10 Signs of a Healthy Relationship

by: Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

“My parents had a very good relationship,” I often hear my clients say.

“What do you mean by good?” I ask.

“They didn’t fight. They spent a lot of time with each other.”

That may have been the definition of a good relationship years ago, but now most people want more. Following are ten signs of a healthy relationship.

KINDNESS

Is kindness more important to each of you than having your way, being in control, or being right? Do you each receive joy out of being kind to each other? Being kind rather than controlling with each other is essential for a healthy relationship.

SPONTANEOUS WARMTH AND AFFECTION

Do you and your partner well up with warmth and fullness of heart for each other and express it with affection? Are you each able to see the beautiful essence within each other, rather than just the faults? Are you able to get beyond the outer to the unique inner Self of each other? Do you enjoy sharing affection? Warmth and affection are vital for a healthy relationship.

LAUGHTER AND FUN

Can the two of you laugh and play together? Do you appreciate and enjoy each other’s sense of humor? In the midst of difficulties, can you help each other to lighten up with humor? Can you let down and be playful with each other, letting yourselves be like kids together? Laughter and fun play a huge role in a healthy relationship.

ENJOYING TIME TOGETHER AND TIME APART

Are you both each other’s favorite person to spend time with? Are you motivated to set aside time just to be together?

Do both of you have friends and interests that you enjoy doing? Are both of you fine when you are not together?

Some couples spend a lot of time together because they really enjoy it, while others spend a lot of time together out of fear of being alone. It is important for a healthy relationship for each person to have friends and interests, so that they are not dependent on each other. Dependency is not healthy in a relationship, particularly emotional dependency.

A METHOD FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION

All relationships have some conflict. It is not the conflict that is the issue, but how you deal with it. Do you have a method for resolving conflict, or do the issues just keep getting swept aside? If fighting is part of how you deal with conflict, do you fight fair, or are you hurtful when you fight?

LETTING GO OF ANGER

If one or both of you get angry, do you hang on to it, punishing your partner with it, or can you easily let it go? In healthy relationships, both partners are able to quickly move on, back into kindness and affection.

TRUST IN YOUR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER

Do you each trust that the love is solid, even in very difficult times between you? Do you each know that you can mess up, fail, disappoint the other, emotionally hurt the other – and the love will still be there? Do you each know that the love is about who you are, not what you do? This level of trust is essential for a healthy relationship.

LISTENING, UNDERSTANDING, ACCEPTING AND LEARNING

Do you each feel heard, understood and accepted? Can you share your secrets with your partner without fearing being judged? Are you each more interested in learning about yourselves and each other than you are in controlling each other? Is listening to each other with an open heart and a desire to understand more important than judging each other or defending yourselves?

SEXUALITY

Is your sexual relationship warm and caring? Can you be sexually spontaneous? Can you talk with each other about what brings pleasure to each of you?

FREEDOM TO BE YOURSELF

Do you each feel free to be all that you are? Do you each feel supported in pursuing what brings you joy? Does your partner feel joy for your joy?

While some people may naturally be open, kind, affectionate, accepting, and emotionally responsible for themselves, most people need to heal the fears and false beliefs they learned in their families. Healthy relationships evolve as each person evolves in his or her ability to be loving to themselves and each other.

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Improve Your Results With Active Listening

by: Jason De Boer

Listening is one of the most common and important things that we do. Recent research on work behaviour suggests that we spend approximately 9% of our time writing, 16% of our time reading, 30% of our time talking and 45% of our time listening.

Listening is a fundamental part of the communication process. Regardless of the type of job you do or the industry in which you work, it is important to understand the listening process, have an awareness of barriers to listening effectively, and learn how to listen actively.

Listening as a process

Hearing and listening are not the same thing. In fact, hearing is just the first of three stages in the listening process, all of which are fairly obvious but still worth remembering.

- Hearing Simply the process of sound waves being transformed by our brains into impulses.

- Attention Important so that we can hear what is being said to us, but often difficult due to distractions such as noise intrusion or internal distractions such as thinking about something else rather than what is being said.

- Understanding This is the most crucial aspect of the process on a number of levels. As well as understanding what is being said, we need to try to understand the context of the message, and understand the significance of any verbal or non-verbal clues from the speaker. Having a degree of background knowledge regarding the speaker or the subject is also helpful.

