LEVEL 4 / Specialist · Connection & Intimacy
Thank You, Out Loud
The kind things you say about your partner, finally said to your partner.
Case file
For two weeks in October, while Iris’s car was being repaired, Noah got up at 5:40 every morning and drove her to the early train. Then he went home and packed three lunches.
Iris thought this was heroic and said so. She told her sister, who said he was a keeper. She told the whole accounts department, twice. She told Mr. Okafor next door, over the fence, in some detail.
To Noah himself, on the second Friday, she said, “Cardboard goes in the blue bin, not the green one.”
By the end of October, two households and an accounts department thought very highly of Noah. Noah’s own information was that he was a man who could not sort cardboard.
LESSON 1 · FREE PREVIEW
The applause is in another building
Listen to yourself for a week and you may find that you talk about your partner in two voices. To other people you are generous. Your sister has heard about the patience, and your colleagues know about the 5:40 mornings. To your partner you are a dispatcher: trash, keys, what time, which shelf.
The cause is traffic. Instructions are urgent, because the truck comes at seven. Admiration is never urgent, so it keeps giving way, like a polite driver at an intersection, and finally gets through when you are standing at a fence with someone who has time to listen.
There is also the feeling that your partner must already know. You have thought it so clearly, and so often, that it seems to have been said. It has not. Your partner judges how they are doing in this home by what reaches their ears, and on that evidence some very loved people believe they are mainly a problem with the recycling.
Praising your partner to others is a good habit, and nobody should stop. It is applause held in a different building from the performer. So the next time you hear yourself telling someone how good your partner has been, take note of the sentence. It has one more stop to make.
LESSON 2 · FREE PREVIEW
Name the thing they did
LESSON 3 · FREE PREVIEW
Thank them for the Tuesday things
The Registrar rulesA compliment is the only thing you should say behind your partner’s back and then repeat to their face.
LESSON 4 · FREE PREVIEW
Compliment the person, not only the service
LESSON 5 · FREE PREVIEW
Take the compliment and stand still
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