A powerful strategy to manage fear is to create a clear vision, personal commitment, and action plan. Action taking is a great antidote to fear. Do you and your partner share a vision? Have your committed to always do your best to support this vision? Are you taking daily actions to succeed?

Lets say you fear about a difference of opinion you partner has with you. When you experience fear, pause and ask yourself, “What am I afraid of? Am I worried he will be angry, put me down or reject me? Am I taking this too personally?”

Ask if your current fearful behavior, i.e. avoidance, is supporting your partnership vision. Remind yourself of your commitment and action plan. Ask yourself, “If I were to act like a victim, what would I be doing? If I were to act like a navigator, what would I do differently?”

Take a deep breath, regain your personal integrity, and act the way a navigating partner would act: talk straight, express your concerns, state your commitments, and engage in a skillful discussion.

Bottom Line

• Take a risk
• Be a leader
• Stop giving power away
• Act like a navigator
• Remember, everyone is afraid!

Demands may come at you one after the other like ocean waves pounding at a ships hull. You may feel like everything is about to capsize. Well, guess what, you’re not invincible or indestructible. At some point you will break down and become an impaired partner. You will be overstressed and burnt out. At this point, there may not be recovery time. You or your partnership will be in danger of self destruction.

Research on high performance indicates that sustained success requires frequent recovery periods. There are four stages you can use to locate your partnership:

1. High Performance
2. Stress
3. Burn Out
4. Recovery

High performance feels great but it is difficult to sustain. You and your partner need to take recovery breaks every day. After 90-120 minutes of focused action, attention, and concentration, intelligence dwindles and errors intensify. A 15-minute recovery time can substantially renew your energy, focus, and intellectual functioning.

Time outs aren’t just desirable, they are necessary. You need to step away from the issues at hand, catch your breath, and relax. Maybe you can’t both take a recovery break at the same time. No matter what, take turns. Renew and Refresh.

Bottom Line

• Partnerships can’t sustain high performance without recovery periods.
• Push too hard and stress, breakdowns, and exhaustion will show up.
• Recovery periods lead to increased energy, intelligence, and problem solving.
• Make sure your partner is taking recovery time.

Our coach’s strategy was to track each of our best times and encourage us to improve our personal best each race. He never compared any of us to our lead runner. As long as each of us focused on doing our individual best and contributed to the team effort, our team won.

As a partner, are you competing against your partner? Do you withhold or distort information? Do you focus too much attention on how poorly your partner is doing instead of looking at how you can use your talents to improve and contribute to your “partnership team” score?

To excel, you create and manufacture breakthroughs in your performance, while acknowledging and supporting your partner’s successes. To excel, you focus on maximizing your strengths and managing your weaknesses. To excel you focus your competitive instincts against those teams beating you in the marketplace. To excel, you collaborate by maximizing your mutual talents and strengths.

Bottom Line

• Your partner is not your competitor.
• Use your intelligence and drive to personally improve your contributions.
• Support your partnership team wins.

It seems people do a lot more talking than listening, so maybe it’s talking that gets the vote. From my perspective, I think listening is a more important contributor to success, especially in a partnership. When conflicts of interest arise, or feelings are involved, listening becomes crucial.

I don’t mean the kind of listening where one partner is temporarily quiet just waiting for the other person to stop talking. Good listening involves paying concentrated attention to what is being said. It requires some active behavior on the listener’s part to let the other person know listening is present.

There are 3 good practices you can use to increase the quality of your listening:

1. Seek to understand. Stay engaged or let your partner see that you are trying to understand his point of view: “Let me make sure I understand what you are saying. What I’m hearing you say is… am I right? Tell me more!”

2. Validate what you hear. People want to be valued, respected, or appreciated. Good listeners validate what they hear: “What you say makes sense from your point of view. I can see where you’re coming from.”

3. Empathize. Appreciate your partner’s feelings, especially if he is upset. Don’t take it personally if your partner is angry or upset. Show some compassion instead of defensiveness: “I hear how upset you are about what happened at the meeting. You must have felt really hurt or disregarded.”

Bottom Line

• Be a powerful listener.
• Seek to understand first before being understood.
• Express your point of view.
• Problem solve

I recently gave a talk entitled “How Navigators Communicate: 15 keys to get your point across. Here is the list for your convenience:

1. “Go to the balcony”-gain perspective from the other person’s perspective
2. Listen effectively-“what I am understanding you to say is” (paraphrase what you hear) and then say “am I right?”
3. Validate what your hear- “What you say makes sense from your point of view because…….
4. Practice straight talk- “This is how I see the problem……”
5. Don’t take things personally
6. Don’t fight with someone else’s weapons-Think about your strengths
7. Know your weak spots-your achilles heal
8. Ask for feedback-Debrief the conversation-what worked, what didn’t work
9. Surface the elephant in the room and seek transparency/be honest. An “elephant” refers to the issue everyone know is present but no one is talking about
10. Keep the promises you make
11. Focus on the circle of influence and what actions can be taken-not concern or worry
12. Admit your errors
13. Be there for others
14. Don’t offer unsolicited advice
15. Summarize what you’ve agreed and not agreed to

Actions To Take

• Listen more than you talk
• Get to your point sooner
• If you find yourself and the other person repeating your positions, simply say, “It looks like we have a difference of opinion. Where do you thinks we can go from here?”
• Acknowledge the other person more often