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Supporting Men in Building Their Romantic Relationships in 2012

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What’s in the way may be what you fear the most?

True Leadership is vulnerable, heart centered and connected.

In relationships I often see women having the same conversation with their men, and hoping that this will finally be the time that they get what they want…or that their men are finally aggravated enough to change.
 
This may be based in some expectation of how a romantic relationship “should” look.  As a man consider the opportunity to be curious.  What does your partner actually want?  Is there a need that’s going unmet?
 
As an example, I typically let the dishes pile up and then do them when I have to eat with my hands.  My partner and I for years have had the conversation about how she likes the dishes put away immediately and we would diagnose “why” I don’t do them or she would resign herself to doing them herself since it doesn’t seem to bother me.
 
After years of this, what made the difference is a conversation we had that wasn’t based in the past.  I asked her what makes her so happy about me doing the dishes each night and she told me that she feels really cared for.  So, now I was enrolled in showing my love through doing the dishes – there was a new relationship I had now with doing the dishes.  And it was actually giving me power in my life through fulfilling on a promise each night.
 
But that wasn’t enough – I actually had to look to the future to see what kind of structures I needed to actually keep this habit in place.  So I was honest about needing to be reminded each evening and not being allowed to go to bed without the sink being empty for 30 days.  I gave my girlfriend permission to hold me accountable and told her that some nights I would complain and want to sleep, but that she could still remind me of my commitment and I wouldn’t hold any of it on her. 
      
As small as doing the dishes may seem, the experience created an opening for my partner and I to communicate in a more effective way.  It allowed me to change in a way that was a win for me instead of having it be another thing I wasn’t doing or something I was wrong about.
 
The lesson: 1. Being less bad is not likely to create motivation for change – have the real value of your new action be present consistently; 2. Create structures sufficient to your resistance – don’t expect your habits to change with insufficient support to make that happen or you will create a history of how you can’t change

-CEO, Accomplishment Coaching

Participating in a 21st Century Man workshop will give you the tools to step into your greatness, to create highlights everyday of your life and be the man you always knew you could be.

Women need you, Your organization needs you, The world needs you! Now!

I look at my friends (Facebook and otherwise), peers, colleagues and I’m hard pressed to find people in my life that I can share my 10th wedding anniversary with that know what it means to reach this milestone. If I look at the same group, where are my mentors, the people who have been beyond 10 years, the ones I can learn from along the way? I realize my wife and I have primarily been alone in this. Perhaps WE are the mentors, maybe we have something to offer. Here are some thoughts.

First, I got to thinking, why does 10 years matter?

It matters because it’s ridiculous!

Given the structures available and commonly utilized for successful marriages and the challenges that took place over our first 10 years, it’s incredible we or anyone else get here. We’ve lived in busy cities where people primarily keep to themselves, their demanding jobs and social lives. Our parents didn’t live nearby. We weren’t a part of a spiritual community. Our incomes were never enough to take amazing care of ourselves, we had growing debt and we threw children into that set of insufficient structures for success. It all makes little sense on the surface and we had the perfect conditions for a big ball of stress. Just the set of circumstances that will make the modern divorce a ripe possibility.

What were our assets? Love is an asset, but over 10 years love must grow. There’s no way it will look the same at the outset of the relationship as it will look 10 years later. Don’t even think about it. We hear phrases like “the magic is gone” and that’s true, if we relate to magic as one trick that we expect to deliver over and over again. One trick gets boring. Love must evolve. As the commitments within our marriage became more clear, like raising children, owning a home, becoming a contributing part of each other’s families and other scary things that come along, we had to love who we could be for one another.

Love evolves from “you complete me”, which is momentary and relieving to “together, our love of each other will always get us through.” Not so romantic, perhaps, unless you romanticize being committed to something greater than yourself. This is what any marriage that lasts 10 years must become, where we surrender to our commitments and know we need each other to succeed. This is the only way to become pillars of our professions, parents, homeowners, household accountants, personal health administrators, eventual retirees and grandparents and keep the relationship intact with our modern standard of needing to be in love that we need to keep us in our marriages.

