#341 - The Four Agreements | Stop Making Assumptions (3/4)

0:00Welcome back to part three of our book club series on the four agreements. Today's agreement is for anyone who has ever assumed the worst and worried about something that wasn't even true. Let's get into it. Light this beautiful! In December of 1998, NASA launched a spacecraft called the Mars Climate Orbiter. The mission of this orbiter was to travel hundreds of millions of miles to Mars and to study the planet's atmosphere and help scientists to learn more about the climate over there. So, these brilliant engineers spent years and years and years designing and building this thing, making all sorts of predictions and calculations to try to get all of these millions of miles away successfully. Yeah, they will pile, which is insane in of itself. But then something went terribly wrong. After traveling through space for more than nine months,

1:00the spacecraft finally reaches Mars, but they realized one engineering team had calculated the force necessary using the English system of measurement, and the other team used numbers that were in the metric system. So, one side was using pounds, the other was using new ins, and nobody caught the mismatch that was happening here. And because each team assumed that the other team was working from the same numbers, as this spacecraft approached Mars after years of preparation, those small tiny errors added up, and this spacecraft was forever lost. So, those years and years of hard work went completely down the drain. The problem was not that these people were not intelligent. It was that they assumed that each of them were on the same page. So, what is the third agreement that we were landing on here? Nick? Oh, I like what you did there. I didn't even realize what's what are we landing on? So, I'm right there. Number three is don't make assumptions.

2:01And I think that story is a really good articulation of what happens when you make assumptions. It's basically going to lead to a failed mission, whatever that mission may be. I think about personal relationships more than anything and how much drama and stress happens because of assumptions. Yeah. I feel like text messaging has definitely increased the level of assumptions that are being made because so much gets lost in translation from a text message. Yeah. We'll get a message that says K and we'll freak out about it because like we're assuming that this person is really angry with us and it's happened with me and my wife and only to realize that they were just in a meeting or driving and couldn't really see or just did it by itself. Yeah. So, I think there's a lot of arguments that can be saved from not the acting assumptions. The author actually says all the sadness and drama you have in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things

3:02personally. So, he combines agreement number two and three together here and he says that is actually the root of all sadness and drama in your life. Yeah. You know what? Another example I'm thinking of. So, me and my wife are very different in our like what we define as clean. And I think you and your wife are the same way because we talked about this. So, my definition of clean is tidy. Basically, like there's no shit everywhere. Everything has its place and as long as something is in a drawer or tucked away and when I look at the room say far away, it looks clean. That to me is clean. My wife on the other hand, her version of clean is the close-up version of clean meeting. If she could look at it from far away and everything's a mess, that's like still clean to her. If when she goes with the microscope and she doesn't see dust and it's been wiped down and it's very clean like germ-wise, that's her definition of clean. So, we have very different definitions of clean. And in the beginning, we assumed each other's definition. So, I would always get mad when

4:05she would leave things out and she would always get mad when I didn't clean the kitchen sink or like I didn't wipe down the dust that was accumulating wherever. Right? So, we had these very different definitions that we assumed that we understood each other. Until we finally communicated it, solved the problem and said, listen, this is how I see it, this is how you see it. Let's get on the state page here. I want to take it a level deeper than cleanliness in a relationship and I want to talk about expressing love. So, we've read the book, the five love languages. Is that the name of it? Yeah. Right? I think so. I think that's the name. But basically, the author makes this point that we are all, we all value how to be loved differently. And most of our problems and relationships come when we express love, how we want it received rather than how our partner wants it. We assume that our partner wants to be loved the same way we do. So, for example, for me, my love language is words of affirmation. Right? I love when a man to tell me I'm doing a great job and he loves me so much.

5:10Right? Yeah. So, when I express love to a man, sometimes that's naturally how I'll try to love or I'll say, oh my god, man, I love you so much. You're doing such an amazing job. All these words of affirmation. But after reading this book and talking with her, I realized her top love languages is actually acts of service. So, for her to feel loved, it's me actually like unloading the dishwasher without her asking. Right? So, that was an assumption that I had to overcome by getting curious and talking to her to understand how she wanted to be loved. Yeah, I think that's the main takeaway of this episode is communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate. Yeah. That is how you solve this problem of not making assumptions, communicate, communicate way more than you think you need to. If there's anything I've learned from being married for the short time that I have been, if you need to communicate way more than you think that you need to. I agree. I also think there's just something to like, I feel like so many people just automatically

6:11default to negative assumptions. And I think we can train our brains to default to positive assumptions if we had to do an assumption analysis and then get more information afterwards for our own happiness. So, I think that would be helpful if we operated that way. Indicental proven guilty. Exactly. Like our judicial system says. Exactly. So, call to action today, Mike. The call to action for today is to ask before you assume. It's really that simple. If you are on the verge of assuming something negative about your partner, for example, or someone at work, or a friend that you think is doing something wrong, before you jump to any conclusions about why that person is an asshole or how to get you or being mean, just ask a simple question, investigate a little bit and get the actual facts before you make that assumption. Because when you assume you make an ass out of you and me. Yeah. I love that. Alright, thanks for hanging out with us.

7:11See you for the final part of our four-part series tomorrow. Love you. Peace.