In the wise words of Pat Benatar, “Love Is a Battlefield.” But is love the kind of war you can win, or do those scorched-earth tactics leave everyone feeling burned?
If you’re constantly bickering with your spouse, or you find yourself avoiding unresolved topics, Pick Your Battles: Relationships is an essential guide to conflict resolution that can strengthen a relationship, rather than weaken it. It’s a result co-authors Miles and Trisha Power can guarantee, based on the way it’s strengthened their own marriage. In the book, which delves into how the two of them co-exist while sharing their work life as well as home life, the two admit “we’re not relationship professionals” but describe their heartfelt approach to resolving conflicts.
Most days, Miles and Trisha spend their time running Bibbeo, a multi-million-dollar company they founded together, which provides installation services for safes and other equipment for more than 100 client companies across the country and around the world. How do they do it all and find time to write? “We communicate,” they said. “That’s one of our big three essentials we work hard at it both as a couple and professionally.”
We got a chance to talk with them about the thought process behind the Pick Your Battles Method, what has been the key to their methodology and what new project might be up next.
Q: What inspired you to write this book, especially since it is not your usual area of expertise?
Miles: Well, to be honest, the longer we went on in our marriage and in our working lives …
Trisha: Especially the more we worked together!
Miles: Yes, that’s true. The more we worked and worked together, the more we realized that the Pick Your Battles Method was really a Method, and that we applied to it all areas of our lives: parenting, business, friendships. We kind of started thinking about it, like, what is the actual Method to this thing? So we thought we’d write it down and share it with other people.
Trisha: Besides the couples we hang out with, that is! And yes, in parenting 100% we use the Pick Your Battles Method!
Q: How was it writing this book together? Were there any battles you had to pick during the project?
Trisha: We really enjoyed the process of working on this book. We would sit down once a week and talk about the origins, and then we’d try to boil it down to different areas and approaches. We kind of made a date out of it. It was fun.
Miles: It was great for both of us. It really took us back to the early days of our relationship, and also made us think a little bit more about how other relationships in our lives have influenced our own. The only Battle we had was how to make time to do it!
Q: What are the most important things to remember when picking your battles so that you don’t end up losing the war?
Miles: We talk a lot about this in the book, but I think it’s important to remember to respect your partner, and to choose your relationship over everything else. Whenever a problem comes up, I ask myself, is this best for me? Or best for us? Truly, is this worth fighting over? Or am I just trying to be “right” or to “win” for myself?
Trisha: And I think the parts about how and when to approach your partner about a problem are important, so not to just fly off the cuff in the heat of the moment. It’s important to consider what kind of day they’ve had, or if they’re tired. And sometimes it helps you get your own position in order. Sometimes I’ve found if you let it cool off a minute, you realize it’s not a battle you want to pick after all!
Q: What do you hope that readers will take away from the book?
Miles: I hope that readers will really think empathetically, and remember even when they are disagreeing about something, they want to be together in the end. I feel like with all the distractions of the world, and how busy we all get, it’s easy to forget the place we are starting from.
Trisha: For me, I hope people remember that you can approach big and small problems with the Pick Your Battles Method, and that it’s actually better to address small things earlier than to let things simmer. Sometimes the small things point to a larger pattern and it becomes a great discussion. We’ve made the way we run our daily lives, or travel, better because we’ve had some seemingly silly Battles.
Q: How did you discover that empathy was such a big key to using the Pick Your Battles Method?
Miles: I would say that travel has made us ten times more empathetic than we ever would have been without it. We feel so lucky to have traveled so much and made friends all over the world. Cultures have their own approaches to things, and understanding that helps you look at how others are confronting a problem. They may not be thinking the same way you are, so you may have to take a step back and see if they have a point before rushing forward with your own solution.
Trisha: Yes, absolutely. Seeing the world puts your own life in perspective. You really start looking at things from other people’s shoes which changes how you think about pretty much everything.
Q: What are you working on now? Are you working on it together?
Trisha: I mean, Miles and I literally do pretty much everything together! We’re lucky that way! We’ve started tossing around ideas for the next book in the series, but we’re trying to decide between Parenting and Business. Which would you rather see?
Miles: I’m pushing for Business. Our daughter is just becoming a teenager, I’m not sure we’re qualified to do Parenting yet!
Trisha: Yeah, we might want to wait a bit on that one! Or break it into parts … I can see it now: Pick Your Battles: The Teen Years!
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Miles Power received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Hawaii in Business Administration and a double MBA degree in Decision Science and
Computer Information Systems from St. Johns University. St. Johns prepared him to operate ethically and with a passion for high principles which he put
into play when he started his first company in 2011.
Trisha graduated from Texas A&M and married Miles in 2005. In 2012, they formed Bibbeo, which has grown to a $50M company. Together they navigate the world of marriage and parenting, faithfully attend Denver Broncos games, travel the world with their daughter and work alongside each other while using the principles of the Pick Your Battles Method every step of the way.
