A Mason's Work

[00:00] So today we're going to talk about the architecture of commitment, the mechanics or anatomy of
[00:06] what commitments look like, and how those turn into, you know, relationships that matter
[00:15] and the foundation for interactions that make sense.
[00:20] So yesterday you may remember I mentioned a book by the name of Conscious Business,
[00:26] whose author Fred Kaufman does a really, really good job of articulating what a impeccable commitment looks like
[00:36] or a commitment that is honorable both from an intentional perspective as well as from a transactional perspective.
[00:45] So I'm going to go over some of this anatomy over the course of this episode.
[00:51] And in that you should walking out of it, maybe even just by virtue of having that language at your disposal,
[00:59] identify maybe where a recent contract or commitment that you had made has gone awry.
[01:07] So we'll start with the beginning.
[01:10] Any commitment requires a requester.
[01:14] Okay.
[01:14] And the requester is the person who knows something that they need and they can call out what that is.
[01:21] It's a named need.
[01:26] And then it requires a receiver, somebody that can meet that need in some way.
[01:34] It also requires a clearly defined action that will be taken and a timeline.
[01:43] And then the last piece of that agreement is an explicit agreement, an explicit statement of mutual consent.
[01:53] If you take any of those pieces out, if you remove timing, if you remove concrete action,
[02:00] if you remove consent, the agreement, the commitment itself falls apart.
[02:06] You have something that seems like a commitment.
[02:09] It seems like something that's going to like, we have an understanding.
[02:14] But then when it's stress tested by anything that happens in the world, it completely just disappears.
[02:20] So you may have had situations in your life where you have these kind of understandings where like,
[02:26] oh, yes, I thought we knew what was going to happen or I thought we knew what we were going to do.
[02:33] And you get there and nothing has happened or worse.
[02:37] Right.
[02:37] So so let's talk a little bit deeper about these things.
[02:41] The requester is where most men run into trouble first, and it connects directly to last week.
[02:48] So when we make a real request on the requester side of a conversation, if you're somebody who needs a thing or needs help or needs support in some capacity,
[02:59] you have to know what you really need.
[03:02] And you can't be honest with yourself.
[03:04] You'll never get there.
[03:05] Right.
[03:05] So you there's a big understanding here on from the inside out that if you don't have that ability to honestly self-examine,
[03:16] when you create a request or specify a need to someone else,
[03:23] there's a real good chance that that needs not going to get met because you didn't diagnose it properly,
[03:28] because you don't have what I like to call referential integrity.
[03:32] So when we build this understanding, this referential integrity,
[03:37] this ability for what we say we want and what we know we need are in alignment is vital to creating a request that works.
[03:49] When we talk about a request, right, this is another part of that dynamic.
[03:56] Um, the requests themselves must be simply stated requests.
[04:03] It can't be demands and it can't be applied leverage or some sort of, uh, imbalance in the relationship that is designed to get an outcome without the other parts of the contract or the other parts of that agreement or commitment.
[04:23] So if you're in a position where you can force somebody to do a thing, um, you're not going to drive to a mutual understanding of what that thing is necessarily.
[04:34] And you're certainly going to have a hard time getting consent.
[04:37] Uh, the moment it's coerced consent, it's not consent.
[04:40] So, um, you can start to see where some of these pieces break down right away.
[04:45] And if we're not conscious about our own, uh, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and have that kind of an honesty and integrity,
[04:53] we're not going to be able to do things like ask folks for even trivial help.
[04:59] So on the other side of that, on the recipient side, um, it requires the same level of self-understanding.
[05:09] If you don't have the ability to know what it is you're feeling, you might find yourself regularly agreeing because you are doing so out of a desire to be liked or receive approval.
[05:22] As opposed to whether or not you can honestly and rationally agree to what's happening, what the request is.
[05:31] So the more we kind of look at this, the more you surface your own understanding, you begin to see that without an anchor, without understanding your own plum, you will lose the ability to build anything off of that, you know, upright.
[05:53] So, uh, we want to also talk about things like the requests itself.
[05:59] Um, when we talk about what a request is, what the nature of those agreements are, um, you want to ask for stuff that's specific.
[06:08] You want to help folks understand, uh, when you are making a request, the, the design intent behind that request so that they can act accordingly in the event that the terms and conditions need to be changed.
[06:21] If your mission is to, you know, dig a hole, um, and you specify that it's with, you know, a certain shovel and that shovel is not available.
[06:30] And so they don't do anything, uh, because they don't know you're really just trying to dig a hole.
[06:37] Uh, you've got these problems.
[06:38] And so, you know, horrible examples aside, there's tons of ways that this kind of conversation goes awry.
[06:46] And so we want to be sensitive to each of these parts, the, the time commitment, the positive consent, the, um, the nature of the request and the essentially alignment of the requester and the recipient of that request.
[07:02] To their own plum.
[07:05] And in so doing, we can begin to build relationships that really stand the test of time.
[07:10] So we'll talk more about how to use the ARA sequence in the context of taking on and getting to that consent stage of the agreement moving forward.
[07:18] See you tomorrow.