Whatever floats your boat...

The specifics of what motivates us - and especially the differences in these motivations within a couple - are important keys to understanding communication. They are especially powerful in understanding why communication seems to break down at times.

For example, take the couple who agree on Wednesday evening that come Saturday, they are going to spend the day working on the garden. They both feel excited and pleased by the prospect, and yet by 10am on Saturday, they are embroiled in a major disagreement. 

Here's why: even though they thought they were agreeing to the same thing, what "a day working on the garden" means to each of them is quite different. In Birkman terms, if one of them is high Artistic and high Musical, then "a day working on the garden" meant something along the lines of "enjoying the peace of the garden, and giving significant time to thinking and discussing how to get it looking 'just so', and then executing this plan to deliver maximum pleasure to the eye..." 

Unfortunately, if the other one (and it could be the woman just as easily as the man, before we make any sterotypical assumptions!) is high Outdoor and high Mechanical, then by the time the first person has made it to the garden, brimming with creative ideas, the second has been to the petrol station, bought a tin of two stroke fuel for that chainsaw that has lain unused in the shed for the last five years, and taken all the major limbs off three of the big trees at the bottom of the garden. Being outside, doing something practical and "hands-on" was what they were looking forward to, and the destruction and noise simply heightens their sense of achievement. Yet it sends the first person into an absolute spin.

This couple didn't realise that a day working on the garden held such different - and in this case mutually exclusive - promise for each of them. I'll give a couple more examples next time, but this is why simply comparing your Areas of Interest reports can be such a fruitful exercise.