Teamwork Quirks | EP053

Crystal Clark: 00:00:00

Welcome to our love space today, and welcome to May. It's my birth month, so I always love May. And if you're listening, when this drops, I'll already be another year older by that time. So there you go. Happy birthday to future me. As you know, we are all about living in a teamwork, collaboration, love space here, and this is because when you work together as a collaborative team with your with the love of your life, it has so many benefits to your own personal well being and also to your connection in your relationship. So when you work as a team, it actually gives you the opportunity to practice now, whether this is you working as a teamwork, collaboration, for setting a goal and achieving it together, you know, tweaking something in your love space and managing to tweak that together, or if it's really just about solving a problem that's come up in your relationship, slash your your life, right? We all have everyday problems, or, you know, things that we need to problem solve around. So whether it's any of those kind of things, goal setting and or problem solving. Working as a team together is really beneficial for your connection, because it gives you so many opportunities to practice all of the skills that you need for when you run into actual relationship difficulties and hiccups together, right? So all of those April showers we talked about last month working as a team on something that is not about your relationship specifically, and coming together to collaborate on that actually practices all the skills that you need to for when your relationship needs it. So it gives you that opportunity to practice clearly communicating with each other, because you're going to need to share ideas with each other about the goal, about how you can achieve the goal, or how you're going to solve the problem, and maybe even you're going to brainstorm together, right? Which means you get to share those ideas out. You get to collaborate. You get to be flexible and good, giving and game with just letting the other person, or both of you, have all of your ideas. When you share ideas with another person, it actually releases oxytocin in your body, which we all know is the bonding, love, cuddle hormone. But if you are the person who gets to hear someone else's idea, or hear someone else's secret, or hear someone else's intimate thing that actually creates you, receiving that in a kindful way, actually creates oxytocin in your body. So how wonderful is that you don't even need to cuddle or snuggle to have that released into your body? You can simply just be actively listening to the other person's thoughts and ideas, to your love of life's thoughts and ideas, and that's going to do it for you, for each other, especially if you're working together, collaborating, you're both sharing out ideas, right? And you're both getting the chance to accept and listen to each other's ideas. And that also gets you to practice kindfulness, but also vulnerability and right? Because we know, like, vulnerability is not just about all of the hard, heavy stuff, like I have to share all these heavy, hard emotions with you, and that's me being vulnerable. No, our vulnerability can actually also just be about the fact that I can share any of my ideas with you. I can share any of the thoughts I'm having about how to solve this problem or how we're going to achieve this goal, without feeling that I have to hide anything or be secretive or be worried about what you might think about my ideas. And that is truly right. That's the freedom to be yourself in front of your love of life, right in front of your LOL, and to feel that you're going to be safe and comfortable when you are there, being yourself. And that's really a great opportunity and a great act of vulnerability that we get to share with each other when we're collaborating together. It can also, when you collaborate together, you can also it can also give you a sense of a win or a success that you get to have as a couple. So whether that's a win or a success with you solving a problem or a win or a success with you accomplishing a goal together, that's going to leave two positive, emotional interactions with each other, right? And when you get to that winner, that success, you have something to celebrate together, right? Because lots of times in a relationship where it's sort of taking turns celebrating in each other's success, sharing in the other person's joy with them that they have accomplished or achieved something. But when you do it together as a collaborative team, then you both get to share, in a joint sense, an equal. Goal, or, yeah, an equal sense of joy and delight in accomplishing that goal or solving that problem. And because that creates those positive interactions, it actually can activate the dopamine in your system. So again, right, doing all these kind of life things together, and this is, it sounds so simple, but when you actually do these life things together with each other, that your body is going to respond in a positive way, that is what we are programmed for as humans. We're programmed to be social problem solvers. We're programmed to have social, positive social interactions with each other, right? That's what we're made for. We're not made for just being on our phones and having things overly curated and hyper focused on just our needs and wants all the time. No, as humans, most of us are programmed to be social and to interact with each other, and our bodies naturally benefit from that, because that's what they are programmed to do. So you will actually release dopamine when you have achieved a goal, or when you have achieved a sense of success at problem solving, so that's fantastic, and that's going to also lead if you have some successes at problem solving and or accomplishing goals together, that's also going to give you a sense of positive anticipation for any other problem solving opportunities or any other goal setting, which is crazy, because lots of times we might be thinking like, oh, we want to avoid, you know, problem solving, right? Because then that means there's a problem. But when you have a history, a learning history, of successfully solving problems together as a team. When a problem comes up, you won't feel scared, you won't go into survival mode. You won't be like, Oh no. Avoid, avoid, avoid. You will actually have a positive feeling about that, like, hey, when my love of life gets home, I'm going to have to share this problem, and we are going to start to work as a team to solve it. And you'll actually have a positive feeling towards that, rather than a feeling of dread or wanting to avoid it also leads to increased flexibility with each other and confidence in each other's skills. So sometimes, when our relationships are not going good, we can fall into those traps of like, oh well, they always do this, or they always do that, or they never do this, or they never do that, right? And we've chatted about that lots on here and explored that because it is so common. And the more we work as a team and we collaborate together, and the more we get to see each other's skills and action, the more confidence we have in each other's skills, the more we are able like if we have an A type personality, the more we can see someone else's skills play out and be effective and be successful, and that we're willing to let go and give that person, give the love of our life the opportunity to be successful and to show us their skills, the more we will be able to let go in the future and have confidence in what Our love of life is able to do in our relationship and is able to do in life. And I can't remember exactly what episode number it is, but if you are having difficulty trusting your partner's abilities to live life, to adult in life, that is a very powerful thing under the thing. And I believe there's an episode about, like, Don't parent your partner, or like partner and don't parent something like that. I will see if I can put in the show notes for you so you can refer back to but if that, if this is resonating with you and you're like, oh my gosh, yes, like, I cannot trust the love of my life to even like, fill, you know, put the dishes in the dishwasher correctly.

