The six most important words:
I admit that I was wrong.

The five most important words:
You did a great job.

The four most important words:
What do you think?

The three most important words:
Could you please. . .

The two most important words:
Thank you.

The most important word:
We.

The least important word:
I.

KEEP THIS LIST HANDY, JUST IN CASE EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS….

Technorati Tags: appreciation, human needs, inclusion, love, respect

a) Living life as it happens, in a naive way, adapting yourself to what life dishes out to you ( as the facts of family of origin; level of poverty/wealth; educational possibilities; personal health, etc), being resigned to your circumstances and seeing yourself incapable of changing anything.

b) Having a personal plan, designed by you and based on what you want from life.

Now, with so much psychological research, we get to know more about what constitutes a good life. We already know that we need some degree of peace and happiness (life stress managed and kept under control) in order to live healthy.

Because life stress and interpersonal conflict attack your life structure, they bring anxiety and reduce your life quality.

We also know that having negative emotions make you miserable, reducing your quality of life and diminishing happiness. A life full of conflict and stress is also a life full on medical and health incidents…they go together.

Knowing all this, even when our origins gave us bad health, unhappy family of origin and a lot of psychological anguish and suffering, it is now possible to make the strategic decision to focus on how to make your life happier.

First, you need to stop thinking that you have no power on the kind of life you are having, and begin accepting that you have some power on its quality. Taking responsibility for seeking to develop positive and nourishing interactions with others is the first one. What else can you do to enjoy a happier life?

You need to identify your needs, and make a plan to establish a source of satisfaction to each different need. If you have a need for security, the solution for it is different from the solution to the need for love and security, and so on…

You are also responsible for establishing links with people who can respect and appreciate you; and perhaps looking at th impact of negative people in your life, avoid connecting with the people who stop your growth.

As now your life design is in your own hands, you are responsible for making yourself grow: identify the areas where you need some push to develop further, towards a better education, a better job, or a better body, and follow the plan. Remember to keep growing, always.

Being in a better and happier place will make you more resistant to friction and conflict: learn to keep smiling while you continue your own way; no need to discuss with others to force them to change. You only can change yourself, and that is a large job!

In short: you will have to catch up in your own happy self-development, towards the person you want to be. Don’t let anyone challenge your own image of your good, purposeful life. And yes, this also means that you have to take your inner child to play!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today, by buying the ebook with solutions for reducing stress in your life and having a happier love relationship…

Technorati Tags: anger, appreciation, conflict, confrontation, critique, Emotional Abuse, forgiveness, Healthy Marriage, healthy relationships, passive aggression, recognition, Relationships, respect, Self-Esteem

What if we believe that we have “bad luck”? then everything we plan will have to do two battles: one against reality out there, and the second one to convince “luck” to bend over our desire….making everything a double challenge.

We all have a variety of core beliefs, of which some are empowering (positive beliefs) and others are limiting (negative beliefs). In the US, popular culture tends to push for more positive than negative beliefs, which promotes a feeling that most projects are possible and doable. If we grew up with the people around us telling that only men can do the things we also want to do, then we have again the double challenge: getting to have the opportunity to do those desired tasks and proving that we are as valuable as men at each step….

Every day, in fact every minute we are reinforcing or weakening them. It is an on-going process. Each time we tell ourselves that our plans are within reach, we help them be doable. Even we are influencing each other when we express those beliefs, and sometimes it doesn’t help our loved ones hearing us expressing negative beliefs about their capacities. Why, if they never did this task, how come now they think they can do it? Well, me saying that they will never learn is only a half disguised act of sabotage…Perhaps it’s best to let them try, because even trying and failing, they will know better for the next try.

As a result, we need to be aware of negative, judgmental beliefs popping up in our minds, and work actively to replace them with a more positive approach.

This reframing goes a long way: we can “reframe” failure as an opportunity for a new beginning; and we can see conflict as an opportunity to really know what we want and negotiate better what we need to receive. It’s only a matter of framing these two concepts into the right environment!

