Have you ever just wanted someone to meet you halfway? I’ll tell you why you might want to hold off on making this super basic request.
Tyler Small: Hello, I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence today. I want to talk about this concept of meet me halfway. It's the idea that everybody puts in 50% and that makes the relationship work out. Most of the people that I coach end up asking me about this sometime during our engagement.
[00:00:30] And my advice is always very similar. It's that in almost all cases until you have a Five-star Relationship with your counterpart, you can't really be justified from their perspective in asking them to meet halfway because you haven't met them halfway, according to them.
[00:00:55] From your perspective, you may have met them 90%. You may have gone 90% or a 120% , and you still may be waiting for them to come just the slightest tiniest bit, from your perspective. However, with a relationship you're not just working with your perspective, you're working within the framework of the other person's perspective.
[00:01:20]Asking them to meet halfway is not a legitimate request until you've created that Five-star Relationship.
[00:01:29]Now after you've gone through the steps to create a Five-star Relationship with your counterpart, and they're feeling good about the relationship, that means that they feel like you are meeting them halfway or at least halfway and probably a little more than halfway.
[00:01:48] A great time to ask someone to meet you halfway is to first talk about the relationship. Hey, over the past week or so, how would you rate our relationship on a five-star scale?
[00:02:00] And you've likely asked this question several times before they've answered it. And this time it's five right on the Mark. Once again. And you say great. How can I make sure it stays that way you ask the follow-up question, the sidekick question and. Maybe they give you an answer.
[00:02:18] Great. I'll do that. Sorry. I missed that this time or what it last time, like I'll work on that. Or maybe they're like, everything's great. Like just keep doing what you're doing. This is great. And then so that's the framing, right? Of basically to legitimize your request, to justify your request.
[00:02:35]You're basically going over that. And there you're not trying to pin him down. You're not trying to. Hold them accountable, so to speak or anything like that, all you're doing is confirming that you are basically meeting them halfway , in language that you've been using along the way.
[00:02:52] Now then at that point then is it as a great time to ask and really pick your battles, of course, but it is a great time to ask. Hey, can you meet me halfway out something or just to say, Hey I would love your help with something and to give them the opportunity Hey, it would really be a Five-star Experience for me, if, and then fill in the blank, the very, very specific thing you're looking for.
[00:03:18]And chances are that if you're working on this relationship, that the other person hasn't met you halfway, and that's why you're using the Five-star Approach is that they're at a big deficit from your perspective. Now if the other person, if your counterpart asks you to meet them halfway, if they say to you, Hey, can you meet me halfway on something?
[00:03:46] Or, Hey, just meet me halfway. Then this is a huge opportunity for you, especially if you feel like they haven't met you halfway, because from their perspective, they obviously have, right. But it's an opportunity for you to close that gap in their mind. And so even if the idea seems utterly ridiculous that they have actually come halfway from their perspective, obviously they have, and it's this huge opportunity for you to do whatever it is that they're asking.
[00:04:21] Now, of course, there are healthy boundaries. There are regulations, there are limitations to the scope of your role. However, there will probably be some way that you can fulfill that request. It may not be a hundred percent of what they're asking. It may not be the same thing.
[00:04:41] Maybe there's a different way to meet the need that they haven't thought of, but together you can come up with it together, you can figure out how you can in their mind, meet them halfway. So the funny thing about all this, I think again, is just, if someone's saying, meet me halfway, the question is who's halfway, are you talking about,
[00:05:07]and if you always treat that like a grain of salt, knowing that you're probably needing to put in quite a bit more contribution to the relationship then you'd naturally think in order to create this Five-star Relationship. In order to meet the other person, your counterparts expectations, according to their perspective, and it's all about their perspective and managing their personal bias.
[00:05:40]I will say that by listening to this podcast episode, I feel that you have met me halfway. So I appreciate that I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.