In the John Gottman book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” he introduces the concept of “yielding to win.” He uses an example of a traffic jam to illustrate the point. He highlights two approaches to the situation:
“One is to stop, become righteously indignant, and insist that the offending obstacle move.”
“The other is to drive around it”
Although the chapter is regarding his Principle #4 ” Let your partner influence you” it has a strong message for those of us working on Words of Affirmation (WoA).
When we’re faced with a situation in our relationship, we have a choice. We can use words of complaint (a gateway to criticism, which is like playing with fire) OR we can choose to simply yield.
For me, in practice, this is how this looks in my life:
I recently noticed a pile of clutter left over from one of my wife’s projects. My choices were to mention it to her in hopes that she would clean it up OR I could spend five minutes simply taking care of it myself. I chose poorly in this case.
Instead of “yielding to win,” I used words of complaint which turned critical and met with a defensive response from my WoA spouse.
The next time, I’ll drive around that traffic jam by simply taking care of the five minute job without using those words and risking a poor interaction with my spouse.
I ended up cleaning up the clutter myself after it all anyway. I’ll definitely “Yield to Win” next time!