What were the first 3 minutes like with your kids this morning? How about the first 3 minutes after school? What about the first 3 minutes when your husband came home? Or the first 3 minutes when you walked through the door at the end of the day?
Odds are that if your first 3 minutes were filled with warm, encouraging and posititve words the next 3 minutes were filled with the same. And if not? Well, let’s just say the minutes that followed were probably not moments of you or your family at their finest.
Studies show that the first 3 minutes of any human interaction determine the course of the interaction for hours afterwards. That means those first 180 seconds are pretty darn powerful.
I should know.
Yesterday my daughter and I scurried straight from church to a cheerleading competition 45 minutes away. We skipped breakfast but stopped to grab a quick (and very small!) bite to eat on the road, then spent the next 5 straight hours inside a gym filled with screaming fans and blaring music. And because the entrance and parking fees cost almost as much as giving birth to my first child, we had no money left over for snacks or drinks of any kind. The words “Cash Only” loomed everywhere.
We got back in the car exhausted and HUNGRY. And low blood sugar does not a patient woman make.
So I called my husband.
“What are your thoughts about dinner?”
“I don’t know. Are you hungry?”
“Starving! And we are 45 minutes away from home. We have chicken breasts in the freezer. There’s a really easy recipe we could have – just pour a jar of vodka pasta sauce over the chicken breast and bake them for about 45 minutes. You don’t even need to defrost the chicken.”
“Well, Taylor and I were just going for a walk.”
“That sounds like fun. If the temperature is lower the chicken can bake for an hour.”
Ah…..Ashton and I could hardly wait to come home to a home cooked meal all ready to eat.
Only when we opened our front door no yummy smell greated us from the kitchen. Somehow my husband misunderstood that I wanted HIM to start the dinner. (More about how to communicate with the male species on a later blog). He, in fact, thought it was rather odd that I gave him cooking instructions when he was clearly headed out for a walk. The thought of putting the chicken in the oven to cook never even entered his mind.
So, let’s just say the first 3 minutes were less than ideal.
Which meant the next 3 minutes were also less than ideal.
Fortunately we have been married long enough to know that you can’t let these kinds of situations go on for hours. In fact, after all was said and done (and I had food in my stomach) we laughed about it.
But…..
I couldn’t help wonder what our interaction might have been like if the first 3 minutes had been different. What if I hadn’t taken out my frustration on my husband? What if I found out the details first? What if I had greeted him with a warm hello? I can’t say for sure, but I would be willing to bet we would have laughed a lot sooner.
You know what causes most arguments in a marriage? The little stuff of life. The daily frustrrations, misunderstanding and unmet expectations. This stuff is going to happen in a family. It just is.
But the first 3 minutes set the tone for how these things are handled. It sets the tone for how big or small these issues become and how fast they get resolved.
So today give your first 3 minutes with your loved ones some thought. I know I will.
