You'll know many relationship seasons, ups and downs, until you're coached in effective relationship mindsets and skills. Then, bliss follows.
Every relationship has its springtime; then winter rolls around. Winter can come in a few days, a few weeks, or a few months but, with rare exception, it sure does come.
This may seem to happen for a variety of reasons – everyone has a story about why a given relationship didn’t work out – and we tend to buy into these stories. There is, however, a bigger truth at work than these narratives.
In reality, winter in relationships happens for one big reason: Very few people are trained in relationship skills. Worse, most of us deal with conflicts and tensions in relationships by relying on coping mechanisms and patterns learned in childhood and teenage years – and in most cases these patterns are actually disruptive of relationships, when not absolutely destructive of them.
This is easily remedied by two things. One is professional Life and Couples coaching. The other is an absolute willingness on your part to become a student of effective relationship skills and of the healthy way to understand and approach relationship that a coach like myself will impart to you.
It doesn’t matter the current stage or pattern of your relationships. You can be at the early dating stage, you can have experienced a lot of failed short term relationships or affairs, you can be with someone for months or years. What matters is this: If you want to have a great relationship that endures past the early romantic, sexual phase, you need to learn modern relationship skills in order to gain and keep real closeness to one another.
This learning doesn’t come automatically– it can take tens of years of trial and error and ups and downs in relationships to figure it out – and that’s why Life and Couples coaching is booming. Why takes a trillion years to accomplish a state of partnership satisfaction when, given modern research and knowledge, you can learn your way into a great relationship in a few weeks to a few months, depending on how actively you apply yourself?
First, you must learn an alternative to blaming your partner or yourself. You must be accountable for your actions and get out of “the blame game.” Blaming others doesn’t solve anything. Instead, it is important to understand why you and your partner feel and behave the way you do when challenges arise- and then learn how to resolve problems in a mature manner.
Second, arguments and disagreements can actually be resolved after you have been taught some superb and easily-learned methods to deal with them. Simply learning the techniques for creating agreement and closeness provides so much confidence that it is much easier when a challenge arises for you not to go into reaction and to take a moment instead to think about the situation rather than say or do something that will make matters worse.
Third, keeping agreements is still another core principle. Better to go back and renegotiate even the simplest agreement – “I will wash the dishes tonight” – than break trust.
Fourth, open communications are essential to prevent each person wondering what’s happening with her or his partner – a gap most of us tend to fill with projections, worries and fantasies.
While there is considerably more than these four principles to learn, a smart basic way to approach working with a Life and Couples coach is to start by accepting the realworld truth – which is that most relationship difficulties, from the early dating
stage on, are caused by the tension and misunderstanding created by two people who simply don’t know (because they haven’t yet been taught) how to make the other person feel safe EVEN while retaining their own autonomy.
Life and Couples Coaching can teach you that and much more. It can take you way past resentments and tensions. It can help you and your partner get out of your own ways and each other’s way so that you are each relating from a place of authentic self and tremendous acceptance.
It can, in fact, get you to an exquisite state of existence of a sort you may only have had hints of in your life.
It does this by showing you what needs to be changed and how to make those needed changes almost painlessly.
We all sometimes need good teachers and good guidance to take us past the “flaws” we think we and our partners have that show up in relationships. A skilled Life and Couples coach can be the ideal person to turn to in times of turmoil, because that’s how you can discover that such flaws almost always result only from everyone’s backwards original education in the most crucial of human experiences – in how we are to relate to each other.
By contrast, a Life and Couples coach like myself can teach you truly effective, very neat and satisfying relating skills. For most people, the sooner you learn, the sooner your relationship and life can improve.
For more info: http://www.relationshipcounselingtoday.com/
There are three internal elements of yourself that determine whether your relationship and life is satisfactory or not and whether you are stressed and unhappy or not. One is how often – and to what degree – you either feel negative emotions or bottle up the ones you don’t know how to express safely. Because of lack of training in just exactly what to do with negative emotions, for many people a good day is one in which neither stress, anxiety, worry, anger, resentment, frustration, sadness, depression, grief or sheer numbness are dominant.
In other words, for most people to feel really good most of the day and enjoy a great range of subtle pleasant emotions is the exception, not the rule. The general rule is: “Hey, it’s great when I feel some joy breaking in to my usual stress, unpleasantness, or bottled up numbness.”
Elements two and three involve the mind. Element two is the mind chattering to you all the time, constantly trying to figure it all out and wondering whether this or that will work for you, or how this or that person is going to respond to you, and commenting on and concerning itself with everything.
In most modern societies we develop this chatter in childhood as a response to needs of ours that otherwise are not being met – and most of us go to the grave with our minds chattering away and believing that this is the way of all humankind, not realizing how much such unnecessary and changeable “mentalizing” obscures our intuitive wisdom and knowingness while robbing us of peace of mind.
Element three is the critical part of the mind that watches your own and everyone else’s every move and is perfectly happy to find fault with others as well as yourself. At its worst this inner voice of judgment robs us of self-confidence and self-esteem while doing real damage to our relationships and to friendships and family members- and often enough to our careers.
The good news is there are absolutely superb tools available via which you can dramatically alleviate all three of these elements. There are skills and techniques you can learn that allow you to master your emotional body so that you can alter negative feelings almost immediately and heal the profoundest of traumas.
Learn these skills and you don’t need a therapist.
There are also skills by which you can gradually end the mind chatter and master the critic, so that your mind is free to perform in a remarkable manner you have rarely experienced. These are techniques developed over the last 40 years which have a solid scientific foundation and were simply not available to your ancestors, and probably not even to your parents.
It is these and additional skills for dealing with other aspects of life – including finances, career, family and relationships – that a good Life Coach brings to the table. In fact, a healthy way to define a Life Coach is a teacher or tutor guiding you to a post-graduate level of doing life well, rather than the grade school or lower level many people are educated to.
Another way to look at it is that the goal of Life Coaches like myself is to teach you to be so skilled in dealing with your challenges that you become your own life coach and therapist. Then, as you share your learning with friends and family, you become a source of helping other people’s lives improve.
In short, it’s a big win all around. I’m happy to help you get started.
For more info: www.jaylevin.com