It’s also been raining for six weeks — at least in Cincinnati, where I’m sitting at my desk.  I say this with a wink and a smile at its relative triviality, but it’s a fact that this dreary, unrelenting grayness is dragging people down and generally causing a lot of extra bother.  I myself was the lucky recipient on Mother’s Day of a long-wished-for pair of tall rubber boots — shiny yellow with white polka dots — which, with the swamp of mud in my back yard and Maggie, the golden retriever who needs me with her to “go outside,” were perfectly on the mark. ( Not just in terms of the mud, either; it just occurred to me that adding a little bright color has actually relieved the gloom — like one of those black and white photos that has a single red rose.)

But, back to today’s question. How, when your world is in muddy disarray, are you supposed to find time to “work on” your relationships?  The answer is in the four mini-dares that you’ll find in this post.

Enhancing relationships is often about getting smarter, not working harder.  It’s about becoming highly aware of the opportunities to connect by simply being yourself.  It doesn’t have to take more time and energy (indeed, connecting successfully with another person will regenerate rather than deplete your energy).

I’ve heard it said that there are two paths a relationship can take: either it grows or it stagnates and dies. Whether it’s your marriage, a friendship or a relationship with one of your children, “maintaining the status quo” is just a form of stagnation.

What makes relationships really exciting, compelling even, is the self development that they stimulate.  When you’re with someone who challenges you to grow, you feel alive and positive about yourself!

This is really obvious when it comes to parenting.  Each child is a puzzle and it’s tremendously gratifying to figure out what works and to connect with your child! Really learning another person is another part of what keeps relationships sizzling.

It’s a little more subtle when it comes to the relationship with your significant other.  The key self development challenge, the one thing that can make the bond between you ever stronger, is the courage to be yourself and to embrace your partner’s efforts to be real with you.

Courage, really?  Definitely.  It takes courage to share a loving thought if you are fearful of being dismissed.  Far safer to keep it to yourself.  If you believe that your value to others lies in always agreeing with them, it takes guts to take a stand.  Sharing your fears about growing closer takes a double dose of courage.

Here are four mini-dares to start with. Think of each of these as taking “one step further into the woods” — the title of an Invincible Voice podcast on moving into the unknown.  And remember, it often takes less than a minute to transform a connection with someone you love from bland to spicy.

1. Share your happy thoughts. If you’re driving by the cafe where the two you you had a lovely lunch last summer, send a quick text.  “You’re on my mind — I just drove by The Coffee Courtyard and remembered how much I loved being there with you!”  Receiving a message like this feels delicious.
2. Openly disagree. Give up “people pleasing” and say what you really think.  Relationships can only thrive when real people, not facades of people, are involved.
3. Speak your fears.It can be psychologically frightening to allow someone fully into your heart.  It’s completely predictable to have fears of losing someone whom you’ve come to love; of becoming dependent; of being abandoned.  Saying your fears out loud is liberating — and it gives you your partner the opportunity to move closer to you by fully understanding what you are feeling.
4. Be very curious. Extend the same gift of understanding to your partner.  Learn about what he or she loves — and why; what s/he fears — and why; what s/he believes — and how this might differ from your own beliefs.  One of life’s greatest gifts is being invited by another person to freely expand into the person you authentically are meant to be.

Scary or not, these are some of the ingredients to a tantalizing relationship.

Go ahead — I dare you : ).

And from that, something clicked that I would like to check out with you.  In fact, I would like very much for you to reply to this column with your reaction.

Many women have had the experience of being quietly shushed.  Inconspicuously and just a little apologetically, maybe your mother or a friend or partner has hinted that you need to hold back a little on expressing yourself; to not be too boisterous or opinionated; to avoid standing out. If you were taught to keep a little quiet, err on the side of beige and to subordinate your wishes and opinions to those of the men in your life, you’re not alone by a long shot.

It occurred to me that, for many of my clients, finding within themselves the power to rebel against this cultural mandate has been a source of liberation and pure pleasure. They love the people in their lives who have tried to keep them in check, but they’ll be kept in check no more.  Once unleashed, their delight is contagious to everyone in their lives.

I think of them as Joyful Rebels and I imagine the lively times they have with their daughters, sharing a spirit of vivaciousness. In fact, being a great mom really does start with having the guts to be yourself.

How about you?  If you’re willing to share, your voice will really help me shape this idea.    Please add a comment or email me at franhendrick@selfdevelopmentplace.com and tell me about your own experiences as a joyful rebel, or your reactions, positive or negative, to that image.  I’d really like to get your take on this, and I’ll be happy to answer.

I was talking my friend Ralph, a scientist with a long and successful career (and my professorial consultant for www.mycoachfran.com).  As a child, Ralph had decided that he was not going to live in poverty, and from the moment of that decision, he actively worked to create the life he wanted for himself. In the process of describing that path to me, he talked about writing a paper when he was nineteen on a certain topic related to DNA. He began to be very interested in a very specific research question.  Here’s what then happened:

1. He decided that he wanted to be involved in the research.
2. He asked his instructors who in the United States was doing the research.
3. They told him.
4. He contacted those people and let them know he wanted to work with them.

