Are you showing up fully in your romantic relationships, or is something holding you back? The reality is, something from our past might have greatly influenced us, and the way we allow ourselves to connect with others. Cordelia Gaffar is an emotions opener, and she employs empathetic listening tactics. Cordelia uses a 3 question sequence that unlocks the emotions we’ve been holding back.

Her 3 phase process stars with releasing what you’ve been wrestling with, let it go if it’s not serving you. Then you restructure our awareness and how you experience emotions, often giving yourself the permission to feel. Then you refresh and build your emotions back up in a positive and authentic way. I can personally relate to this, realizing recently how some experiences that happened in pre-school and junior high school shaped my understanding of romantic relationships.

The one constant in all of your relationships is you. You are one-half of all of your relationships. So, guess what? If you have a certain thing that comes up in a lot of your relationships, it might be time to think about how you are part of that problem, and more importantly, what you can do to fix it.

But, let’s expand on that, and necessarily so, because we have many types of relationships. First thing we think about are relationships with people, but we also have relationships with things like money, power and influence. We have relationships with past experiences like achievements as well as trauma. We have relationships with our emotions, relationships with our issues, with just about everything! And that’s because our relationships simply are our understanding of how things work, and how we perceive ourselves to exist within that understanding. 

The opportunity here is, if we are a major part of our relationships, then it’s within our control to change them for the better. This requires self-awareness, and figuring out what energy you’re putting off and therefore what you’re attracting. Often, we find things happen in our lives, good and bad, with no explanation. I would argue that your energy attracts more of the same, and your default way of seeing things will change the energy you’re giving off. To me, this is reinforce and reaffirm positivity, optimism, and gratitude in my mind, so that it attracts more of the same. And in doing so, and changing your state, you change half of your relationship with everything else! 

I think we can all relate to the dangers of social media consumption. We almost unknowingly open up the app just to quickly check our notifications and find ourselves swiping for another 20 minutes thinking “How the heck did this happen?”. If that sounds like you, give this a try.

Move your social media app icons to a different place on your phone. It’s so simple, but really powerful. Over time, we’ve become conditioned to opening social media as an outlet to earn a quick hit of dopamine, or to easily access entertainment. And the repetition of reaching for our phone for these reasons ends up encoding as a habit on a subconscious level. By moving the app icon, you disrupt the normal subconscious habit, bringing your awareness to the activity, and introduce some friction to exercising the habit itself.  

What all of this does is it makes opening the app a conscious decision. In that moment when we realize we can’t execute the subconscious habit, our conscious mind takes over and asks, “Do I really want to be on social media right now?”. It gives you the power to choose when your social media apps are open instead of just realizing that you’re on social media again minutes after you started.

This is a philosophy shared by two of my favorite habit formation brains, James Clear who’s the author of Atomic Habits and Nir Eyal who authored Hooked and Indistractable. James Clear calls it making the response more difficult, and Nir calls it an effort pact, but they both function the same. It’s about bringing your awareness to the moment of action, which usually occurs with little conscious processing, so that you can make the decision for yourself.

Life is a process. We learn new things, change our beliefs, meet new people, find new interests. It’s not fair to compare the different phases of life to each other because everything is a dynamic progression that adds upon itself to create our current experience.

I can’t help but think of the way we narrow the scope of our own lives, and when we reflect it’s the highlights and the low lights that come to mind first. These are influential moments, but they’re not representative of the life you’ve lived as a whole. Let’s take a step back and think through how this all works.

Something I really enjoy about the English language is the use of the word "practice". Doctors have a medical practice, lawyers have a law practice, nurses have their nursing practice. I love this because despite the years of schooling and hours of investment to learn the craft, it’s still recognized as a dynamic process and in practice. And it makes sense because these fields are changing so rapidly that practitioners need to be able to adjust to new information and standards.

The literal definition of “practice” in this way actually means, “the expected procedure or way of doing something”, and I love how this contrasts with the typical improvement-oriented definition of practice because it creates a beautiful blend of standardized method and dynamic exploration. This blend is best demonstrated in the way it’s used for a yoga practice that abides by the general movements and patterns of the exercise while leaving room for personal preference and self-exploration.

I bring this all up because life is a practice in this sense. There are certain rules and guidelines that we all should follow to have a good general experience. Within that framework, we each have an opportunity to discover how we can optimize life for ourselves! That is our life practice, and it’s a beautiful thing to see how our uniqueness, preferences, and connection has meaning from this lens.

You are the master of your own life practice, and it is a practice, because things will change and you’ll need to adjust. Follow your heart and explore your own practice!

This is a powerful thought, especially in light of the quarantine and related circumstances. We all had to change our plans. People are rescheduling weddings and vacations as well as businesses that are forced to temporarily close. Everyone needs to adjust across the board. We all see this time as extremely inconvenient and disruptive to the way we wanted things to be,but let’s consider the flip side of it. What if all of this is happening for you?

