Hey you, I'm Andrew Siemen.
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Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Negotiate Anything.
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Now I'm very excited about this episode because I'm going to share with you an idea, a concept that I've been playing around with personally for a long time.
For about one or two years I've been playing around with this in private.
And it is a concept called Optimal Relationship Distance.
And I created this because I believe that it could be another data point of analysis for us to explore when we are looking at why certain relationships are breaking down, why we find ourselves in consistent conflict with certain people and we can't really put our finger on it.
So think about times where you might have a relationship with somebody where it's either at work or in your personal life.
It just does not seem to mix.
There are going to be some people where things just don't gel.
The concept or the saying of oil and water comes to mind.
For some reason, these two things don't mix chemically.
Oil and water don't mix.
And similarly, the chemistry between people.
Sometimes these people don't mix.
It might be a difference in values.
It might be a difference in ethics, priorities, incentives, whatever it happens to be.
But for whatever reason, these two people don't mix.
Now what could be leading to that?
And what I found is that with certain people, there is a certain amount of distance that you should keep with that person.
Now here's an idea. So for me and my wife, Whitney, we've been married for 14 years.
14 years we got married on graduation day from undergrad.
And we've been living together ever since, right?
We have a family and clearly we have a very narrow, optimal relationship distance.
So what I mean by that is that we can be very, very close to each other in terms of physical proximity, in terms of intimacy of conversation, like the depth of conversation.
So we can be very, very close to each other.
And in most cases, the closer we get, the better.
Now of course, there are certain times where we just need some space.
Like, please get away from me.
Please just give me some space.
That is usually Whitney saying it to me, by the way.
And so we have to respect that distance.
Now with other people, the opposite is true.
The further away you get from that person, the better the relationship becomes.
And now this calls into question sometimes because sometimes we are finding ourselves in a position where this is not a relationship that we necessarily chose per se.
It is a relationship of circumstance.
So it might be somebody who is in your family.
You don't really choose your biological family in that sense.
It might be somebody that you work with, a colleague at work.
We don't always choose the people we work with, but we often find ourselves working with certain people where we just do not have that mix.
And so what should we do?
And this reminds me of the book called The Like Switch by Jack Schaefer.
And this is a good reminder we need to have him on the podcast.
He's a former CIA agent.
And he said that when it comes to liking somebody, the principle of liking, it is like a switch psychologically.
And there are certain things that you can trigger in order to get people to like you.
And one of those things is proximity.
The other thing is like intimacy, the depth of the conversation.
And right now in this moment, I cannot remember the third thing.
But the thing is, with the like switch, you're trying to get somebody to like you.
So you're trying to increase the intimacy of the conversations that you're having, the closeness, the depth of the conversation.
You're increasing the proximity.
How frequently am I seeing you?
How often do we see each other?
How close are we when we're having these conversations?
For instance, there's a greater level of proximity when we're in person versus a video call versus a phone call versus a text message.
You're seeing how we're getting more and more distant from each other.
And so his theory is the closer we get, the more of the people are going to like us as long as the interactions are positive.
And so I wanted to kind of reverse engineer and say, okay, well, if there are circumstances where we're recognizing that we're not connecting with the other person, maybe what we need to do is do that same thing, but in reverse.
So I'm going to increase the proximity.
So I'm going to try to get a little bit more space.
I'm going to decrease the intimacy.
I'm not going to go as deep into the conversation.
I'm not going to explore that as much because with some people, they might be so different or your values or beliefs might be so different or counter to each other that the deeper you go into the relationship and the deeper you go into the conversation, the more likely you are to find something that just does not vibe with you.
So what does this mean for us practically speaking?
What this means is that there are going to be times where we find ourselves in circumstances where we have to work with somebody.
We have to spend time with somebody.
We've all had family members who we would rather not spend time with.
We've all had colleagues at work that we would rather not spend time with.
But in those circumstances, we often find ourselves in.
All right, I hope you enjoyed that clip.
And if you are not subscribed to Negotiate Anything Premium, make sure to click the link in the description so you can get your free trial and you can hear the rest of this bonus episode.
I'll catch you later.