Barriers to listening

In most situations there are a number of obstacles which can stop us from listening effectively, and as a trainer it is important to appreciate what these obstacles are and how to overcome each of them. Broadly speaking, there are four types of barriers to listening –

- Psychological barriers, including prejudice, apathy or fear on the part of the listener. For example, someone working in marketing or production may not be as interested in a presentation on annual financial results as an accountant or sales director, given that it may not directly impact on their day to day activities.

- Physical barriers, including disability, fatigue or poor health on the part of the listener. For example, trying to listen to a speaker for long periods while you are suffering from a heavy cold is a fairly difficult thing to do.

- Environmental barriers, including distracting noises, uncomfortable or poorly positioned seating, or an unsuitable climate such as an overheated, stuffy meeting room.

- Expectation barriers, such as anticipating a mundane or boring presentation, expecting to receive bad news, or being spoken to in confusing jargon.

In a work or educational situation, you can certainly address tangible barriers such as environmental factors or physical obstacles. Dealing with internal barriers can be more difficult, but a lot of this can be achieved by thorough preparation before any meetings or group sessions.

Active listening

In order to understand the concept and value of active listening, it is worth considering it as one of three different types of listening.

- Competitive listening You will see this most often in negotiation situations, or when politicians are debating with each other. The person being spoken to is more interested in getting their own point of view across when the other person stops speaking, rather than acknowledging what they have just heard. Alternatively, they are distracted by thinking about their own argument or point of view rather than listening properly.

- Passive or attentive listening This is always a danger in lecture style presentation sessions. An audience will pay attention to the slides and listen carefully to the speaker, but there is no real opportunity to interact. This means that the speaker may not know how well their message is being understood.

- Active listening This is the best way to listen for and understand the real message in what people are saying. It involves taking the next step from just listening attentively, by looking to show obvious interest in what the speaker is saying, and by trying to interact with them. As a manager, salesperson or trainer you need to try to use active listening yourself, and provide opportunities for colleagues, customers and learners to use active listening techniques as well. This is of particular importance when involved in informal training activities such as coaching and mentoring.

In terms of outlining the techniques which can be used for active listening, it is useful to think back to the three basic stages of the listening process – hearing, attention and understanding.

Hearing and attention

- First and hopefully obviously, stop talking.

- Try to eliminate as many distractions as possible, both external and internal.

- Try to control your own non-verbal signals to the person speaking. This could mean paying attention to your physical stance, your body movements, eye contact with the speaker, and encouraging motions such as nodding or smiling.

Understanding

- Make sure that you understand the purpose of the speaker, and also be aware of you want from the conversation.

- It also helps to take notes, but try to focus on writing down key words and phrases that will jog your memory later, rather than trying to write down everything that is being said in an act of dictation.

- If possible, try to ask questions. You can use the notes you have written to remind you of points that need clarification. Try not to interrupt though!

- Finally, try to use the technique of reflecting what the speaker says to you.

Reflecting

This is a technique used extensively by people involved in consultative selling, but it is also a very useful tool for anyone involved in business, education, training or voluntary work. Communication can be broken down into three levels – facts, thoughts (or beliefs) and feelings (or emotions). Reflecting works on all three levels.

- Repeat the facts that you think you have been given by the speaker. This is sometimes referred to as ‘parroting’. If you are right, you know that you are getting the basic elements of what the speaker is telling you. If you have made any mistakes, this gives you both an opportunity to get back on to the same page.

- Also share the thoughts or beliefs that you have heard, and try to convey the underlying feelings or emotions which you believe are involved. For example, the speaker may be very upset and wants you to display empathy or sympathy with their situation. It is this reflection of thoughts and feelings which distinguishes reflecting from just parroting back to the speaker, which might get a bit tedious and annoying for all concerned.

Again, this is a very useful tool when coaching or mentoring. It can also be used during feedback sessions in a more formal situation such as a performance review meeting.

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Convince The Conscious Mind For The Subconscious To Work

by: Enoch Tan

Your conscious mind is the part of your mind that deals with reason and logic. It is the director of your subconscious mind, which is the part of your mind that deals with energy and creation. Your conscious mind is the logical mind that functions with logic. You think with the conscious mind and it is the programmer of the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind that carries out the program. Convince your logical mind so that it will send the right instructions to your creative mind.