Ralph glossed over this story because it wasn’t really what he wanted to talk about; he had another point he was trying to make.  But I stopped him cold.

“What made you think anyone would care that you wanted to work on this? As a student it never would have occurred to me that anyone would care,” I said, a little incredulous at the perceived audacity of a kid who approaches the big guys in his field and says that he wants in.

“It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t,” he said, looking confused, as though I had asked him to explain something that was self evident.

I explained to him that he had just encapsulated the difference between his upbringing as a boy and  mine as a girl.  To me, it never would have occurred to me that anyone would pay attention to my interests and invite me in.  To him, the thought that they wouldn’t didn’t even have residence in his psyche. Because of this, Ralph had a fabulous academic path, including working with a Nobel Laureate.  Why? Because he asked.

Linda Babcock and Sara Leschever, address the power issue of the socialization of girls in their book, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.  I want to raise your awareness of the impact on you of the messages you heard growing up on your ability to go after what you want right now, today.

Here are just a few of the reasons, according to Babcock and Leschever, that women don’t ask:

• Asking equals begging, and women don’t beg.
• Women are supposed to take care of others; taking what you want for yourself is selfish.
• When men are unhappy with what they’re getting, they ask for more; when women are unhappy, they blame themselves and retreat into feeling inadequate.
• Women try to become more and more “deserving” by working harder so that what they want will be offered without their asking.  (And are angry, resentful and depressed when it doesn’t happen, I’ll add.)
• Women believe that asking is damaging to relationships.
• Women believe it’s rude or insubordinate to negotiate. (That’s a message that is first delivered by parents who don’t realize how crippling it is in the long run.)

Here’s why this is so important.

If you’re unable to identify what you want and ask for it, you’re headed for feeling resentful.  You’ll underachieve and that makes self esteem go down. Instead of following the career path you’re capable of, you’ll settle for working under people who don’t have more talent than you — but do have the ability to ask for what they want.  All of that spells depression.  Long term.

So this is a buried skill worth digging up.  I say that because you knew how to ask for — even demand — what you wanted as an infant, before you’d been told that nice girls don’t do that.  With some personal work, you can restore that innate ability.

Sound difficult? ASK for help!!! :)

Distorting reality by presenting seemingly innocuous facts out of context is one technique that emotionally abusive people use to make themselves appear to be sterling characters with the finest intentions – and their victims to be petty, complaining people who just want to make them look bad. One of the most painful elements of emotional abuse is the experience of being invalidated again and again by people who just don’t understand what’s happening. That’s the topic of this podcast.

Listen here:

Download here.

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

For instance, in the interest of writing this post while I grabbed dinner at Cracker  Barrel (the bums discontinued the apple chicken special and I’m stuck with a scrambled egg sandwich), I have texted my dear friend Ralph to ask if he can remember the conversation about the weeds.  As I sit waiting for his reply, I imagine him suddenly appearing at the table; perhaps (I imagine) he had intended to surprise me by being at my house when I returned from the office tonight and, upon reading my text, has hopped in the car in order to surprise me here instead.  Even though he sort of hates Cracker Barrel.  This, I imagine, is why it is taking him forever to respond to my text about the weeds.

I think my whole face lights up at the thought of looking up and finding him there.

After what seems over-long, I text again. “You’re not sitting in my living room or something, are you?”

“No,” he answers, “but I could be in 35 minutes.”

Now my face clouds over.  I need to do the taxes tonight, I really do.  And that means saying no when it feels like Ralph wants me to say yes.

“The truly best thing for me to do is finish expenses and mileage tonight,” I answer thinly, and my energy shifts to stress and guilt.

“Okay, I’ll call after 9,” his words appear, muted by cyberspace.

“I really need the answer to my earlier question about the weeds,” I text him back. “I’m trying to write it up.”  I hope just enough of my impatience coats the words to summon up a response.

“When you get stuck in the weeds, you just reverse the engine for a short time.  Then you can go forward at full speed again.  Same for life, too.”  This has taken him several minutes to type.

“I know that part,” I say in exasperation, “I said most of it!  I’m trying to remember the context of our conversation. “

“Call me when you get home, that’s easier,” he answers.

This is his final word, Ralph has laid the phone down.  “Hmph,” I say to myself.  So much for getting the post done over (cold) scrambled eggs.

We are now stuck in the weeds.

If there’s one thing I know from my clients, it’s that having a conversation through email or texting is a high-risk venture.  I have gone from delighted to guilty to peeved in the space of less than 100 words.  Ralph, I begin to realize, has no idea of this.

In fact, it occurs to me a half hour later when I’ve arrived home, that Ralph is a two-finger typist, and when it comes to texting, well, let’s just say that his hands, while breathtakingly gentle, are not precisely delicate.  Sort of like typing on the pinhead keyboard with baseball gloves.

