Aware Expectations

I was just a kid, excited about going on a trip. Because the logistics of going on a trip were beyond me and depended on many factors about which I knew nothing, the anticipated fun event didn't happen. Or course, I was crestfallen. 

Fortunately, I had very wise parents who took my childish disappointment very seriously. They apologized for giving me the idea that this exciting thing was going to happen. But they also made me realize that I had built up the expectation on my own, with very little encouragement from them. They hadn't committed the family was going to go on this trip, they had stated they were going to explore making a decision about it after they researched the details. The trip was going to happen eventually, but not when and how I had expected it.

They attributed me building up my expectations to how much I like to make up stories; making me see that I had created my own disappointment because I had a talent and a passion for storytelling. They helped me to realize that I couldn't blame them for being the cause of my distasteful disappointment. If fact, I came to understand that because I liked to make up stories and explanations for many things, that I couldn't blame anyone else for that talent in me. The nature of talent is that it is irresistible. Paradoxically enough - talent can be almost an obsessive curse.

But still, here I was, causing my own emotions, feeling bad and how was I going to deal with it? Surely this expectation that I'd built so carefully into a blissful state of excitement wasn't a negative thing?

Even if an adult promised me who had the ability to make these things happen, was it really in my best interests to expect it and possibly make myself feel bad if it didn't happen? I realized that, so many events and factors were out of my own knowledge and influence, things could go wrong for grownups too that were unexpected. It was possible for disappointment to happen to me at any time because of what I had packed with meaning by doing this expecting.

My family offered me a much more interesting question about expectations: How was I going to use my irresistible ability to tell stories to make me feel good instead of bad?

Wolf Teacher

I have known a couple of wolves,
and they were pretty socialized
animals, but they also did have
their own agenda, which might
or might not include you
as a human in their plans.
The most striking difference
between dogs and wolves was
the wolves’ lack of being
affected by what you
thought of them.

Dogs always care and want
to know you are pleased
with them – and adult wolves 

could pretty much care less 

what your needs were. It's 

part of why wolves have 

self-respect.
I have experienced exceptions 

to that lack of care. One of the
wolves I knew I accepted the 

responsibility to take care of as
a house sitter for six weeks 

while her people traveled. Of 

 course I had been friends 

with the wolf, having met her
previously. But I did not really 

appreciate how the wolf had
accepted me into the pack as 

a “family” member when I 

began to take care of her. 

Ten days into taking care of 

the wolf, I got some very bad 

news that a former boyfriend 

of mine had committed suicide. 

I was on the phone for days 

helping my ex’s relatives find 

places to stay when they 

arrived from out of state. Our

 ten year relationship had continued 

with his family, despite the two of 

us breaking up the five years
previous to his death. Of course, 

there were many cleanup details 

of sorting out the loose ends of an 

end of life scenario.
The strange thing was, with the 

wolf and I having spent only ten 

days together, for three days 

following the news, that wolf 

did not leave my side when I was 

with her. I was both touched and 

shocked to have become adopted 

as a pack member by her so 

absolutely as was evidenced by 

this wolf’s actions. The wolf was a 

source of solace by matching my 

state of mind and then transitioning 

me out of it better than any ever-enthusiastic
doe-eyed dog could have been. I’d 

never experienced anything like it 

then or since.
Strangely enough, this experience 

with the wolf made me understand
how many advantages there were to 

tempering my blinding enthusiasm
with a little friendly reserve. I began 

to show certain others with my actions 

their relative importance to me, and 

people responded.
People in my community took me 

so much more intentionally (even
when I wasn’t serious) as I made 

these changes in being aware of
how I affected them. It was quite 

a rite of passage for me.
But maybe there was perhaps 

another thing going on entirely...
Have you had experiences with 

a wolf?

Special

When I was sixteen, I made an agreement with my mother to smile more often. Because of our bone structure, we have a mouth that turns down because our lower jaw is a bit small in relation to our skulls. This makes it look as if we're frowning or are being seriously judgmental when our face is at rest.

