The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.
The quality of your family life and your relationships will determine most of your happiness or unhappiness. Your goals in this vital area of your personal life cannot be left to chance.
Men and woman are often different when it comes to their attitudes toward their relationships. Going back thousands of years, men were hunters while woman tended to the hearth and took care of the children.
Men derived their feelings of self-esteem and self-worth from demonstrating their proficiency as hunters, having the ability to bring back game and provide for their families. A man’s status in the tribe was determined by how good a hunter he was in comparison with the other men.
Jump ahead to the twenty-first century and very little has changed. Men still achieve their primary source of value and self-esteem by demonstrating their ability to hunt, to earn a good living, and to provide for their families. Men still compare themselves with other men in terms of their hunting ability. They seek out and admire symbols of success that tell others that they are good hunters and providers, such as cars, clothes, expensive watches, homes, and other material objects.
Women are different. They largely base their success and happiness on the quality of their relationships, especially with their husbands and children. They continually seek to do everything possible to improve and enhance the quality of their relationships and their home life. For most women, relationships are central.
For both men and woman, family and children are the most important factors in their lives. Men, however, sometimes become so busy working to provide for their families that they lose sight of this fact. Women seldom do.
Because family and relationships are so important to the mental, emotional, and physical health of everyone involved, setting clear goals and making specific plans to ensure a high quality of family life is absolutely essential to long-term happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction.
The twelve-step process for setting and achieving any goals is perfectly applicable to designing a wonderful life with your family and with the people in your most important relationships.
Stand back and imagine that your family life and relationships were perfect in every way. What would they look like? How would your family life be different from what it is today? Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and create the perfect lifestyle with your family and relationships. What would it look like?
If you are single and searching for exactly the right person for you—your soul mate—here is an exercise: Take a piece of paper and write out a list of everything you can think of that you’d want in a perfect mate.
Imagine that you are sending an order to a “perfect mate factory” and the factory is going to send you the exact person that you have described on paper. Be as detailed as you possibly can. Write down every single positive element, factor, or ingredient that, based on your experience, your perfect person would have. Include age, education, health, appearance, values, sense of humor, experience in life, interests, likes, dislikes, family background, friends, hobbies, attitudes toward children, money, travel, and so on.
When I recommend this exercise to my seminar participants, many people react by suggesting that this is too cold and mechanical for finding true romance. On the contrary, I point out. Making a list of all the factors that you want in the perfect person for you helps you develop absolute clarity, a clarity that you may not have had before. It programs this ideal picture into your subconscious mind and activates your superconscious powers. By becoming absolutely clear on paper about the person you really want, you set up a force field of energy in the universe that begins to attract this person into your life, sometimes in the most remarkable ways.
Once upon a time, I did this exercise for myself. I wrote out a list of everything that I wanted in the perfect person for me. Sometime later I met a young woman while I was taking courses at a local university, and she asked me how to find the perfect person for her. I gave her the same exercise. I told her to write out a list of all the factors she would want in a perfect person and just to trust that the universe would bring the right person into her life at the right time.
Some months later, we sat down and compared lists. We found that each of us was the ideal person for the other. Barbara and I have now been happily married for more than thirty years and have four grown children. Does it work? It worked for us!
Here is the point. All it takes is a piece of paper and a few minutes of your time. Is this a worthwhile investment when you consider the possible consequences for your life? Of course it is!
Countless people have come back to me over the years, very much in love and happily married, and told me that this exercise transformed their lives. Sometimes, after being alone for many months or even years, the perfect person for them walked into their lives within three days of describing this perfect person on a piece of paper. Try it for yourself and see. Encourage your friends to use this exercise as well. If it works, it can be the most profound of all life-changing exercises.
If you are currently married or in a relationship, stand back and imagine that you could wave a magic wand and make it perfect in every way. How would it be different from what it is today? What would you be doing more of? What would you be doing less of? What would you start doing that you are not doing today? What should you stop doing altogether if you wanted your relationship to be the very best it could possibly be?
Your beliefs about yourself and your relationships become your realities. These beliefs about the roles and responsibilities of each person in a relationship go back to early childhood. They are shaped by your experiences throughout your life. They may or may not be based on fact. Sometimes your beliefs about what should happen or should not happen in a relationship are not true at all. They are merely “facts” that you have picked up in some way that are not consistent with the reality of the other person.
To be happy in a relationship, especially a marriage, your beliefs must be reasonable, achievable, and life enhancing, leading to greater and greater happiness and well-being for each person, and congruent with your highest values and principles.
Thousands of books and articles are devoted to the subject of relationships, but some principles seem to be timeless:
1. The foundation of a quality relationship is the unconditional positive acceptance of and regard for the other person. This means that you accept the other person exactly the way he or she is, with no attempt or desire to change that person’s basic character or personality. Unconditional acceptance is the greatest gift that one person can give to another.
2. In a loving relationship, you care more for the happiness and well-being of the other person than you do for your own. Spouses who love each other and who love their children are willing to make any sacrifice to preserve and protect the others’ health and well-being.
