Intentional Living with Tanya Hale Tanya Hale: Certified Life Coach

It is really easy for us to create dysfunctional and destructive relationships when we haven't learned how to respect and honor others' personalities, preferences, and perspectives.  These three things are at the heart of who people are, and when we reject these things, we reject them.  And when we reject them, we shut down the opportunity to create deeper friendship and intimacy.

Although I talk about the thought model and use it here on the podcast, it's been a while since I talked about the basic parts of it and how they work together.  On this podcast we will be looking at how the circumstances in our lives are neutral, how we have thoughts about those circumstances, how those thoughts create feelings, how our feelings fuel our actions, and then how our actions create the ultimate results in our lives.  When we can understand this model more clearly, we have the tools to clean up our lives and our relationships in ways we never imagined.  And it all starts with a thought. . . huh!  Who knew?!?

John Gottman is a brilliant relationship expert who has done an amazing amount of research on what makes marriages successful.  He has identified four elements of dysfunctional behavior in marriages that are especially destructive, and he calls these The Four Horsemen.  These four elements are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  In this podcast we are digging into these four behaviors and learning how to identify and clean them up in our own relationships.

Our primitive brain does some amazing things for us.  However, if we aren't paying attention, it can keep us stuck and struggling to create the kind of life we really want to have.  When we learn to manage our primitive brain and engage our pre-frontal cortex, we have the capacity to really show up for our life in the ways we want.  On today's podcast, we're learning just how to use your brain to do what you really want to do.

Today Sione and I are celebrating our second year of marriage, and we have a lot to celebrate!  In this podcast we are talking about how we have grown this past year, tools we have learned and implemented, and ideas we have come to understand better.  This is a chance for you to see how the tools I teach here on the podcast are implemented in real life.  

I think a lot of us grew up believing, at some level, that love was a reward for good behavior.  And yet, when looked at through the eyes of God, love is never a reward.  Love is actually the first and greatest commandment, it is a law. The law of love teaches us that regardless of how others act, regardless of how we're treated, regardless of what is said or done, our responsibility in every situation is to learn how to love.  That's a tall order, to be sure, and it is also the way to find our greatest happiness and best relationships ever.