Episode 18: 5 Powerful Practices to Improve Any Relationship
Hello and Welcome to The Love Your Life Podcast, Episode 18 -
5 Powerful Practices to Improve Any Relationship.
I had a fun opportunity this past week to be interviewed for an episode on the Love and Confidence Podcast by Laerke Nielsen, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-love-confidence-podcast/id1662409219
I am in episode 115 that comes out on February 20th, The Secrets to Long-lasting Love. It was a fun conversation about some best practices that go into lifelong relationships. She even got me to share an interesting story about when my husband broke up with me after we had dated a few months. Spoiler alert: he came back! Laerke discusses all things love, dating, and confidence weekly and is a fantastic coach. If you want to grow your thinking around your personal confidence and/or your confidence in your dating life, she is a great resource. I’m putting the link to her show in the notes for this episode.
Our conversation reminded me how much I enjoy coaching on relationships, and since this episode is coming out on Valentine’s day, I wanted to give you my top 5 tips that increase love in any relationship and that you are absolutely in control of.
1- Know yourself.
No one is going to know you better than you are going to know yourself because humans can’t read minds. It’s up to each of us to figure out the things we like and don’t like and then to speak up for it. When you figure out your own likes, dislikes, needs, and wants you will be better able to find someone who fits you. The best relationships have the same want matches in life. Don’t default to matching up with things you don’t want. That is a lower level of interaction. You deserve
If you have gotten in the habit of ignoring your own needs, or judging yourself for having them, you are at risk of waking up some day in a world of things you don’t like.
It is always worth the effort to figure out what it is you want for your life. Knowing who you are already, helps you map out what it will take to get you to where you want to go. It also helps you sort out who you want beside you as you go.
2- Be Responsible.
When you know what you want in your life, don’t sluff off the responsibility of getting it to someone else. Human minds are prone to looking for someone to come and save us or fix things for us. Brains don’t like to be uncomfortable. They would rather be safe and certain.
In relationships, when we wait for our partner to do things so that we can be happy, we end up in emotionally immature loops. We begin to focus on what they are doing or not doing, and try to get them to do things just right so that we can be happy. When the focus is on changing them, we will inevitably end up disappointed because we don’t have the power to control others. But we do have the amazing power to control ourselves.
Being responsible for our own feelings, needs, and desires lifts a burden off of our partners and frees them up to love us right where we are instead of giving them the job to fix things for us.
If your brain notices that you would like something - then it has notified you that you are just the person to make that something happen.
3- Be curious-
Curiosity is a super power we can bring to all areas of life, but it is extra awesome in our relationships. When we are curious, dopamine is released in our brain as a form of anticipated reward. Not only does dopamine feel great, but when applied to dating and relationships it also makes us more interesting and attractive.
Curiosity is a signal to others that we are open and interested in them, which helps them feel safe. It is like they can see our vulnerability of openness and meet us with their own vulnerability.
Curiosity also signals to others that you can manage your own feelings and even handle theirs. When you are curious you are letting others know that they are worth your time, even and especially when they are different from you.
Have you ever been around people and noticed that they didn’t ask one question about you? It can come off as arrogant when people don’t show interest in others, but I find that frequently when someone shows little curiosity in others it is more often that they are telling us that they are not very confident in themselves. They don’t trust themselves to know what to do with the unknown information you might present to them if they ask too many questions about you, or they might suffer from comparing themselves to others and therefore don’t like to find out much about people around them as a way to protect themselves.
Lack of curiosity in others and the world around you can become a bad habit that keeps you stuck in life. If you want to progress in any area of your life, start getting curious and the world will open up to you.
One great thing about curiosity is that it is pretty easy to practice getting better at it. If it is not natural for you, you can decide ahead of time that you are going to ask questions about the people you spend time with? Set a goal to ask two questions about the next person you interact with and train yourself to lead out like this. Before you know it, curiosity will be a habit that helps you and those around you feel more loved and connected.
4- Be forgiving.
We can’t control the people in our lives or the circumstances of our lives, but we can control how we react to them.
One of the best practices to have in healthy close relationships is forgiveness.
