Secret to a Happy Marriage: The Shamu Maneuver

My husband emailed me a link to a hilarious New York Times article, What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage. He had just one sentence in his accompanying note.

It’s worth reading the article all the way through, both for the humor and the pretty decent take-aways on changing behavior, whining, positive reinforcement and happier relationships. A couple of choice snippets, both of which made me giggle aloud in the context of the article:

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Good Read: The Art of Possibility

There are a few books I return to regularly, reading them cover to cover every few years because they feed my soul. They bring me joy, the opportunity for deep reflection, or reminders of what’s important. They feel like a part of my family.

In the world of fiction, those books include Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (the subject of my college honor’s thesis), Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. There are others, a list too long to offer here.

In the works of my professional world, one book I return to is [Read more]

The Man Who Stood on His Head: A Tribute to My Father

My father came to this country from Germany in 1930, a little boy in steerage class. The first thing he remembered seeing when he set foot in New York was a little boy with a bag of candy. He thought to himself, this is what it means to be an American — to be able to afford your own bag of candy.

When he joined the Army during World War II he was still a German citizen and was naturalized during the war. He never saw action and was stationed in Wales with the Medical Corps. By the time I came along 20 years later, he often seemed ashamed of being German and was content when people assumed Lenski was Polish, even at a time when Archie Bunker had made Polish jokes painfully popular.

My parents were married for nearly 50 years and my father remarried after my mom passed away. When he died in 2001, I reeled when I read his obituary. A Purple Heart recipient, he had been a P.O.W. in Germany, it said. My siblings and I felt stunned and angered that he had lied about his life to his new family. I also felt sadness for him; what must it have been like to so need recognition that he made up part of a life to get it?

In the last year I have found myself returning to these questions. Who was the real Wilhelm (Bill) Lenski? Which family did he lie to? What if he really did earn a Purple Heart? Why is knowing the truth important to me? Perhaps my father carried parts of both kinds of men in his heart, one the man that he was and the other the man he thought he could have been had life unfolded differently.

I have come to this: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which man my father was. Our loved ones hold parts of themselves secret and we should celebrate our ignorance, for the promise of new discovery is then in our future and they get to keep a part of themselves for themselves.

It is enough for me to know that my father was a richer, more complex human than the seemingly simple man who stood on his head for me each night when he came home, so the coins would fall from his pocket and my five-year-old self could giggle and grab the pennies, thinking I’d tricked him again. It is enough for me to know that he loved us in the ways that he could.

And the mystery he left was his final gift, it turns out, the pennies for my adulthood. In forcing me to recognize that I knew only part of him, I’ve had to confront my own tendency to judge others based on limited knowledge and acknowledge that I can’t fully explain others from the narrowness of my own perception. The real Bill Lenski, it turns out, was a man that loved, a rich tapestry of a human, a man of mystery, a giver of gifts.

He would have been 84 this month, that little boy who could never, even as a man, pass up a piece of candy.


Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.

Common Negotiation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

As a mediator, one of my primary jobs is to help people negotiate their dispute as effectively as possible, with the idea that approaching the dispute differently can help them achieve an outcome that wasn’t possible before.

I’ve been doing this work for well over a decade now, and I see the same ineffective patterns of behavior repeatedly with folks I work with in all regions of the country. Of course, most of us are not at our best when a conflict is entrenched or complicated (the kind of conflict that mediators get asked to assist), so I don’t expect people to be at their best at the mediation table. But I do find myself wishing that the ways many of us learned to “do conflict” had been a little more effective. Here are some of the common mistakes I see and suggestions for ways to alter the thinking that’s usually behind the ineffective negotiation behavior: [Read more]

Conflict Hack: Yes, But…

Instead of using the phrase “yes, but” next time you’re in a disagreement with someone, try “yes, and” instead. The former sends a mixed message: “yes, that is true…but, no, it’s not.” The latter suggests that you agree with some or all of what the other person said and that you have some additional information to supplement their comment.

Giving Advice: A Habit to Shed

Terri and her co-worker, Jamie, ran into each other in the coffee room. Jamie recalled that Terri was having some work done on her house and asked how it was going. “Awful!” said Terri. “The builder won’t listen to me and I have to ask my husband to raise my concerns for me. What a chauvinist that builder turned out to be.”

Jamie replied, “You should just ask your husband to stop talking to the builder, so that the builder has to communicate with you in order to move forward with the work.”

“We tried that approach,” answered Terri, “and the result was even worse. The builder just made his own decisions and we ended up having to move a light fixture after the wallboard was already up. What a mess.” [Read more]

Better Conflict Skills: What a Difference 10 Minutes Can Make

A few months ago, I wrote a post audaciously titled, Do Conflict Better in 10 Minutes a Day. In what has proven to be a highly popular post, I asked, “…what if you gave yourself 10 minutes a day to work on strengthening the conflict skills or attitude you want to strengthen? If you were to give yourself 10 minutes a day to get better at conflict, what would you do with those 10 minutes? Ten simple minutes.”

If you’re one of the people who’s been intrigued by this idea, then you may be interested in this post from Lifehacker: Beat Procrastination with the 10 Minute Rule. Quoting Pyschology Today, the post reminds us that we can… [Read more]

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