Tame the Primitive Brain: 28 Ways in 28 Days to Manage the Most Impulsive Behaviors at Work

Day 8

Relationships Are Dyadic

It Starts with Your Mother!

There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.

—Diana, Princess of Wales

Today you’ll tame:

• Clinging to the apron strings

Jennifer is trying her very best to manage her client, but the recent churn in the client’s team is keeping her from moving ahead with the project. During meetings she tends to direct all her remarks to the lead, with whom she started this project; she avoids developing individual relationships with the other team members. Jennifer is perhaps unconsciously presuming that her relationship with the team leader—the “mother” of this whole project—serves as a proxy for her relationship with the other team members.

This, of course, is only causing animosity between Jennifer and the new team members, who now seem to be working against her.

“Why can’t they just get on board, take my lead, and pull together as a team, for the sake of the project and the business?” she fumes inside.

Can Jennifer develop closer working relationships with all the members of a group, and not just the single authority figure, in order to align the whole group around her and the initiative? Will she be able to see past her primitive impulse for latching onto certain individuals and totally detaching herself from others?

We are primitively programmed by our earliest life experiences to form dyadic relationships. This means that we tend toward one-to-one connections rather than with groups of people.

Yes, it ...