How many times have you said "Why can't we just communicate" or "How can I be content when everything around me is always changing?". If you feel this way or have ever felt this way in different seasons of your life, this blog has five of my best secrets that can change your life and relationships for the better.
Now you may read these secrets and think, “these aren’t a secret” or “people say this all the time”, but keep in mind, secrets are hidden. So in this moment, you may read this blog, and it makes perfect sense. However, when you go on with your week and you find yourself right back in the chaos or the arguement with your spouse, are you going to think of this blog or will these tools/skills stay hidden? The truth is, for a lot of us, we read something or learn something and if we don’t actively put it into practice, we lose the skill. The trick is that once you learn the secret, you must keep it visible for it to be beneficial.
Secret 1: Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is one of the most if not the most important skills to have. Building self-awareness allows you to become more aware of your own perceptions, beliefs, assumptions, judgements, and other thought processes that contribute to the feelings and choices/behaviors that you make. Asking yourself questions like “what does it mean to do my best”, “what kind of person do I want to be in a relationship”, “what do I value and prioritize in relationships and my daily life” can be helpful to start thinking more deeply. The more you know about yourself, the better you can communicate with others as well as not look to others to create your worth and identity through validation. You’ll not only begin to find contentment in yourself, but you will also begin to value it in your relationships.
Additionally, by modeling self-awareness, you will simultaneously encourage this quality in others. If you’ve ever been around a self-aware person, you can tell because they carry a level of confidence that creates a sense of security which is often a very attractive quality.
Secret 2: Be humble with an open mind
If you find yourself thinking that you’re always right and your opinions and beliefs are the best and only way to live life, you will struggle in relationships. Being able to have conversations with people that have different views and opinions is not only a great skill to have but it also challenges you to learn new things. You don’t have to change your mind or opinion on the subject, but by hearing different perspectives, our brain grows and develops as well. If you only surround yourself with like minded people, you won’t experience as much growth or inspiration to try or experience new things.
Healthy challenges or differences can be great if handled in a respectful and humble way. The secret here is learning that both perspectives and thought processes can be “right”. What works for one person may not work for the other, but that doesn’t mean because it doesn’t work for them that it’s wrong. It simply means, it doesn’t work for them.
Secret 3: Accountability
Find ways to keep yourself accountable. Accountability is most successful when you agree and believe in what you are doing. For example, if I am trying to change my behavior and thoughts so that someone else is happy with me or stays in the relationship with me, I may temporarily be able to do what they are asking, but over time, I will become resentful and get tired/go back to old habits. I will feel unstable, insecure, and like I'm a disappointment. However, if I want to change because I want to be someone who maintains loyaly, trust, and committed to the relationship, it will create lasting change because I’m the one motivating myself.
The secret is, when I am motivating myself, the motivation is not driven out of fear of losing a relationship or someone else’s dissatisfaction in me. Start by determining the kind of person that you want to be, and hold yourself accountable to that regardless of what others think or believe about you.
Secret 4: There doesn’t always need to be someone/something to blame
If you find yourself blaming others or needing an explanation after every inconvenience, you may struggle with blame shifting. Blame shifting is when we take accountability off of ourselves and project it onto someone or something else. This will leave you in a constant state of negative sentiment (meaning life feels unfair/everything is an inconvenience etc.). Let’s say your spouse forgot to take the trash out before they left for work, and you go to throw away something and find an overflowing trashbag. You were already running behind, and now you have to take this bag out, put a new one in, and finish getting ready for work. Rather than taking accountability for running behind yourself, you decide to send a text to your spouse saying “you forgot to take the trash out….again….now I’m going to be late”.
Even though the spouse did forget to take the trash out (which perhaps was their responsibility or what they committed to), you now attribute being late to them not having taken the trash out instead of you not having given yourself enough time to get ready. This type of behavior has the potential to immediately spur defensiveness in the spouse rather than just moving on and talking about the trash later when you can say, “I don’t know if you realized this, but the trash didn’t get taken out this morning. I didn’t realize how much I appreciated that until it didn’t happen, and I was rushing for work”. Ideally, your spouse would hear this and be able to take accountability for forgetting. If your spouse launches into “well I couldn’t do it because I was getting the kids ready and xyz”---now they are blame shifting instead of taking responsibility. So you can see how getting rid of blame all together can really help with smooth communication. You can still bring up issues kindly; however, remember the role that you’ve played in the issue as well.
Secret 5: Remember that your health includes physical, mental, and emotional health, not just whichever combination you’re good at.
In a lot of ways, our body and our health is a representation of the work and substances that we have put into it. When things start to feel off, don’t “just push through”. Take time to assess your health to see what is off. Maybe you haven’t been sleeping well or you’ve got an important meeting coming up and you’re feeling a little anxious. The secret here is, don’t just leave it at the cognitive level of recognition, but do something about it. Take action in making sure that your health stays in balance. People get used to living a certain way and tolerating things that aren’t benefitting them but they forget that in the same way they got used to those things, they can get used to a new habit like getting to bed early, putting their phone away when they get home, going on a walk, learning a new skill, the list is endless.
Building new habits means we are building new muscles and pathways in our mind, and this takes time. Here are some steps to help:
Create a plan and stick to it.
Begin building accountability with yourself, but if needed, you can ask for accountabilityfrom others as well.
Develop a plan of how to respond if failure occurs (i.e. if I regress into old habits, how will I respond and be accountable to myself/others).
Create/develop a sense of meaning/motivation/purpose for this change.
Having gone through five secrets, I’m hopeful that some of these will stick with you and that you feel encouraged with some practical skills that you can use right away. Remember: once you learn a secret, the only way it can change your life is if it doesn’t stay hidden.
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