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These articles are not directly related to home design or construction. Feel free to skip them and return to our main site .
The process of designing a home is in many ways parallel to designing the life you will lead in that home. We do everything we can to improve the design of your physical home. These are some tips that we have found helpful on the living side of the design equation. They are based on our perspectives, experience, and opinions. Even if you don’t agree, hopefully these observations can be helpful in developing your own approach.
If you have any suggestions of your own, please get in touch . We would love to hear what has worked best for you!
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Motorcycle Analogy—The Dangers of Overcompensation
The best thing that ever happened to me was marrying my wife! There is one overarching practice that has made our relationship work so well. It can be best explained with what I call the motorcycle analogy. [CONTINUE]
The motorcycle analogy is basically about two opposite patterns for approaching doing something with someone else you care about.
If you have two people riding a motorcycle (in a relationship) together, there are a couple different ways they can compensate for each other’s leanings and perspectives. When they are riding on a mountainside road, one person might be concerned about getting too close to the cliff edge. The other person might be more concerned about getting too close to oncoming traffic or the rocks that might roll down from the hillside above. If you are the one concerned about the cliff, your tendency will be to lean away from that. Your partner may have already tended to lean the other way, but now they need to lean even further to compensate for your leaning. If that pattern continues, you soon have two partners who are each completely tipped in opposite directions to try to compensate for the extreme leaning of the other person. I call this negative pattern overcompensation .
With this negative pattern, you soon have one person with half their body hanging over the cliff trying to compensate for the other person with half their body hanging into oncoming traffic. Eventually one person might lean far enough that it throws the other person off balance and they are both flung one way. I wouldn’t have much hope of that ending pretty!
To make that motorcycle analogy more concrete, let’s consider a stereotypical marriage. The husband believes the children need strict guidance. The wife believes the children need loving nurture. If the husband sees mom being a little too kind and letting the kids get away with more than they should, he could be extra strict to help compensate for her “weakness”. She might see his actions as overly unkind and respond with extra indulgence. I think we can all see where this is headed.
Going back to my wife, her real genius is that she does the opposite! When I start to lean too much one way, she frequently responds by sharing my concerns and perspective and leans a little that way with me. Now because we are both leaning that direction, we can both feel being a bit off balance, and I am encouraged to lean back in her direction. Pretty soon the pattern becomes reciprocal and habitual. When I can tell she is worried about the cliff edge, instead of thinking, “Oh dear she is probably going to start leaning too far away from that, I better lean towards it”, I try to respond to her concern and lean a bit more away from the cliff. Because she then feels safe that I am not going to drive us off that edge, she is then free to be aware of and respond to my concerns. This better pattern continues in a positively reinforcing cycle .
We can’t claim to have a perfect marriage, but I’ve got to say that the strategy is working pretty darn awesome for twenty-plus years!
Motorcycle Analogy Applied to Groups
The motorcycle analogy is more difficult with groups, but I believe the same principles apply.
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Sometimes we can get so busy ignoring and refuting and overcompensating for the other side’s concerns that we have half of us hanging over the cliff and the other half hanging into oncoming traffic.
It can be hard to not have feelings of misunderstanding and hurt when you can’t understand how friends and family that you love dearly can see things so differently or vote in a way that seems against everything that you have in common.
One idea that has helped me is to try to come up with the very best reasons I can for a good person to see things opposite of the way I do. It helps me better understand those who lean differently than me and also helps clarify my own thinking. Sometimes, it even helps me communicate in a way that can be more understandable to others.
If nothing else, that approach can maybe help provide some understanding of how someone that we love or respect could possibly approach a topic in a way that initially seems diametrically opposed to everything we value. I almost always find that we are not as opposite and it first seems. Is it possible that both sides really do have valuable insights to offer and that we are best when we combine our strengths and acknowledge our own weak points and blind spots?
Whether we are talking about a marriage, a family, a group, a community, or a country, It is much better when we can ride the motorcycle balanced and ready to adjust rather than like a circus act waiting for disaster. Overcompensation does not work well. I want to try a better strategy! I am going to try to acknowledge and respond to our other riding partners’ concerns just a bit. I have been trying that by reaching out to those with different perspectives and following several news sources I dislike.
Even if we still end up approaching some issues from opposite directions, we can still try to lean a bit more their way and see the legitimacy of their perspective.
What would it be like to move even one tiny step closer to riding life like a partnership with both sides having valuable insights and contributions?
Great Teen Years
In the works...
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