The source of our ability to achieve anything we desire is the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind will accept any sustained impression, particularly fuelled by emotion, and therefore any sustained thought, and bring it into manifestation without question. It is the task of the conscious mind therefore to choose carefully which sustained thoughts and impressions the subconscious mind receives.

The bible says that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of the Heavenly Father which is in heaven. The “two of you” referred to are the conscious and subconscious minds. Before anything can be achieved, both need to be in harmony. The subconscious mind is always in harmony and never argues about anything, so it is the conscious mind that needs to be convinced.

The subconscious mind does not need reason to make things happen. When an impression is made upon the subconscious mind without conscious awareness, the subconscious mind will proceed to work on it automatically. But its effect will soon become noticeable by the conscious mind and will be interfered by it. If your conscious mind cannot accept what is happening because it reasons against it, then it will send a conflicting impression that will undo the first.

There are two conditions that need to be present for subconscious change to be sustainable. The first condition is that the subconscious impression must be continually induced in order to maintain its strength over the mind. The second condition is that the conscious mind must become convinced by reasoning the result as a logically acceptable event. When either one of these two conditions are present, the subconscious mind will be able to continue creating the thing it is programmed with.

When change happens unconsciously, it can also reverse unconsciously. There are times when you experience good or bad things happening to you for awhile. But you have no idea how exactly did you cause those things to happen because you were unconsciously creating them. Then when your subconscious mind undergoes a change, the good or bad things begin to change as well. That is why if you want to have deliberate control over your reality creation, you need to have conscious understanding.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate. That is why gaining awareness is so important. All of life is a learning experience to become all that you can be. The purpose of all our experiences whether good or bad is for us to evolve in our consciousness. The more conscious we become, the more power we have as deliberate creators of our own reality. Awareness gives us freewill to choose our experiences.

Even when you choose to use techniques or technology that bypasses the conscious mind to program the subconscious mind for unconscious change, you should seek to learn how it works. When you are aware of the process and the logic behind it, you are able to have both your conscious and subconscious minds working for you. Total transformation involves the whole mind and not just part of it. It is your belief that the subconscious technique works that affects its influence over you as well.

We seek to understand how everything works and to discover the explanation of every mystery that presents itself to us. It is because when we can comprehend all that we experience according to logic, we are able to master our situations instead of letting it master us. Everything in the universe runs according to logic. When we encounter anything we do not understand, it is not because it is illogical but just that we have yet to discover the logic of it.

Logic does not originate from the conscious mind but from the subconscious mind. No one invents a new idea that never existed, but he only discovers it through inspiration that comes from a place where it already exists with everything else. It is the conscious mind that plays with logic and then decides how shall the subconscious mind operate with it. The truth is all programs already exist within the subconscious mind, but the conscious mind decides which ones it shall run.

Perfect creation requires perfect harmony between the conscious and subconscious minds. That is why you need to find as much information as you can that supports you in believing in the possibility and success of creating what you desire. Conscious knowledge enables us to direct reality as we will. Understanding is the key to solving all our problems. Understanding the problem dissolves the problem. Understanding is the reason that convinces the conscious mind for the subconscious to work.

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Motivational Operations

by: Brent Filson

There’s an inexorable law operating in business. I call it the law of UP — Unfulfilled Potential. One can see aspects of this law working in other areas:

For instance, in neurophysiology, humans are supposed to use only a fraction of our brains’ capabilities; in technology, superconductivity is not yet widely available; and in medicine, the harnessing of the body‘s abilities to fight cancers is only just beginning to be understood and realized.

But the law of UP is particularly dominant in the business world — and especially in operations. Operations is the blocking and tackling of any organization, the fundamentals that create the foundation for consistent success.

It’s such an important function that in many companies the Chief Operating Officer is usually the next in line for the job of CEO. If a company is not doing operations well, all of its other functions are diminished.

Having consulted with operations leaders in a variety of top companies for two decades, I’ve seen that many are unfortunately strict adherents to the law of UP — for one main reason: They’ve neglected an all-important results-driver, motivation.

Clearly, many factors further operational excellence: capital, cycle time, technological advancements, quality, efficiencies, etc. But motivation is the most fundamental, operational determinant at all, for it drives all the others.

