7 Ways To Improve Your Relationship

Good relationships don just happen. Ie heard many of my clients state that, f I have to work at it, then it not the right relationship.?This is not a true statement, any more than it true that you don have to work at good physical health through exercise, eating well, and stress reduction.

Ie discovered, in the 35 years that Ie been counseling couples, 7 choices you can make that will not only improve your relationship, but can turn a failing relationship into a successful one.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF

This is the most important choice you can make to improve your relationship. This means that you learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings and needs. This means that instead of trying to get your partner to make you feel happy and secure, you learn how to do this for yourself through your own thoughts and actions. This means learning to treat yourself with kindness, caring, compassion, and acceptance instead of self-judgment. Self-judgment will always make you feel unhappy and insecure, no matter how wonderfully your partner is treating you.

For example, instead of getting angry at your partner for your feelings of abandonment when he or she is late, preoccupied and not listening to you, not turned on sexually, and so on, you would explore your own feelings of abandonment and discover how you might be abandoning yourself.

When you learn how to take full, 100% responsibility for yourself, then you stop blaming your partner for your upsets. Since blaming one partner for one own unhappiness is the number one cause of relationship problems, learning how to take loving care of yourself is vital to a good relationship.

KINDNESS, COMPASSION, ACCEPTANCE

Treat others the way you want to be treated. This is the essence of a truly spiritual life. We all yearn to be treated lovingly ?with kindness, compassion, understanding, and acceptance. We need to treat ourselves this way, and we need to treat our partner and others this way. Relationships flourish when both people treat each other with kindness. While there are no guarantees, often treating another with kindness brings kindness in return. If your partner is consistently angry, judgmental, uncaring and unkind, then you need to focus on what would be loving to yourself rather than reverting to anger, blame, judgment, withdrawal, resistance, or compliance. Kindness to others does not mean sacrificing yourself. Always remember that taking responsibility for yourself rather than blaming others is the most important thing you can do. If you are consistently kind to yourself and your partner, and your partner is consistently angry, blaming, withdrawn and unavailable, then you either have to accept a distant relationship, or you need to leave the relationship. You cannot make your partner change ?you can only change yourself.

LEARNING INSTEAD OF CONTROLLING

When conflict occurs, you always have two choices regarding how to handle the conflict: you can open to learning about yourself and your partner and discover the deeper issues of the conflict, or you can try to win, or at least not lose, through some form of controlling behavior. Wee all learning many overt and subtle ways of trying to control others into behaving the way we want: anger, blame, judgment, niceness, compliance, caretaking, resistance, withdrawal of love, explaining, teaching, defending, lying, denying, and so on. All the ways we try to control create even more conflict. Remembering to learn instead of control is a vital part of improving your relationship.

For example, most people have two major fears that become activated in relationships: the fear of abandonment ?of losing the other - and the fear of engulfment ?of losing oneself. When these fears get activated, most people immediately protect themselves against these fears with their controlling behavior. But if you chose to learn about your fears instead of attempt to control your partner, your fear would eventually heal. This is how we grow emotionally and spiritually ?by learning instead of controlling.

CREATE DATE TIMES

When people first fall in love, they make time for each other. Then, especially after getting married, they get busy. Relationships need time to thrive. It is vitally important to set aside specific times to be together ?to talk, play, make love. Intimacy cannot be maintained without time together.

GRATITUDE INSTEAD OF COMPLAINTS

Positive energy flows between two people when there is an ttitude of gratitude.?Constant complaints creates a heavy, negative energy, which is not fun to be around. Practice being grateful for what you have rather than focusing on what you don have. Complaints create stress, while gratitude creates inner peace, so gratitude creates not only emotional and relationship health, but physical health as well.

FUN AND PLAY

We all know that ork without play makes Jack a dull boy.?Work without play makes for dull relationships as well. Relationships flourish when people laugh together, play together, and when humor is a part of everyday life. Stop taking everything so seriously and learn to see the funny side of life. Intimacy flourishes when there is lightness of being, not when everything is heavy.

SERVICE

A wonderful way of creating intimacy is to do service projects together. Giving to others fills the heart and creates deep satisfaction in the soul. Doing service moves you out of yourself and your own problems and supports a broader, more spiritual view of life.

If you and your partner agree to these 7 choices, you will be amazed at the improvement in your relationship!

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

You Can Improve Your Relationship

It seems as if creating successful relationships with our significant others and parenting children are two of the most difficult jobs we face and yet we get no formal training in either. It as if people believe that we are born with an inherent ability to do these two things. Yet, look around us. In the US, the divorce rate is slightly over 50%! I don know anywhere but baseball where a 50% average is a good thing.

Couples go through life getting along when times are good; and fighting with, ignoring, or leaving each other when things get tough. Most people believe that to seek help with their relationships means to admit a certain kind of defeat that says something about who they are as a person. Or possibly, they believe that relationships are something we are just supposed to be able to manage on our own. Or, finally, some people believe that those out there helping couples can know any more than they do. After all, what to know about keeping relationships together?

