by Brian Tracy
You are responsible for your own emotions. You are the cause of your own happiness or unhappiness. Nobody makes you feel anything. If you experience self-pity, it is because you choose to feel sorry for yourself. And you can choose another reaction if you want to. The basis of self-pity is the mistaken notion that someone else is responsible for making you happy.
Self-pity is a form of weakness and insincerity that stops you from becoming a completely fulfilled human being. If you are in a relationship in which the other person is feeling sorry for himself or herself, be as compassionate and as understanding as possible and then encourage him or her to get busy doing something that he or she enjoys.
The fifth major problem in relationships is negative expectations. These occur when you constantly expect the other person to do something to disappoint you. The fact is that your expectations tend to be fulfilled. If you expect good things to happen, you will seldom be disappointed. If you expect your partner to let you down, you will seldom be disappointed in that either.
The rule is to always expect the best of your partner. Perhaps the most wonderful words that one person can say to another are, “I love you, and I believe in you.” Always tell him or her that you have complete confidence and faith in his or her ability to do anything that he or she puts his or her mind to.
It feels wonderful to go off to work in the morning knowing that the most important person in your life believes in you completely. And it is wonderful to come home at night to a person who has complete faith in your ability to succeed, no matter what the obstacles. Many of the most successful men and women who have ever lived owe their success to the unshakable positive expectations of their mate.
The sixth major problem in relationships is incompatibility. Incompatibility is a very sensitive subject, which many people do not even like to discuss. However, it is one of the most common problems that arise in relationships, and perhaps the most common reason why people are unhappy in their marriages.
Usually, when two people meet and fall in love, they are attracted to each other by things they have in common. However, as the years pass and they change, they often grow in different directions. They develop new interests, new tastes and new opinions. What was important to them when they first met no longer means as much, and it loses its power to bond the two together.
The most common time for incompatibility to occur in marriages seems to be between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two years. During their twenties, people grow and change at the most rapid rate of their adult lives. If a couple gets married during their early twenties, by the end of their twenties they may find that they have very little in common. They may find that they have become incompatible.
THE WARNING SIGNS
The first sign that a couple is no longer compatible is that the laughter goes out of their relationship. They don’t joke together or find a lot of funny things in common.
The second sign is that the conversation dries up. They seem to have little to talk about. The home becomes a functional place where the couple just happens to live, rather than a place of shared warmth and harmony.
Each person preoccupies himself or herself with work or the children or something else. Each goes through the motions. Each puts on a good front for their neighbors and friends.
Many people who are unhappy in their marriages plunge into their work, working twelve and fourteen hours a day, so they do not have to go home. And the less time they spend with the other, the worse the relationship becomes. They have less and less in common.
If you find that the laughter and conversation are going out of your relationship, it’s time to take action. If you feel that you and the other person have very little left in common, you should make every effort to rebuild the relationship. You should recognize that you have a serious, life-disrupting problem and sit down together and discuss it. You should make every effort to recreate what you once had.
Perhaps you need to take some time off and go on a trip. Perhaps you need to start taking an interest in each other’s activities, or to develop new common interests. If you have invested several years and a good deal of emotion in building your relationship, and especially if there are children, you must do everything possible to save the situation.
HOW TO PUT THE LOVE BACK IN
One of the most powerful ways to put love back into a relationship is to realize that love is a verb: Love is an action word. “To love” requires that you do the things that a loving person would do if you wish to feel the emotion that a person in love would feel. You may be able to act your way back into loving the person you have fallen out of love with.
You learn to love another person by doing loving things with and for that person. Small attentions, little favors, kindnesses, gifts and other things that make the other person happy actually make you love the person more. When you stop doing these little things, you can begin to fall out of love. The emotional ties begin to unwind. The fires begin to die down.
The Greek word for this process of rekindling love through action is called Praxis. The Principle of Praxis states that you generate emotions in yourself by doing things consistent with those emotions over and over until they kindle into flames. You act your way into feeling, very much as we discussed in Chapter Three, The Master Program.
You can put the love back into your relationship by once more doing the things that you did during courtship. You can start to be more caring, more attentive, more understanding and more sympathetic. As you act the part of a loving spouse, you may find your feelings toward the other person beginning to change for the better. You can act your way back into love.
By thinking loving thoughts about the other and by talking to the other in a loving and courteous way, you can often rekindle the feelings that once brought you together. Look into the other person for the good qualities you once admired. Forgive and forget mistakes that the other person may have made. More than anything, acting your way back into love requires that you really want to stay with this person, that you really want to rebuild and preserve this relationship.
