(00:04) Stephanie Warner: Welcome everyone to Season 4, episode 57. Hello, Father.
(00:13) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.
(00:15) Stephanie Warner: Welcome back. We’re no longer time travelers. We’re officially back from Dallas. We had a really, really good time. And you actually got to talk about Rare Leadership for one of your workshops there.
(00:29) Marcus Warner: I did. Then they broadcast it to their online audience as well as to the hundred or so people that were in the workshop room. So that was good.
(00:36) Stephanie Warner: That was really good. And I’m excited because today we are getting into the acrostic itself, right? We’re getting into chapter seven, looking at RARE, “Remain Relational.” So we’ll get into that in just a moment. But first, I just want to remind everyone that the goal of this series is to equip you to live and lead with more emotional intelligence and resilience on your walk with God.
And we have a free discussion guide for this book that you can find in the description links. So without further ado, chapter seven. In this book here, Rare Leadership, we are looking at the first principle. Remain Relational. Since we are now officially unpacking the acrostic RARE, would you just take a moment to remind us briefly what is the RARE acrostic? Where does it come from? What’s its purpose? Briefly.
(01:31) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so the RARE stands for four habits. And as the subtitle of the book says, they are four uncommon habits that produce trust, joy, and engagement in the people we lead. But before they became that, they were just these four habits that everybody needs to learn in order to be mature. And so what we’re talking about is what are the four habits of mature leaders, which would be another way to put this.
Of these four habits, the anchor of them is the E, and that is Endure Hardship Well. That’s the main habit that we have to develop. How do we go through hard things well? And so the first three habits help us get there. So that is, that we remain relational when things are not, when things are hard, right? So remain relational when things are hard. Act like yourself when things are hard. Return to joy when things are hard.
Okay. And that is how we, you know, endure hardship well. So Remain relational, Act like yourself, Return to joy, Endure hardship well. Those are the four RARE habits. And they come from brain science, right? So they come from this idea that when I’m not enduring hardship well, I get stuck in unwanted emotions that hijack my body and kind of take over my thinking process.
And I get stuck in sadness and shame and anger and disgust and despair and fear and these negative emotions, and so that’s what returning to joy is all about is, is getting back to the front part of my brain where my identity center is, where I remain relational, I act like myself by living out of this front part of my brain, and I return to joy when I recover and get back to that part of my brain. So these first two habits both have to do with living out of the front part of my brain, that right orbital prefrontal cortex that we often call the identity center or the joy center of the brain. So…
(03:33) Stephanie Warner: So let’s linger on specifically Remain Relational since that’s this chapter, this episode. What does Remain Relational mean and what does it not mean? Like, yeah.
(03:46) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so sometimes it helps to contrast things like, well, what does it look like when you’re not remaining relational? And you tend to shut down, you tend to blow up, or you tend to melt down. You also just throw away relationships, right? And so really quickly. Now there’s a caveat to that, and that is that you can’t save every relationship. And if your whole motivation is trying to save relationships out of fear, that moves into the area of codependency, where I can’t be okay unless all of my relationships are okay.
And, you know, even Jesus couldn’t save all of his relationships, right? There were people who literally killed him at the end of his life. So I think that what we’re talking about here is that when people are not being relational with you, and they are making your life hard. How does that affect you? Are you able to keep the relationship bigger than the problem?
And the way you keep relationships bigger than problems is by conducting yourself in a relational manner, making sure that you are staying engaged with the person, while you deal with the hard things. And so we often, along with this idea of remain relational, the other phrase that we put with this is let’s keep relationships bigger than problems. And that’s a good way to say remain relational when things are hard, is keep relationships bigger than problems.
(05:23) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and I like, you know, there’s a spectrum here of, you know, if you’re not keeping things relational, if you’re not keeping the relationship bigger than the problem, then it’s likely going to, you know, it could escalate to the point of losing that relationship. But even just in the little things, part of being a rare leader is remaining relational even in the little things. Can you linger on that too? What does it look like to remain relational in little things?
(05:48) Marcus Warner: Yeah, some of this is making sure that you lead with relational things, and you don’t lead with your negative emotion or your upsetness about them. I think of the parent who walks into a room, and just blows up at the kid. Like, what in the world are you doing? And why is this room so dirty? And what is wrong with you? Instead of walking in, taking stock of what’s going on, and starting relationally, and then going to correction, and then coming back to being relational.
