Little Changes Big Results® for Crazy, Busy Couples

Little Changes Big Results for Crazy, Busy Couples - Kindle edition by Becky Tirabassi, Roger Tirabassi. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC.
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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Keep the Change by Becky Tirabassi. A Radical Approach to Permanent Transformation really liked it 4. Achieving goals in life, love, and work is only half the battle. To make permanent transformation last, you have to make change a way of life. This revolutionary book is the answer. The strategies, if dilligently followed, will result in positive and permanent change in any area of personal development. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

To ask other readers questions about Keep the Change , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Tammy rated it really liked it Sep 19, Jamin Melanson rated it really liked it Oct 31, Amanda Renee Foxall rated it really liked it Oct 02, Paige Easterling rated it it was amazing Dec 03, Al rated it really liked it Oct 13, Robin rated it it was amazing Feb 26, Jessica Robinson rated it liked it Oct 28, Rick rated it liked it Oct 12, Stephanie Murphy rated it really liked it Feb 14, Yccacc Youth marked it as to-read Apr 28, Talitha marked it as to-read Oct 19, Vicki marked it as to-read Jul 25, Just as causing pain to your muscles allows them to grow back stronger, often introducing some pain into your relationship through vulnerability is the only way to make the relationship stronger.

Behind respect, trust was the most commonly mentioned trait for a healthy relationship. But trust goes much deeper than that. If you ended up with cancer tomorrow, would you trust your partner to stick with you and take care of you? Would you trust your partner to care for your child for a week by themselves?

Do you trust them to handle your money or make sound decisions under pressure? Do you trust them to not turn on you or blame you when you make mistakes? These are hard things to do. Trust at the beginning of a relationship is easy. But the deeper the commitment, the more intertwined your lives become, and the more you will have to trust your partner to act in your interest in your absence.

What if she is hiding something herself? The key to fostering and maintaining trust in the relationship is for both partners to be completely transparent and vulnerable:. Trust is like a china plate. If you drop it and it breaks, you can put it back together with a lot of work and care. If you drop it and break it a second time, it will split into twice as many pieces and it will require far more time and care to put back together again. But drop and break it enough times, and it will shatter into so many pieces that you will never be able to put it back together again, no matter what you do.

Figure out as individuals what makes you happy as an individual, be happy yourself, then you each bring that to the relationship. You are supposed to keep the relationship happy by consistently sacrificing yourself for your partner and their wants and needs. There is some truth to that. Every relationship requires each person to consciously choose to give something up at times.

Just read that again. A healthy and happy relationship requires two healthy and happy individuals. This is the person you chose. It will only backfire and make you both miserable. Have the courage to be who you are, and most importantly, let your partner be who they are. Those are the two people who fell in love with each other in the first place. But how does one do this? What do I mean? Have your own interests, your own friends, your own support network, and your own hobbies. Overlap where you can, but not being identical should give you something to talk about and expose one another to.

Among the emails, one of the most popular themes was the importance of creating space and separation from one another. People sung the praises of separate checking accounts, separate credit cards, having different friends and hobbies, taking separate vacations from one another each year this has been a big one in my own relationship. Some even went so far as to recommend separate bathrooms or even separate bedrooms.

Some people are afraid to give their partner freedom and independence. BUT, more importantly, this inability to let our partners be who they are , is a subtle form of disrespect. What does it say for your respect for yourself? Drives me nuts when I see women not let their husbands go out with the guys or are jealous of other women. We have changed faiths, political parties, numerous hair colors and styles, but we love each other and possibly even more. Our grown kids constantly tell their friends what hopeless romantics we are.

And the biggest thing that keeps us strong is not giving a fuck about what anyone else says about our relationship. I can get on board with that. Among major life changes people told me their marriages went through and survived: Amazingly, these couples survived because their respect for each other allowed them to adapt and allow each person to continue to flourish and grow.

You know who they are today, but you have no idea who this person is going to be in five years, ten years, and so on. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, and truly ask yourself if you admire this person regardless of the superficial or not-so-superficial details, because I promise almost all of them at some point are going to either change or go away. Much like the body and muscles, it cannot get stronger without stress and challenge.

You have to fight. You have to hash things out. Obstacles make the marriage. John Gottman is a hot-shit psychologist and researcher who has spent over 30 years analyzing married couples and looking for keys to why they stick together and why they break up. What Gottman does is he gets married couples in a room, puts some cameras on them, and then he asks them to have a fight.


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He asks them to fight. Successful couples, like unsuccessful couples, he found, fight consistently. And some of them fight furiously.

The Coach and The Counselor™

He has been able to narrow down four characteristics of a couple that tend to lead to divorces or breakups. The reader emails back this up as well. Out of the 1,some-odd emails, almost every single one referenced the importance of dealing with conflicts well. But all of this takes for granted another important point: Be willing to have the fights.

Say the ugly things and get it all out in the open. This was a constant theme from the divorced readers. There were times when I saw huge red flags. Instead of trying to figure out what in the world was wrong, I just plowed ahead. And instead of saying something, I ignored all of the signals. You can be right and be quiet at the same time. In fact, his findings were completely backwards from what most people actually expect: To me, like everything else, this comes back to the respect thing. Compromise is bullshit, because it leaves both sides unsatisfied, losing little pieces of themselves in an effort to get along.

