Nine Ways to Enhance a Relationship and Three Ways to Destroy It
Our enjoyment and satisfaction with life and work is almost always grounded in the quality of our relationships with other people. Quality relationships are not easy to establish, maintain, or especially enhance. There are ways that are almost always effective for doing any of these and specific ways that can be very destructive. The best ten ways to improve quality of your relationship and the four ways to damage them follow. Try more than one and see how much your relationships go.1. Participate and give without expecting something in return. Expectations and assumptions gum up our interactions by blocking others and us from being authentic.
2. Be honest yet tactful. Respect what the other person needs to know and what they probably don’t want to know about you. Always tell the truth, but don’t offer what isn’t requested or permission given to provide. Consider that some things, especially quick judgments are often best left unsaid or until another time.
3. When communicating, listen to understand. What are they really saying in words, tone, and body language? It is easy to anticipate what someone means so we can formulate our response, but often we miss what is really being said and especially not said.
4. Know if you are motivated by need or love. Most romantic relationships begin with egoic needs and never progress past that. Loving someone is not about what they can do for us, it is about giving and sharing because you love them (see #1).
5. Lose the judgments. Judging creates a wedge in communications and poisons most relationships over time. It is another way to determine whether you need or love someone. Most judgment is needs based, yours, not theirs.
6. Give up the belief that you own another person’s attention, energy, or time. Relationships are not entitlements and if they become that, one or both people start to feel suffocated and eventually resentful. Relationships enhance and support by choice, not demand.
7. Respect the other person’s perspectives. Each person is a culmination of experiences, knowledge, and meanings that determine how they view themselves and their relationship with you. Neither of you are the same, nor will you ever be. Honor the differences and learn from their perspectives.
8. Let other people have their experiences. Don’t attempt to change, fix, or save another person. The most powerful relationships are based on mutually respecting each other and letting a person be who they are.
9. Stop taking everything so personally. Find out before you react. The Second Agreement in Toltec Wisdom explains that no matter what another person does or says, it is about them, not you. You only get to choose how to respond or not respond. Gather information and determine if you need to respond, do nothing, or offer support. (See #8 above)
… And Three Ways to Destroy It
Relationships become difficult and even impossible when you:
1. Judge and compare yourself to others. When we judge ourselves, we judge others to inform our comparisons and most of the time we come out on the short end of the stick. Often what we judge in others as unlikable or negative is just a reflection of what we see in ourselves. You can’t love someone you are judging because judgment and love are incompatible. Of course, that includes loving yourself.
2. Blame other people, especially those in your closest relationships, for your unhappiness or experiences. While others are clearly part of our relationships and we share experiences, the rest is up to us. No one is ever nor can they be responsible for your happiness; it is a fool’s errand, so to speak. Blame keeps us from choosing and especially changing. If you don’t like what is happening, you have the power to change your experience in the relationship, but not their experience.
3. Complain about efforts, actions, and choices of other people. It is an illusion that complaining about something or someone leads to change. Discomfort is the number one stimulus for change, but only if action is taken; complaining blocks action. Most importantly, complaining about another person brings in judging, blaming, and expectations that will only make both of you miserable and certainly won’t bring about change in them.
Developing, maintaining, and enhancing relationships is an ongoing process. Some of the ways listed above may be just what you need to move your relationships forward or even transform them. Best of all, your relationships could become more enjoyable, enriching, and complementary and isn’t that the point of having a relationship?
©2009 Dr. Jane Miner - PERSONAL Solutions. For more information or support for your personal solutions contact me at jane@janeminer.com. May be reprinted with this attribution fully intact.
Should You Try Harder?
Trying harder is your natural response when skills, strategies, or situations are not working as you want or expect. Other people, wanting to help, may tell you to increase your intensity, give more effort, or try harder and it will get better. All of these imply that you need to do more; you just need to try harder to get success. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what you need to do!
Trying harder increases your stress responses, raises your anxiety, and hurries your mind. You get caught up in the emotions, especially fear and anger, as you become distracted by what isn’t working. As a result, you make more errors, focus on what won’t work and raise your frustration. Continue trying harder and you will find yourself in a spiral of increasing negative results, as your mind and body get totally out of sync, interfering with what you want to do.
