Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

If you think about your relationship with your mate, you might notice that you and/or your mate is really good at criticizing. And, if you are good at criticizing the prognosis for your relationship really stinks.  You are going to kill the relationship because criticism is continually toxic; it actually robs the relationship of its foundation. If you want to pretend that you are helping instead of actually criticizing you might want to adjust your perspective on things.  A relationship with continual criticism in it will actually die.  So replace the criticism with all that reinforcement that you did during courtship.  When you do that, you are building a foundation and you can repair things. 

Do you get defensive?  Do you defend yourself all the time? If you do, then you’ll notice that very often you have to be right or make sure you avoid being wrong. When you defend yourself, your need to be in the contest is more important than your need to resolve an issue with your mate.  Therefore, if you or your partner continues to be defensive, that creates a death-nail for your relationship. So ask yourself, do you need to be right or would you like to resolve the issue? If you think about resolving it then the need to defend yourself goes down and now you actually resolve issues and make progress, so consider that.   

When you feel sorry for yourself, in addition to wasting time, you are sucking life out of your relationship.  When you say “Life isn’t fair,” the reality is that is correct, life is unfair.  When you say, “Nobody knows the pain that I’ve suffered,” then you are seducing people into feeling sorry for you.  Decide that it is now time for you to become a grown up.  Quit feeling sorry for yourself and start validating what is good rather than whining about what is bad.  “Poor me” will suck energy out of a relationship so turn it around and breathe life into it. 

If you are like most people in relationships, you spend an enormous amount of time trying to change somebody else.  As a matter of fact, in most American marriages, you’ll notice that at least 80% of them have at least one person in the marriage that is self-appointed to fix the other person.  And you’ll notice that the person who is presumably broken is completely unaware of it and has zero intention of being fixed.  If you really want to change any kind of relationship, what you do is change yourself first.  When you change your behavior, you have a lot more power over it and you are much more likely to now force people to behave differently.  So, change yourself first and you will see a by far, bigger cascade of change around you by everybody else.