Intentional Living with Tanya Hale

When we're not paying close attention, we can very easily slip into critical words and behaviors in our relationships. Often, we won't even see it, because in our minds we are being helpful or just expressing concern or our opinion, but it can still very easily be perceived as criticism. And criticism breaks down relationship by treading on trust and respect. When we create awareness around our critical tendencies, stop criticizing, and instead move into curiosity, we create deeper connection and intimacy. Curiosity strengthens our relationships whereas criticism destroys our relationships.

We live in a society that can be a little happiness obsessed at times. And though the thought of being happy all the time can sound lovely, it's just not going to happen. Life is meant to be messy, to be challenging, and to provide us with a lot of opportunities to figure out the tough stuff. It can be difficult to remember this when we live in a world where discomfort is seen as a problem to be avoided rather than just part of life. This week we are discussing how to balance out the discomfort of life and our quest for happiness.

Most of us, at one time or another, have had a story that we are not good enough. And it can really wreak havoc in our lives. It can cause us to feel insecure, and from that place we struggle to be the person we really want to be. Understanding how to address our 'not good enough' thoughts is a life-changing skill that will bring a confident and beautiful approach to life.

It is really easy for us to create dysfunctional and destructive relationships when we haven't learned how to respect and honor others' personalities, preferences, and perspectives. These three things are at the heart of who people are, and when we reject these things, we reject them. And when we reject them, we shut down the opportunity to create deeper friendship and intimacy.

Although I talk about the thought model and use it here on the podcast, it's been a while since I talked about the basic parts of it and how they work together. On this podcast we will be looking at how the circumstances in our lives are neutral, how we have thoughts about those circumstances, how those thoughts create feelings, how our feelings fuel our actions, and then how our actions create the ultimate results in our lives. When we can understand this model more clearly, we have the tools to clean up our lives and our relationships in ways we never imagined. And it all starts with a thought. . . huh! Who knew?!?

John Gottman is a brilliant relationship expert who has done an amazing amount of research on what makes marriages successful. He has identified four elements of dysfunctional behavior in marriages that are especially destructive, and he calls these The Four Horsemen. These four elements are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. In this podcast we are digging into these four behaviors and learning how to identify and clean them up in our own relationships.

Our primitive brain does some amazing things for us. However, if we aren't paying attention, it can keep us stuck and struggling to create the kind of life we really want to have. When we learn to manage our primitive brain and engage our pre-frontal cortex, we have the capacity to really show up for our life in the ways we want. On today's podcast, we're learning just how to use your brain to do what you really want to do.

Today Sione and I are celebrating our second year of marriage, and we have a lot to celebrate! In this podcast we are talking about how we have grown this past year, tools we have learned and implemented, and ideas we have come to understand better. This is a chance for you to see how the tools I teach here on the podcast are implemented in real life.

I think a lot of us grew up believing, at some level, that love was a reward for good behavior. And yet, when looked at through the eyes of God, love is never a reward. Love is actually the first and greatest commandment, it is a law. The law of love teaches us that regardless of how others act, regardless of how we're treated, regardless of what is said or done, our responsibility in every situation is to learn how to love. That's a tall order, to be sure, and it is also the way to find our greatest happiness and best relationships ever.

Many of the people I work with who are struggling in their marriages find friendship with their partner to be elusive. It was there when they got married, and over time, they have become more and more distant, negative, and dismissive, until they find they just don't have a good friendship with their spouse anymore. And this is a huge problem. Dr. John Gottman, a relationship expert has said, 'happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. . . a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.' It's time to rekindle the friendship in our marriages, and in this podcast we're going to talk about how.

I hear so many people who just want us all to get along. What many of them are meaning is, why can't everyone have the same opinions and wants and needs? Why doesn't everyone just do things the way I want and then it would be easy? Of course that would be easy, it would also defeat a huge part of the reason we are here on earth, to learn to be more loving and accepting and respectful of other people's agency. So, maybe we're actually not all supposed to get along, maybe we're really supposed to learn to love and accept other people for who they are and honor their agency.

When we feel safe in our relationships, we feel we can show up with more vulnerability. When we show up with more vulnerability, we create more emotional and physical intimacy. But oftentimes, the behaviors we are engaging in in our relationships put the other person into protective mode rather than feeling safe, and so we struggle to create the connected relationships we really desire. In this podcast we will talk about ten ways we can create more of a safe space for our person.

So many of us did not learn growing up what it means to be in a relationship. If you're like me, you thought that growing up and getting married would mean that you would have someone to love you, to shore up your insecurities, to validate you, or to agree with your opinions. If you're like me, what you wouldn't have thought was that a relationship is a place to learn how to be more loving and kind and show up in a space of US rather than a space of ME. In this podcast we are digging a little deeper into what it means to show up in relationship to create a safe space for our partner.

When I really got serious about dating in my 50's, I used something called the 90-day Relationship. An idea baby of Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, I took it and ran with it. Basically, you're all in, fully committed, and figuring things out for 90 days. It was a brilliant process for me to figure out relationships more and to find my person. Through this process I discovered some of my most destructive patterns of behavior and was able to clean them up. Check out this podcast to learn more about why this process worked so amazingly well for me.

Dating in the middle part of our lives is a different ballgame than when we were in our 20s. Thank goodness! We have a much better understanding of who we are and what is really important to us in a relationship. And using the tools you learn here on the podcast you will be able to create something very different. I'm going to be sharing with you some of the ways that I showed up dating in my 50s that I feel made a huge difference for me finding such an amazing partner.

Divorce is a major life event, and one that can leave us feeling as though our whole world has been upended, because, often it has been. It can be really tough to get our feet on solid ground with all of the emotional and even physical turmoil that divorce creates. How do we start to heal from all of the pain? And how do we move forward into the life we imagined waited for us outside of our terribly dysfunctional marriage?

If ever there is a time in our lives when our self-worth seems like it's up for grabs, going through a divorce is it. It's a time when we question our judgment, our wisdom, our value, our loveability, basically, we question so much of who we are and the choices we have made. And yet, having a strong sense of self is so vital to our abililty to move forward and heal and grow. So, how can we hold onto, or even grow our sense of self-worth? How can we see our value even in the midst of one of the toughest decisions in our lives?

One-upping and one-downing in our relationships is so normal and expected for most of us, that we can often have a tough time recognizing when we are doing it. Here are two things to look for to help you be more aware: resentment and contempt. When we are putting ourselves in a one-down position, we will often feel resentment. When we are putting ourselves in a one-up position, we will often feel contempt. When we can learn to recognize these thoughts and behaviors, we can then start to figure out how to approach our relationships from a much healthier and happier equal place.

Validation is something that we often seek from others to shore up our sense of self. And this never really works, because SELF-worth is something that can only be created within ourselves. Validation in our marriages and relationships, however, is a very important tool. It lets the other person know we see them, we acknowledge them, we accept them, and it creates connection and intimacy. In this podcast we are discussing how we can better validate our relationships to create greater connection.

It's hard to know what to do when you're in a tough marriage. You have tried so many things to make it better, and often it seems that despite your best efforts it's getting worse. You're stuck in limbo trying to decide what to do and whether you should call it quits or keep trying. What can we do to make it better? How do we know what the right decision is? How do we make a decision we can feel confident in? All that and more in this podcast.