? Are you going to continue talking bad about him? Or are you going to shake his hand and show appreciation?

Look, you don’t have to get all mushy. Especially with people you don’t particularly care for. But if you took a moment, shook his hand and looked him in the eye, and said, “hey man it’s pretty cool of you to say that. I appreciate it,” I’ll bet things will go pretty well for both of you. And you buy yourself some bonus reputation points as a wise and cool guy for the low, low price of not being a dick.

But sometimes our rewards and punishments to other people are more subtle than this.

Take the example of an addict or an alcoholic.

If you know any addicts or alcoholics, you’re familiar with how little trust they give to others. How little they open up, how rarely they give you a glimpse of what’s really going on inside them. Everything is a lie, everything is a game, and everything for you, as someone who must deal with them, is an incredibly frustrating and discouraging experience.

There may come a day when the addict in your life tells you a secret. Tells you something he’s struggling with. Tells you some or all of the real root of his problems. This is like the holy grail of interpersonal trust. This is the kind of confidence that addicts rarely ever have in anybody. Lots of addicts die of overdoses before they ever share their true struggles with anyone.

So if your addicted friend or sister or brother tells you something in confidence, think about what that means. It means that, for the first time in possibly years, they are trusting someone with something.

It means that they have selected you as the steward of their truth. They have chosen you to open up to.

Think twice before going and telling the rest of your family. Or your friends, or their significant others. Think about the message you’ll be sending: “You trusted me with something, and I immediately broke it and made this about me and/or everybody else.”

And you might say “well wait, J.R., if an addict tells me something that’s important, why would I not tell the rest of his family and loved ones? They want to know! They deserve to know.”

Yes, of course. They do want to, and they do deserve to.

But the addict also wants and deserves to be able to feel trust in other human beings. And that, to me, is endlessly more important than everyone else’s desire to “know.”

There’s one sure way to make an addict go out and do something incredibly stupid and dangerous — and that’s by showing him that his fears were right and he cannot trust other people. A better message to send is “you gave me this and I’ll hold it for you. You can trust me. And maybe if you’re brave you can trust other people too.”

No matter how tempting it is to make other people’s problems and issues and apologies about you, you must abstain. Always keep in mind that all you were trying to preserve in the first place was a relationship that is good and healthy and serves your needs fairly. All you were trying to protect in the first place was trust and truth — the ability to be happy and cooperative. And remember that, if you give in to vindictive or selfish temptations, it becomes you who undermines those things. You become the very thing you swore to destroy.

Remember to handle things with care and nobility — as if everything you touch is a task appointed to someone special. You’ll be trusted with more because you’ll be worthy of it. You’ll have better relationships because you’ll deserve them. You’ll have the love of more and better people, because you’ll make them want to love you.

Drink some water but only if it apologizes first,

JDR

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” - Sun Tzu