Hi, a very warm to listeners and readers. Welcome to this podcast on how to have a great relationship. My name is Ayesha Jane Walker and I am a relationship coach. 

I will be sharing a series of podcasts including some tips, tools, and strategies that I use with the couples and individuals that I work with in my coaching practice, with you. So perhaps I should open today a little bit talking about what a coach is.

What’s Relationship Coaching?

Perhaps most people are a little bit more familiar with the concept of couples counselling. For sure. There’s some crossovers with the work that I do, but I would say as a coach there are also some very distinct differences. First and foremost, as a coach, I’m not always working with couples. It is my belief and my experience that it doesn’t always take two to fix or heal a relationship.

Yes, I know that’s a fairly provocative thing to be saying right out the gate, and I’m not going to address that whole subject area in this podcast.

It is something we’ll be talking about in later podcasts, but it is one of the distinctions, I would say, between couples coaching and couples counselling because I’m not always working with couples.

The Skill Of Relationship

The second thing I would say about coaching that makes it distinct perhaps from other talking therapies is that coaching is very much about sharing skills. It’s a term that came from the sporting world, so I’m sure everybody’s familiar with a football coach or a tennis coach.

And in those fields, the coach is teaching skills to the individual on how to play a better game, right? How to up their game, how to improve their game. You could even use the same terminology and just swap it for relationships.

I am sharing with individuals and couples how to improve their game, their skills as individuals within a relationship. Now, that also may be a slightly unexpected thing for people to hear.

This idea that relationships, skills, I would say this is absolutely my own experience. Experience, that the skill of dealing with the challenges that relationships bring is a skill. It is something that first and foremost, we are not taught or we are taught, but taught very badly. And it is something that can be learned or relearnt, just like any skill.

So I’d say this is the good news, guys. If you are struggling in your relationship, if you’ve got problems that keep repeating over and over and you are feeling hopeless, critical of yourself or your partner, take heart, it’s not your fault and it’s not their fault. You just never learned the skills required for navigating this wonderful experience that we have in life of intimate relationships.

And I’m hoping that in this series of podcasts, I can demonstrate exactly what some of those skills are. So you can take them, go out, use them, and put this concept to the test.

Communication

Relationship is a skill and the very first skill necessary for a great relationship is the skill of communication. Without good communication, whatever your issue is in a relationship, you are not going to be able to move forward.

Now, I don’t mean that both of you have to be in good communication with each other. I mean, you as an individual can learn skills to up your ability to increase, your ability to communicate so well with your partner in such a profoundly different way that you will cause change without them being asked to change, without you demanding that they change so that your relationship can change.

So this skill is not a couple’s skill, it is a skill. You learn as an individual how to communicate better. So that’s where we will begin these series of podcasts with the skill of communicating better, the skill of expressing yourself better, more authentically, more empathically, more clearly what it is that you want to say or that you feel.

And the skill of listening better, deeper, more empathically, more compassionately, how your partner is being or behaving so that you through these skills of listening and expressing, can cause change without demanding change. And so because of this, this is not a podcast that you need to be doing with your partner.

Your Personal Growth

It is only a podcast that requires your individual attention. Again, I’m hoping this is great news because it’s likely if you’re having problems in your relationship that your partner may not necessarily be on board with doing relationship work, right? So here’s some more good news. This is a podcast for you as an individual. I would say it’s actually another distinction about coaching. Coaching is for individuals, not couples.

Coaching is really for your own personal growth. For your own personal development. It is through those skills, through those commitments that you will cause the greatest change in your relationship.

Be The Change You Wish To See

So put aside the idea that you need to learn skills to convince your partner to shift or to change, because those skills do not exist. You can never make another person change. If you try, you will be met with their resistance and you will probably strengthen that resistance by pushing them to change. It is not a good path for shifting the dynamic of your relationship.

And I’d like to do a little exercise with you here and now to really illustrate exactly what I mean by that and why it will never work. So hopefully you’re all sitting comfortably. This exercise requires two hands. So if you are doing something with both hands that requires both hands such as driving, please don’t do this exercise. That’s not gonna end well. For the rest of you, sit comfortably and put your hands together in the prayer pose.

So your elbows will be bent, your hands will be together, resting against each other in front of you at about chest height in the prayer pose. And what I now want you to do is push as hard as you can with your right hand against your left hand. Okay? So you’ve got your left and your right hand pressed together. I now want you to push with your right hand as hard as you can against your left hand.

Hopefully you are all doing that, okay? And push a little harder still and a little harder still, and stop. Okay? Now, stay where you are in the position that you were in and take a look at where your hands are resting. If you were really following what I was instructing you to do, pushing with your right hand against your left hand, your left hand will now be pushed way over to the left.

But I am going to bet almost anything that pretty much everybody is in the same position that they started with their left and their right hand pushed against each other. Because what you did when I told you to push with your right hand against your left is you pushed back instinctively with your left hand. When your left hand felt that push coming against it, it pushed back.

We Can’t Push Our Partners To Change

This is what’s happening when we are pushing our partner to change their behaiour, even if it is done with the best of intentions, even if it is done in the kindest, most heartfelt, empathic and gentle way. And let’s be honest, most of us don’t push in that way. We tend to do it a little bit more aggressively. But let’s say you are doing it in the gentlest way, gently trying to coerce them into shifting how they are behaving towards you.

It will only be met with resistance. Why? Because it’s there in our very biology. When we feel pushed against, even if it’s ourself to ourself, we will push back. So this is not the way to cause change in your relationship and it is the, it’s not the way to communicate with our partner to push against them. What that looks like in communication, by the way, when you are pushing your partner to change, is you are cajoling, guilting, shaming, judging, criticising, pleading, placating.

Because even placating is you doing something to get them to, to change. It’s a push against them. You, all of these things are done in communication terms to get your partner to do something. This will not cause change in your relationship. It will only cause pain, lost time, resentment and resistance. But there is another way to communicate that will have a completely different response.

And that is what we will be talking about in next week’s podcast. So I hope you guys can hang on till then. I hope you, I’ve left you with a few tantalising ideas, some provoking thoughts and a sparked interest to learn a little bit more about the skill of relationships, and in particular, the skill of communication and how learning that skill can cause the change that you long to see in your relationship.

The Power Is In Your Hands

And that the power, my friends, is in your hands. This is the good news. It is not in the hands of your partner. You don’t have to wait for them to change, for things to change for you. You can cause this change, and you can cause it from a very powerful place. Okay, I think that’s enough to be going on with for this week. But if you are interested to hear more, please subscribe to this podcast.

If you’re listening to it on Facebook or another platform, which you can like it, please like it and tune in again next week to learn a little bit about what that other way of communicating with your partner is. Until then, have an incredible, powerful, wonderful next seven days and a great start to the new year. Take care.