When a skill, strategy or situation is difficult or not happening as you expected, slow down and divert your focus elsewhere. Take a couple of deep breaths, retie your shoes, or move on to a different skill or situation; all can shift your focus quickly and immediately. By interrupting the emotional and physical states that were interfering with your performance, you allow your mind and body to find the appropriate speed and intensity or different approach needed for success.
The key to success in any situation is to provide the appropriate energy and intensity needed to get the job done efficiently. Pushing and increasing your intensity or trying harder will not change the nature of the task, only your responses to it – for the worst. By approaching the task or situation in a different state, you give yourself a chance to comfortably and confidently respond. The more you apply this approach, the more you will learn the best effort and intensity for you to succeed at anything, especially the most frustrating things
©2009 Dr. Jane Miner - PERSONAL Solutions. For more information or support for your personal solutions contact me at jane@janeminer.com. May be reprinted with this attribution fully intact.
Excuses Begone by Wayne Dyer - Review
This book represents in many ways a return to Wayne Dyer’s beginning works. Trained in counseling with Abraham Maslow as his mentor during his doctoral studies, the mind as creator of experiences is critical in his writings. In this book he addresses thinking that is self-defeating or what he calls the “habit mind.” In our habitual thinking are the excuses or self-limiting thoughts and beliefs we repeat to choose our actions and behaviors now. They keep us from living our fullest life by trapping us in our past life in the form of programming. Until we challenge these “excuses” they persist and continue to create (or recreate) automatically. The good news is that we can actually “create” something new and different, make new choices, and have different experiences. This is done through “creative consciousness” by using seven principles and a paradigm shift process to address the eighteen common and most limiting excuses in the “subconscious” mind. These excuses include familiar ones such as: “I don’t deserve it,” “I can’t afford it,” “I’m too busy,” and “It will be difficult.” These and the other fourteen are the barriers to everything we want and don’t have.
The first part of the book explains how the mind works uses excuses to dominate our experiences and create lives we don’t want and don’t enjoy. The second part of the book thoughtfully presents his seven principles that include: awareness, alignment, now, contemplation, willingness, passion and compassion. Each principle is clearly explained with the creative consciousness power demonstrated as applied to some of the most common excuses.
The paradigm shift is the third part of the book. Building on Byron Katie’s “The Work” he has designed a series of seven questions that can be used to challenge thoughts and especially excuses. When thoughtfully asked these questions dissolve beliefs and fears while empowering choices. I think this series of questions may be even more powerful than those of The Work, because they allow the questioner to find a source of and identify choices for change.
Each part of this book is useful and together they provide a compelling process for clearing excuses and making permanent changes in the brain and mind. All the concepts and strategies are clearly illustrated and applied. This is a book to read, study, and use.
What I Liked in Excuses Begone
I liked this approach to behavior changes, as it is similar to what I use in life coaching. I am convinced that the mind is the key to everything from change to joy and that each of us has the power to use our mind to create anything and everything. I found much in this book to add to the ideas and strategies I share with other people and can use myself. Here are three examples of the principles I found most useful and applicable.
• Alignment. This principle says that life is an indication of our alignment with our “essential nature” and the source of our creation. Excuses and faulty thinking are indications of our misalignment. Realign and many of our problems and issues are gone. He says alignment is “awareness in action.” When we are aligned our focus is on what we want to create.
• Contemplation. All creation, positive or negative, begins with contemplation. What is in our experience and what surrounds us is due to our previous contemplation or thoughts and feelings. Fortunately contemplation now is the key to our future experiences through creative consciousness.
• Willingness. This word was an unusual way of describing what is often called commitment. Willingness is stronger and more powerful when followed. He provides four questions that support willingness zeroing in on taking full responsibility for the conditions of life, surrendering, holding our vision, and shedding all unwillingness. Answer the questions and the direction for willingness is found.