3. The true measure of the health of a relationship is how much and how often the people involved laugh together and how often. Since laughter is the outer expression of an inner feeling of true happiness, it is the one measure that cannot be faked.
The starting point of solving problems and difficulties in relationships is often the questioning of your beliefs, especially your self-limiting beliefs. Good beliefs are life enhancing; bad beliefs are happiness destroying.
If you do not experience happiness and joy in your relationships, it could be that your ideas and beliefs about what is acceptable or unacceptable, right or wrong, and proper or improper about the relationship need to be examined and questioned. Always be willing to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.
Write out a clear, present-tense, positive personal description of your ideal life and lifestyle in detail, exactly as if it were already perfect in every way. List each of the important people in your family and relationships, and then describe how your relationships with those people would look and feel like if they were perfect in every way.
Describe your ideal lifestyle. What would your life be like, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December? If you were living your perfect lifestyle along with your family, what would you do together? How would you spend your time in the evenings, on the weekends, and on vacations? Where would you go? What would you do when you got there?
Imagine no limitations. If your life were perfect, where would you live? What kind of a home would you have? What kind of material possessions would you want to provide for your family? What schools would you want your children to attend? What colleges would you want them to be able to afford? And what would you do to make this possible? What kind of clothes, cars, and possessions would you want to make available to the members of your family?
The very act of writing down these factors on paper increases your likelihood of achieving them. Remember, decide what’s right before you decide what is possible. Decide what is ideal before you decide what is affordable.
Best of all, sit down with your family and decide upon these factors together. Ask each person what he or she would want if your family life or relationship was perfect in every way. Write down all these goals and desires and then use them as the basis for the organization of your family life.
Conduct an honest analysis of your current situation. Speak to the most important people in your family and other relationship circles to find out how they think and how they affect your current situation.
Some years ago, I began teaching an exercise to my seminar participants. I told them that they could change their life in only four ways:
1. They could do more of something that they were already doing.
2. They could do less of something they were doing that was not working very well.
3. They could start doing something brand new, something that they had never done before.
4. They could stop doing certain things altogether.
After asking my students to consider how these statements could apply to their own lives, I suggested that they go home and ask the following questions of their family members:
1. Is there anything that I am doing that you would like me to do more of?
2. Is there anything that I am doing that you would like me to do less of?
3. Is there anything that I am not doing that you would like me to start doing?
4. Is there anything that I am doing that you would like me to stop doing altogether?
I suggested to my participants that if they had the courage to ask these questions, the answers that they would get would surprise them, and in some cases shock them.
One evening, I decided to go home and practice this exercise with my wife and children. I was amazed at what they told me. I immediately took action and began following their recommendations: I did more of some things and less of others, I started doing things that I hadn’t been doing, and stopped doing certain things altogether. It made a profound difference in my family life. Try it yourself and see.
Make a list of all the benefits you would enjoy if your family life were perfect in every way. If everyone in your family was happy and fulfilled, and you had ample financial resources, what kind of a difference would it make in your life and in the life of each person in your family?
Make a list of all the benefits that would flow to your family overall and to each person in particular. Especially, write down how each person would feel about himself or herself, the family, and his or her personal potential. The more reasons you have for wanting to create an ideal family life, the more motivated and determined you will be to persist until you succeed in achieving this goal.
Once you have a clear idea of what you want and the reasons you want it, set clear deadlines for the achievement of each of your goals in your relationships and for your family. Some of these deadlines will be short term, even a single day, and others will be longer term, taking months and years to fully reach. One of your goals should center on the specific amounts of time your family spends together. This can include short-term activities in the evenings or on weekends, as well as shorter and longer vacations. In each case, these should be planned and scheduled well in advance or you run the risk of putting them off when something more pressing comes up.
With family vacations, we have always found it best to book them a year in advance and pay for them in full. Once you have paid for a family vacation, you virtually never neglect to take that vacation. But if you have not confirmed and paid in advance, there is always the temptation to put it off to a more convenient time.
If your family goals involve material things, such as moving to a larger home or a different neighborhood, acquiring cars or computers for the members of your family, or providing for education for your children, these should each be scheduled in advance and financial arrangements provided for.
If you have children, you must look far into the future and make long-term goals. Some years ago, when my children were young, a friend of mine with four children about the same ages as mine asked me if my children were going to college. Of course, I assured him that they were. He then asked me if I had set aside the necessary monies to ensure that they could get the best college education that they could qualify for.
My children were all under the age of ten. I had to tell my friend, somewhat embarrassed, that I had not really thought about it. Providing for their college education was something that I was going to do later, “when I got around to it.”
He smiled and assured me that he personally had already set up fully funded trust funds to guarantee that his children could go to college, no matter what happened to him in the years ahead.
That was all I needed to hear. Within five years, all of my children had fully funded college trust funds. It was a valuable lesson.
I subsequently learned that many families who neglected to provide for their children’s education were absolutely shocked when they learned how much four years of college was going to cost in after-tax dollars.
Whatever you want to do with or for your family, don’t put it off. Set a schedule and a deadline and begin making provisions for it as soon as possible. This can relieve an enormous amount of stress and tension later on and could become one of the smartest things you ever did.
