The Unwritten Contract

Are you butting heads with someone? Do you leave every conversation feeling like you just can’t see eye to eye?

Here’s a radical idea: Maybe you’re trying to enforce an unwritten contract.

What is an Unwritten Contract?

Contracts are critical in business. You have to set expectations for both sides, whether it’s a multi-million-dollar deal or a bid from your plumber.

But life gets tricky when we have unwritten contracts, which are simply assumptions we’ve made about the way a person should act or a situation should turn out. Projecting unrealistic expectations is a behavior worth releasing, the topic of the November series, The Art of Done.

My friend, Geoffrey, is an amazing negotiator. He thought he had one job: Closing deals. Time and again, his clients would give him a long “Go, do” checklist. Geoffrey would wear the vendors down until they signed. Mission, accomplished—right? Wrong.

Geoffrey sighed, “I thought everyone would be happy once a deal was finished. But difficult negotiations led to the belief that we would be difficult partners. Vendors were defensive over every little problem! I got one contract after another signed but failed where it really mattered: building relationships.”

Is Someone Trying to Hold You to an Unwritten Contract?

Geoffrey’s learning applies to a lot more than business deals. Think how frustrating it was the last time someone projected their version of life onto you. Perhaps these examples sound familiar:

• You’re hard wired to be a checklist kind of person. But your co-worker who loves winging presentations keeps telling you to just go with the flow.
• You’re dreading going home for the holidays. You love seeing your parents, but their chirpy early morning breakfasts wrecks your night owl groove.
• Your older brother loves his 9-5 job and keeps bugging you to apply to his company when you graduate. You don’t know how to tell him you really want to do field work for a non-profit.

Take a lesson from Geoffrey’s negotiation experience: The person on the opposite side of the table is probably just as frustrated as you are. So, be done with unproductive expectations by using Technique #2, “Update to Confrontation 2.0,” from my free book, Genuine Power—7 Techniques to Be Powerful in a Loud, Complicated World. That’s how you can leverage your creativity to work through different perspectives and find the middle ground.

Three Ways to Tear Up the Unwritten Contract

Here are three ways for you to try this technique:

• Make it fast by communicating one thing you have in common. At the very least, everyone wants peaceful, fun relationships.
• Make it deep by reflecting on a time when someone tried to hold you to an unwritten contract.
• Make it real by taking time to pause and understand when a momentary perspective has turned into a rigid, unspoken expectation.

Don’t let hidden expectations get the best of you. Tear up that unwritten contract.