Hi everybody, welcome once again to my podcast on how to heal your relationship.

If you haven’t caught me before, my name is Ayesha Walker, I’m a relationship coach and in this podcast I like to share strategies, tips and techniques on some of the things that you can do to heal, evolve and grow your relationship.

Commitment And Consistency

So this week I would like to talk to you about commitment and consistency. Why?

Well if you’re one of my regular listeners, you might have noticed that there wasn’t a podcast last week, I skipped a week.

Now I made a commitment at the beginning of this year to do a podcast every week so I’ve rather broken my word and this is something that I like to really train people into not doing, break your word and to be consistent when they are implementing new habits and behaviours in their relationship.

So I thought this week was kind of an ideal time to talk about this, the importance of this and something that you can do to really have a better understanding of why it’s important and how we get ourselves into a new habit and how that happens and some of the pitfalls that can occur when you are doing that.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

So commitment and consistency, why are they so important? Well, if you want to implement a new behaviour or break a bad behaviour, the key ingredients in being successful in that is repetition, repetition, repetition.

Doing something over and over until it becomes embodied within you, until you don’t even question whether it’s something that you do, you’re already doing it.

Let me give you a very, very simple example, do you ever question whether you would brush your teeth at night before you go to bed?

You do it so often, so consistently, so repetitively that it just becomes an absolute habit.

You don’t have to think about it, it’s gone into that subconscious part of the brain.

Another example that we used from a previous podcast is when we’re learning to drive a car, you go through this period of time where you’re having to learn all these new things that you’ve got to do to drive the car to look in the mirror to put your foot on the accelerator on the brake, et cetera, et cetera.

But there comes a point when you’ve done it enough times that you don’t even have to think about it anymore.

So this is what we want to achieve when we are looking to implement a new healthy behaviour to do it so often we don’t even have to think about whether we’re actually going to do it, commitment and consistency.

So let’s have a look at where that might show up in relationship work.

Well, let’s say you’ve made a commitment to do something we were talking about last week which is non-judgmental listening with your partner.

So what that breaks down to essentially is listening to your partner without interrupting them and with a truly open mind so you don’t have that internal dialogue going on as you’re listening to them, that is judging them.

So how do you get yourself into the habit of doing that, right?

You are going to sometimes remember and catch yourself and do it successfully and there will be other times when you will really struggle with that and you’ll get triggered and you’ll interrupt them or even just have a judgmental thought going on in your mind as you are listening to them.

Patience And Compassion

So the first thing I would like to say around that is be patient, be compassionate and be understanding of yourself when you’re trying to implement a new behaviour, a new positive habit.

All learning occurs on a spectrum.

When you understand the concept of the spectrum of learning, it’s then that you will be able to have that compassion and that patience with yourself when you’re looking to implement a new behaviour and having that compassion and patience is very, very key to keeping going at it, to not giving up, to not condemning yourself when you fall off the horse.

So what do I mean by the spectrum of learning?

The Spectrum Of Learning

Well, I’d like you to imagine a line in your head.

You’ve got, let’s say point A at one end of that line and point B at the other end.

Point A is right at the beginning when you’re looking to implement that new habit and point B is when you’ve achieved that habit so well that you’re not even having to think about it anymore.

You’ve already anticipated the problem and you’ve gone into the new behaviour that fixes the problem.

So if we take our lovely example of non-judgmental listening at point A, you have a goal of not interrupting your partner when you are listening to them, but even though it’s your goal, when you’re at point A on the spectrum of learning, a lot of the time you’re not going to do it, you’ll still be getting triggered, you’ll have the best intentions in the world but you will completely forget.

So point A is lots and lots of good intention but you’re forgetting how to do it. But if we move a little bit incrementally along that line, that spectrum of learning, there’ll be a time when you are having a conversation with your partner and you will get triggered and you will interrupt them and afterwards you’ll remember rats.

I meant to not do that, I broke my word to myself but you did remember after the fact, right? It was a little bit late in the day but you did get it at that point.

Now we move a little further from A towards B along that spectrum and one day when you’re listening to your partner, you start to get triggered, you start to interrupt them and you’ll remember in the moment that, ah shoot, I didn’t mean to do that, I’m going to stop myself, I’m kind of halfway there but I’ve remembered and I’m going to backtrack.

I’m going to shut up and I’m going to stay in listening mode. So you’ve moved kind of midway along that line and then comes the day when you’re listening to your partner and you are ready for yourself.

You are all prepared to make sure that in this conversation you are not going to interrupt them and they’re saying something and you can feel yourself about to get triggered and you want to interrupt them but you don’t, you remember in the moment.

So you are about three quarters of the way along that spectrum and then comes the beautiful day when you’re finally at the far end of that spectrum of learning. You’ve reached point B because you didn’t even have to think about it this time, you were having a conversation with your partner and you trained yourself so effectively over a number of situations, over a number of times that you didn’t even have to think about it, you naturally stayed quiet as you listened to them sharing their point of view even when it was something that would have really triggered you to interrupting them in the past.

So that’s the spectrum of learning and understanding that learning and you habit or new behaviour doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s points along a line and by the way you can go a bit back and forth along that line so I’m sure you can imagine that one day you achieve a conversation in which you don’t interrupt but next day you forget and you go back a little way.

But the next time you remember and the next time and the next time you remember but the next time after that you go back a bit.

So understanding that spectrum has a little bit of elasticity to it, you go back and forth a little bit but generally as you keep going, as you stay in that place of commitment and consistently over time you’re going to start remembering more than you forget and that my friends is how you create a new healthy habit or break an old unhealthy one.

So go forth, be consistent, be committed in all the things that you do and when you occasionally fall off the horse, as I did last week, have compassion, go back, clear up the mess, okay?

If it’s a conversation you need to have with your partner you could apologise for interrupting them, you could hold up your hand for not keeping your word and interrupting them and you can recommit to the next time you’re going to keep your word to yourself and don’t condemn yourself or come down heavy on yourself for falling off that horse occasionally.

Learning is on a spectrum, it doesn’t happen instantaneously, it takes time and repetition, patience and compassion.

So I hope you enjoyed this week’s podcast, I look forward to speaking with you again and this time it will be in one week’s time. Take care everybody and have an amazing week.