We were building our dream…

Or so I thought…

We’d been together for a few years and we’d got past that stage where we doubted having a future together.

We knew we wanted to be together and we had mutual hopes and dreams.

Or so I thought…

But one day a chance conversation opened my eyes…

And changed how we communicate, even to this day.

You see, I’ve always been the builder in our relationship.

I’m the one who builds out our forward path and nudges us towards it.

I could see our future stretching out ahead of us, jobs, houses, family, leisure…

All building towards our shared dream of eventually having some land and animals together.

All of which we had discussed many, many times, as you do when you are excitedly weaving your lives together.

Then one day, I turned to Andrew and idly asked, “How much land are we aiming for?”

I was working out a more detailed timeline in my head…

I knew ideally we wanted a house and some land, but I was trying to work out how much money we would need to save up, and that was driven by how much land we would need to live that dream.

He would know that bit.

His answer completely floored me…

“I don’t know…”

I looked at him puzzled, “You must know…?”

“Why would I know that, I don’t know how much money we’ll have at that point?”

This did not compute at all for me…

“But we’ve discussed this so many times, it’s our dream together, we’re both working towards it…”

He looked at me and smiled and reached for my hand…

“We are. But we’ll get what we can when we know what we have to spend surely?”

…

My mind was blown…

We then talked this point backwards and forwards a good few times, him’ “we’ll see how much money we have”, me, ‘tell me what you want and we’ll build towards buying that”

We were getting nowhere…

The conversation ended (amicably for those of you wondering ;-)) and we went out to walk the dogs, but as we walked my mind was whirring…

In my head, I stood back from the situation, what on earth was happening, why was that conversation so difficult?

A question jumped into my mind…

I turned to Andrew and asked,

“When we’re chatting about the future, what do you see in your head?”

He looked at me puzzled, “What do you mean see?”

“You know. The picture – the house, the land, the cows, the pigs, the sheep, the…”

My voice tailed away as I looked at his puzzled face and the penny dropped…

“You don’t have a picture in your head do you??”

“Nope, I have no idea what we’ll end up getting, so how can I have a picture of it in my head?”

It was then that I realised that, for years, I’d totally missed something hiding in plain sight…

We are soulmates, our dreams are mutual, but our approach to them was very different.

I couldn’t believe I had missed this in my own life!

I do strategy for a living and at that point I was leading big change projects at work and one of the keys to them working was educating people that not everyone thinks like they do themselves.

You see, when you encounter someone who processes differently, it’s the equivalent of you speaking a language they don’t understand.

Andrew’s an engineer, a go/no go person, build out from base principles and it only exists when it’s done.

No wonder he didn’t “see it” – to him, to coin an old saying here, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating!”

I’m a visionary, I have a really clear picture in my head of what the future could look like and then I build out the actionable steps to get there.

We really were talking different languages…

I changed my questions,

“So, let’s assume we know we ideally want a house with land, but it’s probably not viable to just do farming alone.  How many cows/pigs etc do you think you could look after, at the same time as doing a job, and how much land would that many animals need?”

“Well…”, he began…

Looking back, personally I’d say that this was one of the defining points of our relationship and definitely one of the things that started to build us a rock solid foundation.

By recognising and valuing our differences, we strengthened our communication, lowered our frustration with each other and created a way forward.

Time and time again, understanding this has moved us personally through disagreements, and it applies to work just as easily.

Can you see situations where you might have been speaking a “different language” to someone you love or deal with? How might that be affecting the way you interact?

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