It is a common mistake among couples that they only go to a relationship coach or counsellor when things get bad. This is like suggesting that the national team shouldn’t have a coach unless they start losing games. The time when you should ask for advice about your relationship is before you have started it.
Before starting a serious relationship there are several things you should do before becoming more deeply involved which help ensure that you are compatible and that being together is the sensible option and not simply ‘a nice idea.’
One important thing that you should do is check what values you have and make sure these values are similar. Furthermore, they should be prioritized so that you both know which values are most important to you. It’s no good thinking that ‘time together’ is a shared value when she considers it the most important element of the relationship and he believes that ‘time together’ is something that happens only when the weather is too bad to go fishing and there’s no sport on.
Another good precaution is to sit down and describe to each other the ideal relationship and how you envisage the relationship together. Many couples go into a relationship with differing ideas about what an ideal relationship should entail, they both try to create an ideal relationship, but because its an individual, rather than a team effort it leads to frustration, unhappiness and conflict. Knowing what the two of you want and coming up with a shared goal for life together is essential to ensure that that life will be just as magical as dating.
Learning how to communicate can also help ensure that a relationship continues to function beyond the honeymoon. This may seem odd, because if you are thinking of taking the relationship to the next level you clearly like being with each other and are communicating. However, there are important principles to learn about each other which couples often do not know and never learn.
One of the common mistakes is not speaking the same language as your partner. Have you ever had a situation when you have been with someone and they have said something and you really don’t know what they meant by that? With your partner it is often slightly subtler, in that you probably think you know what he or she means, but it doesn’t really have much meaning to you and consequently you don’t value it.
Furthermore, when couples communicate and miss-communicate they often do a series of quite predictable mistakes which can cause havoc with a relationship. These mistakes can be simply failing to respond to your partner when you are busy, failing to take an interest in what your partner does, not valuing your partner – and worse, valuing them, but not telling them that they are valued and failing to have a shared purpose together.
Good relationships are not simply the result of chemical highs caused when we are in love, if we rely on these, we don’t get a relationship but an addiction and become addicted to the non-functional nature of the relationship. A relationship takes love, care, affection and communication and for your lives to work happily together they must be bound with overall goals and hopes. All of these are things which need to be worked out before becoming serious, otherwise serious problems can be caused in what would otherwise have been the perfect couple.
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© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, www.cogniscientNLP.com.
There is nothing so disheartening as competing and knowing that you are being beaten by a player who isn’t as good as you are, or who trains less seriously than you do. Every sportsperson has participated in games where the worse player has somehow managed to win. This was particularly galling when I was the player being defeated and I could do seemingly nothing as my opponent, lacking technique and finesse, doggedly took my game to pieces and came out the bloody victor at the end. Most sportspeople know of this experience and have often experienced it both ways, taking satisfaction at knowing that they have beaten someone who is better than they are. So how does it happen?
This is a clear demonstration of how what we do with our minds affects how we perform and who we are. As human beings we have a huge amount of control over what our bodies do and how they behave and react. Since we are complicated beings, the majority of these tasks are assigned to the subconscious mind (and a good thing too, imagine what would happen if we absent mindedly forgot to breath) and since the subconscious usually operates beneath our conscious awareness we lose control of this vast and complicated system which runs our bodies for us. With NLP techniques we can take back control of some of these functions and reset the system so it operates more efficiently and towards the outcomes which we set. This is extremely useful in sport when often we have to force our bodies to operate at a peak level the logical and sensible option is simply to take a break, eat some food and relax until we have some more energy and can focus more easily on the game. Sport just doesn’t let you do that, so instead we have to force our bodies and if the subconscious is unwilling, we literally have to fight against ourselves, which distracts us from the important task of focusing on the game or the race and putting all our resources behind winning.
In other cases it is a matter of self belief. Steve Gurney expected to lose his last Coast to Coast because the running leg of the competition had been increased and he had short legs. Dr. Richard Bolstad, who was working with Steve Gurney, took him through some processes which altered the belief that he couldn’t win. For the first time ever Steve won the running section of the Coast to Coast. He attributes his success entirely to NLP and the work that Richard Bolstad did with him (see Lucky Legs, Steve Gurney).