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Work, kids and all the other activities we participate in, means there’s not much time left over. When everything seems so important, we sometimes put focusing on our relationship at the bottom of our list.
Some couples think relationships are supposed to be easy. Not true! We must find the things that connect us and keep working on them. A relationship takes time and care to thrive. It’s easy to take our most important relationships for granted and put them on the back burner. Don’t let this happen to you! Use research to determine how to strengthen your bonds without much guesswork. Agreeing on relationship vision, managing disagreements with respect and creating connection are three of the most important things to keep this game going strong. Do you and your partner know what you want your relationship to look like? Once you agree on the most important values, hopes, dreams, etc. it’s easier to make a plan. Know how realistic your vision is and remember, IT WILL BE A CHALLENGE! The most important things in changing your relationship (or anything) are consistency and persistence. All relationships will have conflict and 99% of all conflict can be resolved with negotiation. Don’t let your conflicts become overwhelming. You both must accept each other for who you are and set non-negotiable differences. (My suggestion is don’t make it a non-negotiable unless it’s, well, non-negotiable!) It’s important to keep in mind that tolerance and respect is important as well. Learn to forgive yourself and your partner. But also know what you’re not ok with. Those are boundaries we need to maintain. When things get tense, we might not handle ourselves well. So, learning to manage your emotions is an important part of negotiation. Most couples have the same argument (different versions), over and over again. Don’t think that you must resolve all arguments because research shows us happy couples have “perpetual arguments.” Some won’t ever be resolved. Know the ones that are important and focus on those. Learn to listen to your partner’s viewpoint, be respectful even if you disagree and try to understand why it’s important to them. Being comfortable being uncomfortable is a skill to learn. Establish and practice rituals of connection. Do “couples” things to strengthen your identity as a couple. Take time to learn about each other on a regular basis. Go and share adventures together. Spend time periodically refreshing your couple’s vision. Remember, your relationship is a living, breathing thing and it depends on you to nurture it so it can grow! Have a great day lovelies! Allison
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Is there such a thing as caring too much? All the world needs is a little more love, a little more caring about each other, right?
While this rings true to most of us, you’ve probably wondered, is it possible I care too much? In this world, balance exists in all things, gentle and sweet/ violent and chaotic. You might expect there’s a situation where someone might care too much. To quote philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.” Caring for others gives us the greatest cause for gladness and distress. Emotional stress is a sign that we may be in this state of too much caring. Our best judgment comes when we have just the right measure of caring and detachment. Too emotionally attached, we lose objectivity. This causes us to make irrational decisions. What are the signs that we care too much? We feel emotionally upset by what is going on. Feelings are going to happen, but we don’t have to act on every feeling we have. I’ve been married almost 25 years. I have been very upset at my husband MANY times. As a counselor, this scenario plays out for me in my office several times a week. One of a couple, for their own reasons, does something their partner feels is detrimental. They may feel very strongly about it and express it. Once voices are raised, rationality has left the building!! Strong feelings give us an opportunity for self examination. What underlies these feelings? Are you afraid for your partner’s safety? Is your attachment bond being jangled? Are you feeling neglected by your spouse? Teasing out these feelings and exposing them to the bright light of day often reduces their impact. If you’re forcing a thing, this might also be a sign that you’re caring too much. At times, we see what we think is the most direct or best route to an end, and we try to force the “how” of achieving it. The more you push, the less “flow” can occur. Who can argue that the universe has a serendipitous way of easily making things happen? Often in spite of our so called assistance! Examine yourself. If you have areas in your life where you feel you are caring too much, give yourself space to take a step back. What are the thoughts and fears pushing you? Look around. Aren’t there an infinite number of other possibilities? Now, I don't really want you to care less. I do want you to cling less to what your fear tells you to do. Taking responsibility for your behavior in the face of your fears is the anecdote to that powerless feeling we get from caring too much. Don’t let your fear have a seat at the table. It makes you grab on just when you should be letting go. If you want to go deeper, sign up for my self coaching course here. It’s a great step to creating a relationship you love! Caring just the right amount, Allison xo  Outcomes are goals that we strive for. As a culture, we are pretty addicted to meeting goals. We’re taught how to set goals that are SMART. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Limited).