Crystal Clark: 00:08:41

I'm telling you right now that you can, and if you can't, then, for sure, you need to listen to that episode, because your partner deserves that you're going to trust in their skills and treat them as an equal, treat them as the love of your life, and not as a child or as like, you know, incompetent colleague, right? That's not the vibe that we want in our relationship. We don't want our partners to feel like we think they're incompetent colleagues, right? And we would prefer not to do group work projects with them. Now, our love of life should be one of our favoritest people in the world. To do a teamwork collaboration with right to do a group work project with they should be one of our favorites. The other piece is that problem solving in a social interaction piece, right, or problem solving with another human, actually activates our limbic system, which is the part of our brain that's in charge of emotions, and if we are having some positive experiences in problem solving and in goal setting with each other and in accomplishing these things and riding them out till the end, then we will be creating positive emotions, right? And we all know that positive emotions around our teamwork are going to want us to do. Do more teamwork. So with all of those benefits being said, it is going to activate our oxytocin and our dopamine to take these opportunities to act as a teamwork collaboration. So we can see that taking the all of these opportunities to have teamwork, collaboration in our love space is so important, right? It activates our dopamine and our oxytocin with each other without even having to do all of the lovey dovey stuff, right? It has those benefits that's going to draw us closer together, that's going to create connection for us. It gives us chance to practice all the parts of our cake, right? It gives us chance to practice our communication, to show affection to each other in these hard or and or exciting times, depending whether we're problem solving or goal setting, it gives us a chance to use our kindfulness, and that's really what we're going to dive into. And if we're doing all of these pieces, and if we're having these positive emotions, that's going to fill up our emotional Cup, which, as we know, creates energy in our relationship, and that's going to be so beneficial for us. But for some of us, the teamwork, collaboration piece is not as easy as it is. For other people, it doesn't come as naturally. And so there's a few things we might have to keep in mind that could be stopping up our teamwork collaboration, and that's what we're going to explore today, and really, and especially if you're in a neuro spicy relationship, like either both of you are neuro spicy or neuro diverse, or one of you is and the other one is just a boring, neuro typical person. And you know, my thought is that I don't think anyone is, you know, 100 is neuro typical. That just means that on our on the way we group populations together, right the way it falls on the bell curve is that most of the people, the majority of people, act a certain way, and we call that normal. And that has really nothing to do with this conceptualization that there's a right way or a wrong way. But these could be some of the things that could be stopping you up from successful teamwork, collaboration. So the first one is going to be active listening. And again, I said, these are all diving into our kindfulness piece, and they are. So remember that kindfulness means that you're being present in the moment, right? So that mindfulness piece, plus you are accepting your love of life in a kindful, safe way so that they can feel safe, to be vulnerable and to go through these processes with you and to be in the moment with you. Okay, so we're these are all using our kindfulness so active listening. You really need to be present and in the moment, and listening to your lols ideas, listening to your lol suggestions, listening to their words, in order to collaborate as a team. So if you are distracted, or if you are thinking about other things, or if you are, you know, just generally over stimulated, overwhelmed, whatnot, not in a place to listen actively, then the other person is going to feel unheard. That's going to make them feel unimportant, right? And you certainly can't build off of each other's ideas. If you're not really clear on what the other person was suggesting, you can't build off the other person's ideas if you have no idea what they just