I am delighted to have Laura Heck here with us today.

Laura is a licensed marriage and family

therapist in private practice.

She recently served in a leadership role at the Gottman

Institute as the Director of Professional Development.

Together with the Gottman Institute clinical director,

Laura co-developed the Gottman Seven Principles Program

and is also the author of the "Seven Principles Companion

Workbook," a tool for couples to use in conjunction

with the "Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work"

book by Dr. John Gottman.

Laura is a master trainer for the program which

has trained thousands of people to offer the Seven Principles

Program in their communities across six continents.

Laura resides in Salt Lake City with her beloved

and very patient husband.

And they have a one-year-old son.

Welcome, Laura.

LAURA HECK: Thank you.

So what Alison didn't say is that I'm also

the godmother to her child.

So we know each other very well.

She is my BFF.

So I'm here.

I've given, sort of, about an hour.

And what I'd really like to do is just share with you

the CliffNotes version of the "Seven Principles

for Making Marriage Work."

I'm just curious, by kind of a show of hands or a nod

or a wink, how many of you have either

heard of Dr. John Gottman or are familiar with the "Seven

Principles" book?

OK.

How many of you have actually seen him live,

seen him present live?

OK.

I am not going to be as charismatic or funny

or brilliant as John Gottman, but I will certainly

try to give you as much information in as short

a period of time as possible.

So as Alison had mentioned, the reason

why I'm here and speaking on the Seven Principles

is that I have had the pleasure of co-developing the Seven

Principles Program, which is really a training

program for training professionals

all around the world to work with couples using this

as their main criteria, their main curriculum.

And so I know the Seven Principles inside and out.

And I just taught the class yesterday

here in Seattle, Washington.

And I think the next place I go is Chicago.

And then it just kind of continues on from there.

As far as questions, I think maybe

what would be helpful is if you have a question about something

that we're covering, if I notice, just as far as time

goes, that I have some time to take some questions,

I'll ask for you to come up to the mic.

And I might be able to take a few.

And if I don't get to it, hold on to your questions.

Hopefully you can remember it.

And then I'm hoping that we can cover all of them.

OK?

OK.

So this book has actually been in print since 1999.

And it just recently rolled over the $1 million mark.

Not million dollars, but 1 million copies sold.

And there was a rewrite that was done on this just one year ago.

And it has been translated into 20 different languages.

The reason why this book is so important

is that Dr. Gottman has been studying couples for 40 years.

He's studied over 3,000 couples.

And over those 40 years, he has been

able to distill down as much information

as possible into seven principles which I'm hoping

I'm able to get through all seven for you

so that you can go home in whatever relationship you have,

and you can begin to apply some of these principles

for making relationships work.

The nice part about Dr. Gottman's principles

is that it's not just about intimate relationships,

although those are the ones that he was studying.

You can directly apply a lot of these principles

to coworker relationships, to the relationships

with your children, to the relationships

with your parents.

Any relationship that you have.

Because it's really about how to communicate in a way

that is truly hearing your partner.

It's about being able to work through problem-solving

and how to have a meaningful connection with another person.

OK.

So what I'd like to start out by doing

is to just give you a brief synopsis

as far as Dr. Gottman's research and how

he came to come about all of this information.

So Dr. Gottman originally started out

as a mathematics major at MIT.

And he was actually young when he started.

But he had a roommate.

And this roommate was studying psychology.

And I don't know how many of you enjoy psychology,

but John was looking at his math books

and had decided that whatever his roommate was studying

was more fun than what he was studying, which I don't blame.

So he promptly finished up his mathematics degree

and then went in to become a psychologist.

So not only does he have this firm foundation in numbers,

he became a researcher, but he also

has this firm foundation in psychology.

So we have this amazing combination in this math wizard

that was interested in relationships

but could also study really, really well

and definitively defining what it is that relationships,

makes them work.

So Dr. Gottman went from MIT, and then he went over

to the University of Indiana.

And he started working with his best friend, Bob Levinson.

So Dr. Gottman says at the time that his relationships were not

going so hot at the time.

And Bob Levinson and him were interested in

good relationships with women.

But at the time, Bob said, we can either

research good relationships or we can have them.

