As I shared in part one of my ongoing Transforming Your Relationship column series, How to Create Your Unshakable Love & Unleashed Passion in 8 Simple Steps, in each issue I will be guiding you deeper into each of the 8 transformational steps of my Relationship Transformation System® and give you a tool or strategy to implement to experience a shift in your relationships that day! In this issue, we are covering Step One: Seeing.
STEP ONE: Seeing.
Seeing is all about creating a vision for your relationship. It’s a foreign concept for most of us. We fully accept that we need goals and a vision for our business, health, wealth and so many other areas of our lives…but our relationship? Huh?
As Zig Ziglar once said, “You can’t hit a target you can’t see.”
Let’s take grocery shopping as an example. Have you ever gone to the grocery store without a list before? Yeah, remember that? You came home with about 50% of what you actually needed, a bunch of crap you didn’t really need and you forgot 3 of the ingredients for the dinner you were planning to make.
Our lives are busy today. If we don’t make an intentional list of what we need before we head out to the grocery store, we won’t have the things we need in the house when we need to get that meal on the table.
What’s that saying from Ben Franklin? “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
It’s the same with your relationship.
I know it sounds like a crazy parallel, but hang with me for a second while I explain.
If you don’t start with a vision in mind for the relationship that you want to create each day by design, then you end up living in your relationship by default each day, bounced around by the events of the day and living in reaction to your partner.
And most of your reactions in relationship are unconscious, habitual, and picked up from watching the relationships around you growing up, which are probably not relationships you really want to model today.
Life today is very fast. Most of us do not take the time, within the moments of the day, to stop, pause and decide, “What is the best way for me to react to my partner in order to create the relationship that I want.”
So, just like before going to the grocery store, we need to create a VISION for our relationship ahead of time, so that in the busy moments of the day, we are, in fact, acting on the decisions that we made intentionally.
I’m blessed to serve thousands of people every day, and at this point, there’s one thing I know for sure…
You are creating the relationship you are living in.
With every moment, every decision, every word, every action, every experience you participate in, you are creating your relationship every day.
You are currently living in the relationship you have created with your decisions and actions from yesterday.
And tomorrow, you will be living in the relationship you created with the decisions and actions you make today.
If you are anything like most people, then you have never thought about creating an intentional relationship vision before, and you are currently living in a relationship that you have ended up in by default. I know you had only positive intention for your relationship, you didn’t do that on purpose, it’s just that no one ever teaches us this stuff!
Well, life today is busy and complicated. And your committed love relationship is the most important relationship of your life and impacts more of your life than any other relationship you will ever have.
If you have a plan for the freaking grocery store, maybe you want to take this opportunity to create a vision for your love relationship!
Creating this vision is the first step in bringing more confidence, purposefulness, empowerment and passion into your relationship transformation journey!
“Begin with the end in mind.” – Steven Covey
It’s time to get crystal clear on what specifically is the relationship that makes your heart sing…so you can start creating it in the steps of the system that follow.
If you want to be successful in creating your relationship by design, there’s one thing you need to know…you will do this Relationship Vision process MORE than once!
WHY?
As with any visualization process, you will create what you visualize with absolute belief. What you manifest is based on your energy, not your words.
For example, when you first attempt to create your relationship vision, you may say to yourself, “My relationship is fun, playful and full of passion.”
But your inner voice tells you “Yeah, it WAS those things, and now it’s busy, stressful and you’ve had sex 3 times this year.”
This is VERY normal. There’s nothing wrong with you! That’s your brain talking to you. It’s what we call your “drunk monkey brain”. It’s the negative self-talk that is always chatting away. And it only sees your current reality or past experiences as proof of what you CAN be.
But there’s a part of you that knows that is not true. There’s a part of you that knows that MANY times over, you have created or accomplished something you had never done before. The part of you that absolutely believes in new possibility. That’s the part you want to use to create your vision.
But there’s a ninja visualizing secret. Want to know what it is?
Start creating NEW results in your life every day, and when you go to visualize the next time, you will BELIEVE your vision more than you did the last time!
Our students tell me this every day! One student just posted the other day that she did her Relationship Vision exercise again after just 5 months of creating transformations in her marriage and she could not believe how much more certainty she had about the vision she wrote. And, as an extra bonus, after taking such positive action and seeing real results for a few months, the vision that came through her for the relationship she REALLY wants was much bigger and more amazing then the vision she wrote five months prior, when she was hurting, frustrated and feeling stuck.
That’s how it really works!
The students that get the greatest success with the 8 Step Relationship Transformation System® I’m teaching you, come back to the Vision exercise every so often and redo it from a better place!
Are you ready to start creating your Relationship Vision?
YOU CAN START WITH ANSWERING ONE JOURNAL QUESTION…
“My ultimate relationship would be like…”
As you walk through the exercise of exploring your relationship vision, focus your intention on the “relationship” that you want, not the partner. Don’t limit yourself or your visioning by your partner, your current circumstances or anything. Let your imagination take over and consider this a fantasy exercise.
For example: Journal your thoughts and feelings using relationship focus, like “my relationship would be playful”. And avoid partner focus like “my partner would be playful”.
Focusing on your partner is a form of blame. And when you blame, you place all the power to change things in the hands of the person you are blaming and render yourself powerless. Don’t do that. Focus on the relationship and what you want to create.
And suspend the disbelief that you can create it someday.
If you had told me 15 years ago when my husband was walking out the door, that today we would be wildly passionate for each other, rock-solid, indestructible and teaching thousands of people around the world to create the same unshakable love and unleashed passion for themselves…I would have told you that you were crazy.
And yet, here we are…doing exactly that and living in a relationship so far past anything I could have ever dreamed up back then! So everything is possible darling! Suspend disbelief! If I can do it, YOU can do it too!
Just getting clear on what you want to create, will empower you with confidence, purpose, meaning and the joy of living intentionally…. instead of living another day in your relationship by default.