Not long before she died at fifty-four, my mom was starting to become upset about becoming older. She pointed out that her face was now sagging, making her down-turned resting face frown more noticeable. Her face looked so much more beautiful when she smiled anyway, so I suggested she learn to smile more often and she agreed that doing that would be a good idea. But she needed my help. To cue her to remember to smile, I began a habit of smiling at her - giving her an outright huge, toothy grin or just turning up the corners of my mouth so they didn't turn down. It turned out that smiling more often actually made me feel happier too, so I kept doing it. I realize now that it's an agreement I made with my mother long ago that still persists and connects me to being her daughter. Here is a picture of me at fifty-four with that slight smile next to my brother.

Smiling more often as a matter of course has had an unexpected effect on others...

Many years ago when I first came to Hawaii, I was invited to this birthday party for someone I didn't know, because I was connected to a band member of the party gal. Most of the people at the party were younger than me. They seemed to be talking about who they knew, how cool they were (or how afraid they were not so cool) and what clothes the others were wearing. They weren't particularly interested in having conversations that were about ideas, languages, relationships or values, which were my favorite subjects. So I spent my time playing with the kids and the household dogs, randomly smiling to recognize people passing by as I wandered around the party. They put up an open mike for musicians to share their original music, so for the birthday girl I sang the Bolinas version of an original "Happy Birthday" written by Ananda Gino Brady.

At the end of the night while driving home, my friend who had invited me said he didn't understand how I could be so completely misunderstood by strangers. When I asked him what he meant, he said someone had asked him if I was a special needs person. Evidently those twenty-somethings believed that if you were smiling too often, there had to be something seriously wrong with your sanity.


But wait! I have yet another story about this...

In San Francisco, people who are special needs adults go out together in a group. Along with them comes one or two workers who are paid to chaperone and generally make sure the group doesn't get into trouble.

I was standing at the corner waiting for a bus in S.F. when this sort of group joined me to also board the bus. People of all walks of life take the bus in San Francisco, because of the parking difficulties. I was heading for a music lesson, so I wasn't carrying a pack or purse.

All of us got on the bus together, and I took the only available seat next to one of the special needs people. We began to talk. I guess I encouraged rambunctious replies because their "handler" asked for quiet and to stay in their seats. I apologized and stated that it was my fault to have encouraged the intensity of response. After some time had passed, a metal water container made it out of the pack of one of the members of the special needs group and rolled two seats away back into the depths of the lurching bus. Since I knew all of them were barred against fetching it, I asked the person in the seat in back of me to please hand it forward so it could be returned to the owner. There was no response, so I got up and retrieved the item before it caused a problem.

In a short time, the correct stop came and the special needs group disembarked. I slid over to a window seat that was now unoccupied and glanced back to the woman behind me who had ignored my request previously to help retrieve the water bottle.

She had a red face to match her red hair. She gushed, "I'm so sorry that I assumed you were one of them."

"Yes," I agreed, attempting some humor. "It's embarrassing when you realize you've treated special people in special ways. I like to be especially smiley. Sometimes it makes people think I'm special."

"Well, the good kind of special then," she grinned. She nervously laughed with me.

We talked a bit more about how smiling affects people. I told her the story of my smiling agreement with my mom. She declared that maybe she would smile more often too.

Real Natural

Do you have a claim to fame?

It's one of my standard fallback questions that I developed from my days of hitchhiking in the quest of becoming an entertaining conversationalist. If the person can say yes to this question, it never fails to yield an interesting tale about who they are and what has been important to them.

A former teacher of mine is someone who claims he's the inspiration for the character made famous by R. Crumb in the hippie comics era. In fact, he even changed his name legally to become Mr. Natural. This confounds those who have him fill out forms because his first name is Mr.  That's right - not Mister, but Mr. with a period.


But Mr. Natural as a real person has further claims to fame beyond his name and how he became famous for having assumed it. For instance, under his previous name, he personally fought and he won a case as that shaped landlord/tenant rights in San Francisco.

Natural has written a book about his own way of teaching music. It's a sort of reverse engineered jazz theory for beginners based on "do-re-mi..."  He and his business partner Angel have published a pretty easy-to-understand disambiguation of a college level music theory course called "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers". He's uploaded many group courses on music from classes he recorded and put on youtube for many instruments. He even invented a short-cut for composers to sketch their musical ideas before the song makes it into notation that's an improvement on what's known as "Nashville Notation."

 So - do you have a claim to fame?
If you don't yet, what would it be when your ship comes in?