I think of this happening often in parenting and marriages and with coworkers in settings. So, you know, sometimes even in emails, sometimes people just blurt out their upsetness with the person as the opening of their email. And why haven’t you done this yet? And why is this taking so long? And what is wrong with you? And blah, blah, blah. And they’re so in their own negative emotion that they don’t know how to remain relational with it.
So one of things we coach people to do, you know, in Deeper Walk, even internally, is start your email with something relational. It doesn’t have to be something positive necessarily, just like, hey, I, you know, hope the day’s going well. I need to bring something to your attention. You’re like, here’s the problem, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So you can get to the problem pretty quickly, but trying to make sure that you’re in a relational place when you do that, is going to make it much easier for everybody to work together, to collaborate more easily, and to feel like this is a place I I like to work ’cause even when we have problems we handle them relationally.
(07:25) Stephanie Warner: That’s good. So I’m just thinking about, you know, in this chapter you talk about, you know, how as leaders, we get lots of problems to solve, right, throughout the day. Whether that’s all the emails that are piloting, you know, everybody’s coming at you with an email, or you know, that has this problem to solve and that problem to solve.
But then also there could be relational problems to solve. And then, not to mention that, you might have, you know, marriage, family, church, you know, whatever other extracurricular things could be bringing problems in. So you’re just bearing the weight of a lot of problems to solve. How do you navigate that relationally, you know?
(08:05) Marcus Warner: Well, yeah. So, when I think first of all about relationships I haven’t been able to save, and what, you know, what is the common denominator in some of those. And I think one of them is that we end up on a narrative path that just don’t go together anymore. And that is that, this person’s narrative about what is going on, and my narrative about what is going on, we can’t reconcile that narrative. And it just gets to the point where there’s no point in us trying to work together here, if when our narratives are this incompatible, our goals become different, our solutions are so radically different that we’re just not on the same page anymore.
Even there, you try to leave things in a way where there could be reconciliation, you know, where there could be something. Because there’s a difference. It doesn’t mean you dislike the person or that you disdain the person. It just means that this is not something we’re going to be able to work at well.
The other thing that comes with that is, a lot of times when you can’t get your narrative on the same place, is people lose trust in one another, because I don’t trust them to follow through with what we’re doing. I feel like they’re going to become kind of a lone ranger and go off and do their own thing regardless of what I want to do.
There’s a variety of things that can cause a relationship to get lost. Betrayal of trust is one of those things. But even then you try to be relational in the way that you handle those things, even if you’re saying goodbye to a relationship, and even if that person isn’t going to be in your life on a consistent basis anymore. It’s not always easy to do. And even if you do, it doesn’t mean they’re going to receive it that way. And so it can be hard.
Like there are times when no matter what you do, the person isn’t going to like you and isn’t going to agree with what you are trying to do. Isn’t going to agree that what you are doing is actually being relational, but you can’t control all of those things.
(10:12) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. No, it’s definitely hard and, you know, as Christians we get to take that to Jesus, and pray for them, and seek wisdom about that. But…
(10:26) Marcus Warner: Yeah, you pray for them and you’re asking God. It’s a part of what, you know, may God judge between us means, like if I am wrong, then may God show that to me and bring me confirmation so that I can make some changes, you know, because, you know, there’s a whole scale to this stuff too. Like, that’s why you can’t just boil it all down to one or two things all the time.
(10:51) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. So like what I’m imagining is, yeah, the scalable problems to solve. So sometimes as a leader you have those big things of those, you know, this could make or break a relationship, or a partnership, or what have you. But then you have, you know, you’re dealing with other coworkers and their needs. You’re dealing with, you know, your external things and just like the smaller things. They all add up.
So like one of the things you talk about in this chapter is the danger of fear mapping as a leader because you’re just walking through life with problems to solve and it’s up to you to figure out how to do that. So can you address fear mapping as a leader?
(11:35) Marcus Warner: Yeah, one of the things that happens is I stop seeing the people on my team as people and I treat them as cogs. I treat them as problems. I treat them as potential solutions. You know, but I’m looking at them almost like objects that get things done. And I stop treating them like people. And so remaining relational starts there, is let’s treat people like people, and let’s not treat them like problems.
