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The Top Ten Habits for Successful Relationships
#3 – Speak Your Truth Appropriately, Quickly, with Good Intention and Emotional Congruence
>> Turn Up Your Speakers <<
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We hope you are enjoying these videos! What are your thoughts about telling the truth as discussed in this video? Please let us know what your own experiences have been.
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The Top Ten Habits for Successful Relationships
#2 – Listen without Interrupting or Being Distracted and Respond with Sincerity
>> Turn Up Your Speakers <<
Click Here to learn about our new Heart to Heart Talks Communication Program!
We hope you are enjoying these videos! What are your thoughts about listening as discussed in this video? Please let us know what your own experiences have been.
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The Top Ten Habits for Successful Relationships
#1 – Know What You Want and Ask for It In Ways That Inspire Cooperation
>> Turn Up Your Speakers <<
Click Here to learn about our new Heart to Heart Talks Communication Program!
This is the first in our new series of video blog posts. Please leave a comment below and let us know what you think!
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Sandy and Robert had just broken up and it was a mess. They were part of a group of friends that went back fifteen years and the emotional tension was driving a wedge between all of them. They just couldn’t hang out together anymore.
One of the members practices EFT and offered to do some “trigger work” for the whole group. Each person identified what was hurting them most. For Sandy, it was watching Robert be affectionate with others in the group. For Linda, it was the familiar conflict of having to choose between the people she loves, something that went back to her parent’s divorce when she was a child. For Stacy, it was feeling helpless to help. For Robert, it was guilt because he was the one who initiated the breakup.
Each friend clarified what was troubling them and held it in mind while they rated the level of intensity of emotional pain on a 0 to 10 scale, 10 being as emotionally intense as it could be and 0 being no sense of distress at all.
They all sat together focusing on their individual issue and using the EFT procedure, which includes tapping gently on the end points of the major meridians on their face, torso and hands. After three rounds, in about ten minutes, they all stopped and rated their intensity level again. All but one of them had experienced a significant drop in their emotional pain and reported relief from the physical discomfort that accompanies relationship pain. Emotions can cause headaches, nausea, tightness in the face, chest, stomach and throat and a variety of other physical symptoms.
They decided to do several more rounds to see how much better it could get. Several more levels of improvement occurred for each of them. Most of their levels had dropped to a 0 or 1 and a few others were hovering at3 or 4. EFT had treated the invisible perturbations in their individual energy fields that were generating the group tension. This gave significant and rapid relief because they were treating the cause, not just the symptoms.
After the EFT treatments, about 45 minutes, they spontaneously started to discuss how each of them had been affected by the “breakup”. Instead of everyone feeling heavy and stilted, they were all laughing again, joined in the familiar camaraderie that had kept them together for fifteen years.
Our own experience with this invisible “whateveritis” has shown up in our own relationship since the very beginning when we first met. And it has continued to show up in our work with relationships, deepening our own sensitivity to fluctuations in the field.
If you do not have certain distinctions about what actually causes relationships to be the way they are, the way to healing, repairing and evolving relationships can appear impossible or difficult, at best. And without these distinctions many relationship interventions are more like a band aid on a gushing artery.
We’ve worked with families, companies, teams and communities in which there were relationship challenges between two or more people that had a significant negative effect on the entire group. Families have been torn apart, production in companies negatively impacted and communities damaged for lack of understanding how a single unresolved issue between people can affect and damage the whole.
It happens all the time and it doesn’t have to. In our view, this level of relational sophistication and maturity is actually the leading edge for human evolution.
All of our relationships exist in an invisible field of energy that can be calm and stable, in a state of homeostasis. But when there are powerful emotions between two or more people, those emotions, such as anger, sadness, resentment, hurt feelings, etc. ripple out through the field, having an effect on everyone involved. The more people suppress or deny their feelings the crazier the field gets which has an undesirable effect on everyone else involved.
Emotional Tanking
The illustration on the left depicts a phenomenon called “emotional tanking”. Click on illustration to enlarge
The story above is similar to the one we shared in our last post and is typical of what EFT can do. It is a deceptively simple and powerful tool for healing relationship issues of any kind. We use it all the time in our coaching practice and in our relationship with each other.