Touchy

 I used to feel self-righteous about the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched. I wrote a bit about that on my other more public blog. 

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I needed to become aware of and problem solve.  Lots of times, who I was trying to change showed me their sharp teeth and I had to learn not to take it personally. I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched. But they didn't seem to want it.

It happened at the point where the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast it off as a fad. But I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Because it resulted in her son no longer wanting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hang out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her six year old son by cautioning him not to trust people about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. It really made me angry. But it also made me realize how an accusation like that is pretty much the same as a conviction. So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often. I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect.

But I'm still on the fence whether it's a good thing to be "training" people to accept being touched - or to just accept them the way they are. In the last year, I have been adopted by a stray cat who doesn't like being picked up. But over time, he's learned to accept me doing that for him to hoist him up to where he gets fed, without scratching me. I reason that some day, I'm going to have to pick him up when he's upset and I don't want him to freak out and attack me. But it's really just that I like his fuzzy ass in my arms and I like enjoying his trust. It's a bit like that with my friends too.

Find A Mentor

Why would I consider apprenticeship? That began with a college experience.

I had previously had the experience of adopting a mentor with a professor named Dung Fong Lee at U.S. International Univ. in Poway. I was in the habit of "checking out" my teachers before taking a class. After sitting at the back of this teacher's office all afternoon, I observed to him how I now understood the confusing comments I had gotten about his teaching style from his previous and current students. He seemed to radically change his persona to suit the needs of each student, (joke & storyteller, factual info dumper, sparklingly polite conversationalist, bumbler, impolite psychologist, political leader, confessor) without being concerned with presenting a consistent identity. His reply was that he believed this ability to be the mark of an excellent, flexible teacher - and that I probably also had this ability because I had noticed it in him. This began a very interesting relationship where he allowed me to hang out with his family and included me, (and my boyfriend at the time) in his social life. He also taught me Chinese at a breakneck pace for seven weeks. (Since he decided I already knew the content of a introductory class on the I Ching that he offered; he proposed I learn something else.) Later he offered me an opportunity to travel to Taiwan where he would continue my Chinese lessons and set me up teaching English. But I wasn't able to accept at that time, as I would lose the remainder of a four year college scholarship. (One of my life's regrets!)

I believed Lee and I crossed over into a personal relationship partly because he was from another culture and how the USIU college had been intentionally structured to encourage such behavior. Probably my being orphaned as a teen also had something to do with it. So that is how I found out how the apprenticeship experience could go far beyond the content of what was being taught. The few situations where I adopted a position of apprenticeship happened in the course of my various work projects, but later I got the nerve to propose it barefaced... (By asking, "would it be OK to ask you a few more questions again later?") Of course, the questions and answers became more elaborate as they had the inclination and time to teach me and as I showed more interest.

The next mentor I adopted I found by landing a job doing illustrations for a sales booklet of a solar design sales course for a sales manager, Chuck Lewis. This was a presentation meant to be displayed during a home sales call by a troupe of salespeople to introduce hot water solar panels to customers. He was also writing a book of aphorisms about life lessons, and needed a cover illustration. We spent quite a bit of time together because he wanted to explain the book to me so I'd understand how to make the cover...and we enjoyed talking with each other. Then he began to write another book, (eventually titled "You're Gonna Love It!") about sales, so he wanted to talk to me about that too, to help him write the book because he said I was his "perfect customer" that he wanted the to be written for. The book grew from our personal conversations about how to teach sales to people who formerly had assumed that selling and marketing was vulgar and beneath their ethics about how people should be treated. He also taught me quite a bit about telling jokes and how to invent them, which seemed to be a supporting subset skill of salesmanship.

Another person I routinely called where he worked and jokingly asked for the "Terry Delsing School of Comedy." (Which of course, was not where he was really working. But his boss put up with it.) Terry would tell me a joke. I would figure out why it was funny, change around the particulars and tell him the joke I'd just invented. It only took less than five minutes a call. We did that ongoing maybe once a week for a couple of years until I spaced out calling him for too long.

My next mentor, Ray Belange of Apache Signs, came from attempting to paint and fabricate signs as a business. The way I found and adopted Ray as a mentor is the most easily translated to any genre.