And that starts with the little things, whether it’s emails or whether it’s short conversations, whether it’s conversations and meetings, you want to deal with problems, but you want to make sure that the relationship, that you’re dealing with problems with people, and that the relationship stays bigger than the problems. And when I say relationship stays bigger, I’m saying my ability to remain relational stays bigger than the problems. Not that saving the relationship stays bigger than problem, what I’m saying is my ability to remain relational stays bigger than the problem.
(12:42) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Yep. So one of the things that we’re going to start unpacking momentarily is one of our favorite acrostics. So to this episode, we’re getting an acrostic within an acrostic, right? We have RARE and we’re breaking that down over episodes. And today we’re going to go into CAKE, which is one of our favorites. It can be a relational rubric or a relational assessment of, am I shut down relationally? And it can also be strategies for, oh, I’m shut down relationally, how do I get my relational self back online. So we’re going to walk through that.
But I do want to linger on the fear mapping thing, because I think that this is true across the board. I see so many people, including myself, right? I can catch myself in this where your brain just starts looking for problems to solve, right? Your brain starts looking for, where is the point of fear? Where is the point of, you know, looking for pain points, looking for problems, looking for who needs my help, right? And how do you reclaim that, right? We are not supposed to just live in a fear mapping world, you know. We talk about joy mapping or so can you just give a framework for fear mapping versus joy mapping real quick?
(13:56) Marcus Warner: Yeah. So the fear mapping is a little bit like waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that is, everywhere you go, what gets your attention is what’s potentially scary in that situation. I’ll give you a classic example.
One of the reasons that some students find it hard to learn in a classroom is because their brain is so wired to look for what is scary in the classroom. That the least scary thing going on is the teacher up there teaching. And so their brain is wired to the bully in the back of the room, the, you know, somebody who they’re having a relational conflict with who’s in the same classroom. They’re thinking about what’s going to happen when they get out of school, and they go back home, and they’re with people who are scary. So their world is so oriented toward what there is to fear and how they’re going to survive, what’s going on, that there’s fear that they kind of block out, and they shut down the present. And so they find it very hard to stay in the present. They find it hard to engage sometimes with the task at hand.
And so I think that a lot of the learning problems that happen with students is actually related to fear. And that if they truly felt safe, I think they would find it much easier to focus, and their learning would go up dramatically.
(15:35) Stephanie Warner: All right, let’s get into relational strategies with CAKE. So what is CAKE?
(15:42) Marcus Warner: So CAKE is how we picture what it means to remain relational. So if somebody’s going to describe, well, give me a picture. What does it look like to remain relational? I would just walk them through the elements of CAKE. And that first one is Curiosity. And that is, well, what does it look like to remain relational? It’s to be curious. I am curious about what you think. I’m curious about how you feel. I’m curious about your perspective on these things. Curiosity is the first quality of what it looks like to remain relational.
Second one is Appreciation, that I find things in you to appreciate. I may dislike your narrative, I may dislike your behavior in some regard. I may dislike something about you, but I can find something about you that I do appreciate. And so this happens a lot because we never appreciate everything about everybody. But you can find something that you appreciate about them. And being able to find that and focus on it is part of remaining relational.
The K is kindness, and that is I want to try to find a way to be kind. and even when I am correcting you, I want to try to find a way to be kind. And then the last one is Eye contact, and that is…
(16:56) Stephanie Warner: In this book, it’s actually Envelope conversations. I just double checked that.
(16:58) Marcus Warner: That’s true. In the white book it is envelope conversations. I changed it for the green book and in the Four Habits series with Chris Coursey. We changed it to eye contact. In this book it is, you’re right, it is envelope conversations. So let me explain that one.
(17:13) Stephanie Warner: You can explain both, that’s fine. Double E.
(17:19) Marcus Warner: Well, the the eye contact idea from the from the Rare Leadership in the Workplace book is the idea that if I find that I’m not making eye contact with a person when I’m talking to them, it’s a sign that I’m probably not in the relational part of my brain. So,
(17:35) Stephanie Warner: And this is, you know, you can get into like, different brains work differently and so that’s not always the case. But for general, I’m not qualified to talk on this, but.
(17:54) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so no, there are people like who are on the spectrum for whom this principle may not apply, and there’re other kinds of situations where it may not apply. But the idea is when you’re being relational, there’s more apt to be a twinkle in your eye, right? More apt to be some kind of warmth in your eye contact.