It’s those commitments that forced us to learn more about each other and to support each other in who we needed to become so we could take them on honestly, as a team. Just a few generations ago, being in love was not necessary to keep a marriage together. Men had their team and women had theirs. We lived near our childhood friends and families and became members of clubs and groups designed to support us in making our lives work.

Not any more!

Who do we have the tough conversations of our married lives with? A recent survey posted on YourTango.com (http://www.yourtango.com/201192892/men-think-discussing-relationship-problems-waste-time) revealed that men think speaking about your relationship is A WASTE OF TIME!!?! It’s just not en vogue to have conversations about your life on the most real and valuable level. So now we have much less support. We’re doing our best primarily on our own, without natural buffers like friends and family that are actually involved in our lives and relationships and it puts the relationship on shaky ground. Letting these commitments fall, not owning them completely as a couple is what leads to divorce. I don’t think we’re going back to living over the years next door to our families and High School friends, growing and becoming the people who can have the tough conversations and take on these challenges lis what’s necessary to prevent divorce.

There’s no way my wife and I could survive as a couple today as the people we were 10 years ago. I barely resemble the person I was 10 years ago, aside from some of the essential good qualities that made me the man that my wife chose a decade ago. The challenges of our commitments and our lives forced me to go through a transformational process, with the love of our commitment to each other as the backbone, the reason to transform. What my wife withstood as I struggled and fought the process makes her the angel of my life. That today she is everything I ever fell in love with and so much more makes her the miracle of my life.

This is what it takes. Marriage will take you on quite a ride. You’ll infuriate and inspire each other equally and thrive on the other side of each challenge, grateful for your partnership, as long as you are a YES to the ride and a YES to who you can be for each other and who they can be for you. Divorces happen because people stop believing that they can be the one for their partner. We choose to be the one for them not from our displeasure with each other (not from fixing what we say is wrong), but from love. Divorces happen because we forget how much a difference love can make.

Reach 10 years because you say you will, because nothing will get in the way. Then every day, practice making your choices in life from that commitment. Choices like whether you will choose to create an(other) argument over something trivial, if you will eat that extra slice of pizza, will you help out cleaning up the living room, will you change the baby’s diaper now and not wait for him/her to do it, will you go for the promotion, will you learn what you need to be responsible for your finances, will you remember that you can be grateful for your partner’s commitment to you, even when it doesn’t look so wonderful that day.

It even works if you’re not yet married, if you choose that this is what you want in life. That will keep you out of the places you don’t belong, out of the relationships you don’t truly need to be in and out of the habit of complaining about what’s not working, which never solves anything.

Do you want to reach your 10th anniversary? What choices will you make today to ensure it?

How can men be responsible for creating connection in relationship?

What’s possible in a world full of men who are strong AND heart-connected?

I recently created a breakthrough for myself in forgiveness.  For almost two (2) years, my coaches have been asking me to practice forgiveness.  I always agreed and I followed their requests.  However, I now see that I practiced forgetting, NOT forgiveness.  Actually, when I really look at again, I believe I was practice delaying blame!
Myself, the king of pop Michael Jackson and The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth were strong contributors to my breakthrough.  I am going to quote Maria from her book:  “When you forgive, you dismantle structures of knowing about that person.  You lay down your weapons and armor and proceed onward.  You lighten up.  If ever there were an act of courage, this is it.  As Lawrence Stone said, “only the brave know how to forgive.”  Maria continues when she says, “you lay aside conclusions about other people and the motivations for their actions.  It begins and ends with you.”

The judgments you have of others (or circumstances), the complaints you have about life, the blame you place are WEAPONS.  You believe you are protecting yourself by making the other person the enemy and making them wrong.  What you are unable (or maybe unwilling) to see is that picking up, using and maintaining those weapons against another person or circumstance are actually being used AGAINST you.  You carry those judgments and complaints with you in your life.  They weigh YOU down because you carry so much energy as to how it “should” or “shouldn’t” be.

It begins and ends with you.  Remember Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror.  “I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways.  And no message could have been any clearer, if you want to make the world a better place.”  You are well practiced at forgetting and delaying.  Odds are, you are not well practiced at forgiveness.  First you must forgive yourself for this!