“Everything comes to you at the right moment.”

Who’s to say that the plans we had set were for the best? And how would we know that what we had planned was exactly the way it was supposed to be? There’s an element to this situation that has a novelty that we need to tap into. There’s a greater force or power that has urgently disrupted the way things were for a reason. Instead of rejecting that and seeing it as an inconvenience, we can choose to see it as divine and powerful.

It’s important to place your faith in the universe and it’s creation. Last week, I had a great conversation with Dr. Sangeeta Sahi about how important it is to be flexible and accommodating to the universe’s plan. From our narrow point of view, we are in no position to understand the larger workings of the things around us, and how its meant to serve us. However, we can recognize that things beyond our control are working for us, and that everything will come to us at the right moment.

Even in difficult financial, physical, and personal circumstances, it’s important to see the lessons you are learning and the growth that you’re being pushed into. Its also important to see how that ultimately contributes to your overall well being. I know it’s hard to hear during these difficult times, but it’s important to trust that everything comes to you at the right moment.

There are many people who talk. They say that they care, they say that they’ll be there next time, and they say that it’s really important and they support it. Yet, they don’t show up and do it. I’ve been on the wrong end of this in my life, and convinced myself that I’m applying effort and genuinely invested, when in reality I’m just watching from the sidelines.

It’s easy to do, but it doesn’t need to be that way. As we know, actions are louder than words and the same goes here. You can pretend to care but you can’t pretend to show up.

There’s subjectivity in the emotions and intentions of our behavior, and as humans we can easily rationalize or create a story that protects ourselves. This is when we’re on the sidelines rooting for our team, but not doing anything to actually change the outcome.

But, you can not pretend to show up. It’s objective, either you’re there or you’re not. Showing up means you are physically present and choosing to allocate the time, energy or resources toward the cause. Even if you show up just to check off the box, you’re still there. What I’ve found is, showing up is the hardest part. The motivation and ability to apply yourself usually finds it’s way once you’re in the right setting. Once we get started on something we have a tendency to pursue it longer than we expected.

If there’s something you feel like you’re faking, or trying to get behind, think about how much of that time you’re spending talking about doing it, and how much time you’re spending actually doing it. You can pretend to care, but you can’t pretend to show up.

As great, amazing, and cooperative people are, there is always going to be one recurring problem. We don’t always see eye to eye. There’s an art to handling disagreements and negotiating, so that you ultimately get the result you want. But, there are two very different ways of going about it that don’t always seem different, and I explore it a bit today.

What is the difference between a fight and argument? To enumerate, this is physical harm aside, we’re talking about exclusively in a conversation. But the fact that an argument resolves without violence speaks to the difference as well.

When we fight, we want to assert dominance. We want to overrule through force and intimidation. This is often why fights are an exchange with more intensity, because more energy is put into the interaction and emotions escalate and amplify. As a result things get personal and out of line and hurtful. I think we can all agree this is less constructive.

This is because in a fight we don’t go in with the common interest to resolve. That’s an argument. Arguing is about taking positions and converting people over to your side. While there could definitely be a large disagreement still within those two sides, both parties are approaching it from trying to generate a certain outcome. In doing that, we don’t resort to personal attacks because that isn’t an effective way of converting their beliefs. In arguments, you share your authentic beliefs and the reason why you’ve come to certain conclusions, which is based more in facts and experience. 

It comes down to this. In a fight, you want to win, and that could come at the expense of someone else. In an argument, you want to win over, show why your position is superior, and encourage them to believe that too.

 Very different once it’s explained right? Now, it’s on you to understand when you might be in a fight, and figure out how to transition that into an argument.

The book I am re-reading right now is The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins, and there are a number of ideas I want to touch on but I’ll start with this.

In the book, Mel talks about the two sides of procrastination. There is the one we all talk about, called destructive procrastination that keeps us from doing important tasks, but then there’s also this thing called productive procrastination.

Productive procrastination is actually a really important part of the creative process. While you may want to submit that proposal or start making headway on that new system, sometimes we complete our work before we’ve applied our best mental effort. When we procrastinate on the topic, we let the idea ruminate in our minds and give our brains the time to make obscure connections and evaluate more creative options. Presently, that process of delaying and putting off the work is being labeled as procrastination. For example,“I just can’t get myself to sit down and do it”. This happens because our intuition is telling us it’s not the right time yet. It knows that we have something better to produce, and procrastination is us buying time for that to come to light.

However, if there’s a deadline and the work needs to get done, then it’s not entirely about the creative process, and that’s where the conventional destructive procrastination comes in. That’s when we know there are consequences to not taking action. Here, procrastination is a mechanism of escapism from our present reality. 

So be careful, and understand that procrastination isn’t all that bad. Thinking through what your reasons are for delaying the work will help you realize which form procrastination is taking.