I had developed this strategy, when I wanted to learn to do something practical, to call up people cold out of the phone book who were in the business of doing what I needed to learn and asking them a few questions about it. The first few people I asked about what was the proper terminology for the field; the next few I asked how to phrase useful questions I could ask other people and so on... My reasoning that people were willing to answer a few questions was sound, because they were busy at work, and I was asking for free advice. So I just kept calling different people until I had the whole picture, (short of actually doing it.) As I got involved in the process of doing it and hit a snag, I'd call again on those people who seemed willing to talk with the the first time around because some time had passed. They seemed interested in my progress too.

Ray was someone who, as I explained my thinking about what I was trying to do, recognized that we thought alike in an unusual, original way. Turns out, he had expanded on the same idea I had independently originated too. So he invited me to his shop and not only showed me how he'd designed his way past the questions I had, but where to find suitable materials, how he had expanded and innovated how to use the materials, where to find new customers, as well as the joys of riding on motorcycles in foreign countries and living in RVs and warehouses as a lifestyle. (He had raised five kids as a single parent that way!)

Since then, I've hit on the idea of contacting admirable authors and volunteering to help them in whatever way I could be useful. In return I've gotten many free perks in the form of trades of me writing reviews for their book which they sent me free...to helping them using my writing abilities in exchange for their lessons in an ongoing way. One time a mentor I had contacted like this put me in the hot seat of representing them as a tele-workshop host, despite not being trained formally by them. This experience taught me that I had an unusual proclivity for talking coherently, being a high idea producer when everyone else had run out of idea, all while tending the engineering side of an online workshop, (being a natural multi-tasker) which was a talent that I never knew I had, (but Barbara Sher had recognized the ability in me.)

So - mentoring needs a dream - a focus that's practical involving what you are trying to learn to do. Then you ask for help - a little at a time. You find examples of skills you admire in people who enjoy offering the benefits of their experience. You don't admire them, but ask them specific questions about what you'd like to do, encouraging them to be the authority and to think about how they do naturally what you cannot do. If they have other students, you offer the benefits of what you're learning to others who aren't as far along as you are. As you show interest by involving yourself in what they love to teach - you're on your way to learning something and having an interesting relationship with them. Sometimes you're in the position of giving them an idea of how and what to teach others that they couldn't imagine before they met you...

Worried Today, Time to Make Art

Thinking of what to do to improve the level of my own happiness today. I'm worried today because money to pay rent hasn't appeared on the horizon. Realized that making art has worked for me before when I've felt like a deer in the headlights, so decided to draw a picture of a kitty who was nice enough to tame herself so I could be her friend.

Shared her with Janet after I began a mobile lifestyle, so I even have corroboration about how unusual this kitty truly was. This pussycat became my icon for the proof that a specific character could surpass the character traits of her species. In her case, she was thoughtful and compassionate about others, when felines are known for being completely and shamelessly self-involved. I wrote about her story previously here.

Her name was "Squeeker," affectionately known as, "Ms. Vanilla."

Most Magnanimous Kitty - Ever

All my cats have had "theme songs," usually parodies.

Squeeker's theme song is sung to the tune of

"Look At That Stupid Girl" by the Rolling Stones.

~I'm not talkin' about the cutest squeak she has.... 

~ Look at that fluffy kitty

~ I'm not talkin' about the ever-wafting baths... 

~ Look at that fluffy kitty

~ The way she packs a punch

~ Poor mice fast become her lunch

~ To me the sweetest cat in the world

~ Greet that fluffy kitty!

~ I'm not talking about the kind of dust she wears

~ Check out that fluffy kitty...

~ I'm not talkin' about the twisted fang she bears

~ Look out for that fluffy kitty...

~ The way she bathes her friends

~ Her peace-makin' never ends

~ Her lack of vanity plus times ten

~ Gotta pet that fluffy kitty!

Being Authentic

    There's a cost to being generous and to then draw personal boundaries.

    Certainly being "honest, real, and ethical" as defined by yourself is a good thing to do. However, if you care about others, you still must deal with how others feel about how you're acting. How do you want to affect others and the situation while communicating effectively?

    It's wise to choose your battles deliberately. Sometimes it's better to tell a white lie and go through some meaningless social niceties than it is to announce your contrariness just out of the starting gate. Asking for permission is more complicated than asking for forgiveness.