What most people fail to realize or know how to look for, is the earliest similar incident to what is going on in the present that appears to be causing emotional pain. Nine times out of ten, present time emotional pain has its roots in our childhood and our relationship with our parents and siblings.
It’s just that the present time incident is so overwhelmingly compelling that it really looks like that is the problem, when in fact the present time event “triggered” the pre-existing, unresolved event from the past. The force and velocity of the feeling is historical. When you deal with the deeper historical level, the current issue loses its steam, as well.
It is one thing to “know about” this as a concept and another thing to “know” it as an opportunity to clear the past with tools designed to heal at the deepest level possible. Once it is cleared and resolved, your own energy field becomes less affected by difficult situations in the present. This allows you to be more resourceful, loving of yourself and others and a more powerful creator of your life and relationships.
EFT is an evolutionary tool that clears unwanted emotions. It isn’t always clear to people that their ability to adapt to accelerated change is directly related to the density of their “pain body”. The pain body holds the unfinished business from the past that often determines your perceptions of the now.
Because of these phenomena we often can’t see new and powerful possibilities in difficult situations. Now is a time for all of us to see clearly “what is” so we can make wise choices for ourselves and the people we love.
© Paul and Layne Cutright
Resources: The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra and The Field by Lynn McTaggert
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Santa Fe Easter
“We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” ~ Joni Mitchell
This is Easter weekend, a time for the celebration of renewal, rebirth and resurrection. This time we call Easter is actually a blend of the secular and religious, deriving as it does from a myriad of cultures dating back to ancient Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Italy and Persia leading up to Judaism and Christianity.
All of these cultures had central figures of legend who died and were resurrected centuries before the birth of Jesus. Even bunnies and eggs were associated with fertility and new life in Spring by Romans, Persians, Egyptians and Babylonians. Though they were probably not made of chocolate and sold in stores as we do today!
The true meaning of Easter is to be found within your own heart and celebrated in ways that bring you joy in feeling connected to the Universal rhythm of life as resurrection is made plain in newly budding and blooming nature; a nature in which we, as human beings, are as embedded as a fetus in the womb.
It is in this spirit that we share with you a story of the miraculous resurrection of a marriage relationship that was experiencing its own kind of death.
John & Lisa Heal the Deep Pain of Infidelity in Record Time
When “John” and “Lisa” walked through our door together, it was the first time they had seen each other since his recent affair was revealed. It had been an ongoing affair, but Lisa had just found out only a week ago while John was away on a business trip.
John was in California and Lisa was on the other side of the country. She was going along in her life as usual when she had a strong impression he was having an affair. Without much thought she picked up the phone and heard herself ask him if it was true. He knew he had been caught and though his first impulse was to lie, he confessed instead.
"Oh my god, what have I done?"
Lisa sat there frozen in pain. The collision of feelings left her speechless. Disbelief, hurt, anger, wanting to strike out, fear and dread sent seismic shock waves through her whole body. John was in a panic. He loved his wife and never wanted to hurt her. He thought she would never find out. His mind raced trying to find the right thing to say. He kept running into dead ends. The silence over the phone line was deafening.
“We’ll talk later,” Lisa said and hung up. John heard the click, awash in a sea of his aloneness.
Lisa then called us and said she felt like killing him and asked for an appointment. The arrangements were made and within a week she flew in. John, already in California, drove down the coast, showing up at the same time for their session with us.
It was taking everything they had to appear calm and rational on top of a boiling cauldron of relationship pain. They looked as though their emotions would burst out of control at any moment. She loved him but felt betrayed, angry and hurt. He felt guilty, confused and he didn’t want to confront her anger. It was a very strained situation, to say the least.
Meridian Tapping Techniques
We worked with each of them separately, for about an hour, using a meridian tapping technique to calm and heal their pain. We have been using meridian tapping since the late 1990’s. It is a form of Energy Psychology that uses the invisible meridian lines that are used in Chinese acupuncture. But, the technique is to gently tap on the end points of the major meridian lines with your fingertips. The tapping activates what we call the emotional immune system.