said, right? If you're like, Ah, I totally blanked out and in my love space with my lol. It's so funny because he that he can, for sure get disengaged right in the middle of something, whether it's a fun conversation, a boring conversation, a problem solving conversation, and I can actually tell, because his pupils will constrict, right? So it's almost like his like, you know how they say eyes are the the windows to the soul? I think it is 100% true. And they've actually done studies where they can measure how hard math problems are by how much someone's pupil is dilating or constricting as they go through math problems. And the easier ones, their pupils tend to relax and dilate more to regular light levels. And when they're on a hard question, their pupils will constrict like, almost like you're going inside yourself, like you have to see inside your brain. So anyways, in our love space, this happened. This doesn't happen all the time, but, you know, happens quite often, where I could just see, like, the change in his eyes, like the people's just constricted. I'm like, Oh, we have zoned out. We are no longer listening to Crystal, and that's fun. And sometimes I just pause, or sometimes I go, Oh, what we thinking about in there? And it's just like a little fun joke in, you know, in between us, because it's just a part of our love space in our regular life. And like I said, it doesn't really matter what the conversation is. It's not for you know, for him, it's not, it's not like, oh, what you're saying is boring. And I so dumb. Like, sometimes it's like, Ah, it's trying so hard to listen, because I did want to know what you said, but my brain just had other ideas. So so it sounds really. Simple, but it really can stop up your teamwork, collaboration, if you're not actively listening to the love of your life, if you guys are not clear on what ideas and what you know emotions, because there's all there's when you're active listening, you also pick up on your partner's you know emotions and some of the things that they may be saying non verbally to you, besides just their words, right? And so there's a lot of communication that you will be missing. A lot of the message that they're sending that you won't be picking up if we're not using our active listening, or really if we're not being kindful. Okay, so this is a way to bring more kindfulness into our teamwork collaborations. Next is really emotional reactivity or, you know, and this could also be kind of categorized or lumped in, also, if you have someone who is sensitive to criticism as well. And these two things can often come up with people who are neuro spicy, so maybe people who with ADHD and or autism and, and that's can sometimes be a self regulation piece. But this can happen when there's like, also, for all couples, when there's a mood of competition, or there's a need to be right somewhere in there for someone right. And so if there's a mood of competition. That means that someone is keeping track of whose ideas are, whose, whose idea was actually chosen to solve this problem and or to you know, whose ideas were chosen to get us towards this goal, and that that makes that person the winner, if their ideas were chosen, and it should be so much about what you want, really, for your love space is that it is so much about the teamwork, collaboration. There's so many ideas or thoughts or whatnot, or building upon each other's ideas that you can't even remember whose idea was whose. And if you're like, Oh no, totally. But then you have that thought creeping in that is saying to you, like, Oh no, for sure. We don't even want to know whose idea it was, but it was my idea. But if you're having that intrusive thought right now, like, Oh yeah, totally. But my idea, you need to stop yourself, because what is going on there for you? What is happening in your brain. What is the thing under the thing where you need that acknowledgement? You need to be tied to the idea that was successful. What is going on? Why do you need that approval or that recognition for the success? That's a teamwork, collaboration between the two of you, right? And why does it matter? Why does it matter that you're recognized for the thing, and not that you're recognized for the success together. Okay, that might be something you need to figure out, or your partner needs to figure out, if that is popping up for you, because that's definitely a thing under the thing that will put a wedge in your teamwork, collaboration,