And people notice that you’re giving them your undivided attention, because you know you’re making eye contact with them, and staying engaged. So that’s what we’re trying to communicate with that one. It’s a little harder to do through, you know, a computer screen, but it’s a…
(18:33) Stephanie Warner: I like it. I’m going to start calling it eye twinkle. Okay.
(18:36) Marcus Warner: Yeah, the eye twinkle. Yeah.
(18:33) Stephanie Warner: Okay, but envelope conversations.
(18:36) Marcus Warner: So envelope conversations are a way to keep relationships bigger than problems when you’ve got to confront somebody and you’ve got to address a problem. And so the envelope conversations idea of we got to talk about this problem. That’s the main thing that’s going on here. But let’s drop that problem in the envelope of relationship. And that is, I want to deliver the conversation on problem to you in the envelope of relationship. So I want to start with relationship, I want to end with relationship, and we’ll talk about the problem in the middle.
Another way to look at this is the sandwich conversation. That is I start with the bread of relationship, end with the bread of relationship, and put the meat of the problem in between. Either way, it goes relationship, problem, relationship. Now, what we mean by this is, you know, the first example I heard Dr. Wilder use when he explained the concept to me was, let’s say that your neighbor is constantly backing out of the driveway and knocking over your trash can. And you’re upset about that. Why is he always knocking over my trash can? And so you got to talk to him about it. Well, how do you do that? So the idea of how do you start relationally?
Well, what you don’t do is, you don’t start off like you’ve been a terrible neighbor for as long as I’ve known you. That’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s just you and I have been neighbors for what two years, for three years, for four months, for 17 years, whatever it is. We’ve been neighbors for a while. That’s it. We’ve started with relationship. And that is the definition of a relationship. That is what connects us together. I’m not pretending we’re best friends, I’m not pretending anything beyond that. Just, you know, we’ve been neighbors for a while.
And routinely, well, you don’t say always, you don’t say, you know, never, but you say, there’s routinely, been times when you’ve backed out, and you’ve knocked over my trash can. I’d really like to find a way to solve this problem. Now, this person may not have those skills, and they may just go, well, it’s your fault, like you put the thing right where you…, and he may be wrong, right? And he may be wrong. It may be fully on your property, on your side of the line or whatever.
(20:56) Marcus Warner: And so at that point you have the temptation to just, you know, well, no, I’m not, and you just…, and the whole thing can escalate. Yeah, like, and it is okay to, you know, defend yourself. That’s part of an adult level maturity, is being able to stand for what is truly yours and not let people run over you. And so you try to have a conversation, say, well, I’m willing to make some concessions here. I just, but I also ask that you would be aware of this. I will try to, you know, get this in a place where it’s not, but sometimes it just isn’t possible, because of how things are configured or whatever.
And so you have the conversation, you do your best, and then you say, I’m hoping that we can solve this in a way where we continue to have a good relationship as neighbors. And again, I’m not saying where we become best friends, where, you know, our friendship matters to me. It’s like maybe you’re not friends.
But same thing like in work. You go, it’s like we’re coworkers. We work on the projects regularly together. So we’re going to have to navigate a lot of problems. So I’m hoping we can navigate this problem where we enjoy working together in the future, that we can continue to collaborate well together moving forward. And so what you’re doing is you are just subtly making this conversation as much about the relationship as about the problem.
And what that does for people who maybe have a narcissistic tendency, if they think that you are making just about the problem, they go into attack mode pretty quickly. But by making it about the relationship, you give them an out and an opportunity to also make it about the relationship. And it can diffuse some of those things. And not just talk about narcissists, but I’m talking about, if you’re going to have any chance though in that kind of a conversation, it’s going to have to follow some kind of pattern like this.
(22:56) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Well, and I like that you said subtly. And I like, man, there’s so many things, that we could probably just do a whole episode just on conversations.
(23:04) Marcus Warner: Whole episode on envelope conversations.
(22:56) Stephanie Warner: I think, you know, part of the, you know, there are training wheels of, I really don’t operate this way and I need to learn this, you know, formula, so to speak, to help train myself into, this is how I should approach situations, not just leading with the problem all the time, right?
There does come a time where, if you’re only being nice to people or relational to people when there’s a problem, they’ll start being like, oh no, they’re saying something nice to me. What’s wrong, right? And so this isn’t just a, well, if you follow ABC, you know, everything will go well. This is as much about training ourselves in how we are like, our worldview, how we are approaching the world, as it is a, hey, if you do this formula, you will get good results, right? This is, we want to shape ourselves.
