Host: What is the sixth key value for compatibility?

Gloria MacDonald: The sixth trait around compatibility is what we call Action Orientation. This doesnt have just to do with how athletic you are and how physically active you are. Although, thats a big part of it, but someone can be always out and about very busy without being, without playing tennis and golf and skiing and swimming and running. They can be always on the go, running from meeting to meeting to meeting and have a very active social life and that's still what we will consider to be high on the Action Orientation Level.

So, think about what you really enjoy doing when you are on vacation for example. Are you the type of person that loves to just go to the beach and wedge out? Can you just take five great books and really, totally wind down on a vacation, sit by the pool, just wedge out? If so and you find that thats really important to you, then you would be low on action orientation and the person who is high on action orientation, that type of vacation would drive them bananas. They would be so antsy, they would be fidgety, they would have to be doing something.

So, you can imagine how a couple with one who is very low on action orientation and one who is very high on action orientation will have some friction to deal with, whether it is around planning vacations or weekends or maybe the person who is low on action orientation, just really after day of work, needs to come home, needs to sit in front of the TV and just wedge out, because they truly need to re-energize with quiet down time.

Whereas the person who is high on action orientation, when they come home from work they are still ready to go and maybe they want to go out to dinner and maybe they want to go to a social event or they have got another sporting event or something they are doing after their workday is over. So, its important to understand this value and that the person who is low on action orientation is not better or worse, its not right or wrong, its just different than the person who is high on action orientation.

The person who is high on action orientation might look at the person who is low on action orientation and think of them, They are lazy, they are slothful. But thats not necessarily so at all. It really can be that this person just recharges, gets their energy back in a very different way and they have to. Its the way they are hard wired, where the person who is high on action orientation, frankly, will be drained of energy if they are just sitting around wedging out.

It is hard for someone who is low on action orientation, who needs that quiet down time to re-energize, to understand that the person thats high on action orientation is truly going to be drained if they have to sit around for four hours, five hours on a beach and just read a book.

Its hard for a person who is high on action orientation to understand that that partner who low on action orientation absolutely, positively, physically needs the quiet down time.

So, vacations, weekends, holidays can be absolute nightmares for the two people who are opposites on this if they dont truly understand that the other person is different and appreciate and value the differences in their partner.