Crystal Clark: 00:17:56

also, if you're not in the space to collaborate, right? So if you're going to be reactive and not be able to be in a kindful place, right? And this goes with criticism or just being, you know, in not a good emotional place, right? You should know that for the criticism piece, you should know that your LoL is going to receive you kindfully. So if there's feedback. And, you know, sometimes it's the way we word things or whatnot. And you know, this is what I like to help couples tweak and work on, because we can definitely give our partners feedback. Some of us need feedback in certain ways, or some of us just need it labeled that this is just a thought or feedback, and it's not that you're a bad person, right? It's not that you're always wrong and everything is always horrible, right? And we're talking in all those absolutes that, you know, nobody's perfect, and everyone can tweak something at any point in time, right? That's just a fact of us being humans and trying to human. That's not anything special. Nobody's perfect. Everyone can improve something at any point in time. So if you are not in a place to collaborate, like you are tired, you're stressed, you're distracted, right? You're not able to active listen, you are feeling overstimulated or overwhelmed, or you just need a moment to especially when it comes to problem solving. Like sometimes, if I come in and I'm like, Oh, here's this problem. Okay, I just need a moment to maybe vent it out about the problem, or process the problem a little bit, sit in the problem a little bit before I'm going to be able to jump into a teamwork, collaboration. And the important thing with that is that if you are not ready to collaborate, that you need to let your lol know. You need to let your partner know that, hey, I need a moment. I need an hour. I need until this for me to be able to come back and make this work, so that I can be a real team player here with you and make that plan right. Don't just be like, I can't do this now. This is too much, and then walk away. Be like. You know, it. Give a check in time, give a possibility, because that's just the kind thing to do, right? Even if you're like, I have no idea, but maybe let's try tomorrow, or maybe let's try later tonight. That's enough. We can check in again. Hopefully we'll feel a bit more regulated by then, a little less distracted, and we'll be able to firm up more of a plan about when we can collaborate, and because you want your really, you want your love space to be a place where it's supporting both your needs, whether, like I said, whether you're both neuro spicy, whether just one of you is neuro spicy, one of you is neuro boring, or playing. What can we call that would be the like opposite, neuro spicy, neuro playing. You know, whatever it is you want your love space to be able to support both of you that's ever so important, and you don't want to always feel like one person is having to make all of the compromises, or one person is having to do all the stretching. Your love space is a safe space for both of you, and there are ways to have everyone be able to feel safe and confident and comfortable in their love space. And then the last thing that I really want to focus on and think about today, with this idea of kindfulness, as being really the big foundational piece of our teamwork, collaboration and our problem solving, is the idea of follow through. Because if we're not following through on our problem solving plans, or on the plans that we need in order to reach our goals, if we are not following through on those, then that can really stop up our future opportunities for collaboration, because that's when we get the like, oh, well, we talk about these things, but the person Never does it right? We can make plans and we can brainstorm until the cows come home, but how we actually get to implementing and doing the things that we've talked about doing to solve the problem or to achieve our goal or whatever we're, you know, collaborating on that if there's no follow through by one or both people, we're never going to get there, and then that makes the collaboration piece seem negative in hindsight, rather than positive, and then we're less likely to collaborate in the future because we just don't think it works. But that is hard to tell. It's hard to tell something worked if you actually didn't do it right. Like, you could be like, This is my diet plan, and I record all my food in my food diary, but if you did make any changes to your actual diet based on, you know, recording everything down in your food diary, then you're not going to see a change on the scale or in your clothing, right? And you're going to say, Oh, it doesn't work to do a food diary. Well, it might work to do food diary, but you didn't actually do any. You didn't actually implement any changes with that information that was given to you from that right? You can't blame the food diary. So if you are in a mixed couple or not, right? Mixed, neuro, spicy, slash, narrow playing couple, you know, we could see more of these differences in follow through. Also, if you read the book, like, say, surrounded by idiots, which, you know, I think is a great it's a great little read. Just to give you some perspective, taking on the way different people work, or different color combinations of people work, it's so fantastic. It is a good read. It's not like the end all and be all, but I would say it's a good book to read. Um, anyways, they break people down into four different colors. They're reds, yellows, greens and blues, and that most of the population are greens. But this could you know if you think you're a a yellow, which is kind of like me, like a like, not a wishy washy person, but a very like, go with the flow, optimist kind of person. And you mix me with a red who's a very like, blunt, direct, like, Let's go for it. I don't need 100 word explanation. And I'm like, Could I have a 2000 word explanation?