Like when I think about CAKE and the relational strategies for CAKE, it’s another way to, you know, instead of saying remaining relational, I also think of it as, this is giving dignity to the other person. Like this is, you are operating from an understanding that the people that you are dealing with are people, right? And not problems.
That there are problems to solve and they are probably real problems to solve, but you are ultimately dealing with people who are made in the image of God, whom God loves, and you know, depending on the relationship, you might also love, right? And so how can we operate from a place of giving each other dignity, and honoring each other even in the little things. Also just say with CAKE, you don’t have to have all four at one time, right?
(24:52) Stephanie Warner: So if you’re thinking, I need to get curiosity and you’re like, I’m struggling with finding curiosity, you know, you might jump to kindness and be like, Okay, I need to stair step in. How could I be kind to this person right now? And then that could jog some of the other stuff. And so it’s okay if you’re shut down enough that you can’t get all of it at once, start with one and then work your way there.
(25:16) Marcus Warner: Yeah. No, that’s true. So when we started off with CAKE as a description of, what does it look like to be relational, to remain relational when things are hard. What it looks like is maintaining curiosity, maintaining your appreciation for what there is to appreciate about the person, being kind in the way you interact, eye contact, and then, what we did is we turned envelope conversations into a separate skill because it was such a big thing.
And in envelope conversations, that’s also what we’re doing. It becomes a checklist then to know when you are not being relational, because you lose those things and you’ve lost curiosity, lost appreciation, you don’t feel like being kind, you’re not making eye contact. And so when that happens and you realize, all right, I have lost this, I am not remaining relational, then it also becomes the solution for how you get it back. And that’s what you’re talking about. How do I get this back?
And when you’re trying to get it back, you don’t have to get all four of them at once. If you are being relational and you’re there, the four all come naturally. You don’t even think about it. But when you’re trying to get it back, you know, you got to find one of these. So usually what Dr. Wilder, the way he explained it to me was, you break eye contact. That’s the one you intentionally lose. Stop making eye contact while you solve this problem.
(26:40) Stephanie Warner: ‘Cause if you’re in problem solving mode and making eye contact, you might be glaring him down, and that’s not going to help the situation.
(26:45) Marcus Warner: Exactly. Yeah. If I’m staring at you while I’ve tried to solve this problem, those two things don’t go well together. So I break eye contact, I look away, which most people find normal because most people don’t expect you to make nonstop eye contact. And then while you look away, the problem you’re trying to solve though is, how do I find curiosity, appreciation, and kindness, or at least one of those, as you pointed out.
And then once I do, I don’t have to announce it to the person, hey, I lost, you know, my relational skill, I was finding you boring and offensive. You know, you don’t have to announce this. and you don’t even have to say, so I am curious and, you know, like say something. You just got to find it for yourself so that it is a motivation. And that’s part of what we’re doing. You got to reclaim what is motivating this conversation.
Do I have some curiosity, appreciation in this that is motivating the conversation. So just say that. You don’t have to announce it. There’s not a formula that you have to say, I really appreciate this or I’m curious about this, or I just, you know, feel like doing something nice for you. So you don’t always to do or say something about that. You just got to find those motivations.
(27:58) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Yes. Oh man, so much more we could say, but I fear any other questions I’m going to ask you is going to take us way over time. So I am going to say, thank you everybody for being here on the trail with us. We really enjoy getting to talk together and with you, and man, just being at the Hope Together conference, and getting to meet so many of you who are on the trail with us. That was such an encouragement.
Thank you. Thank you for all your encouragement. You guys are epic. Thank you to everyone who partners with us to keep us here financially, or prayer warriors, volunteers, all of you. Thank you. And we are looking forward to getting back on the trail again with you next week. Father, until then, any final thoughts?
(28:45) Marcus Warner: You know, some of my favorite people are blunt, bottom-line kind of people. But most of them have learned the art of connecting relationally before their bluntness and their bottom line-ness. And so I would just want to say, there’s hope out there.
Like, you know, if you find that you are sort of a blunt bottom line person, adding a little relational dynamic into that doesn’t have to take that away. And if you are somebody who has trouble being straightforward with what you say, just understanding that you can be relational and straightforward, and most people will appreciate that. So it’s a great skill to develop.
(29:23) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, that’s a good word. See you back next week.