Which is great if you actually could set a goal like that! Believe me, when I worked with an agency, there was like 1 person out a 100 who could actually set a goal that the auditors thought was SMART. In your relationship, what’s your goal? Is it to fight less? Not fight at all? Is it to be “in love” again? A lot of times, I have people say, “I want us to get back to where we used to be.” Those are all pretty big goals. What happens when a goal seems out of reach? When we look at it and it seems impossible. Fighting less might seem like a great goal, but what are the steps it takes to get there? Do you know the steps? If you knew and could do the steps, wouldn’t you have already done them? When we start doing these little steps, we get frustrated because we feel we should be at the goal already. We feel shame and blame we’re not meeting what we see as our desired outcome. We also fail sometimes. I can’t tell you how many couples are making good progress and they slip and have a huge row and they feel like they’ve lost all the progress they’ve made. All that can make us give up and stop going for it. It seems like an exercise in futility, it’s too difficult, or we just aren’t capable of doing it. Well, I’d like to reassure you. When the end game seems impossible, it’s time to focus on the process, not the outcome. Using a football analogy here: If your desired outcome is to win the Super Bowl, but your team has not learned to run a play yet, you better focus on running the play! Not only do you need to learn to run the play but you need to become great at it! You are going to run that play over and over until it’s second nature. You’re going to know that play inside and out. At first, the play is going to be awkward. At first, the whole team isn’t going to be good at it. There’s going to be a lot of failures in making the play. But eventually, your team runs a great play! They win a game, then another and before you know it you’re a Super Bowl contender. That outcome that seemed so impossible is now within reach. But only after you’ve mastered the process. There have been times in my relationship when I’ve felt happiness wasn’t possible. I didn’t think it’d ever happen again. That seemed like an outcome that was too much to hope for. Turning that around took a focus on the process. The processes of a happy relationship, (I call the pillars) are compassion, communication and commitment. Making the little decisions every day that align with these qualities is what got me closer to the end goal. I had to be kind when I didn’t want to be. I had to decide to stay just one more day when it would have felt great to walk out. Talking about things that made me vulnerable created intimacy little by little. I focused on the process because I didn’t know how to get to the outcome I wanted. I was so far away from it, I needed a telescope. By paying attention to the process, I moved closer and closer, with consistency and persistence, until I could see happiness on the horizon. I tried to stay focused on my own behaviors, not my partners. By continuing on, we’ve found our way to a place of happiness I don’t think we ever imagined. We’ve now passed our 20th anniversary and we enjoy each other more now than we ever did. Do we still disagree? Yes. Do we still annoy each other? Yes. We fail all the time. But we focus on the process. Practice time: What is your desired outcome? What processes do you need to get there? It’s the little things you practice every day that lead you to winning. What is one process you can commit to today? Consistency and persistence are mandatory! Let me know what you decided. Comment below, I’d love to hear from you! Cheers to the process! Allison PS-Did you know I have a Self Coaching Program? It's available here.  There’s a saying that if you don’t care where you’re going any road will take you there.
You want to be deliberate about the road you’re travelling. In order to make lasting change, you have to set a goal. Setting a goal will help you Win Your Relationship Game, but there’s some planning to do first. Winning Your Relationship Game has a lot to do with habits and behavior change. Many of the lessons are based in research that’s proven to support positive relationships and behavior change. You aren’t going to rely on will power. Anyone who’s had to try to diet knows that will power is very unreliable. You’re going to set goals that allow you to capitalize on motivation. Your initial goal, I like to call a personal motivation statement. This is where you’d ultimately like to end up. Take just a minute and focus on what change you’d like to see in your relationship. What is it you’re hoping to improve? Now, go back and look at it again. Does it focus on changing something about your partner? You can’t change anyone’s behavior except your own, so if you thought about something your partner needs to change, think again!! This is the beginning of your personal motivation statement. Right now it can be fairly broad. As you go on, it will change, you’ll gain insight and tweak it to fit. Remember, this is the foundation for moving forward so it’s worth some thought. Having a Personal Motivation Statement is good, but to really ramp up your motivation, you have to know why that Personal Motivation Statement is important. You might be able to tell that I like to play games whenever I can. It makes life more fun. To clarify a Personal Motivation Statement I like to use a game called “The Five Whys”. The five whys are actually business concepts used to do what’s called root cause analysis. It’s also a really useful tool to help you dig deeper into your thoughts and feelings. Refer back to your personal motivation statement. You’re going to ask yourself WHY it’s important to you. You’ll get your answer and then you’ll ask again WHY that is important to you. Then you’ll have another answer and you’ll ask WHY that is important? You’ll continue to do this for five cycles. Don’t rush through this. If you are persistent, it will lead to a very clear idea of the value of your personal motivation statement To give an example: My Personal Motivation Statement might be: I want to feel closer to my partner. 1. Why is it important to feel closer to my partner? Because closeness feels good. 2. Why is it important to have the good feeling of being close? Because I feel more secure when I’m feeling close. 3. Why is it important to feel more secure? Because feeling more secure reduces my anxiety about belonging in my relationship. 4. Why is it important to have reduced anxiety about belonging? Because then I can be relaxed and really be myself. 5. Why is it important to feel more relaxed and be myself? Because then I feel have a stable foundation for all the other areas of my life. Just walking through this exercise reveals something deeper about of what is important to me. I know exactly why it’s important for me to be closer to my partner. It’s going to put me on the road of changing the right behaviors creating more closeness with my partner. That’s the basics of setting a Personal Motivation Statement about your relationship. Having a Personal Motivation Statement to focus on is a habit you can start today. It can be revised as needed, but every day, you want that statement front and center in your awareness. I want you to find such value in focusing on that statement so that by this by the time this program is over, you’ll continue to use it to motivate you to your goals. The recap:
Practice time: Take all the time you need to work through this. It should take you a while and it might be frustrating. Don’t rush it. If you have an answer that just doesn’t seem right, sit with it. Trust yourself. We all have a deep inner knowing, so when it’s your truth, you’ll know. If you get stuck, send me an email at [email protected] . I would love to hear from you! In the meantime, sign up for my email list and I’ll share some great relationship tips with you! Sign Up HERE! |
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