Conflict becomes much easier to navigate because you see more of the context. A similar concept seems to be true in relationships: But how do you get good at forgiving? What does that actually mean? Again, some advice from the readers:. And finally, pick your battles wisely. You and your partner only have so many fucks to give , make sure you both are saving them for the real things that matter. One piece of advice that comes to mind: Some things matter, worth getting upset about. Like Chinese water torture: Is it worth the cost of arguing? Eventually your kids grow up, your obnoxious brother-in-law will join a monastery and your parents will die.

You got it… Mr. You and your partner need to be the eye of the hurricane. Even cleaning up when you accidentally pee on the toilet seat seriously, someone said that — these things all matter and add up over the long run. This seems to become particularly important once kids enter the picture. The big message I heard hundreds of times about kids: Parents are expected to sacrifice everything for them. But the best way to raise healthy and happy kids is to maintain a healthy and happy marriage. A good marriage makes good kids.

So keep your marriage the top priority. Make time for it. Sex starts to slide. No other test required. I still remember back in college, it was one of my first relationships with a cute little redhead. We were young and naive and crazy about each other. And, because we happened to live in the same dorm, we were banging like rabbits.

We fought more often, found ourselves getting annoyed with each other, and suddenly our multiple-times-per-day habit magically dried up.

Becky Tirabassi (Author of Let Prayer Change Your Life)

To my surprised adolescent male mind, it was actually possible to have sex available to you yet not want it. It was almost, like, sex was connected to emotions. For a dumb year-old, this was a complete shocker. That was the first time I discovered a truth about relationships: If the relationship is good, the sex will be good. You both will be wanting it and enjoying it. When the relationship is bad — when there are unresolved problems and unaddressed negative emotions — then the sex will often be the first thing to go out the window.

This was reiterated to me hundreds of times in the emails. The nature of the sex itself varied quite a bit among couples — some couples take sexual experimentation seriously, others are staunch believers in frequency, others get way into fantasies — but the underlying principle was the same everywhere: But sex not only keeps the relationship healthy, many readers suggested that they use it to heal their relationships.

That when things are a bit frigid between them or that they have some problems going on, a lot of stress, or other issues i. A few people even said that when things start to feel stale in the relationship, they agree to have sex every day for a week. Then, as if by magic, by the next week, they feel great again.

The sooner everyone accepts that, the happier everyone is. We all have things we like to do and hate to do; we all have things we are good at and not so good at. TALK to your partner about those things when it comes to dividing and conquering all the crap that has to get done in life. Everyone has an image in their mind of how a relationship should work. Both people share responsibilities. Both people manage to finely balance their time together with the time for themselves.

Both pursue engaging and invigorating interests on their own and then share the benefits together. Both take turns cleaning the toilet and blowing each other and cooking gourmet lasagna for the extended family at Thanksgiving although not all at the same time. The fact is relationships are imperfect, messy affairs. Well, maybe if you had been listening, asshole. The common theme of the advice here was be pragmatic.

If the wife is a lawyer and spends 50 hours at the office every week, and the husband is an artist and can work from home most days, it makes more sense for him to handle most of the day-to-day parenting duties. My wife loves cleaning no, seriously , but she hates smelly stuff. So guess who gets dishes and garbage duty? Here honey, let me get that for you.

On top of that, many couples suggested laying out rules for the relationship. To what degree will you share finances? How much debt will be taken on or paid off? How much can each person spend without consulting the other? What purchases should be done together or do you trust each other to do separately? How do you decide which vacations to go on? Have meetings about this stuff.

She immediately told me not to laugh, but that she was serious.


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I think the most important thing that I have learned in those years is that the love you feel for each other is constantly changing. So even if you feel like you could never love your partner any more, that can change, if you give it a chance. I think people give up too soon. You need to be the kind of person that you want your spouse to be. When you do that it makes a world of difference. Out of the hundreds of analogies I saw these past few weeks, one stuck with me. A nurse emailed saying that she used to work with a lot of geriatric patients.

And one day she was talking to a man in his lates about marriage and why his had lasted so long. The key is understanding that few of those waves have anything to do with the quality of the relationship — people lose jobs, family members die, couples relocate, switch careers, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money.

Your job as a committed partner is to simply ride the waves with the person you love, regardless of where they go. Because ultimately, none of these waves last.

Keep the Change: A Radical Approach to Permanent Transformation

And you simply end up with each other. I felt as if we were floating along, doing a great job of co-existing and co-parenting, but not sustaining a real connection. It deteriorated to the point that I considered separating from her; however, whenever I gave the matter intense thought, I could not pinpoint a single issue that was a deal breaker. I knew her to be an amazing person, mother, and friend.

I bit my tongue a lot and held out hope that the malaise would pass as suddenly as it had arrived. Fortunately, it did and I love her more than ever. So the final bit of wisdom is to afford your spouse the benefit of the doubt. If you have been happy for such a long period, that is the case for good reason. Be patient and focus on the many aspects of her that still exist that caused you to fall in love in the first place.

As always, it was humbling to see all of the wisdom and life experience out there. There were many, many, many excellent responses, with kind, heartfelt advice. It was hard to choose the ones that ended up here, and in many cases, I could have put a dozen different quotes that said almost the exact same thing.

Exercises like this always amaze me because when you ask thousands of people for advice on something, you expect to receive thousands of different answers. But in both cases now , the vast majority of the advice has largely been the same. It shows you how similar we really are. And how no matter how bad things may get, we are never as alone as we think. I would end this by summarizing the advice in one tidy section. But once again, a reader named Margo did it far better than I ever could. That means emotionally, physically, financially or spiritually.