How To Teach Yourself To Make Relationships Work
A Training Session From The School Of Hard Knocks
If you've been dreaming about being in a great romantic relationship. you're not alone. Just about everybody - even those already in great relationships - has been dreaming about it since puberty and probably won't stop until they’re no longer alive.
Despite our built-in desire to be in a relationship, the vast majority of people still have no idea how to get into a relationship they can be thrilled with.
There are tons of information about relationships from some of the brightest minds from College Professors and Relationship Experts to Books, YouTube Channels, and Workshops. Though most of what you'll find has value and can make some difference, no one in the entire Relationship Industry has figured out the complete successful relationship creation formula. Even more important, no one has figured out how to teach it in ways that cannot possibly be misunderstood.
With that said, if you follow the instructions fully that you’re about to read, the quality of your romantic relationship will improve dramatically. Those instructions are the following:
· Pay Attention To The Relationships Around You In Your Life
· Track What You Learn, What Worked & Didn’t Work
· Analyze What You Learned From The Information You Tracked
Pay Attention To The Relationships Around You In Your Life:
Pay attention to what you agree or disagree with in those relationships and the people in them, notice the things you would never do or always do, what works and doesn't work, what shocks you, amazes you, distresses you, or scares you. In other words, do a complete examination of everyone in both shakey and successful romantic relationships, and identify the common actions, thoughts, and decisions that produce the results they are getting.
When people really pay attention, they do more than just look; they are awake and alert to what we're looking at. When this happens, they clearly remember what happened, what they saw and can bring it up for further examination at a later time without distortion. Also, the more you do this, the more complete and accurate what you grasp and learn will be. This is because when we stop being Curious, we stop learning and are only collecting information without analysis. That doesn’t work.
Paying attention comes in 2 flavors: shallow and deep. The deeper you pay attention, the more you'll learn and the better your relationship will be. Shutting your mind down because you felt you had an insight without looking to see if there were any more insights to gain would be the shallow type. That makes learning and growing slow and difficult. Like oil well drilling, the deeper you go, the greater the benefit you'll gain.
If you don't intentionally choose to pay complete attention to what’s in front of you, your eyes will be open but you're not fully paying attention. You'll have turned yourself into a robot, if only for the length of time you're not paying full attention. You’ll also be sending the following nonverbal message: “You're not important enough for me to pay attention to.” That's a message you don't want to send to your partner and it’s a message that, when observed while in your Learning Phase, will teach you how to not do that to the person you get into a relationship with.
The most important elements to look for and understand about people in relationships are a person's “Why” or Purpose for being in a relationship and what they're committed to. By recognizing - through observation, the reasons for the actions people take, you'll be able to avoid actions, practices, and habits in relationships that don't work while making changes and creating new patterns that do.
Because relationships are all around us, we're always in a position to learn about them; you could see people in relationships on a bus, at a supermarket, restaurant or just walking down the street. While paying attention to the people and relationships around you, ask yourself the following questions to help you learn from your observations:
o What are they really committed to?
o Are they trying to be right or be happy?
o How do they keep the relationship going so well?
o Is what they're fighting over really worth fighting over?
o What do they see in each other that makes them want to stay with each other?
o What must they be thinking that makes them feel that what they just said or did was OK with them?
There's no limit to the number of questions you can ask yourself when paying attention to and curiously observing people. In fact, as you do this regularly, you'll create new questions that serve you in teaching yourself how to learn from those around you.
Track What You Learn, What Worked & Didn’t Work:
Tracking is for seeing and knowing what to do about what does and doesn't work.
The more information you collect, the better off you'll be. If you wrote down the information you've gathered, it’ll help you even more. The reason why this is important is that you’ll get better at recognizing patterns, habits, and mindsets in ways that will help you understand what's happening, what's about to happen, what to do about it, and why.
Some people have 20 years of experience in relationships. Every year they're involved in new relationship experiences that improve their relationship skills. Then, there are those who had 1 year of relationship experience but stopped learning anything new because they either became satisfied with what they learned or were too hurt or scared to examine their feelings and results any further, so after 20 years, they still have 1 year of relationship experience but experienced that 1 year 20 times.
That sucks - big time. Don’t let that happen to you.
If you gain just 1 new bit of information per week, you'll have 52 new bits of relationship information in a year. Each piece of information builds on the bits of information before it. There's no way you won't get much better at relationships with that amount of learning from that amount of work. The more you know what doesn't work, the less you spend time smashing your head against the proverbial brick wall trying to do the impossible.
Analyze What You Learned From The Information You Tracked:
As you go through everything you've gotten from this process, you'll see patterns you can use to enhance your relationship and have you feel comfortable in the knowledge that you know how to make relationships work. This is because analysis eliminates both the fear of failure and actual failure based on the fact that analysis creates and allows for complete clarity. In fact, there's really no such thing as failure. No one is actually scared of failing. We all know and can accept the fact that we're going to fail occasionally. It's when we KNOW we didn't learn how to keep from failing the last time that makes fear kick in. This makes sense because if we haven't learned how to use the brakes on our car after our last accident, we KNOW we're gonna have another accident.
Conducting analysis in this arena is the antidote to the fear of failure. Analysis makes sense of data, making it possible to learn and therefore, do better the next time.
Education may be expensive, but it’s not as expensive as ignorance. Don't let laziness, skepticism, or a lack of clarity stop you from doing the work recommended in this article. Study the people around you and their relationships, especially the successful, happy ones.
Ultimately, you are responsible for the success or failure of every relationship you're in whether you agree with this or not. That's not to say relationships are easy or you're to blame if relationships don't work. It just means that you have the power to make them work and if you don't use your power, the consequences will be dire.
In closing, keep this list with you so you always have the tools below available:
· Pay Attention To The Relationships Around You In Your Life
· Track What You Learn, What Worked & Didn’t Work
· Analyze What You Learned From The Information You Tracked
This is your Power Tool when it comes to relationships. Make sure you never do without it.