The Art Of Thinking In Systems: Improve Your Logic, Think More Critically, And Use Proven Systems To Solve Your Problems Strategic Planning For Everyday Life pdfdrive com

The same goes for relationship problems.
If you find yourself constantly fighting with someone you care about instead of
talking to one another and trying to get to the root of the problem, the same
system error occurs. You have a negative reinforcing feedback loop at work. As
a result, you’ll have more fights with one another because that is what you have
come to expect.
The balancing feedback loop can’t keep up and overcome the negative
reinforcing feedback loop. If you have ever reached the point where you were
afraid to say or do anything at all because you were convinced it would only lead
to another fight and make things worse, then you know exactly how this works.
I can remember a time when my in-laws were coming for an extended visit. My
wife and I had gotten into an argument about the timing of it all, and it quickly
went downhill from there. We argued over plans for keeping them entertained,
the sleeping arrangements of the kids to create a more private guest room for
them while they visited, the added expense and time needed to prepare all of the
meals, etc. You name it, we argued about it. Finally, I thought I would try to do
something nice and help my wife clean the house, but at that time we were
caught in such a negative and powerful reinforcing feedback loop that even that
led to another fight, as it was seen as an insult to the way she took care of our
house. Needless to say, it wasn’t the most enjoyable or productive few days in
our household.
We had to take a step back and remember to see the best in each other instead of
assuming the worst. Once we realized that we both were trying to solve the
problem in our own way, cooler heads prevailed and we got our relationship
back on track.
When we allow our standards to be impacted by our past performance and
negative perception of it, we are setting our systems up for failure as we allow
them to drift toward low performance and take our goals and expectations right

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along with them. In order to combat this, we need to keep our standards steadfast
despite dips in performance and expect that we will rise to meet them. If we do
this, we can flip the script and start drifting toward better performance.

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