After all, operations is the sum of people doing many jobs; and when skilled people are motivated to accomplish those jobs, great results happen.

But many operations perceive motivation as “soft” — as opposed to the “hard” factors of cycle time, quality control, etc. — and so either ignore it or struggle with actualizing it on a daily basis.

I see motivation, however, as a “hard” determinant of operations that can be a concrete, a practical results-producer.

I’m going to provide four imperatives that you can use right away to achieve consistent increases in operational results. But before I do, I’ll offer a working description of motivation. For leaders often fail to motivate others because those leaders misunderstand the concept of motivation.

The best way for me to describe it is to describe what it is not.

Motivation is not what people think or feel. It’s what people do. Look at the first two letters of the word, “mo.” When you see those letters in a word, such as “motor”, “motion”, “momentum”, “mobile”, etc., it usually means action of some kind. Look at motivation as action too. If people are not taking action, they are in point of fact not motivated.

Motivation is not something we can do to somebody else. It is always something that that someone else does to themselves. Look back over your career, and you will see that the motivator and the “motivatee” were always the same person. As a leader, you communicate, but the people whom you want to motivate must motivate themselves.

Motivation is not a dispassionate dynamic. It is an “emotional” dynamic. The words “motivation” and “emotion” come from the same Latin root word, which means “to move.” When we want to move (motivate) people to take action, or in truth have them motivate themselves, we engage their emotions. Put another way: People will not take action for more results faster continually unless their emotions are engaged.

Finally, the best way to enter into a motivational relationship with people is not by distant communication but the kind of face-to-face speech that has people make the choice to be committed to your cause.

Those are descriptions of what motivation truly is. But descriptions alone won’t help you meet the challenges of UP. You must follow clear imperatives to help you transform descriptions into results.

Here are four that will help you cultivate motivational operations.

1. Give leadership talks not presentations. The difference between a presentation and a leadership talk is what Mark Twain said the difference between the almost right word and the right word is. “That is the difference,” he said, “between the lightning bug and lightning.”

Let’s understand the basic difference between the presentation and the leadership talk. Presentations communicate information; but leadership talks have people believe in you, follow you, and, most important of all, want to take leadership for your cause.

My experience has taught me that 95% of all communication in business is accomplished through the presentations. However, if 95% of communication were accomplished through the leadership talk instead, leaders would be far more effective in getting results.

So before you speak to people, and leaders speak 15 to 20 and more times a day, ask yourself if you are simply providing information or are you motivating those people to motivate themselves to take action for results.

2. Create motivational systems. Most operational leaders are good a systemizing quality initiatives, cycle time, efficiencies, etc. But few understand that some of the most important systems they can put into place are systems that help people make the choice for motivation.

A particularly effective motivational system is one that saturates operations with “cause leaders.”

Unquestionably, people accomplish a task better if they are not simply doing it but taking leadership of it instead. When we are challenged to take leadership, we raise our performance to much higher levels. With that in mind, create systems that identify cause leaders, challenge them to take specific leadership action, and support those actions through systematized training and resource allocations.

3. See results not as an end but as a motivational process. Clearly, you have to get results. But many operations leaders misunderstand what results are about. I teach leaders the concept of achieving “more results faster continually” — not by speeding up but instead by slowing down and working less, by putting the motivational imperatives into practice. Leaders understand the “more results faster” aspect — but they often stumble when it comes to the “continually” aspect.

We can usually order people to get more results faster. But we can’t order people to do it on a continual basis. That’s where motivation comes in. Instead of ordering people to go from point A to point B, say, we must have them want to go from A to B. That “want to” is the heart of “continually.”

When we understand results this way, understand that we must achieve “more, faster” on a continual basis, then we begin to make motivational operations a way of life.

4. Challenge people to be motivational leaders. The imperatives are powerful when you use them consistently. But they are even more powerful when you have your leaders use them and teach others to use them. After all, you alone can’t create motivational operations. You need others to help you do it, especially those mid-level and small-unit leaders. If they are not putting the imperatives into practice every day, your attempts to raise the standards of operations to a consistently high motivational level will falter.

Define the success of your leadership by how well your leaders are leading, and you are well on your way to making motivational operations a reality.

Once you begin to institute motivational operations by applying the four imperatives, the law of Unfulfilled Potential becomes your competitor’s worry, not yours.

2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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