When you think about your relationship with your co-founder*, you probably think things are okay, and while you have some challenges, it’s not that bad. Even though a part of you knows that it takes more effort, month after month and year after year, to keep things going in the right direction, the situation hasn’t felt quite “bad enough” to really do something about.

Be careful—if you don’t address these issues, you may discover you’re a frog dying in boiling water!

Most of us have heard the metaphor of the boiling frog before: If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately to save itself. However, put that same frog in a pot of cold water and then light a fire underneath the pot, and the frog adapts to the slow and gradual heating of the water until—voila! Frog soup.

This gradual, slow cooking is precisely what happens in many co-founder relationships. As sleights and disagreements with your co-founder slowly accumulate, they lead you to feel increasingly disrespected and undervalued. What initially looked like a promising partnership starts to feel unworkable. As the friction and frustration builds, you spend more and more energy managing that relationship while your passion drains away. One day you wake up and realize you’re cooked.

But wait a minute—people aren’t frogs. We feel the heat and we know what’s going on. So why don’t we do anything about it? There are 3 main reasons:

1. We believe we can control the temperature

Boiling frogs tend to be conflict avoiders as a rule. Rather than pushing back and potentially escalating things, they tend to minimize challenging interactions, and—where possible—avoid them entirely.

2. We think it’s supposed to get hot

“If you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen,” goes the saying, which sounds a lot like the story above, but carries a very different message: being in business is not for the weak or the faint-of-heart. It’s going to get tough, and either you can handle it or you can’t.

3. We’re too invested to jump

Often by the time it’s clear that a co-founder relationship is broken, we’ve put far too much of our time, money and hope into a venture to just let it go.

It’s Time to Save the Frog

Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” If you’re in boiling water because of any of these reasons, it’s time for a new approach.

First, recognize that trying to control the temperature by managing your relationship with your co-founder doesn’t work. While temperatures may temporarily cool down on the surface, they heat up internally as you spend more and more mental energy playing out the arguments in your head that you aren’t willing or able to speak out loud to your co-founder. Meanwhile, putting attention on controlling interactions with your co-founder takes away from the attention and control you should have around the more important work of running the company.

Second, understand that successful co-founder relationships are ones that respond to challenges by communicating more, not less. It’s true—when the kitchen gets hot, you want to know you have what it takes to push through and succeed. But the pressure should come from your customers or your competition or your board. This kind of pressure generates a positive stress that motivates you to play a bigger game. Internal dysfunction in your co-founder relationship, on the other hand, generates the kind of negative stress that can throw you off your game entirely, and trickles down to affect employees and customers alike.

Finally, take a serious look at just how much this company really matters to you. Because you’re never going to reclaim your passion—or the respect of your co-founder—by abdicating your influence. In any disagreement, it’s not the person who is right who wields the most power; it’s the person willing to do whatever it takes to win. If leaving is not an option, then finding a way to communicate with your co-founder—to stand up for yourself and your values—has to be.

*Note: This article was written for co-founder relationships, but if you find yourself in a similar situation at home, try replacing the word “co-founder” with “partner” or “spouse” and see if it fits.

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At one of our recent SF Behavior Labs, Alex Lamb and I did an exercise called Promotion Dance, which modeled a simple organizational structure and explored how both tasks and value are communicated between layers of management. Alex has a wonderful write-up of our findings here.

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One day, Crow and Fox were traveling together. Crow, flying a little ahead, happened upon a nest on the ground, with three small eggs in it.

As Fox bounded up, Crow spoke: “As the one who found the nest,” she said, “I’ve decided that I will take two of the eggs, and you can have the third.”

Fox laughed at this. “I’m much larger than you,” he said, “It makes sense that I should get two eggs, while you get one. That’s my decision.”

For many long hours, Crow and Fox declared their decisions, and argued about which was the right one.

While they debated, Snake slid up beside the nest. Saying nothing at all, he scooped up all three eggs in his mouth and slithered off.

Moral: it’s not a decision until you take action.

I wrote this little fable after a friend told me about how hard it was for him to act on decisions. He would make a decision—to go to the gym regularly, for example—and then do nothing about it. Later, he might decide that going for walks outdoors was a better plan, and then proceed to not go for walks.