    I know I'm an unusual person with unusual values; it's not important to me any more to broadcast that quality to the world. Now I let others figure that out about me on their own. I've learned a little friendly reserve helps others not be intimidated by my lack of social constraints. I decided that I do not enjoy people being afraid of me because of my social "daring." Whereas, I used to broadcast these qualities about myself as my own sense of self.

 

    Tricky to imagine this person in the picture is the one I'm describing, isn't it?

    I have always been surprised how others seem to assign the lowest motive to actions they don't understand. To respond to this, it's best to explain motives and go from there. But this strategy always made me feel the paradox of advertising what's not really there. If it was there, would I need to advertise it?

    Opting out without revealing why is a better strategy. My rule of thumb for making these decisions has been, "keep you eyes on the prize." The virtual question is: "What do I want to create here, and are my means congruent with my goals?"

    Someone who is "ethical" and treats people well is actually is in the act of protecting the other person, while leaving themselves vulnerable. In a perfect world, the other person is being ethical to watch your back, but that's not always the case. So that's why wonderful people lose out, and find themselves paying prices they didn't expect to have volunteered for making the sacrifice. That's one of the costs of "being real." In an intimate relationship, you protect the other person with your ethics, while leaving yourself open. If it works out well, their actions and attitudes protect you. 

    If not, at some point, later in your life you'll get embittered for having put out too much without getting enough back. It's happening to people I know who were real "Givers." They just get jaded and burnt out and withdrawn. It happened to me.  

Just wanted to warn you, in case you're a "Giver." 

Tactful Bonding

How to express tactfully one's intentions or needs? To marry intention with action - this  is a life skill. If we do not have someone to model after to train this skill in the context of the subculture in force, we are bound to make social mistakes casting around for appropriate way to express ourselves.

Establishing rapport is the most important ingredient. Deciding how to pop the question that may accelerate a "non-obligatory" state of friendship into reciprocal give and take is tricky. Key seems to be noticing how people treat their friends with whom they have already established trust of this sort.

Usually, the answer is often that there has already been a "give and take" in the context of the relationship that you may have missed noticing. Each person has a certain language of bonding built out of unique combination of experiences they find essential to establishing trust. Trust in this context is earned, not a given - although many people will declare that they tend to offer strangers the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

For some people this is attending school with them; for others it is working together. Some cannot trust you until you find out a revealing secret and forgive or ignore it; some keep you away until they have a need so great they must ask for help. As they realize you are stellar at offering what they need and they also find out the offer was not an "exchange," it wakes them up that the two of you have established what connection means. Sometimes establishing this connection can happen by merely emulating the way their family members and good friends treat them - gradually. Sometimes this connection is just that the two of you have more to talk about, or that you sense some aspect in character in common or differing in each other that you'd like to explore.

Sometimes I believe there are people who create energy from being with others and spend it on accomplishment...and people who get energy from doing things and spend it on relationships. It is the category of people who love to do things and spend it on relationships, the more dynamic ones who are dangerous. Sometimes people who like to accomplish things are lousy at relationships, because they're somewhat scared of intimacy. You would want to make sure you are NOT making a deal with this sort of person. Otherwise you might get lost in an endless "deal-making" competitive activity with some "aftertastes" of hidden agendas.

Whereas, with people who are into "hanging out," they often have no problems being generous with their time because they will be getting a benefit from your presence, without any directed benefit. No "invested interest" or agenda, in other words. It was modeling those connecting people can allow a dynamic person suggest to "take turns" benefiting each other to establish a warm and fuzzy feeling of mutual benefit.

My First Sub-Culture Artist Friend

When I was twelve I used to make art at a table where each of us who shared the table was from a different race or culture. We joked that we all made "highly integrated" art. My art table friend was American Indian girl, who encouraged me to follow her home one day after school.

When we arrived, her whole family (seven more people) were sitting on two couches that faced each other. No other furniture except a lamp, a TV on a table in the corner and a coffee table. The TV wasn't on.

I sat down, squishing myself in where they made room for me to sit as she did. She introduced me to her family. We giggled a little about something that had happened at school that day. The conversation died down. I asked what the dog's name was after some time had gone by. Another five minutes went by. Her family members told me the story, a sentence at a time from almost every person there, about how the dog arrived and came to be adopted into the family. Another long silence.

