Our Unilateral Contracts
Have you ever unilaterally created a contract between yourself and someone else, forged their signature without their consent, and then held them accountable to the terms of the agreement?
I have. Countless times.
Despite what it might sound like, this is not some white collar crime confession. I am, of course, speaking in strictly metaphorical terms.
I recently came across a social media post from a friend who is in the same industry as I used to be in when I was a trader at an investment bank. The post was a link to an article from a well known internet news site interviewing this person about his accomplishments and perspectives on the industry. Although it was too much to bear to actually read the whole thing, a quick browse of the article made it clear that this person was “crushing it.” As soon as I got the gist of the article, I closed my laptop and got up from my chair. A range of emotions washed over me.
The first and easiest to identify was envy.
After envy came anxiety. Had I made the right choice in switching my career? Had I lost my chance to truly crush it?
Then disappointment. I’m better than this, aren’t I? I should be happy for this person. This is not about me.
And then shame. Oh man, I’m not better than this. I’ve been exposed. It is about me.
But really, more than anything, I realized I was pissed. Yes, that was the emotion I would settle on. I was pissed because I had been betrayed by my friend who had so arrogantly posted the link to the article.
Didn’t he know that posting this article would ruin my day? Didn’t we have an agreement to never treat each other like this?
As absurd as it sounds, in my mind, I had concocted a unilateral contract with this person. The contract stated that he was free to achieve success, but he was to spare me from displays of his success. He could reach out to me for advice or to commiserate about failures, but his triumphs were off-limits.
This social media post was a clear breach of contract.
With this example fresh in my mind, it got me thinking about some of my other unilateral contracts. And once the ball got rolling, it wasn’t hard to come up with more examples.
I have a contract with customer service representatives to agree to all “reasonable” requests that I make.
I have a contract with my friends not to be overly critical of behaviors like excessive Amazon deliveries—lest they expose my own ethically questionable habits.
I have a contract with the TSA not to search me at the airport (in Dr. Attia’s podcast, he talks about the narcissist anthem of “don’t you know who I am!”)
When I used to work at an investment bank as a trader, any time I came up with a trade idea that I sent around to my team, I had a contract with my team members to publicly support the idea.
I have a contract with the other members of the Upbuild team to validate me for my contributions—but only briefly, so they don’t risk exposing the extent to which I crave the validation.
When I’m not in the mood to interact in meaningful ways, I have a contract with my family members to pick up on the nonverbal cues and act accordingly.
When I am giving my full effort to something, I have a contract with other stakeholders to give at least 80% of their full effort to the same endeavor.
I have a contract with anyone who brings a baby on an airplane to sit at least 10 rows away from me.
Just to put this in writing brings up so much shame. My ego and my neediness in black ink for my fellow humans to see.
And yet, I am not alone. The experience of holding people to agreements that they never agreed to is one we are doing all the time. For most of us, it might even be our default way of operating.
When others breach our unilateral contracts, we experience all sorts of unhelpful emotions. Envy, shame, fear, and judgment are some of the most common. We also have lots of mechanisms for punishing those who break our contracts. As examples:
We may act out in frustration (e.g., as I sometimes do with customer service representatives).
We may express passive-aggressive disappointment in others (e.g. as I sometimes do when others don’t give their full effort).
We may behave with resentment as a result of arrogance (e.g., as I sometimes do with the TSA).
We may get grumpy (e.g., as I sometimes do with family members who are supposed to detect my mood swings).
Depending on the particular situation, we may also engage in gossip, withhold our love and attention, discredit others, or use sarcasm, among many other behaviors, knowingly or unknowingly, in order to punish the unsuspecting people in our lives for breach of contract.
Given these unhelpful emotions and mechanisms for punishment, it’s not hard to see why these contracts are wreaking havoc on our lives and in our relationships.
These contracts are also delusional. They are not based in reality. Can you imagine actually asking someone to formally agree to one of these contracts?
An abridged version of a unilateral contract might be written as follows: Johnny, by signing this contract, you hereby agree to never again post a Forbes article naming you to their list of ‘40 under 40’ on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform that Michael might be scrolling. You also agree to make sure that something good has happened to Michael in the last 24 hours before telling him any good news about yourself.
We likely don’t even realize how ridiculous these contracts are until we think about actually writing them or saying them out loud. And even if we’ve had a conversation with another person or group of people about a particular agreement, are the terms of the agreement actually clear to our counterpart? Are they even clear to us? Is there fine print?
So why? Why do we create these contracts if they are based in delusion and they are wreaking havoc on our lives?
Well it’s not actually us who is creating these contracts. It is our egos - our false identities of who we think we should be. And they are creating them for the perpetuation of their existence. For without delusion and havoc, our egos would cease to exist. As my partner Hari Prasada will often share during Upbuild programs, we want to identify our egos so that we can take responsibility for them, but once we have done that with sincerity, then we don’t need to identify WITH them. In other words, we are separate from our egos.
With regard to our unilateral contracts, we need to be honest about which ones our egos have created and the associated methods of enforcement. We also need to be honest about the desires and fears of our egos that have driven the creation of these contracts, and we need to be able to tap into truths that go deeper than the ego.
In the case of the social media post, it was my ego’s fear of not being valuable that drove the creation of the contract. When I am not in touch with my inherent self-worth, my ego has a tendency to measure my own worth against the worth of others. And because my ego links worth very tightly to achievement, it is constantly monitoring other peoples’ achievements to see how I stack up. So when it sensed that someone else was achieving more than I was, as it did when I saw the post, the fear of not being valuable got triggered, which triggered the cascade of emotions from envy to disappointment to shame, and finally, to anger at my successful friend for breaking our contract.
Said another way, the contract was my ego’s way of protecting me from feeling worthless, but because it was based in delusion and triggered deflating emotions, it did more harm than good.
If I had, instead, been able to tap into the truth that I have worth independent of what my mind or body is able to accomplish and bring my attention back to what is truly important to me (my values), I wouldn’t have felt as threatened and likely would have experienced a more empowering and generous reaction.
In Glengarry Glen Ross, a film about a bunch of struggling real estate salesmen that we often screen during Upbuild workshops, Alec Baldwin’s very macho and highly ambitious character proclaims, “Only one thing counts in this life. GET THEM TO SIGN ON THE LINE THAT IS DOTTED.” That might be sound advice in the real estate business, but in the business of being who we truly are, before asking anyone to sign anything, we need to be able to differentiate the needs of our ego from the true self. This takes honesty and courage, but once we more clearly see the needs of the ego, and even better if we can share authentically about these needs with others, we can start ripping up the old contracts that are based on false identities. And we can start living sans contracts and with the freedom that comes from alignment with our core values and a deeper sense of who we actually are.