I also found the paradigm questions in the third part of the book to be very powerful as a process. Each question contains clear areas for consideration and the process is fast and effective. He encourages the reader to let the changes “fall into place” with a “mind that’s open to everything and attached to nothing.” Read the questions and the suggested areas of consideration and the application begins without plans, lists, and rules of instructions. Pretty nifty and pretty effective.
Notes for Application
• Nothing is permanent or inevitable. Even our genetics can be changed through our thoughts and creative consciousness.
• Excuses don’t move us forward they keep us from fully living in the now and the joy and love found there. The reliance on excuses is self-defeating and must be addressed if something different is wanted.
• “Always keep in mind that no single person, place, or thing can force you to believe or disbelieve anything. … Now you have the independence to choose what you believe. Your knowing is yours.”
Should You Read This Book?
Whether you are a Wayne Dyer fan or not, everyone can benefit from this book. If you need a direction, a different strategy, or the guidance to move forward, this book will definitely benefit you. For those who have read many of his books, this one maintains his philosophy but with updated and new applications, especially in terms of the process of change. I found the ideas and especially applications to be consistent with what I have learned in working with people in every area of life. I would highly recommend this book to my clients and to anyone who is ready to live the life they want, fully and joyfully.
©2009 Dr. Jane Miner - PERSONAL Solutions. For more information or support for your personal solutions contact me at jane@janeminer.com. May be reprinted with this attribution fully intact.
Two Strategies for Wisdom
Recently, this message was sent to the subscribers to my private newsletter Personal Wisdom. It is of benefit to anyone who feels overwhelmed, lost, and afraid, along with anyone who wants an anchor to steady them as they make a choice or decision.
I know that each of us has to make our life personal to be successful, without taking everything personally that happens around us. To make life personal without making taking it personally is to hear, listen and heed your personal wisdom. For me that happens when I follow two principles and strategies.
Know and choose your truth while being aware of the distractions that can keep you from it.
As you know, the desert is my favorite place for a couple of reasons. First, I live blissfully and warmly in the middle of the high desert of Southern Utah or paradise, as I like to call it. It is paradise because of its stark, open and inviting serenity. Not much is hidden in the desert, except underground and sometimes under a rock. Other than that the desert presents itself as it is: open, quiet, and balanced. This desert is also very red providing a unmistakable contrast with the bright blue sky that meets it in a 360 degree horizon, no matter where you are standing. Now that’s clarity.
Second, the desert reminds me constantly of the desert inside of each of us. In The Four Agreements, Don Miquel Ruiz is speaking of transformation and how we must “break the limiting agreements” that we have made with our fears. Such agreements keep us from who we really are, love. He says, “Going into the core of those agreements is what I call going into the desert. When you go into the desert you meet your demons face-to-face. After coming out of the desert, all those demons become angels.” Lately, I have been spending a lot of time in both deserts and I highly recommend the experience. In the outside and inside desert can be found peace, serenity, and our wisdom or angels.
Know your potential and focus on experiencing it daily.
Now the most important wisdom I know and have experienced. Each of us, you and me, have a magnificent potential that is the foundation for success in every aspect of life. If you are not experiencing your potential each day, you don’t know and trust your potential or you are distracted and giving your precious energy, space and time to what and who doesn’t support your potential.
Knowing your potential is an inside job. That means no one can tell you what it is or give you permission to experience it. You must explore and discover it for yourself. This happens when you focus on what you can do, have done, and have the capabilities and experience to do now. When you choose to focus and trust your potential, everything changes easily and elegantly.
That’s it, two strategies that have guided me and when I remember them have always opened up my personal wisdom. May your days be personal, your potential unlimited and your wisdom abundant!
©2009 Dr. Jane Miner - PERSONAL Solutions. For more information or support for your personal solutions contact me at jane@janeminer.com. May be reprinted with this attribution fully intact.
welcome
Welcome to Dr. Jane Miner’s blog where I post articles and information about life coaching, sport psychology, and books. I have been writing newsletters for more than ten years and now will be posting that material here. Please return often to read what is new and of course to comment or add to what I have shared. My purpose is to guide, inspire and support success - your success!