Literally, in a few minutes our clients are restored to emotional balance and wellbeing. They are then free to access the more resourceful parts of their brains and think through problems calmly. They are in a good state of mind where they can be coached to locate the “learning opportunity” in the most difficult of situations and find workable solutions.
Within an hour Lisa had shifted from wanting to punish him and hurt him as badly as she had been hurt, to wanting to take responsibility for her part in the marriage deteriorating to such a place. She wanted to stop feeling victimized.
John’s feelings of guilt were so intense he could sense the part of him that wanted or needed to be punished to get some relief. The meridian tapping helped him work those feelings out and forgive himself enough to stop feeling so defensive and more able to support Lisa through her feelings.
After the individual work, they sat on the couch looking into each other’s eyes. Their energy was now completely different. It wasn’t that the problem had been resolved but they had defused their emotional pain sufficiently so they were able to think clearly. They were able to be in one another’s presence and look at each other without feeling like they were going to pop out of their skin.
They were then ready for us to coach them. There were a lot of questions asked and answered to bring clarity to how the whole thing happened and what they wanted to do about it. This situation had the potential to be a devastating crisis that ended the marriage or be a catalyst for more intimacy and understanding and perhaps an even stronger marriage than before.
After a total of about three hours they left holding hands and gazing softly into one another’s eyes. They had essentially fallen back in love with each other. Now, that’s a lot of territory to cover in three hours. Of course, they had work to do when they got home, but they were able to overcome a huge hurdle in a short period of time. They were able to gain enough perspective to be able to see this as an evolutionary learning opportunity and to embrace it as such.
Feelings of Gratitude
When they left, we talked about how grateful we are to have a tool so powerful that it can produce truly remarkable, some would say miraculous, results in minutes. We have been relationship educators and coaches since 1976 and we have a reputation for being on the leading edge of the latest theories and techniques for working with relationships. Even we were somewhat surprised at what we had just seen happen.
What did we do that allowed John and Lisa to cover so much painful emotional ground in such a short period of time? We used a meridian tapping technique you may have heard of or be familiar with, called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). We learned EFT from the man who created it, Gary Craig, and we’ve been using very successfully since about 1997.. We were certified as EFT Masters in January 2006. EFT has transformed our coaching practice and allowed us to serve people all around the world working with them over the phone.
Relationship education and coaching has been a passionate commitment of ours for over 35 years. We are continually on the lookout for easier, more effective tools and methods for helping our clients. EFT is the simplest and most potent tool we have discovered, so far. The kind of miracle we relate here in John and Lisa’s story has become common place in our work with others.
EFT is easy to learn in a relatively short period of time and can become a life-long skill that you can use for releasing fears and phobias, dissolving anxiety, overcoming self-sabotage, fear of meeting new people, public speaking, insomnia and so much more.
If you have followed our blog for any length of time, you may recall our sharing about the incredible challenges we have faced in the months since Paul’s emergency open heart surgery last summer. We can tell you right now that the physical and emotional pain we have gone through individually and in our relationship was significantly mitigated by our regular (often daily) use of EFT, both with each other and alone.
In this time of great transition and uncertainty in which much of what we hold dear seems to be being stripped away, we need powerful tools that can help us navigate the unknown as we are being reborn into a new life in which it is safe to love, to trust and to embrace the unknown as the very crucible of our own resurrection into new life.
“We are stardust, billion year old carbon, we are golden, caught in the devil’s bargain and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” ~ Joni Mitchell
Easter Bunnies with Easter Eggs
© 2012 Paul & Layne Cutright
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I sat next to the bed of old man, a friend for over twenty years, and held his hand. Hal was dying. We both knew these next few days would be his last.
We spent time reminiscing about his long and fruitful career as a church pastor. We talked about old friends. We chatted about his family. And I listened as he offered sage wisdom and advice to a member of a “younger generation.”
