Have you ever found yourself poking along just fine in your relationship, happy as Larry, and then suddenly something happens, and you erupt, or withdraw, or do something really, really dumb? And you think, “Where did THAT come from?”
It’s really important to know yourself well so that when emotions are triggered within your relationship you know the reasons and are therefore better equipped to deal with them in a manner that won’t damage, but instead strengthen your relationship.
Here’s some key areas to know about yourself when it comes to your relationship. You can think about them when an issue comes up in order to help you work through it, or you can work through them now so that you’re prepared once something pops up.
1. Know your Beliefs
2. Know your Values
3. Know your Identity
4. Know what you want - Goals
5. Know your Behaviour Orientation
6. Know your 6 Core Needs
7. Know your Love Language
8. Know your past emotional triggers
Beliefsare our best guesses at how reality actually is. Not only do they include the physical world, but also reality about what is possible and within our abilities. Theyare those things about life that we assume to be true. They are not set in stone and we can choose to believe in whatever we want to. Beliefs determine our behaviour, and therefore I encourage people to choose beliefs that will ensure the success of their goals. Most of our beliefs are formed through parental influence, the community and school as we grow. Often, we shift beliefs without realising it as an adult when we meet new people or learn new information. Sometimes it would do us good to change our beliefs because our old beliefs no longer suit the new situation we’re in. Unfortunately, some people hang on to beliefs so strongly that it costs them success and damages relationships. You must develop a level of flexibility with your beliefs and learn to identify when a belief is appropriate and should be fought for, or whether it’s best to just let it go, replacing it with a more suitable one.
Your identityis your beliefs about yourself, your place in the world and what you’re capable of.
Valuesare the emotions that you want to experience on a consistent basis and reflect what is important to us and who we are. Essentially, values are your goal. They are things such as happiness, joy, adventure, wellness, kindness and love.
Goals are the things we aim for in order to experience our values. For example, you want to travel to South America to experience adventure.
The Behavioural OrientationModel allows you to genuinely explore the motivation behind behaviour. All of us use all of the behaviours at times, however we tend to feel more comfortable with one or two and therefore use them more frequently. I have found that a person’s ability to flex easily between all of the behaviours results in greater success in life as they are more able to use the appropriate behaviour for a given task. The four primary behaviours are:
a) Outcome oriented
b) Socially oriented
c) Peace oriented
d) Quality oriented
Those favouring Outcome and Socially oriented behaviours tend to be high energy individuals. They process information quickly, see the big picture and look for possibility.
Those preferring Peace and Quality oriented behaviours take a little longer to process information and generally have lower energy levels. They are more reserved than their higher energy counterparts, are better at seeing the detail rather than the big picture and are more motivated by necessity rather than possibility.
Both Outcome and Quality oriented behaviours can be identified by the pursuit of facts, completion of goals and exercise of left brain tasks, whereas Peace and Social behaviours draw from the right brain, are more emotionally driven and prioritise relationships.
Tony Robbins identified the Six Core Needsof humans to be:
1. Certainty (comfort, safety, stability, security, protection)
2. Uncertainty (variety, adventure, fun, fear, change, entertainment, surprise, crisis, drama)
3. Significance (pride, importance, standards, achievement, performance, perfection, discipline, competition)
4. Love and connection (insignificance, passion, unity, warmth, tenderness, desire, togetherness)
5. Growth
6. Contribution
Everyone has all of these needs but one or two are usually more dominant than the others. We will look at these in more detail in future blogs.
The 5 Love Languagestakes a look at the ways in which people both express and understand love. In many circumstances people in relationships, whether they are spouses, parents and children, family or simply friends aren’t using the same language to express their love for one another. This can lead to doubt about the relationship, misunderstandings and a lack of trust, where there really is no need for it. Once we can understand and communicate in the other person’s language this enables the people in the relationship to get the most out of it. The 5 Love Languages are:
· Physical touch – including hugging, kissing, tickling, tackling
· Words of affirmation – not just ‘I love you’ but also compliments
· Gifts – doesn’t have to be expensive, just something to signify that you’re thinking of them
· Acts of service – doing them favours that they didn’t ask you to do
· Quality time – uninterrupted time together that is focused purely on them
Sometimes people respond illogically to a situation and it’s often because of past emotional triggers.This happens when a memory from the past is triggered and then the past emotion is activated. Your partner might do or say something (or it may even be something as simple as wearing a certain item of clothing), like “I don’t know about that” and mean absolutely nothing by it, but you may have a negative response because somewhere in your past someone used to say it and meant it in a threatening way. You may have no conscious recollection of the incident and therefore not know why you’ve responded in that way. In this instance, even though your emotions are giving you a negative response, you need to ask your head what your partner’s intention was in saying what they said and trust that maybe somewhere in your past there’s just something you need to let go of.
There’s a lot of information here, so just take it step by step. In future blogs I’ll go into more detail about particular steps.
Things to give thought to this week:
· Take some time to work through the points above. Spend some quality time with yourself getting to know yourself well. And just think about you. We’ll talk about your partner in future blogs.