Well, the truth is that there is a whole lot to learn when it comes to relationships. Unfortunately, the only training most of us ever receive is the passive learning we get through the modeling of the adults who live in our house with us and the media. Now, I don know about you, but my parents had only received the informal training they got from their parents, and they from my great grandparents and so on back through the generations. There is so much more to know about relationships than that!

Also, my parents have helped support that 50% statistic cited earlier in that they divorced sometime around their 25th wedding anniversary. What I learned about relationships from watching them is that couples never argue, especially in front of the children. On the surface, my parents had a very happy marriage but my father experienced a stereotypical mid-life crisis and suddenly questioned the meaning of ife?and decided marriage was holding him back somehow.

In some ways, this type of training may have been as bad as those who have parents who argue all the time. Disagreements are a natural by-product of relationships. It is virtually impossible for two people to come together and create a life without some of their ideals, values, opinions or day-to-day activities coming into conflict with each other. The question becomes how the couple manages this conflict.

There are many things to consider when speaking about couples and their challenges and areas for growth and development. The first is compatibility. I know there is an expression that says opposites attract and I believe there is some accuracy in that statement when you think of attraction as that chemical interaction that occurs when two people meet and are attracted. This chemical attraction doesn care what the other person values are, what is important to him or her, the personality characteristics involved, or what either of you likes to do in your spare time. Compatibility is a key for a successful, healthy relationship. Go to www.therelationshipcenter.biz and take the free Assessment to determine your compatibility with your partner.

A second consideration is simply that there are major differences in how men are in relationships compared to how women are. Women generally don understand men because the men don act like women and similarly, men don understand women because they don act like men. And since a woman has never been a man and a man has never been a woman, how does each learn about these important differences? John Gray researched and wrote about these issues in his book, Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus. But I would say that the majority of people in relationships don take the time to learn about these gender differences. It is easier to point a finger and blame the other person for his or her rrational?behavior.

As mentioned earlier, a third area of growth is learning how to manage conflict. There are time proven methods for resolving conflict that we don learn in school or from a book. There are ways to actually hear each other in relationships. By placing the relationship FIRST in importance, these methods can be implemented by couples to greatly improve their satisfaction.

There is so much to learn about satisfying relationships that your parents never showed you. Please don become one of the statistics of divorce or perhaps worse, stay in a miserable relationship to honor your marriage vows while having so many regrets about your life as the time ticks away.

Take charge and take control of your life. Learn some new ways to improve the relationship you are already in or to prepare yourself for being a better, improved partner for the next person in your life. Contact Kim at 708-957-6047 or email at Kim@TheRelationshipCenter.biz about relationship coaching or take one the many Teleclasses scheduled on the Events Calendar at www.TheRelationshipCenter.biz. Don wait until it is too late.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

You Can Improve Your Relatonships

Is there magic to what makes some relationships last longer than others? Maybe. Do some people just sit back and sulk, while others seem to let life go by right over their heads and problems? It sure seems so. Or maybe it just that some people learn secrets of success from their grandparents or other relatives or friends. And since the latter is probably more accurate, here are some tried and true tips from people who have enjoyed long, happy relationships.

1. REFRESH ?Take time to look back, refresh your memories and share what brought you together. Especially when times are difficult, lean back and rely on these old memories as your foundation and glue yourselves back together with them (not literally, of course!)

2. DATES ?Keep dating each other. Even if life seems too busy, meet at the end of the evening for something light and easy, like viewing your favorite sitcom (record it if necessary) together or playing a game of Euchre.

3. FUN ?Couple tend to have fun on dates, then get married and too serious. Lighten up. Head to Yahoo Games (off Yahoo.com main site) and join in any number of card or other games. Or head to a local rental shop and rent an Xbox or other game player and some games.

4. FORGET ?No need to lways?remember the bad things that happened during an argument. Actively orget?sometimes. Be the first to apologize and make up. Go for it!

5. SPACE ?Give each other some space. Either you trust or you don. Get on with life, though. People need time alone and time with their mates and other friends. Be sure to give and take your fair share of space.

6. DISAGREE ?Agree that it okay to disagree on some issues, and leave it at that. No need to create a new religion or political movement just to appease both of you. You don HAVE to agree on everything. And you won. And that okay.

7. MEMORIES ?Make some together. Enjoy special moments, special anniversary dates and events. No need to be elaborate. For example, maybe you enjoyed watching a hot air balloon race one spring day. The next year, you might schedule time to watch it again. Make it an annual event. Collect postcards with balloons on the, playing cards, toss pillowsver time it becomes a theme.

So don just sit back and sulk. Take short steps to improve your relationships and let life problems magically pass by while you hold on to your relationship.


Improving relationships require knowing what to do and how to do it. If you follow some tried and true tips, it is possible you can also improve your relationships.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.