This showed up in his home life (deciding to move out of his apartment and then staying), his work life (deciding to change careers and then staying), and even his fantasy life (deciding he was going to vacation in Bali someday and then spending his paychecks on new toys and DVDs).

“I’m just not following through,” he said. “Actually,” I said, “you’re not deciding.”

The point where you truly make a decision is not when you say so; it’s when you act on it. Without action, all you have is talk.

Taking action doesn’t have to mean seeing things through to the end. My friend might have started looking for other jobs and decided he preferred to stay where he was. That’s okay—looking is an action that then leads to a new decision: staying put.

And this brings us to the other truth about deciding. Many people have a resistance to deciding, because they don’t want to limit their options. But not deciding limits your options too, because you lose out on all of the new options that would come from your decision.

When I told my friend, “You’re not deciding,” what I could have said is, “You’re not deciding consciously.” Instead, my friend is deciding subconsciously to go with the default—to let his life circumstance make his choices for him. Even if he ends up in the same place—staying in his current job, for example—it’s going to feel entirely different if he chooses it; if staying is the result of his conscious decisions and actions.

So if you find that your inner Crow and Fox like to spend more time “deciding” than actually following through, try making a choice and taking an action. You can always change your mind later.

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to chose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.”
- Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

Recently a client told me she felt powerless in business meetings. She said she wished she could be less reactive and more assertive. I told her that it wasn’t hard; it just required practice.

Logical thinking is an ability tied to your IQ. So is memory recall. These abilities can be strengthened, but a person’s IQ is not likely to change dramatically over time. Assertiveness, on the other hand, is an Emotional Intelligence (EQ) ability, and here there is much that can be done to increase your skill.

Most of us, most of the time, go through life reacting reflexively to our environment. When someone verbally attacks us, we automatically go on the defensive—or even offensive. When a boss calls out our name in a certain tone of voice, we might start sweating and shrink into our chair, or else lock our jaw in preparation for what’s coming.

Simply put, something happens to trigger us. We have an emotional response, followed almost immediately by some conditioned reaction. And then when the experience passes, we go on with our lives with very little awareness of what really just happened. It looks like this:

Someone with a high degree of Emotional Intelligence can do two things very well: 1) She can observe herself and others and identify patterns of behavior, and 2) She can adjust her own behavior so that she functions more effectively, both alone and in relationship to others.

Observation is the first part, and it usually begins with some new awareness. Say you’re talking to a friend, therapist or coach about the experience, and they say, “I wonder how often you have that kind of reaction to that trigger?” The next time the trigger happens, and you have the same emotional response and reaction, something new is added: your awareness. It might be a few hours—or even days—after the event that you say to yourself, “Hey, it happened again.”

Adding awareness and observation to the mix, our timeline now looks like this:

And this is where practice comes in. Physical practice involves building a stronger connection between our mind and our muscles—so that it takes less active mental effort to, say, swing a tennis racquet well, or drive a stick shift, or play piano. The action becomes more automatic and habitual. Similarly, emotional practice is about strengthening the connection between our mind and our emotions. And the secret to emotional practice is simply to pay more attention.

By this point you know the trigger and emotional response to look for. You’ve consciously observed yourself once. Now you just challenge yourself to catch these moments a quickly as you can.

As you up your level of attention, two things happen. First, the amount of time between the triggered response and your awareness of the trigger decreases. Relatively quickly it goes from days to hours, to minutes. Meanwhile, bringing more consciousness to the trigger itself actually creates more spaciousness around it. You may notice that the emotional response isn’t quite as quick, or as strong:

The goal, of course, is to move your point of awareness in front of the conditioned response. When you are able to be triggered and recognize that trigger before reacting, something entirely new is born: choice.

Now, your subconscious conditioning does not have to determine your actions. You get to decide what action to take, if any at all. You are now in control of your path.

Many social scientists argue that your EQ has a lot more to do with your success than your IQ. And it makes sense. You could have a 160 IQ and still be completely at the mercy of your subconscious. A developed EQ, however, puts your conscious mind in the driver’s seat. Regardless of circumstances, inner doubts or others’ behavior, you choose your actions.

And that, my friends, is power.

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