Two Magic Questions

If you want to fix a relationship ask yourself two really important questions. How confident am I right now that I'll be able to do it and secondly how important is it for me to do this? If you feel that it's really important but you are not at all confident, read on...

This is a classic model of despair. The higher something feels on the importance scale juxtaposed against a lack of confidence leads to a series of difficult feelings. These feelings are so difficult that we have an inbuilt program to cope, it's called "denial." If something is really life or death important to us but we genuinely feel, or even know, that there is nothing we can do about it, we pass through several stages that might sound familiar to you if you are in a relationship that is increasingly not working, but is very important.

Firstly we pass through anger and then frustration and onto a stage of rationalisation; trying to "think" our way through, rather than to live with the difficult feelings. After this comes a period often referred to as "minimisation" where we try to tell ourselves things like, "it's not as bad as all that", or "everything will be alright in the end". Sometimes it's possible to be in this stage for many years without things improving or getting worse. The final stage is based upon complete delusion, "everything's okay" and "there isn't a problem". This final stage is known as denial. Often the more pronounced the feelings of hopelessness are, the louder these statements are made. It's a way that keeps us sane and allows us to cope with day-to-day life.

So, what's the good news in this rather bleak picture I hear you ask? Well, the most important thing to realize...and it is really important...is that how confident we feel and how important something feels to us is constantly shifting. Sometimes so slightly we can barely feel it. Sometimes it feels completely stuck.

The other thing to realize is that we can influence how important or how confident we feel about anything...including our relationship. We can actually help to push that terrible feeling of scoring just 1 out of 10 for confidence up a good few notches, and even higher. Like most things, commodities like confidence and importance are not set in stone. When I work with people I often just see my job as providing strategies to help people push these scores up.

A useful way to start, if you want to fix a relationship, is to ask yourself just how important and confident you feel about it all. Do you really want to fix it, is it really 10 out of 10, are you really that confident? Give yourself an honest score for both scales, which will be our starting point.

The second step is to ask yourself what would have to happen for that score of, for example, 3 out of 10, to go up to 4, or even 5. Write down your answers. Don't be satisfied with just a few ideas, keep asking yourself, "and what else" until you have a really comprehensive list of what you need to do next.

The last part is the trickiest, the third step... actually carrying out your own suggestions. If they don't feel like you can do them alone, don't, get help. There are lots of good counsellors, therapists and life coaches who will help you with your plan.

Keep going and best of luck.