At a lull in the conversation, Hal seemed to carefully consider what he was about to say next. Then he squeezed my hand, gazed intently into my eyes and whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “Nothing is more important than relationships.” I knew that this was somehow near the pinnacle of his life’s learnings. As he considered all of his experiences — personal, professional, spiritual and family, this one ultimate observation surfaced above the rest: “Nothing is more important than relationships.”
“Don’t get overly caught up in your career,” he seemed to be saying to me. “Likewise, don’t use people in order to achieve your goals, then throw them away. No project, no program, no task should be pursued at the expense of friends and family. Remember,” I heard him saying, as clearly as if he were speaking the words, “that in the end, only your relationships will truly matter. Tend them well.”
Writer Og Mandino puts it this way: “Beginning today,” he said, “treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”
At the end of a long life, my friend Hal would have agreed.
Copyright © Steve Goodier
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We have certainly experienced a tremendous amount of love and support since Paul’s “heart episode” last month. Most of it has come in the form of e-mails, cards and phone calls. Some of it by local friends chaufferring Paul to various medical appointments. And some of it even in the form of unexpected material assistance from tequila to checks! (The tequila was actually prescribed by Paul’s surgeon.)
Learning to ask for help has been a life-long process for both of us. We like to think we are better at it now, although there was not as much asking on our part recently as there was simply the spontaneous generosity of giving by people who love and care about us. We learned how much of a gift it can be to others to ALLOW them to give of themselves out of their own areas of abundance.
Below is a piece by Steve Goodier about giving and receiving help that seemed relevent. We hope you enjoy it.
Some people never need help. One man caught his foot in railroad tracks. He tried to pull it out, but his efforts only seemed to make matters worse.
He heard a noise and turned around to see a train coming. In a panic he prayed, “Dear God, please get my foot out of these tracks and I’ll stop my heavy drinking and smoking!”
Nothing happened. He was still stuck, and the train showed no sign of slowing.
So he prayed again, “Oh, Lord, please get my foot out and I’ll stop drinking and smoking and carousing and cussing!”
Still nothing. He tugged and pulled as the train bore down. In sheer desperation, he pled for help a final time. “Lord, please, if you get my foot out of the tracks, I’ll do anything! I’ll … I’ll … I’ll become a minister!
Suddenly his foot shot out of the tracks and he got up and dusted himself off as the train whizzed by. Then he looked toward Heaven and said, “Never, mind, Lord, I got it out myself.”
Some people seemingly never need help from anyone. They rarely call on friends or even family to lend a hand. They seldom, if ever, confide in a good listener. They seem to believe they should be completely self sufficient; that needing assistance is an unwelcome weakness.
But others find great value in occasionally asking for assistance, and in offering it, too. Needing help, even once in a while, reminds them that they were not meant to journey this life alone. It is a group outing, not a private experience.
Those who find help when they need it are fortunate. But those who give help generously are the most fortunate of all. Few experiences can produce a sense of joy and satisfaction like that of truly easing the burden of another human being, with no thought of return. Fact is… when we help someone else, we can hardly help but be happy. At those magical times we may wonder who really helped whom!
Copyright © Steve Goodier
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It’s June 1 and this is our first blog post of the year! It’s not our usual style to have such a lapse in communication with our readers, but there’s a good reason for it that we’ll touch on briefly.
We find ourselves in the same place so many people are in now-a-days, looking at how to adapt to changing life conditions. For some people what has changed is their house blew away in a tornado. For others, they have lost their job and they have to find a new way of making an income. For some it’s just an eerie feeling outside their peripheral sensors that something needs to change because their life just doesn’t “feel right” anymore.
But, no matter what the changing life conditions are, the challenge is essentially the same. That is, “How can I/we make the best choices for everyone concerned while staying true to our Soul’s purpose?”
When we first took our work from seminar rooms to teleclasses on the Internet and from our consultation room to telephone coaching, we had the distinct pleasure and privilege of learning directly from “the father of modern professional coaching” himself, Thomas Leonard (http://www.bestofthomas.com/blog/).
We ran across an article he wrote about a decade ago, that speaks to our current needs and it sparked some new thinking for us.