And – I feel my face positively blanch at this realization — he’s been unlucky to have some really painful arthritis in his fingers that he speaks little of.  What in the world am I thinking, asking him to text volumes!

After nine, he calls.  I tell him how badly I feel about not being available tonight.  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he says happily.

Happily. Up to this point, I have assumed that he is frustrated with me and perhaps have been preemptively frustrated with him in response.  Now suddenly all is well!

Here’s the point.

Disconnects in relationships come about invisibly, but not imperceptibly.  Suddenly the energy between two people changes.  When we had first talked about this, it made me think of a boat ride I’d taken with my kids in the Outer Banks.  The Sound was very weedy that summer, and the boat kept stalling, much to its owner’s dismay — it was his new boat.  Each time the engine choked, he would reverse it, dislodge the weeds and then the boat would surge forward again.

Similarly, if you can go briefly into reverse when a conversation breaks down, you can figure out and affirm for each other where things went wrong.  A good measure of understanding and empathy is often all it takes to dislodge the misery and pick up happily where you left off.

As for the chocolate cake — this is the cover image to a proposed coffee table book called Choose the Chocolate Cake: 1001 Joyful Alternatives to an Egg Sandwich.

Which won’t be hard to come up with.

There’s a lot of lingo out there that is sometimes casually used to cast a false light on problems within relationships. One of the phrases you’ve probably heard misused is “communication problem”. This conveys that you and your significant other are simply not understanding one another and that if you gain some communication skills, all will be well. And sometimes that really is the case.

However, it is not uncommon in relationships where there is underlying anger for one person to purposely send unclear or deliberately misleading messages to the other. That’s not a communication problem; it’s a lack of empathy and even conscience. Today I’ll draw the distinction between communication issues and “gaslighting” for you and provide you some tips for assessing which category the communication glitches in your relationships fall into.

Listen here:

Download here.

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

Why can one friend help and support you with an important project and the same efforts from your sister-in-law make you feel hurt and furious? Why do your kids welcome input from a teacher but reject it out-of-hand from you?

We’ll examine the flaws in the concept of “constructive criticism” as well as the folly of blaming the recipient of these unwelcome messages for feeling upset instead of grateful and enlightened. Finally, I’ll provide some tips for making your words match the message you really want to convey and for responding when someone passes judgment over you in the guise of “constructive criticism”.

Listen here:

Download here: Communication That Doesn’t Hurt — and why “constructive criticism” is an oxymoron

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

Conflict feels like high-risk territory to many women. If the idea of entering into the fray with your kids, your partner or your friends carries a sense of doom for you, it’s probably because you anticipate at a very deep level that speaking your piece will cause the people you love and need to reject you, to lose interest, to fade away from your life.

But what if conflict actually holds with it an opportunity to strengthen these precious relationships?

Psychiatrist and author John Birtchnell used a metaphor to illustrate this how this can work. Just like hitting a slick spot while driving in snow, the way to come through a disagreement is to “steer in the direction of the skid.”

We’ll talk about the power in that idea both for relationships and for parenting.

Listen here:

Download here: Conflict Strengthens Bonds with Kids, Partners and Friends — steering into the “emotional skid”

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

If being invisible equates to feeling depressed and drained, being
invincible means really putting yourself out there — and feeling energized and alive as a result.

How do you go from being invisible to feeling invincible? What are the basic fears we all share that might cause you to choose to stay hidden?

Even though remaining “invisible” may feel safer, is it really? What are the hidden costs of quietly staying out of the limelight?

Listen here:

Download here: From Invisible to Invincible

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.

Over time, relationships settle into a set of unspoken rules — about what you will and will not say or confront and the expectations you silently agree to meet. You can find yourself dreading spending time with the very people you love the most! We’ll be talking about how to renegotiate the silent rules that leave you feeling drained and resentful. It takes courage, but opening up the conversation can breathe new life and commitment into valued relationships.

Listen here:

Download here: Relationships That Drain You: changing the terms of connection

Invincible Voice is loaded with tips, insight, inspiration and conversation about vibrant, depression-free living. It’s all about moving from being invisible to being invincible. I’ll talk about why women give up their voices and how you can get yours back. In the process, we’ll look at parenting and how it affects children’s capacity for resilience — and the impact of the way you were parented on your vulnerability to depression as an adult. We’ll explore the impact of trauma on voice; lost voices in the workplace, how to raise daughters to joyfully be exactly who they are — and that’s just a sample!

When you need a little inspiration, a gentle nudge that reminds you of your own value, or ideas about how to support your friends, kids and colleagues in sharing their unique voices, just listen in on any one of these calls.

Finding your voice will change your life.

To receive the links to weekly podcasts, subscribe to the Sea Change ezine here. You’ll be added to The Self Development Place email list to be notified of the topics for future Invincible Voice podcasts as well as about other happenings at The Self Development Place.