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Relationship communication tip number two is that we need to put our friendship before our loveship. Friends put each other first while those who often times have love relationships or sexual relationships sometimes develop those without really developing a true friendship first. So when we take the time to slow down and be a friend to the other person, it deepens the relationship and allows us to have even a more fulfilling experience of that relationship.

Do unto others as you would have people do unto you is sage advice. So is do unto others as they would like to be done unto. You treat your friends the way they want to be treated. You take good care of them. You share with them. Read more »

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Also what we need to do if someone does have a request of us is to reply to them rather than to react to them. Replying is softer and yet still direct. Just reacting is a common cause of communication breakdowns and misunderstandings.

A reaction often times is a verbal or nonverbal, off the top gut response. It is an indirect attempt to show somebody how we’re thinking or feeling without first giving it any conscious thought. That immediate reaction can be a good thing if the input is needed immediately. Yet the lack of forethought prior to communicating can be an issue. Read more »

In graduate school I took a course on Couples Therapy. One of the questions that our professor asked right in the very beginning of the program was, “What is the most important thing that a couple needs in order to have a sound, long-lasting, healthy relationship?”

There were many answers – love, truthfulness, passion, great sex, hope, being kind to one another, doing for the other person, being helpful, talking and open communications, touching them, anticipating the needs of the other person, the answers went on and on. Read more »

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Worry is painful over-concern that is bad for your health, hard on your finances, and tough on your relationships. It’s the misuse of your imagination. It is putting your brain to work making you feel bad. Worry is a form of negative self-talk, it’s “what-ifing” things. Those what-if’s can scare you terribly and stop you dead in your tracks.

Worry is the result of projecting bad things that might occur, using our imaginations to create bad things. Think about that, the only reality is that there are possibilities out there; there are good possibilities and bad possibilities. You need to think about how things may go wrong. You need to think about what you can do to make things go right, but staying focused on why things are not going to work and bad things will defeat you more than anything else.
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It’s important that your advisor, mentor, or coach be a good listener. They need to be an encourager, but they also need to be a good listener and participate actively by listening to what you say and sifting through your words and your ideas so that they can help you to come up with something of benefit.

Great advisors make good decisions, they make good choices because they have wisdom behind them. They have gained this through experience and through knowledge and from listening to other people. How do you acquire wisdom? How does it work in decisions? Wisdom is acquired by gaining knowledge and learning to apply that knowledge to your life, to your routine, to your experience. Those events help you gain wisdom on how you want to act. People who are good decision makers have the ability to test the information, filter out the parts that are not true or don’t work, and then apply it in the ways that are beneficial to them and to those who depend on them. Find someone who is decisive.
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Winning with Good Input

Something you can do to make a difference on your way to winning is to have a great coach or a mentor to assist. There is no substitute for experience. There are two ways to get it. One is to go out and do things and the other is to learn from people who have already done it and made a lot of mistakes and learn what they did that worked. It can be a lot less costly and significantly easier to learn from other people’s mistakes and their successes.

Of course you have to go out ultimately and do it yourself as well and you’ll probably screw it up in the process, but if you learned something that worked for someone else and it worked fairly consistently, then even though you may have trial and error you are going to save yourself a lot of time.
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You have to choose your target, you have to think about where you are going to go and how you are going to do it. Planning and preparation helps build your confidence and gets you ready to win.

Be prepared means that you are equipping yourself with tools, skills, knowledge and attitude so that you can begin building what you want. You need to have high goals, not unreasonably high goals, but goals that are high enough that they inspire you to move forward because they are good for you and good for those you value.

I fully believe you have potential to do and accomplish far more than you have ever believed that you are capable of doing and accomplishing. If you look at history you will see how people who are just normal people have made huge differences in our world. They have achieved things that people said were not possible.
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Goals Build Wins

To win you must be very clear about what you want. You have to have a vision and you have to have goals. There was a survey taken in corporate America surveying people to see how much they were getting done on an average daily basis in whatever the work was they were doing.

Interestingly the side note was that right before they went on vacation, for one to two days prior on average they got double the amount done on a daily basis that they normally did. Why not work like every day is the day before you are going on vacation? Think how much more you would get done.
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