In this article he distinguishes the difference between living a life and having a lifestyle. He poses a key question worth asking ourselves, “How much of my life is being consumed by my lifestyle?”
Thomas suggests that “Lifestyles are expensive to support and can prevent you from evolving.”
He continues, “If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and supporting your lifestyle more than saving money, your lifestyle is too expensive. You’re trapped in it; you must keep working in the job you have, in order to afford your lifestyle. As long as you feel the pull to fund a lifestyle and you can’t afford to stop working, your rate of development/evolution will be much slower than it could be. Rapid personal development occurs when you have the time, space and reserves to afford to experiment with new ways of thinking, working and living. If you’re living wonderfully, yet close to the edge, you can’t really afford to progress in some very important ways, and you probably won’t be attractive. A lifestyle is generally seductive; a person is attractive. Take your pick. (Note: If you have plenty of reserves, enjoy your lifestyle completely! But if not, simplify.)”
To clarify the above, what Thomas means when he says “you probably won’t be attractive” doesn’t have anything to do with your physical attractiveness or the way you look. He’s referring to your capacity to attract what you want into your life.
Spoken like the true visionary financial planner he was!
The concern Thomas points out here is one that we are not only seeing in many of our friends, colleagues and clients of late, but we are also confronting this in our own life.
Sometimes we find ourselves in difficult circumstances due to our own shortsightedness, sometimes out of being thrust into unexpected life circumstances brought about by conditions totally outside of our control.
Who of us hasn’t witnessed the recent destruction wrought by the forces of nature? When events occur that are beyond our comprehension we usually are left to our automatic, reflexive interpretations, which isn’t usually the best approach!
It was about a year ago now that Paul experienced the aggravation of a hidden health condition that resulted in his not being able to work at his usual pace.
His health continued to be a problem throughout last summer and up to the present. One of the most frustrating things about that was the fact that not one doctor or health care practitioner could give us a definitive diagnosis.
One of the most alarming symptoms of Paul’s illness, besides the physical pain, was loss of memory and cognitive function, making it difficult to continue working in our business. Mounting medical expenses without positive results were also taking their toll.
Clearly, something had to give as this was (and continues) taking a toll on every part of our life — and our lifestyle. Only now are we in a place where we are beginning to have enough perspective to write about it.
It has long been our practice as teachers, coaches and authors to communicate as transparently as possible from our own experience. We are not academics or theoreticians, we are researchers, experimenters and practitioners, using our own lives and relationship, workshops and trainings, as our laboratory.
Having been in the public eye working face to face with groups large and small, our successes and failures, learning experiences all, were in plain sight for all to see. Everything became grist for the mill and real life teaching examples, all
gladly shared.
In short, Paul’s illness has brought both of us to the limit of our resources financially, emotionally, physically and spiritually. Over the last few months we have moved from living on the edge to falling off of it.
We have some tough choices to make. Choices become clearer by asking questions.
Our questions are:
Moving from Santa Fe? As it turns out, Santa Fe is not the best place for Paul to heal. Should
we rent our house or let it go?
Change our work in some way? Should Layne find some corporate work or should we both stay focused on our vision to bring affordable evolutionary relationship education to the global marketplace via the Internet? Can we do both at the same time?
Change our lifestyle in some way? Well, that leads us to more questions. How? What could that look like? How can we stay true to our values of soulful relating, love and contribution to the greater whole, while we make some BIG changes in the way our life is designed?
Our question for you is:
How can you find the important choice points that will take you to a future of fulfillment AND also help you navigate the seas of change you find yourself in?
Even though it may feel like you’re on a big river as it accelerates directly into the rapids, and your adrenaline is high because there’s a lot at stake, it’s important to find the calm center inside of you and get some spiritual perspective. Clarify
your choice points by asking yourself and your loved ones some new, life changing questions. Be alert to the tendency to become gripped by any automatic, reflexive interpretations from your past that could limit your creativity and resourcefulness and could make things worse.
Here are a few questions you might consider to jump start your thinking:
Please share with us and our other readers some of the powerful questions you have asked yourself below.
And stay tuned for continued updates and new content . . .