I looked at everyone. They didn't seem to be expecting anything from me, so I just sat there. We sat for about a half hour. Her mom got up and offered us all iced tea because it was hot. We drank the tea and rattled the ice cubes together. Nobody said anything for the next half hour.

Then as if on some cue, everyone got up. We said goodbye to each other and they asked me to come back again and visit. They said they really enjoyed meeting me and was looking forward to seeing me again. They were happy their daughter had such an interesting friend. I wasn't really sure why they thought I was interesting. Then I walked home, feeling lucky I'd just been in another world where I could be interesting for just sitting on a couch keeping my mouth shut.

I kept making art with her and hanging out with her at school and lunchtime, but I couldn't figure out a reason to come back to visit her at her house and she did not press me to return. She said everyone she brought over to her house did not feel very comfortable there. I wanted to be different, but at the time it was just too strange for me too. I'd never traveled before and didn't really understand that I was going to a different culture when I was really just visiting that house down the street.

 

Where Are People Who Are...?

The short answer to this is that great relationships are made and not found. You make relationships that are based on ethical, positive, encouraging and forward-seeking interactions on purpose. There are people around here on this forum who are just like that - you're not SEEING them! There are people around you LIKE THAT, you're not noticing them.

One way to recognize people like that is to talk to anyone you believe is "like that" on the phone using Skype, if you can't find people close to you. Once you have some of Those People to talk with, then you'll get better at recognizing them when you run into them in person. That's what I've been doing lately.

Partly, I recognize people like this because they have other friends and aren't isolated. But sometimes, that's not always true. People who are good at relationships have lots of friends - usually from all walks of life. People who don't have lots of friends sometimes find themselves in that position because they're in a situational bind, have moved house to a new location...or sometimes these are older people who have out-lived their passel of long-time friends. Or sometimes they've gone through a breakup, grief, etc. Interesting to note that one of their characteristics of people like this is that they are not people who put accomplishing things in front of their friendships. Relationships come first, then accomplishments. Of course, there's always a trade-off.

The other thing is that people who are ethical usually had a pretty OK childhood...OR they HAD to put out quite a bit of "inner work" to change the effects of bad conditioning for themselves. Although an interest in "inner change" can outline the gaping, jagged edge of where someone falls short and continues to fall short, sometimes it's at least an indicator of intent. So if you get this agreement from people, you can be on the road together, forgive the shortfall in each other generously, and have fun along the pathway to continuing self-improvement.

I learned quite a bit from books and websites. Whenever I saw someone doing that "Take On Personal Challenge" in real life, I would sidle up to them and get to know them personally. For instance, I met Dennis Rivers at an ongoing David Bohm Dialogue group. Dennis was able to get the group to try things that nobody else could convince them to do because someone would always object - Dennis' ways of communicating could quiet people's objections and defensiveness! What he has to say about this on this website is brilliant: http://www.newcoversations.net He's also got a free "workbook" to help teach better communication.

But watch for this; lots of people who can write do so as if they have the answers. But they cannot deliver because they are lousy teachers. What they say is the way to learn what they are doing will not work...or won't work for you if you do not have identical point of view compared to theirs. The way to learn from these people is to get in their presence and "soak it up" from them...while disregarding their confusing presentations. Look for those who offer their content from a sense of being on a mission to better the world...sometimes this does NOT include being "market savvy."

The short list of books that helped me recognize people who are forward-thinking and capable of having long-term relationships are:

"Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor It's a book on why reinforcement works during training - both positive and negative. It brings together the intellectual ideas of behaviorism with the practical experience of training, which is communication through example and action rather than language.

Check out all the books by William Ury and Fisher that are in the series on negotiation skills, such as "Getting Past No" and "Getting to Yes" , etc. There is a new book I think it was Fisher just wrote about the emotional factor that is brilliant. Here's an article:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118596957/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
These books on negotiation make you realize that you are building tacit agreements when you start any relationship that can become problematic or be a foundation later on...at times it's not possible to "think ahead" when you don't know what you are doing...so this is how to re-negotiate tacit agreements before they become problematic enough to require professional intervention.

The area of non-violent communication is also an interesting field...Also is the "Speaking Circles" authenticity work by Lee Glickstein
http://www.speakingcircles.com/Programs/SCIprograms.html