Our Unilateral Contracts

Have you ever unilaterally written a contract between yourself and someone else, forged the other person’s signature without their consent, and then waved said contract in the other person’s face when they didn’t uphold their end of the deal.

I have. Hundreds of 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 with force and got up from my chair. A range of emotions washed over me.

The first and easiest to identify was envy. This, unfortunately, is not an uncommon emotion for me.

After envy came anxiety. Had I made the right choice in switching my path in life? 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.

By this point, my nerves were on high alert, and my mind was going in lots of different directions, none of them particularly pleasing.

Really, more than anything, I realized I was pissed. Like super 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.

How dare he share this article on a platform that he knows I might be trolling.

Didn’t he know that it would ruin my day?

Didn’t he know that it would expose me for my envy and trigger all sorts of anxiety and shame?

Didn’t we have an agreement to never treat each other like this?

As ridiculous as it might sound, in my mind, I had created a unilateral contract with this person that was signed, sealed, and delivered. The contract stated that he was free to achieve as much as he’d like in his life, but that he would do his absolute best to keep my eyes and ears away from any sort of positive news. He was free to reach out to me for advice and to share any of his failures.

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 all people not to ask me a question publicly that I don’t know the answer to, especially if I have made it clear to the public that I am an expert in the subject in question.
• 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 support the idea regardless of if they agreed with its merits or not. The fine print in the contract was that they had to talk only about the merits of the trade idea as they supported it.
• I have a contract with my friends not to talk too negatively about certain behaviors (e.g., receiving more than one Amazon delivery per week) that might expose me for my own ethically questionable tendencies.
• I have a contract with the TSA not to search me at the airport (in Peter Attia’s podcast, he talks about his own feelings about being searched at the airport and the narcissist anthem of “don’t you know who I am!”)
• I have a contract with the other members of the Upbuild team to validate me when I do something valuable, but to always keep the expression of validation short and sweet, or risk exposing my neediness for the validation.
• I have a contract with anyone who brings a baby on an airplane to sit at least 10 rows away from me.
• When I’m feeling low energy and not in the mood to interact in meaningful ways, I have a contract with the people that love me to pick up on all the nonverbal cues and act accordingly.
• When I’m feeling high energy and start playing the part of the MC hype man for a group of friends, I expect the others in the group to match me and raise their energy levels, but still let me play the part of the MC hype man without taking on that role themselves.
• I have a contract with all customer service representatives to agree to any request that I make.
• When I am giving my full heart to something, I have a contract with other stakeholders to give at least 80% of their heart to the same endeavor.
• I have a contract with my soon-to-be-born son to be able to have a baseball catch with me by the time he is three years old.

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 to mutually undertaken endeavors)
• 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 loved ones who are supposed to detect my mood swings)

Depending on the particular situation, we may also engage in gossip, withhold our love and attention from others, 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 these agreements 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 trolling. You also agree to make sure that something good has happened to Michael in the last 24 hours before ever telling him any good news about yourself.

Or

World, by signing below, you hereby agree that in any situation where Michael is pretending to be an expert in front of a group of people, you will ask him lots of questions that he can answer in order to further prove his expertise, but you will refrain, in all circumstances, from asking questions that he doesn’t know the answer to.

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 Hari Prasada often reminds us, 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 very 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, which is a pretty consistent experience for me, 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, I wouldn’t have felt threatened or looked at worth as something relative, and I likely would have experienced a more empowering 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.