Several suggestions follow from this concept:

• Find the areas in your life you would change if you could (finances, relationships, work)
• Use each subject you have listed as a heading in a new piece of paper, and write why do you believe you can’t;
• Review the list of beliefs, find the negatives and turn them 180 degrees;
• Have a set of ideas, words and phrases that define the positive framing of each issue.
• Put those positive phrases on cards and read them each night before going to sleep.

If you do a periodic revision of your basic assumptions about life in general, and your happiness in particular, you will see that more positive experiences are happening now that you are in control of the beliefs that determine your reality.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: attitude change, backstabbing, critique, Emotional Abuse, feelings, happiness, healthy relationships, negative emotions, rejection, resilience, workplace anxiety

When you are ready to deny them the drama and adrenaline rush (by behaving calmer and less reactive in stressful situations) they initially react very negatively, almost as if they are going through a drug withdrawal.

In fact it is possible that when you first become calmer, they may escalate the shouting in the short term. If you are patient and persevere in this non-engagement mindset, this will change in the long term.

What strategies can you use with a person who loves to and needs to have a dispute with you?

• Never yell back, not matter how upset or angry the other person might be; detach emotionally;
• The more their voice goes up, the more you whisper;
• If you feel the situation gets out of control, just escape to a safer place (the bathroom, a long walk);
• Be a good listener and parrot back what they tell you, but in a softer voice;
• Say that you really want to understand their needs;
• If you are going to work with him, there must be a calmer environment, so the person has to stop yelling.

So, even when the other person has a volatile tendency to start emotional battles, the issue resides on your capacity to detach and keep your cool. That’s real personal power!

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

Technorati Tags: aggression, anger, anger attack, attitude change, confrontation, control, Emotional Abuse, feelings, negative emotions, rejection, respect

But, where is your own perspective here?

Is there a way to re-discover your life project? A simple, straightforward way to find it again? Well, yes! You need to start by checking your basic needs and how they are solved or unsolved just now.

• The most basic activity is to look at your human needs. Remember, we all have different needs of personal security; variety; love and connection, recognition and transcendence.

• Can you look at this list and identify where are you still starving? Can you make a list of your frustrated areas? Do you need security or love, variety or recognition? Where is your most important hunger?

• Having identified which areas are the most starved, decide if you are waiting for someone to satisfy them. If you are an adult, STOP! and make the commitment to solve your own needs by yourself.

• You need to understand that your first priority is not to get hurt, followed by the need to develop and grow with your needs satisfied.

• Wrestling the control over your needs satisfaction into your own hands, gives you your power back.

When you have recovered your own personal power, you can begin a conversation with anyone around you from a position of power, and not of subordination, as before.

You know how to find solutions to your needs, and this attitude gives you the most important life project: to make yourself happy!

From here on, your self-esteem is linked to the question:

How much do I care to listen and solve my own needs? How much do I provide security, variety and recognition to myself and to others?

Remember that: Once your own needs are solved, you can give to others….but not before.

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

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Technorati Tags: appreciation, attitude change, critique, frustration, happiness, recognition, Self-Esteem

It had a dirty secret….if the wife would have different takes on a situation she would have to sneak her views into a conversation, because her husband was the one supposed to do decision-making.

She could suggest, but the final decision (and credit) was not hers. Even if she had, God permit, some really good ideas…she needed to take care of her husband’s face by attributing such ideas to his creation.

And when she felt entitled to some decisions of her own? Several heavy weight traditions would discourage her. Church would preach submission to husbands; society would control her by ridicule. There was little a husband needed to do to “keep her in her place.’’

Even if we accept the benefits of sustaining this state of affairs, times have changed, and this hyerarchical marriage order has disappeared. Has it?

Sometimes I doubt it, because we can see that this male superiority marriage model persists. How? It has taken a different form now given that it’s the husband’s job to enforce her obedience, because society and church have abandoned preaching about wife’s submission to husbands.