WHAT DO YOU DO IF IT CAN’T BE SAVED?
It may happen, as it often does, that the fire has gone out of your relationship completely. There is no longer any desire to make the emotional sacrifices that are necessary to save the relationship. The two parties have, in effect, become incompatible.
Incompatibility is the most common reason for the breakdown of any relationship. The average adult goes out with many members of the opposite sex to find even one with whom he or she is compatible. Why should it be so surprising that two people would evolve and develop into two dissimilar people? Why should it be so surprising that two people become incompatible?
Often you see couples sitting in restaurants eating quietly and not talking to each other. Or you will see people driving along together staring out into the traffic without conversing. These are indications that the couple has become incompatible.
BEGIN WITH ACCEPTANCE
The best thing to do when two people have become incompatible is simply to accept it. William James of Harvard said, “The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so.”
Much unhappiness and psychosomatic illness is caused by denial, refusing to face the fact that something is wrong in your relationship. Denial, or internal resistance, causes stress and tension. The unwillingness to deal with something so embarrassing and so threatening to one’s self-esteem as a failed relationship is a major cause of illness, insomnia, headaches and expressions of negative emotion such as irritability, anger and depression. These are all symptoms of an underlying cause, which may be incompatibility in the relationship.
One of the most useful ways to deal with any difficulty in life is to ask yourself, “Is this a fact, or is this a problem?” If it’s a problem, it is amenable to a solution. There is something you can do about it, and you can apply your intelligence to finding a way to resolve it.
However, if it is a fact, the s
martest thing to do is to accept it. Facts are like the weather: There is nothing that you can do about them except to incorporate them into your world view and make provision for them. Many people cause themselves enormous amounts of unnecessary unhappiness by confusing the fact of incompatibility with the problem of incompatibility. When the fire goes out of a relationship, when the ashes go cold and incompatibility sets in, it is time for one or both parties to face the fact squarely and honestly and then do something about it.
The reason you enter into a relationship with another person is so that you can be happier inside the relationship than you would be outside of it. Many people enter into relationships in order to be happier and more fulfilled, and they instead find themselves unhappy and less fulfilled. Then they mistakenly cling to the relationship, forgetting the reason for entering it in the first place.
The reason that you choose to be with another person rather than to be alone is to make your life better, richer and more enjoyable. It is not to suffer and be miserable. An unhappy relationship robs you of your happiness and undermines your potential more surely than any other single factor.
Many people stay in bad relationships because they are afraid of what others might say. They are afraid of losing face with their parents, their friends and the people they work with. They force themselves to keep up appearances for the public while, behind closed doors, they are bitterly unhappy. They often feel trapped in a relationship that they cannot get out of without suffering intense embarrassment with the people they know.
The fact is that no one else really cares about your relationship as much as you do. In most cases, you will find that the people you thought would be the most distressed to learn of your failed marriage are not really concerned at all. Most people have so many problems of their own that they have very little time or energy to think about you and your problems. In fact most people spend the majority of their time, all day long, thinking about themselves. Even if you are very close to another person—a son, a daughter or a best friend—that other person really spends very little time thinking about you in the course of the day.
Your whole life could be falling apart, but to most other people, what they are going to have for lunch today is more important to them than your problems. Many people find that when they finally decide to leave an unhappy relationship, their decision has virtually no effect at all on the people around them. Others simply do not care. They may express a little sympathy and ask a few questions, mostly out of curiosity, but then they have to get home for dinner and get on with the rest of their lives, leaving you alone.
LET IT GO
The bottom line, based on my seminars and workshops with thousands of individuals and couples, is that the most foolish thing you can do is to stay in a bad relationship because you think that somehow it is going to hurt or upset someone else if you leave it.
The smartest thing you can do is to be perfectly selfish emotionally. If you are not happy and you cannot save the situation, then at least please yourself. Do what makes you happy. You can never make anyone else happy by being miserable yourself. Only happy people can make others happy. Never sacrifice yourself on the altar of someone else’s happiness. You end up achieving neither your own happiness nor the happiness of the other person.
LOVE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
The most important thing in life is love. The security and joy of a loving relationship is perhaps the most wonderful thing that a man and woman can experience.
You should do everything possible to build and maintain a loving relationship with another person, including listening, expressing gratitude and appreciation, treating the other person with kindness, courtesy, gentleness, patience and especially compassion. You should make every effort to build a loving relationship within which you can live indefinitely.
