Couples Counseling

We sat side by side. Poised across a long rectangular table from us was a handsome middle-aged man with silver hair and kind eyes.

“Tell me what’s going on with you,” he said sincerely. “What is the biggest issue I can help you get through today?”

Tommy shrugged and looked to me with raised eyebrows as if to say, “Should I go first or you?”

In response to my encouraging nod, he began. “Well, we’re just so different. She wants things done by these arbitrary early deadlines and I just don’t work that way. I’m the get-your-homework-done-on-the-bus-on-the-way-to-school kind of guy.”

I tensed, holding back a jab about procrastinators. Tommy continued, “But I know I always wait until the very last minute. That works for me.” Turning to me, he said, “I’m sorry. I know that drives you crazy. If you’d just give me a firm push, I won’t have my feelings hurt. I need that.”

“Ok,” I said. “I will work on that. But I don’t want to be your mother figure nagging you to get your homework done.”

Similar dialogue continued for upwards of 30 minutes, as we traded concerns with one another, found suggestions for compromise, even laughed about past disagreements. All the while, the benevolent silver-haired man simply nodded in agreement or looked inquisitively from one to the other as we posed questions of one another.

The silver-haired man was not a counselor. This wasn’t couples’ therapy and Tommy is certainly not my husband – a fact for which I am confident he is extremely grateful.
Tommy and I are teammates on our mandatory, pre-selected teams as part of the Terry MBA program. We, along with two other classmates, are members of a four-person, permanent team to which we were assigned during the first week of orientation. Assigned in part according to our Myers-Briggs results, the teams are designed to have conflict. Tommy’s and my probing conversation took place during our group coaching session with a professional executive coach – a service provided to us by Terry.

Our two other teammates, Wilson and Vishal, were conspicuously absent. Vishal had come down with a nasty cold, likely from spending the better half of an entire day holed up with me in a small study room in the SLC working on an accounting assignment. Just today, I’m finally feeling better from my debilitating, but inevitable cold. As the fog has lifted from me, and my hacking cough has become a thing of the past, Vishal is rendered ill. A hazard of teamwork I suppose.

Wilson had opted out of the session. Scheduling conflicts hadn’t allowed him to join us and luckily, while the coaching resource is provided by the program, it is optional, not mandatory, making it strictly a benefit as opposed to a burden, given our current workload.

So there sat Tommy and I, facing our twinkly-eyed coach. He asked us vague, but still probing questions that caused us to look inward and answer the questions that that we had posed of each other, ourselves. Tommy and I left feeling a little bit shell-shocked by how revealing the whole process seemed to be, despite our initial skepticism.

We walked a few steps out of the meeting room in silence, down a wide corridor before we looked at each other almost shyly, which is uncharacteristic of both of us. I don’t know if I speak for him, but being in that safe environment, talking to an unbiased party about the challenges we face as a team helped me to relate better to my teammates, even to the two who weren’t there. It remains to be seen if we will really enact the compromise we agreed upon… Stay tuned.