Why isn’t your situation with your family and your lifestyle perfect already? What is stopping you or holding you back from creating the ideal lifestyle you desire?
Look into yourself. Is there anything in yourself—your beliefs, ideas, attitudes—that may be standing in your way of creating a happy, fulfilling, joyous family life?
Look at the world around you. Is there anything in your external world, your job, your financial situation, and your possibilities that might be holding you back from creating the family life that you desire?
What is the biggest single problem or difficulty that stops you from creating your ideal family life? What could you do immediately to begin removing that difficulty or obstacle or alleviating that constraint?
Perhaps the most important question you can ask, to ensure peace and happiness in your family and relationships is, “What’s really important here?” Many of the problems in marriages and child rearing come from losing perspective on what is really more important than anything else.
Because of the intensity of the emotions that arise in family relationships and the role of the individual ego in wanting to be right and to prevail in a family situation, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that your most important overall goal is the happiness and well-being of the people close to you. Whenever you get into an argument or disagreement of any kind, or whenever an important decision has to be made, remember to ask yourself, “What’s important here?”
Remember, to achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must become someone you have never been before. You must develop qualities, traits, and abilities that you may have never had before.
At each stage of family formation, you must be open to learning new subjects and accepting new ideas. As your marriage develops, you must develop and grow as well. As your children grow and mature, you must sometimes adopt new ideas and attitudes to keep in step with them—while holding onto your core values and sharing them with your kids.
When members of your family become involved in certain activities that are important to them, you owe it to them to learn as much as you can about the new subjects so that you can keep up with them as they grow, mature, and develop in different areas and in different directions.
When our children were young, we decided to take up skiing as a family. We went to Beaver Creek in Colorado and the whole family took ski lessons for a week. Ever since then, we have been able to take ski vacations as a family in the United States and Canada. These have been some of our happiest times together. How does a child spell the word “love”? The answer is “T-I-M-E.”
When my daughter Catherine decided that she wanted to ride horses, Barbara began studying the entire world of equestrian activities, eventually making herself an authority on the myriad of factors involved in the buying and selling of horses, riding lessons, horse shows, equipment, and saddles and the countless factors involved in the area of competitive riding and jumping. This enabled both of us to fully participate in Catherine’s riding career.
The only way to increase the value and deepen the quality of your relationships is to invest more time in them. The more time you spend with a person, especially when that person is engaged in activities that are important to him or her, the deeper and richer the relationship becomes. And there is no other way.
If you could wave a magic wand and become the perfect person in your relationships with the most important people in your family, how would you be described? Would people say that you had the qualities of kindness? Patience? Tolerance? Empathy? Compassion? Friendliness? Would people say you were supportive? Inspiring? Motivating? Which of these qualities would you like to be known for?
Aristotle said that the way to develop a quality is to behave as if you already had that quality in every situation where that quality is required. In other words, “Fake it until you make it.” By practicing qualities such as attentiveness, caring, patience, warmth, and kindness, whenever those qualities are required, you eventually program them into your personality until they become automatic ways of responding whenever they are needed.
Find out what the people close to you want, need, and are willing to work toward. Keep the lines of communication open. Ask them for their input and ideas, and listen intently to them when they want to talk. Identify the people outside your immediate family circle whose help and cooperation you will require for you to be able to create your ideal family lifestyle. Often your immediate relatives, parents, brothers, sisters, and others can have a tremendous influence on what you can accomplish with your family.
To create a road map to relationship success, make a list of every single thing that you can think of doing to achieve an ideal family or relationship lifestyle. List the things that you would like to acquire for your family, the places you would like to go, the subjects that you would like to learn, and the vacations that you would like to take.
Organize your list by sequence, by what you need to do before you do something else. Organize your list by priority, by what is more important and what is less important.
Create a clear mental image of your ideal home and lifestyle. See yourself living and enjoying a wonderful life with the people who are most important to you. Play this happy picture over and over on the screen of your mind, and imagine how you would feel if you were living the life of your dreams.
Once you have a goal and a plan, have visualized your goal clearly, and have discussed it with the members of your family, take action immediately. Do something; do anything. Demonstrate your commitment to creating a wonderful life for yourself and the people around you by doing something that makes it clear that this goal is going to be a part of your future together.
Make a decision, in advance, that you will persist through the inevitable ups and downs you will face until you have created an ideal lifestyle for yourself and for the people around you.
As in every area of life, the building and maintaining of long-term relationships requires patience, persistence, and foresight. The process is fraught with difficulties, setbacks, challenges, and adversity.
At the same time, the building and maintaining of wonderful, high-quality relationships offers the greatest and most meaningful happiness and joy that are possible in life.
1. Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and create a perfect family life. How would it be different from what it is today?
2. Look back over your life and identify your happiest moments with your family and other people. What were you doing?
3. What one goal would you set for your family life if you were guaranteed of success?
4. What do you need to do more of to improve your relationships?
5. What do you need to do less of to improve your relationships?
6. What should you start doing that you are not doing today to improve your relationships?
7. What should you stop doing altogether?