It’s left in the hands of a husband to make his wife comply and obey, and to support his authority in the home. How does he do it? Lacking divine authority, there is the tool of emotional abuse to help him make his wife to feel inferior.

How? How come I’m linking persistent male authority with emotional abuse in marriage? Very simple: now, the way to have her humbled and in her place is to make her feel diminished and wrong, being always corrected because being criticized by a higher authority. I know a couple, now in their seventies…she has been all her life a stay-at-home wife and mother. He stills walks into the kitchen and announces to everyone: “she is always burning the food, what is she burning today?”

Is it true? Even if it is, what is the need to shame her in front of her relatives or friends? To prove male superiority, of course! After all those years of marriage, his instincts as the last word, judge and executioner are prevalent. Could he had learned to see her skills with more love and compassion? Could he appreciate more her positive aspects? Of course he could!

What he is doing is using snide comments to inflict public humiliation on her…leting her know who is still the boss. The harsh critiques, negative comments and complaints about her only role are the ways in which she is told to keep her place; if she protests, more abuse will be coming.

Why men do this? They don’t have any obvious need to continuously prove superiority…right? Or is it perhaps their insecurity that forces them to nag, criticize and demean the people who love them the most? So they can show who is the boss?

This attitude is really pathetic and has no place in a healthy marriage… How many divorces do you know, caused by her fatigue at being treated as a lesser, never equal partner?

If you married expecting that your partner would be the person accepting you warts and all; love you and admire you even beyond what you yourself know about your skills…then this is fraud. It means that you can’t trust the person you promised to love above others, because this person is reducing you to a lesser place below him.

Emotional abuse in marriage intent is to support male superiority, but ends up destroying the relationship. Are you in a marriage damaged by emotional abuse applied to support his dominant role? If so, how do you manage to keep your self-esteem alive?

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! Go now to http://www.creativeconflicts.com.

Technorati Tags: abuse, appreciation, Emotional Abuse, emotions, feelings, frustration, Healthy Marriage, humiliation, negative emotions, recognition, verbal abuse

Now is time to include in the definition of emotional health the ability to express all emotions appropriately. Those who have this ability are surely mentally healthy, and able to keep their relationships with other growing. The opposite, being emotionally blocked and unable to know what feelings are present and how to express those feelings to others indicate lack of emotional health.

A person might be stuck in depression or in permanent stress; stuck in anger; stuck in obsessive fears, or stuck in perpetual guilt or shame. Each one of them indicates a solution that was chosen as the least of evils way back then, when growing up that now is hindering adult emotional development.

If we watch young children, as young as two years old, we can see the gamut of expressions being externalized as they happen. Emotions are there, and all the social and family education gets to work on the young person to control those expressions that are socially upsetting. Sadly, we repress emotions instead of accepting and channeling them as indicators of deep unsolved needs.

When we grow up, the most socially troublesome emotion is anger. How do we accept anger in ourselves, how to process it as an indicator of some unjust frustration suffered, and what to do to use it constructively is the challenge.
Emotionally healthy adults, with respect to anger, usually are comfortable with anger and hatred, their own and others. It’s not easy to accept, but is part of human emotions and it has a legitimate place.

The problem appears when socially we have no permission to feel or express anger. The message of emotional needs frustration is lost and can’t be solved; and moreover we suffer social rejection because of acting angry. We could even get more isolation and rejection the more the need prompts us to express anger in the wrong places.

This is one of the known roots of passive aggression: the anger gets hidden, and it can’t be expressed by normal ways. It then gets channeled in the more hidden ways: sullenness, sabotages, resistance, and emotional withdrawal…

Anger (including irritation, rage, hatred, etc.) is always based upon unfulfilled expectations. But we need to have the anger expressed, if we want to be able to offer any relief! What do you do in the case that you have only the smoke (passive aggression) but not the real, subjacent anger? Here is where you need to step in the readings about passive aggressive!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: anger, Emotional Abuse, emotions, feelings, frustration, Healthy Marriage, healthy relationships, hidden anger, negative emotions, Self-Esteem

Brain scan studies have shown that early romantic love generates a unique pattern of brain activity. How do we know this? Well, to study love on the brain, researches put men and women in brain scan machines and show them pictures of their loved ones.

