Relationship Coach Blog

The great challenge of life is to live it one day at a time, making the best of every moment.  Life is short.  The present is all that we ever have.  If we cannot enjoy the present, then as time passes, we will have more and more of a sense that we are wasting our life.

Yet, to make the most of the present, we need to learn from the past and prepare for the future.  If we don’t learn from the past, we will continue to fall into the same ditch again and again.  If we don’t plan for the future, we won’t know in which direction to head when we get out of the ditch.

Simply remembering the past is not enough to effect change. Good intentions do not produce good results.  Only actions can produce results.  We must have an additional step that we do whenever we have a good intention so that we can get to action.  Otherwise, we will continue to repeat our past mistakes even though we don’t want to.  We will stay stuck.

One way to convert our intentions to do better into the reality of doing better is to connect past insights with future plans.  You can make two lists-one of past mistakes to avoid and the other of future accomplishments you would like to have.  Then, link the two by drawing lines from one to the other.

For example, suppose you want to change a past behavior of shutting down and distancing whenever someone disagrees with you.  You also have a future goal of more intimacy in your relationships.  You can draw a line from one to the other and write on top of that line, “I can have more intimacy in my relationships if I work through problems rather than emotionally running away.”

You will find that many of the things you want to do differently relate directly to what you want to achieve.  Your relationship coach can help you to learn the better way you need to make the transition (such as how to “work through problems” with your spouse).