Katharine Hepburn is quoted as saying "If you follow all the rules, you miss all the fun"! Hmmm...
It turns out that, at nearly 60, I may be more of a rules-based person than I ever realized!
Dan, my significant other, is a rules based person. Very much so and I tease him about it often. He claims that his rules are all designed to keep a person safe, but I think they are more about control. So the other day, he jokingly says to me 'I don't know why you give me such a hard time about MY rules, when you are just as bad -- you even have WRITTEN rules for people to follow'!
We both laughed (maybe you had to be there!) but he struck a nerve and, as is the case with my overly-analytical brain, I've been thinking about this a lot ever since.
He's right of course. I am a rules-based person. And rules extend not just to my businesses but to all aspects of my life.
I talk all the time about how business rules (aka procedures) are vitally important to insure consistency of quality and continuity of service. You cannot grow your business if all the people you hire go willy-nilly about their day. Training is easier when every process is documented. My belief is:
"The more employees understand about their jobs, the better decisions they make!"
<= Leslie rule!
In our personal lives, rules do protect us: Don't cross the street without looking. Don't run with scissors. Separate your clothes before washing. Don't text while driving. Think twice about eating whatever that green fuzzy thing is that's been in the refrigerator for a month.
But, as those of us who have lived alone for a very long time can attest, tying to integrate a new person into your life makes it glaringly obvious we might have become a little excessive and/or rigid in the number of rules we've created. At first I thought maybe I made all these rules because of my type-A personality.
I tried searching for correlations between rules-based personalities and Type A. No luck. Rules-based and first born? Nope, nothing there. Rules-based and compulsive? Nope. In fact, there seems to be no relationship between rules-based personalities and any other type of personality or compulsion at all.
So I asked a therapist friend of mine and she said that rule-based personalities actually are about control. Rule-followers like the structure and security of clear and detailed guidelines. It makes us feel safe.
That makes perfectly good sense. But then I ran across a quote by Therese Anne Fowler, an American author, who said, "Some rules are nothing but old habits that people are afraid to change". You know what? If we are honest with ourselves, it is easy to see that might well be true.
As an extremely simple example of old habit rules:
Does the bed really have to be made exactly the way you've been doing it all your adult life? Or is it perfectly fine for someone to make it their way? Will the world fall apart if there is a wrinkle? Or a pillow askew? What horrible thing might happen if the blanket is longer on one side or the other? And shouldn't we be grateful that someone else wants to make it at all?
You get the idea here. Sometimes we get in a rut about some task, which then becomes a habit, which then morphs into a rule. And once it's a rule, for some odd reason, we become extremely inflexible about it.
Fortunately, not only are Dan and I both rules-based people, we both believe that if you have a rule, even an apparently ridiculous rule, it is okay to keep it. Each of has the same perspective: It's your rule. I'll abide by it.
Maybe that kind of understanding comes with age. He wants me to be who I am and l feel likewise for him. But if we have habits that don't serve any logical purpose, maybe we can let them go; for our own sake; if not for the other person. Trying to maintain a death grip of control on every little aspect of your life is exhausting.
I think I'll adopt Katharine Hepburn's way of thinking: throw (most of) the rules out the window -- let's go have fun!
