As a life coach, very often people come to me looking for solutions, step by step instructions so they can handle difficult situations. They want to stay the same and just do something specific that’s different or better to enhance their lives.

Understandable, right?

The thing is, relationships aren’t like plastic for instance, where we know it’s properties, what it can do and can’t do, what the strenghts and limitations of the material are, so we can’t be given a set of instructions that will reliably work to shape them into the desired form. Doesn’t exist.

Some people don’t want to forgive you, sometimes it’s not what you do but who you’re being that is sabotaging perfectly good instructions, sometimes we are “ungettable” and will put everything in the way of being heard or understood. The list of complications, which are constantly shape-changing and adapting to the present situation, make the material unworkable for a simple set of instructions.

The best tip I can give you is twofold.  First, that IT’S ABOUT YOU. What happens always has something to do with you. If you put your energy into understanding yourself, undoing patterns that get in your way, perceptions you make from fear and the past, counterproductive actions you seem to consistently take, you’ll become a relationship dynamo and STILL not connect every time, still have work to do, still need to learn to understand the shape-changing going on in this incredibly dynamic arena.

Second, if you want it any other way, you’ll have to exclude yourself from being in relationships, period. This is what it’s like to make things work with other human beings and it’s never simple outside of being in very specific, finite and limited relationships (getting coffee from your barista, paying the toll on the highway, riding in an elevator and you know how fraught with variance even those interactions are!).

Can you hang with that? Are you willing to drop your need for iron-clad solutions and start the journey of realizing what the raw material called YOU is all about that has things go they way they do? You’ll never be done, it’ll never be over, but not taking it on brings consequences we’re all very familiar with and rarely satisfied having to endure. We can be straight about this. Just being in love, just having the same mission in mind, just asking him how his day was or buying her chocolates ain’t gonna cut it.

Looking deeply, with humility, being willing to question yourself and see that some behaviors and persistent thoughts do not serve you and owning your stuff gives you the best chance to grow into someone who can make their relationships work. The best part, it’s also the path to your own freedom.

I’m happy to be your partner in that journey as your private coach. Just be in touch.

I’d also love if you’d like to continue this conversation. Leave your comments below.

Love,
Gregg