Forming Strong Partnerships With Your Cats
Tags: Cats, Satire, Collaboration, Partnerships, Leadership

Cats are not people and people are not cats (surprisingly, most people don’t realize this). While you and your cat may never completely understand each other, we all know that forming strong partnerships with cats is critical for success in every industry. Every single one. You and your cats must work together and leverage each other’s unique skills and perspectives in order to achieve your shared goals and make the world a better place.

A strong partnership is efficient and productive. When cats and people work well together, information flows freely, innovation is ripe, success is sustainable, and delightful GIFs are created. When partnerships are broken, mutual distrust can let fear and hostility control your relationship and you sleep with one eye open to avoid being suffocated by your cat in the middle of the night.

Cats have a reputation for being selfish, poor communicators, vindictive, spiteful, manipulative, disloyal, unsympathetic, territorial, arrogant, evil murderers. So how do you form strong partnerships with these enigmatic fuzz balls? You’ll need to let go of your preconceptions about other cats and focus on three things with your own individual cat: a foundation of trust and respect, empathy, and communication.

Build a foundation of trust and respect

To build this foundation, you first have to find the common ground that both you and your cat stand on. Usually this is the living room floor, or sometimes the kitchen floor. This common ground is where your shared values are. At the root of what your cat wants (food), and what you want (snuggles and lols), is something you both want (to be happy). Recognize that you both want the same thing but may have different ideas about what it means and how to get it. Then demonstrate to your cat that you understand and respect their values with your actions and words. Not your values, their values. Find out what your cat values and respect the shit out of it. You think your cat wants to be awkwardly held while dancing around the living room? No, that’s what you want. But you both value physical contact to strengthen your bond. So sit your ass down on the couch and let your cat enjoy some warm snuggles on your lap.

As you build your relationship, it’s important to focus on behaviors that build trust and avoid those that erode it. Does the following scenario sound familiar to you? You and your cat are relaxing after a long day of hard work. Your cat tucks in her chin, stretches her forepaws and rolls over, exposing that soft silky sanctuary, the irresistible oasis of fuzz. You go in for a belly rub and in an instant you feel like you’ve just reached into a bucket of barbed wire. You’re thinking what the hell, I trusted you! And so is your cat. What you thought was an invitation to partake in nature’s forbidden fluff, your cat meant as a display of ultimate trust: I’m going to show you my belly because I trust that I can be vulnerable around you and you won’t try to hurt me. And then you basically tried to grab her gut. When your actions don’t match another’s expectations, trust is eroded no matter what your intentions were. Own your actions and their impact and apologize to your cat for touching her no-no zone to start building back that lost trust.

Linus seems to trust me a lot given how frequently he exposes his forbidden fluff.

Empathize with your cat

A key ingredient to building trust is empathy. Empathy is a word that gets thrown around a lot on the internet. So what does it mean to empathize with your cat? It means you should try to not just see, but really feel the world from your cat’s point of view. This is actually impossible because we have entirely different perceptual systems, but the point is to try anyway. Just because you can’t see the world 100% from another cat’s point of view doesn’t absolve you from making an effort to understand them. Empathy is not all-or-nothing.

Take for example your cat’s annoying habit of meowing for food early in the morning. It’s understandable that at 4 a.m. this behavior makes you feel like throwing your cat in the garbage (don’t do that). But think about how your cat might feel. Hungry. Starving! He literally thinks he is dying and has no control over when food is coming. All he knows is that meowing eventually = food. Empathy takes work and you won’t always get it right. But when you make an effort to feel what someone else feels, you might see things from their perspective. By recognizing and validating how they feel — “Sargent Whiskers, I can see that you’re hungry and I will feed you in two hours when the sun rises, now please go away so I can get more sleep and be a nicer person today” — you are letting your cat feel heard, even when he can’t get what he wants. This builds mutual trust and moves your relationship in a more positive direction. CatProTip: train your cat to be fed at the same time every day with an alarm, and your cat will become less anxious about when food is coming and might stop meowing as if he hasn’t eaten in one hundred days.

Just because you can’t see the world 100% from another cat’s point of view doesn’t absolve you from making an effort to understand them.

Communicate openly

Strong partnerships need frequent and open communication. The first part is talking to your cat out loud. Whether or not you use a baby voice is up to you, but know that the higher pitched your voice is and the more often you sing Beatles songs with the name of your cat inserted into the lyrics*, the less respect your cat will have for you, and the less respect you will eventually have for yourself.

*I have absolutely never done this

When you communicate openly, you and your cats reduce misunderstandings that result from missed expectations. If your cat is sharpening her claws on your new couch, ask yourself: did I ever sit down and have a 1:1 with my cat to talk to her about the negative impact that sharpening her claws has on the aesthetics of my couch? Did I ensure that she understands the trade-offs and provide her with alternative options for scratching?

The other part is listening and observing so that communication can go both ways. Your cats are communicating constantly with their ears, tail, and posture, and if you give them time and attention you will learn to read their emotions efficiently and automatically. The more time you spend together outside of the meeting room, whether it’s going for a walk or playing with their favorite feather toy, the more opportunities you have to learn each other’s nonverbal cues.

This nonverbal cue, commonly known as “airplane ears,” is Linus’ way of saying to go fuck myself.

If you’ve put in a lot of time and effort into each of these areas, and your cat still sharpens their claws on your mid-century modern tufted chaise lounge, well some cats are just jerks and you’ll need a few different strategies and skills to work with them. But I’ll save those for my next article on working with difficult cats.