But if it doesn’t work out, have the courage and character to accept that nothing in human life is either perfect or permanent. Have the honesty to accept that the kindest thing that you can do for someone else is to achieve your own happiness. If you face life as it is, and not as you wish it would be, you will be true to yourself and true to the most important people in your life.
ACTION EXERCISE
Since happy relationships are central to your self-esteem and happiness, make the decision to get your primary relationship in order. Resolve to sit down with the other person and ask him or her, “What can we do more of, or less of, to make this a wonderful relationship?”
Change your order of priorities, of values, if necessary and make your relationship more important than anything else. Be willing to make sacrifices, changes, if necessary to ensure the quality and stability of your home and the emotional health of the person you care about more than anyone else.
A solid, supportive, totally loving relationship serves as the foundation upon which you can build a wonderful life. It is the true manifestation of the excellent person you are becoming. It is your key to health and happiness. Your relationship is a reflection of the person you really are and your assurance of a great future.
CHAPTER 11
Mastering the Art of Parenting
The most important and enduring relationship that you ever enter into begins when you bring a child into the world. Income, jobs, friendships, health and even marriages may come and go, but your role as a parent lasts as long as you live. The impact of your parenting can affect your child and your children’s children for generations. Parenting is probably the most profound responsibility an adult can ever take on.
No one is born with the skills of successful parenting. We all begin as amateurs. Fortunately, you can learn a lot about how to be a good and effective parent by reading and seeking advice from friends, relatives, doctors and experts in the field. There are many fine books, magazines and articles containing advice and insights that can help you tremendously in being the kind of parent that you want to be.
WHAT IS THE TRUE ROLE OF PARENTING?
The most important single role of parenting is to love and nurture your children and to build in them feelings of high self-esteem and self-confidence. If you raise your children feeling terrific about themselves, if you bring them up full of eagerness to go out and take on the world, then you have fulfilled your responsibility in the highest possible sense. Conversely, if you give your child everything of a material nature but raise him or her lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem, you have failed in your primary role.
The average adult probably spends fifty years of his or her life getting over the first five. Abraham Maslow taught that we have two main types of needs that we strive to fulfill. These are the needs to fulfill our potential, our “being” needs, and the needs to compensate for our perceived deficiencies. The child raised without sufficient love tends to seek it all his or her life, rather than striving to realize his or her potential. Perhaps the kindest thing a parent can do is to give his or her child the love and emotional support the child needs to grow and thrive, creating a climate in which the child feels totally loved by the most important people in his or her life.
The growing child develops a healthy personality in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of love he or she receives. Just as a plant needs sunshine and rain, a child needs love and nurturing.
Parents want the very best for their children. They want to raise their children to be happy and healthy. Why is it then that so many children grow up feeling insufficiently loved? Why is it that parents somehow deprive their children of the love they require for healthy growth?
WHY PARENTS DON’T LOVE ENOUGH
There are two major reasons for the failure by parents to love their children enough. First, the parents do not love themselves. Parents with low self-esteem have great difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves.
The second reason that parents don’t love their children enough is they often have the mistaken notion that their children exist to fulfill their expectations. A major cause of friction
between parents and children is the parents’ feeling or perception that the children are failing to “measure up” to what the parents expect them to be or do.
Many parents look upon their children as chattel, as a form of property. They feel their children are behaving properly only when they are doing and saying what their parents want them to. If the child’s behavior differs from the parents’ expectations, the mother or father responds with criticism. Without planning to, they withdraw their love and approval from the child. They step on their child’s emotional lifeline. The child feels unloved and the foundation is laid for personality problems later in life. All negative or antisocial behavior is a cry for help, an attempt to escape the feelings of guilt, anger and resentment that begin with criticism early in life.
CHILDREN ARE NOT PROPERTY
The starting point of raising super kids is to realize that your children are not your property. Your children belong to themselves. They are a gift to you from high above, and a temporary gift at that.
I tell my children that they have been sent to me by God, and that my job is to love them and take care of them until they grow up. I treat them as if they are precious gifts loaned to me for only a short time. My job is not to make them conform to my expectations, but to encourage them to develop their own uniqueness and individuality.
Each child is unlike any other and comes into this world with his or her own agenda, with his or her own special talents, interests and abilities. What your child can and will become, no one can possibly know until much later. The child’s job is not to conform to his or her parents’ expectations, but to grow and flower and become everything he or she is capable of becoming.
