I was asked to put together a list of the 5 top elements of a healthy relationship and to keep it down to 100 words.
Well, the word count was impossible for me to stick to, so, in the spirit of keeping brief what really are some deep and rich subjects, here is my list of 5.
-
A good relationship with your self
The relationship with our self, needs to be balanced and healthy and full of self respect and self love.
This will impact, affect and dictate what happens in all of your other relationships.
Our relationship with our self stems from how we learned who we believe we are and how much we feel worthy as we grew up. How we identify who we are.
Our self concept runs deep and it can be hiding things that we believe about ourself that can directly affect what happens in our relationships.
We firstly need to establish a healthy, self honouring relationship with our self. This can often include learning about acceptance and forgiveness. But, it also involves plenty of other physical and emotional and spiritual factors. Do you love yourself deeply? Are you your own very best friend and advocate? Do you have your own back? Do you never self abandon?
2. Know your personality styles.
We’re not all the same. If we expect a Pit bull to act like a Poodle, we set our self up for issues.
When we understand some of our personality profile differences, we can cease being hijacked by them in our relationships.
Some of us are direct and dominant as a style and some of us are indirect and introverted as a style, just to keep it brief, and when we judge and assess and communicate in our style and expect others to respond in our style, it goes bad easily, especially if we have no idea about personality styles in the first place.
When we do a little exploring around our own personality profile and we are exposed to what some of the other styles are, we can understand our own behaviour in different situations and other people’s behaviour as well and in a much healthier way.
That way we don’t react or get hijacked or use combative or defensiveness behaviour or apply negative judgement, all due to a lack of understanding about different behaviours associated with the different personality profiles. If you have no idea about personality profiles, you can start with a free quiz online to get some understandings in this space.
3. Manage judgement with kid gloves.
When we work out the first 2 elements, we are better at not using judgement in a negative way. Judgement is a 2 edged sword.
Nine times out of ten, our judgements are missing pieces of vital information and therefore the judgement leads us to an outcome that isn’t honouring all the facts.
Often our judgements are negative too and a negative sitting in your mindset and in our energy is not useful or self serving and is counterproductive to a healthy relationship.
Curiosity about other’s behaviours, compassion for others short fallings, forgiveness, letting go of making things matter so much will all hold a much lighter wellness inducing emotional state within you.
To judge in a non negative way, I have found, is the hardest lesson for people I work with but the most liberating one once the penny drops.
4. Communication
The words we use, and the platform we use to communicate, matter greatly.
It is the lack of communication that is usually the culprit in the case of a relationship issue. Ideally, we would all be able to know our own mind and heart and we would know how to communicate this to people in a way that was not projecting or defending, but rather, merely informing and educating.
Some people do not know how to say what they want to say. Some people do not know how to articulate what they are really feeling or thinking.
Getting hijacked by emotions can really dictate what happens with our communications. Being aggressive or passive aggressive usually comes from a fear.
First seek to understand and then seek to be understood. This great piece of advice requires, knowing your own mind and heart, it requires putting down your ego so you can really hear and understand the other parties thoughts first, and then when you have confirmed you do understand the other side of things, that it is now your turn to share what is going on for you. All of this exchange also needs to be underpinned with a mutual desire to come to a win/win outcome. How do add value to my relationship with myself and how do I add value to my relationship? Unless you’re a barrister, if you need to win a fight, you have chosen an aggressive ego driven strategy that breaks down relationships.
5. Love Languages
Acts of service, Words of affirmation, Receiving Gifts, Quality Touch, Quality time.
Understanding your own love language and understanding your partners love language will start to shine some great light on why sometimes you feel like you’re trying to say I love you, but, it seems to go nowhere. Or maybe you feel your partner isn’t loving you enough, may be because you show love differently.
You can do Gary Chapmans 5 love language quiz for free online.
Roslyn Loxton Mindset Coaching
Brisbane Life Coach, Brisbane Mindset Coach, Brisbane Counsellor, Relationship Support
