Model Example: Joan and the Silent Husband

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The fundamental idea behind the framework that changed my life is this:

Your circumstances don’t create your feelings, your actions, or your results. Only your thoughts do that.

But…how? How does this actually work in practice?

Let’s take a look at an example.

Let’s say you have a friend, Joan, and she complains to you about her husband. Here’s what she has to say:

I’m so frustrated with my husband. Every evening, we’re sitting together in the living room, and he’s just on his phone the entire time. He doesn’t even look at me. I sit there, and I wait and wait to see if he’ll engage, and he never says a word. I wish he would put the phone away for one second and just ask me how my day was. We never talk anymore. How do I get him to hang out with me? Should I institute a “no phones after dinner” rule?

Reading this, you’re probably tempted to give Joan some advice. “A no-phones rule sounds great!” “Don’t just sit there — tell him that you want to talk to him!” “You should get your own hobby so you have something to do in the evening.”

But before we tell Joan what to do, let’s put Joan’s situation through The Model. Remember, this is how the model breaks down situations:

So what is Joan’s model right now?

To start with, what are the facts?

Let’s just pause here for a second. Those are the only hard, objective facts in all of Joan’s story. And these facts are completely neutral. Anyone can interpret them in any way they want. Some people might even say “Thank god! The last thing I want to do after a hard day is talk to someone!”

Everything else that Joan said — her frustration, her complaints, her proposed solutions — all of that is Joan’s interpretation of these facts.

Alright, next line of the model. Joan has a lot of thoughts about that circumstance. Let’s just pick one.

This is Joan’s interpretation of the situation.

Every thought that you have causes a feeling in your body. What feeling does Joan have when she thinks this? Remember, feelings are just one word, and Joan already told us how she’s feeling.

Now, what does Joan do and not do when she’s feeling frustrated?

And what is the result of Joan’s actions on her?

This is the most important part of this whole exercise.

Joan started with a completely neutral circumstance. These are bare facts that had absolutely no meaning in and of themselves.

Her interpretation of those facts was that her husband should put his phone away and talk to her — that they are disconnected right now.

That interpretation made her feel frustrated.

When she’s frustrated, she takes a bunch of actions.

Those actions created disconnection in Joan’s life.

There was no disconnection in the circumstance.

Someone else could have the same exact circumstance and think “This is great! I love that we can hang out in comfortable silence!”

But when Joan thought, “He should put his phone away and talk to me. We never talk anymore,” she ended up creating the exact disconnection that she doesn’t want. ¹

This is an insanely powerful concept. We run around in our lives truly, truly believing that our circumstances make us feel a certain way, make us act a certain way, and create a certain life for us.

But all that circumstances do is exist. Everything else is something we do to ourselves. And if we’re doing it to ourselves, we can change it anytime we want to.

We could have given Joan some tactical advice. And maybe she would have listened to us and decided “I need to talk to my husband about this.”

Even then, if she never changes her underlying thinking, the way she acts would still be driven by the way she’s feeling.

And as anyone who has been in any relationship knows, there is a world of difference between feeling frustrated and telling your partner “You need to talk to me more” vs. feeling connected and saying “I’d love to spend more time with you.” Same advice. Different feelings, different actions, different results.

What you do is just a lagging indicator of how you’re thinking.

Which means: It doesn’t really matter what you do. What matters is why you are doing it.

What matters is what model you are in.

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Photo by Charlie Foster on Unsplash

1. Now remember, the result of Joan’s model has everything to do with Joan — the effects are happening to her. She is not creating disconnection for her husband. We have no idea what’s going on in his mind. She’s creating disconnection for herself.

Maybe her husband loves her like crazy. Maybe he wants to divorce her. If he says something, that will be a new circumstance and a new model. But in this situation, in this model, none of that matters.