And right now, we're researchers.

So the two of them set out to discover in,

I think he would say somewhat of a selfish way, what is it that

makes good relationships work.

And they wanted to study relationships

in a way that had never been done before.

It's very difficult to predict behavior in one person.

But Dr. Gottman wanted to predict behavior

with two people.

So they would bring couples in to a laboratory setting

and within eight hours of the couple being apart,

he would have the two of them sit side by side.

And they would hook them up to monitors

that would study how fast their hearts were

beating at the time.

They would see how much they were sweating by testing

the palms of their hands.

They had monitors underneath the chairs that would measure

how much they would fidget.

They were called jiggle-ometers.

And then he would just ask for these couples,

I simply want for you to just catch up.

Tell me about your day.

What have you been doing?

So couples would turn to one another

and they would start talking about sort

of the mundane things about their day.

Meanwhile, researchers were coding

their facial expressions.

They had cameras that were recording them.

And back in the day, in the '70s,

how large was the computer back in the '70s, right?

Size of a refrigerator.

All that computer was intended to do

was to take the physiological data that

was going on with these couples and timecode it.

And then he would ask for couples to switch over.

I want you to just choose a topic.

Something that the two of you haven't

been able to agree upon.

And I just want you to try to solve the problem.

Have this conflict conversation while we are watching you.

So couples start to pick a problem.

Maybe they're talking about the mother-in-law,

maybe they're talking about laundry.

What are things that get underneath your skin?

And they recorded the data.

So they had these two snippets of time.

Happy conversation, not so happy conversation.

Then they sent the couples away.

All they were looking for were patterns.

They really didn't have a hypothesis

at the time of what they were looking for,

but they were looking for patterns a lot

like early day astronomers that were looking at the stars.

Simply looking for something to stick out to them.

That was about 35 years ago.

25 years ago, he goes from the University of Indiana,

now he's at the University of Washington.

And he opens up what he calls the Love Lab.

The BBC had sort of called it the Love Lab.

But what he wanted to do was he wanted

to see if couples were in a natural environment for 24

hours, what would I see.

What would stick out?

What patterns would arise?

So he made this one bedroom studio apartment as comfortable

as possible on the University of Washington's campus.

It overlooked the Montlake Cut, so you could

see the boats floating by.

It was a beautiful setting.

And he would say from Sunday at 8 o'clock in the morning

until Monday morning at 8 o'clock in the morning,

I want you to just come and hang out.

We will not prompt you.

We're not going to give you anything to do.

We just simply want to watch and observe you.

But we want this to be, like, really comfortable for you.

We want you to feel as if you're in a bed and breakfast.

We want this to be as natural as possible.

So couples would bring their creature comforts.

They would bring groceries, they would bring newspapers,

they would bring puzzles and games.

Anything they could do for 24 hours.

So in this bed and breakfast-like setting,

couples would hang out.

Again, they're wearing the monitor

so that they could see how fast their heart was beating.

Any time that they urinated, they would take urine samples.

They had a one-way mirror where researchers

would be back behind coding their facial expressions.

And when everything was said and done,

they would go right next door, and they

would have their blood drawn.

But Dr. Gottman assures us that it was very relaxing

for couples and it was a lot like a bed and breakfast.

So then he would send these couples home.

But it was a longitudinal study.

So meanwhile, he's collecting all of this data,

and he's starting to look for patterns.

The only way that you can look for patterns

is if you have this longitudinal data.

Where do these couples end up?

What do we know about these couples?

So he had 147 newlywed couples.

And then he checked back in with those newlywed couples.

Of those newlywed couples, 17 of them ended up divorcing.

What were the patterns?

How do we know what is distinct and different about the 130

couples that stayed together and what

is distinct and different about the 17 couples that

ended up divorcing?

So remember when I said that he was very interested in being

able to predict behavior.

So it's hard to predict behavior for two people.

Even more difficult than one person.

He was able to predict 15 out of 17 of those couples.

So he said those, those, those, those, those, those, those.

And when he checked back in with the couples, 15 out of 17.

So with 90% and above accuracy, that those couples

would end up divorcing.

And he repeated this study seven times