Let’s be honest – when you begin forgiving, you will forget.  (forgive yourself)  It is important and EFFECTIVE to create reminders.  Whether it is in your journal, posted on your mirror or taped to the insider of your car – remind yourself that you forgave yourself or other people.  Just say, “whoops, I forgave myself for that.”  When you do this in front of the mirror, it strengthens your forgiveness muscle even more!

Do you want to find out who you really are?  Practice forgiveness.  Forgiveness is CREATED from the inside out.  It comes from the POWERFUL essence of being human.  It comes from your heart with no rationalizations or reasons other than to no longer be weighed down by other people or the circumstances of your life. It is a GIFT for you to provide forgiveness to yourself AND others.

What would you create for YOUR LIFE if you practiced more forgiveness?

If you had more energy – what would you do?

Still looking for it before getting into action?

Most of us are – there’s comfort in evidence, proof and a well-trodden path laid out before us.  It’s the reason so many of us check references, invest in track records, hire people with diplomas, “kick the tires” and wait before taking action in order to “think about it”.

Sometimes it’s the smart thing to do.

AND, in the area of innovation it’s a brick wall. It can lead to planning to plan to plan indefinitely, or complete inaction.  Ever seen a corporation make a big change? It takes YEARS if it happens at all. It also leaves them behind the curve.

Think IBM and their reasoning for staying out of the development of the Personal Computer in the early 70′s – that there would never be a computer in every home. Their belief at the time was that computers would always take up an entire floor of an office building a full city block long and would only ever be accessible to large corporations or the very rich. Why not – that’s the way it was going and had gone.  They had no evidence to the contrary! So that’s what they kept building and perfecting, and fell well behind the rest of the market by the time they realized their mistake.

Now think JFK speaking before a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961 and DECLARING that we would send an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.  He had no evidence, research or scientific proof of it even being possible at that point.

We put a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, and there’s a 99.9% chance you’re reading this on your home PC, laptop, or cellphone.

Stop looking for Evidence.

If you’re up to anything worthwhile, on the cutting edge, revolutionary, or in any way innovative, there will by definition be no evidence for you of what lies ahead.

That’s the whole point.

*Inspired from “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield

I love this question:

What is one skill, that if you practice and mastered it, the skill would bring you consistent success in every area of your life?  Where in your life (your calendar) do you make the time to practice and get better at that skill?

Steven Pressfield in The War of Art encourages us to “maintain sovereignty over the moment.”  When we maintain sovereignty over the moment, we practice having supreme, independent authority over what is occurring in our life.  We choose… is this a real problem in my life (am I a victim) or will I choose the power to have this work to my advantage?

More from Pressfield:

“Professionals prepare mentally to absorb blows and to deliver them.  His aim is to take what the day gives him.  He is prepared to be prudent and prepared to be reckless, to take a beating when he has to and to go for the throat when he can.  He understands that the field alters everyday.  His goal is NOT victory (success will come when it wants) but to handle himself, his insides as sturdily as he can.”

“Professionals conduct business in the REAL WORLD.  Adversity, injustice, bad hoops and rotten calls, even good breaks and lucky bounces all comprise the ground over which the campaign must be waged.  The field is level, only in heaven.”

Here is the inspiration I take from this and practice.

1. Life will HAPPEN.  It includes bad hops, rotten calls AND the good breaks & lucky bounces.  The focus of who I am is not to be defined by what HAPPENS in my life but to be the boss of ME in those moments.  It is WEAK and CRAPPY to always see yourself as being taken advantage of or powerless.
2. Will I choose to be the one who is being taken advantage of or will I use MY BEST to be the advantage in the moments that happen to me?
3. I PREPARE by taking care of MY well being.  I PLACE MYSELF in a higher state of mind to be stronger in what I KNOW will happen.
4. My focus is not whether or not I receive the VICTORY.  Victory is not the result of what is given to me, it is the result of what I give the moment.  I give the moment my attention.  I give it my attention of bringing my best.

If you want to be a stronger boss of YOUR NOW, then practice.  If it matters, if you really value it – get coached.  Call me for more information about my coaching and what our work can do for your relationship, business or well being.