If we do a brain scan of the person in love, we can see that regions of the brain related to addiction light up when the person sees a photo of his or her beloved.

What looking at the picture of the loved one is doing is provoking the same response of neural activation located in the area of the brain associated with intense reward. This response is similar to the ones that appear when people take addictive drugs or gamble, or receive a strong jolt of excitement.

Even better, this work suggests, for the first time, that we can predict the intensity of the same love after 18 months in the future, by looking at how intense the brain patterns are now, during the early phase of romantic love.

Does romantic love translates across cultures? For instance, does a Chinese brain look the same as an American brain when it’s in love?

Regardless how many cultural differences are in ways to express love, they don’t change the brain’s neurological reaction to romantic love. The scans showed that love lights up the brain in the same manner in any culture.

“This measure doesn’t depend on culture,” Dr. Aron explained. “We were able to replicate our American findings in the Chinese culture where everyone thought love would be the most different.”

Dr. Aron said. “What the study does suggest is that love is a powerful force in human life. What is going on at the deep level of the brain is pretty much the same everywhere in each culture.”

Why is this research important? Because feeling in love shakes up our brains, makes them light with pleasure and thus transforms our lives…It is the basis for a healthy marriage. This is the emotion that we need to experience to restore balance, to make us grow in life and to fulfill a deep need for connection with other. There is no substitute for the brain excitement a new love can bring!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: brain in love, Healthy Marriage, love and connection, loving marriage

And sometimes, due to our upbringing, we understand “love” and “connection” and “appreciation” in way different ways….so different we can get confused when we think we know what makes our loved ones happy.

For instance, what is the meaning that “love” has for your boyfriend? Being loved could mean for him a different experience than yours….if you expect touching, and verbal expressions of love and frequent proximity, for him there could be another set of indicators of your love he is still waiting for. Perhaps leaving him the time and space to recover from work; or accepting that he is not in conditions to smile just now, without guilting or reproaching?

What does it mean to care for another person? First we must really “see through” the eyes of the other. Get out of our own ego driven needs and positions, and look, feel, experience life as the other person.

What is it like to be this person? What is he going through? Why? What does he need? What it that is really going on for this soul at a deeper level? What is behind his perspective in life? How can you really help him and relieve his deeper need – or help him reach his goals? In the same way you expect to be deeply understood, he is also operating from a deeper part of him that yearns to be seen and heard.

How can you let him know that ‘I GET YOU’? What do you need to do to show that you love him? Does he really agree with that? Love has different meanings for each one…it helps if you can tell him what is exactly that you need to feel loved. Perhaps a compliment a day? Perhaps seeing the other person finally initiating sex?

Here, the real key to make this behavior succeed is hidden. It’s not a trade; not an interchange of favors…Do your actions in a space of very clear energy; you have to enjoy making him happy, for you it has to be “cool,” happy and playful and humorous. While you do this gift, you have to enjoy being the best person you can be.

I appreciate Cloe Madanes’ (robinnsmadanescoaching.com) proposal of a 90 days challenge to show real love to your spouse. Does it takes so long to get in synch with his/her needs; to be more sensitive about what are the ways in which she feels loved?

Only after 90 days of this dedication you can conclude that your marriage is over; that there is no love left, and that your spouse doesn’t have what it takes to make you happy. Does it work? It’s an extraordinary effort, but the results are twofold: show that you are doing a serious job at recovering the love and connection of your marriage, and also that you are able to make someone deeply happy and understood. There is no better gift than this!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.

Technorati Tags: angry husband, appreciation, attitude change, emotions, feelings, Healthy Marriage, healthy relationships, loneliness, love, negative emotions, recognition, Relationships, respect, understanding