The Sliding Door Moments That Make Things Super Hard Sometimes
I was watching a committee in our town government where they were voting on budget recommendations and one man, an elected official, looking pretty exhausted, said more than once when it was his turn to vote, “I don’t care.”
This broke my heart because I know this guy is absolutely the type of guy who cares about a lot of things and in big, passionate ways, but the optics of that statement, that exhaustion, wasn’t good.
A little earlier, at another meeting, a bunch of elected officials decided not to televise a workshop. They’d be able to talk more freely was one of the reasons cited, being able to work in a certain room was another. Public could still attend, but it wouldn’t be on Zoom or streamed.
Those moments didn’t seem like a big deal to either of those groups involved, but they were huge deals to some other people in our community. They were tiny moments where trust was whittled down.
I kind of think of them as sliding door moments.
Full confession time: I’ve never heard of the term “sliding door moment” until today.
Have you?
If you haven’t, here’s a quick refresher from Ashley Fetters’ "I Think About This a Lot: The Sliding Doors in Sliding Doors."
“In 1998, writer-director Peter Howitt incepted a whole generation with this recurring-nightmare-fantasy scenario, by way of the romantic comedy Sliding Doors. An examination of how tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments can alter the trajectories of our lives, Sliding Doors is a perfectly light, frothy rom-com that improbably shoves you down into a bottomless funk of self-doubt right after the credits.”
I didn’t watch a lot of romcoms or Gwenyth Paltrow movies then so that’s my excuse, but, since its origin, the term’s meaning has expanded a bit.
The Gottman Institute on the Huffington Post wrote,
“Sliding door moments are the seemingly inconsequential everyday moments filled with the words we haphazardly throw back and forth at each other, accompanied by little evanescent pains, frustrations, joys, and laughter, flying through our minds and our hearts, that make or break the most important relationships in our lives.”
Obviously, that’s about romance and not town or state or national politics, which is rarely romantic. However, trust and betrayal, things that can ruin a marriage when life goes awry, are also the things that can ruin a community (or a business).
When times are already divisive (say a presidential election, war, community dealing with a budget increase that’s big, etc.) those tiny moments that seem inconsequential? They can really erode trust.
And trust?
That’s hard to build back. It requires work and it requires a mindset.
So, for a community that isn’t feeling heard, an elected official (exhausted and maybe sick) saying that they didn’t really care about an item that they voted on, can become a big deal thing. That’s also true with someone saying that they don’t want workshops to be televised.
Those inconsequential moments can change trajectories of lives and communities.
Dr. John Gottman, author/researcher, wrote about and studied marriage, wrote over on the Greater Good,
“What I found was that the number one most important issue that came up to these couples was trust and betrayal. I started to see their conflicts like a fan opening up, and every region of the fan was a different area of trust. Can I trust you to be there and listen to me when I’m upset? Can I trust you to choose me over your mother, over your friends? Can I trust you to work for our family? To not take drugs? Can I trust you to not cheat on me and be sexually faithful? Can I trust you to respect me? To help with things in the house? To really be involved with our children?
“Trust is one of the most commonly used words in the English language—it’s number 949. When I went to Amazon.com and typed in “trust,” I was surprised that 36,000 books came up. Now, a lot of these were business books, on how to set up a financial trust. But most of them were really about trust in relationships, and trust in general.
“On PsychInfo, the database that psychologists use to do a literature review, there were 96,000 references to “trust.” And it turns out that when social psychologists ask people in relationships, “What is the most desirable quality you’re looking for in a partner when you’re dating?”, trustworthiness is number one. It’s not being sexy or attractive. It’s really being able to trust somebody.”
It’s about social capital in our communities as well as in our relationships.
Gottman also wrote,
“So what are the characteristics of low-trust regions? Few people vote, parents and schools are less active. There’s less philanthropy in low-trust regions, greater crime of all kinds, lower longevity, worse health, lower academic achievement in schools.
“And low-trust areas have greater economic disparities between the very rich and the very poor—and the greater the discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor in a country, the more it predicts economic decline in that country.
“Clearly, there are vast implications of low trust for states, for neighborhoods, for countries. Isn’t it amazing that it’s in the best interests for us to care economically about the people who are disenfranchised in this country? Yet over the last 50 years, CEOs in the U.S., on average, have gone from making 20 times what the average worker makes to 350 times what the average worker makes.”
So, what do you do to make trust in those sliding door moments? That’s really the question (forget ‘to be or not to be’). Gottman advocates measuring trust, defining it via science.
Still, even with definitions and metrics, it’s not easy.
An unnamed author at the University of Minnesota Extension writes,
”Trust can be looked at four ways," says Eriks Dunens, a former Extension leadership and civic engagement educator who has studied scholarship about how trust happens. "When community members and leaders ask themselves whether they are trustworthy in each of these ways, they can make changes that matter."
“Contractual trust refers, simply, to whether promises are kept, expectations are clear, and community members believe that they can depend on one another. Contractual trust is strong when people follow through on commitments; when they do what they say they're going to do.
“Communication trust is more nuanced. "Community members need to know they'll be told what they need to know when they need to know it," says Dunens. "Clear and frequent communication helps people follow rules, support local causes, and accept change…."
“Competency trust is something even the most scrupulous communicator can lose if they don't perform their job well. "Competency trust is built when people are knowledgeable and skilled in what they do," says Dunens. "This is especially important in communities because running a town or city requires knowledge about everything from financing to street repair. People and groups build trust not just when they do a job, but when they prove they can do their job well…."
“Caring is the softer side of trust. We strengthen caring trust with genuine acts and words that express concern. Caring trust leads others to believe that no matter what might go wrong, you intend to act in their best interests rather than from a personal motive.”
But all of these types of trustworthiness are places to strengthen relationships.
That same article has a lot of ideas for how communities and organizations can build trust.
I like to think of trust as something that starts at home, that starts with a little sacrifice, when you’re willing to put your ego aside a bit.
Gottman writes,
“In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.
“Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom.
“As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment.
“I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, “I don’t want to deal with her sadness tonight, I want to read my novel.” But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hair and asked, “What’s the matter, baby?” And she told me why she was sad.
“Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that build trust.”
We can do that as communities, too. We can care about the person who is terrified about their tax bill and the person who wants the town to give more money to nonprofits, which won’t help the tax bill. We can care about a family business that gets a good amount of its revenue from cruise ships and the people who are very concerned about environmental aspects of that same cruise ship industry. We can choose to see the big picture rather than just our own picture. And we can be kind about it. That’s what those sliding door moments are about when trust is involved: they are about choosing to notice, choosing kindness, choosing understanding.
Gottman’s graduate student, Dan Yoshimoto, created an acronym that might help some of us work toward that in our sliding door moments and maybe all our moments. Okay me. Full disclosure: it will help me. Maybe it will help you, too?
All the wording below is his:
“Awareness of your partner’s emotion;
Turning toward the emotion;
Tolerance of two different viewpoints;
Trying to Understand your partner;
Non-defensive responses to your partner;
and responding with Empathy.”
How cool would it be if we could do that as a community? Just stick in “community” for “partner.” That would be a good start and it might help make those sliding door moments a little less momentous.
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