Crystal Clark: 00:23:56

You could see that our implementation and our follow through with plans could be different and again, being kindful with each other, right? Using our kindfulness is really going to help support the fact that we you, you and your relationship. You and your partner may have different ways to implement or to follow through on things or following through might be easier for one of you and harder for one of you, and we're going to be accepting of that in our love space. It's similar to, I think, Mel Robb. Mel Robbins just released a new book called The let them theory. I think that's what's called let them theory, but that's kind of the the idea that she puts out there is that we really need to meet people where they are, and that we can really only control our own behaviors. And that's even true in your love space, but hopefully in your love space, you're both sharing the ideas that you learn here and the ideas of thinking about working as a team together, and that even though. You can only control your own behaviors. You're even going to be doing maybe thinking about the 8080, marriage book, right? And thinking about like, okay, so even though I can only get we can each only control our own behaviors. How are we both positively adding to this relationship so that there will be some follow through on our teamwork, collaboration, I'd say like, even if you think about it like if you were a couple who both have ADHD, okay, but one of you scores much higher on the inattentive piece, right, or the distractibility piece, and one of you scores much higher on the hyper piece, right? Then you're going to be at different ends of follow through, right? Some people who have more of the hyperactivity piece have better follow through, because they're always looking to move. They're always looking to do something. They like to be busy. They like to have something to do, because they're not going to be a little slow slug and sing around. Versus some people who are more of the inattentive side, right? They might be a little bit more sluggy and slow in their day to day life and follow through might be harder. You also get, you know, some bouts of procrastination with different kinds of ADHD and, or neuro spiciness and, or just neuro playing this right? We all have different levels of procrastination and what's holding us back from taking action on the things we want to take action on. So these are all things that we need to keep in mind and to have a plan for it, right? How, if we're, if we're two people with ADHD, how are we going to do this? Well, maybe we need to do some body doubling together. Maybe our follow through is that we're going to be able to do it together. And that could also be with neuroplane couple, right? Where we're both fall, where our follow through is based on the fact that we're both doing it together, right? Like, ah, we're we need to go, do you know I know what you need to do for your problem solving, but we're both going to go do it together, whatever this action is, so we know that it will both get done, right? Some couples work best, like, Hey, okay, so now you are going to do A, B and C, and I'll go do D, E and F, and then we'll come back together. We'll be like, yay. Our teamwork, collaboration worked. We came up with a plan. We, you know, divided and conquered, and here we are a success at the end. And other people are like, Nope, we need to do it step by step together. We came up with the ideas together. We're going to move through it together, and that's going to be great. Some people are more like, I will do four steps. You do too, and that's amazing, and that works. And no one feels overburdened by that, because you don't want to be the person who's like, I'm doing four steps and you're doing two, and I feel overwhelmed with my four No. But we all have different skill sets, and some people can do four, no problem. And so for some people too, is a lot, right? So again, we're going to meet the love of our life where we are, and we're also going to check in our better skills, and we're going to build on that. So to really feel that you have come together as a team, you really need to complete that collaboration, right? You do really need to follow through. Because, like we said, having that sense of success and accomplishment and that that worked is super beneficial to having more and more success at our teamwork collaborations in the future, and being able to problem solve together in the future, and then when it comes to our relationship, problem solving, right when we're having hiccups with our actual connections between the Two of you that that these skills are all going to make those so much easier.

Crystal Clark: 00:28:32

And that's why kindfulness really needs to be a big picture foundation piece here that we are being in the moment and present with our partners, that we are receiving them in a kind way, with kind intentions. Because when you're able to stay present and in the moment with the love of your life, when you are able to shift your mindset to being able to collaborate freely with each other, sharing freely with each other, building together with each other, that there's no your idea, my idea, they're our ideas. When we're in this teamwork collaboration, you are going to grow closer a dream these times and these experiences, and you're going to be able to grow closer dream the hard times in your relationship. And that's what's going to create a connection that's going to keep you going and keeping you feel loved and keeping you sparked. You.