There is an art to forgiving. To forgive others we have to be aware of the thoughts we are thinking that lean towards condemnation or judgment. You won’t be able to feel true forgiveness until you pull away from those thoughts and get a little curious about why someone would do the thing that hurts you.
It also takes some work to understand within yourself why it hurts. Oftentimes the hurt we feel from others comes from previous things we haven’t cleaned up, but we put that old pain onto a person who is right here in front of us. It’s not really fair to give them the past baggage, and it doesn’t help you relieve yourself from the old pain when you bring it into the present without being aware of it.
In a way, when we practice forgiveness in the present, we start to teach ourselves how to let go of past wounds also. An additional bonus that I see all the time is that when we learn to forgive the people in our inner circles, we also get better at forgiving ourselves. The pattern of forgiving or not forgiving is always always connected to how we talk to and forgive ourselves. So it’s winning all around when we practice it in our relationships with others.
5- Look for the Good -
Last week I taught you that your brain is a magnet and the thoughts you think tell it what to attract. If I could help the people I love do one thing, it would be to help them remember that they are going to see what they look for. If you are looking for the things that are wrong and not working you will find them. And while you see the negatives you will not see the positives at the same time. It just doesn’t work like that.
When I was newly into the coaching phase of my life, I had a daughter in highschool. Her room was always messy, no matter what I tried to do to motivate her, it didn’t help. She is a person who does things brilliantly, but she does them on her own timeline. She has been teaching me this since she was a small child, but at this particular time I was riding the wave of being worried that she wasn’t doing all the things she needed to do to be prepared for her future, and that she was falling behind, and her room was a mess. Did I mention that part?
Well you might be able to see that I was magnetizing my thoughts by noticing the mess and all the things I was worried about not doing “right”. She finally got fed up with my negativity, and said, “Mom, the way you are acting, you would think I am on drugs and failing out of school. But I have a 4.0, I have two jobs, I am on a varsity sports team and a club team, I go to church, I am saving for college, and if I get any spare time, I stay home and read. What do you want from me?”
And her words hit me like a dagger. What more could I ask of her? A clean room paled in comparison to all the things she was carrying on her young shoulders, and all the things she was doing right. I went to my room and cried. I had stopped seeing the brilliance in my beautiful shiny girl because I had let an unmanaged mind focus on something that was temporary, and didn’t really matter. Not only did I see it, I was talking about the temporary things so much that I was starting to invite her to see herself that way too. Thank goodness that she was able to use her words to protect herself from my barrage of negativity, because I needed that reminder. I needed to see the good.
These principles, that coaching has given a voice to, have given me so much opportunity to see the things in my life that I am responsible for, accept that I am creating the results I do, ask for forgiveness for the negative results I don’t like, and then give me the way forward towards growth and change. The change has been towards something that is so much better for me and for the people I love.
I would go on to become a mother who started doing laundry for a highschooler, cleaned her room consistently, and spoke love into every hoodie I folded and dirty sock I lifted from the ground. I pray that my apology was received in time to not damage my relationship with this incredible girl, and that I will be a better mother for it going forward. Thanks to her, I became a mother who practiced seeing the good. I am not perfect at it today, but I find that I am able to course correct faster than I used to. I am definitely more sensitive to the negative thinking when I trip into it with all of the practice I have done.
These 5 skills we have discussed today will improve romantic love in your life, so yay for valentine’s day! Ha- but as you can glean from this last story, they will increase the peace, connection, and love in all of your relationships.
I am sincere when I say to you that you will love your life more today than you did yesterday if you are willing to lean into your relationships with more personal awareness, responsibility, curiosity, forgiveness, and positivity than your human brain does naturally when left on auto pilot.
If you have enjoyed thinking about relationships today, consider this:
Love is like chocolate—way better when shared! 🍫💖 If this episode made you smile, gave you a fresh perspective, or reminded you of someone special, don’t keep it to yourself! Send it to a friend, share it on social media, or leave a little love in a review. The more we spread love, the sweeter life gets! Happy Valentine’s Day, Now go share the love! And I’ll talk to you soon.
