Brian Tracy shares what he learned from 34 years of marriage to Barbara: listen without distractions, spend face-to-face time together, give daily compliments, and treat the relationship as your main thing. A strong partnership, he says, makes everything else in life manageable.
Met her "probably 36 years ago" and "we've been married happily for 34 years."
I want to talk now about how to have a happy, healthy relationship with another person. I met my wife Barbara probably 36 years ago and we've been married happily for 34 years. Many people talk about going through the good times and the bad times, but Barbara and I have never had a bad time. We've never had a difficult part of our relationship. It's always been smooth. We have four beautiful children, we have a lovely home, we have a lovely relationship. And so people ask me, why is this possible? Well, Goethe, the German philosopher, had a line. He said, be sure to make the main thing the main thing. And the main thing in your life is the quality of your relationship with the most important person in your life. So think about that and put that at the top of your list. Here's the things that I have found is. First of all, listening builds trust. Taking the time to turn off the television, to shut down all distractions, to put the newspaper aside and just listen to the other person when they talk is a powerful way to build trust and depth in a relationship. Another factor is time. The fact is that the only way that you can improve the quality of a relationship is by spending more time face to face, head to head, knee to knee with that other person. So the most successful people that I've met over the years are people who deliberately cut apart time 30, 60, 90 minutes longer where they can just be with the other person. When you drive in your car, leave things off. Because when you are driving in a car and there's nothing playing, the car fills with conversation and you start to share ideas and you build this intimacy and this depth in your relationship. Tell your spouse that you love him or her every day. Tell the person in your relationship, married or not, how valuable they are to you. Compliment them on a regular basis, compliment them on their appearance and compliment them on their achievements. Dale Carnegie once said that the key to success in life is to make other people feel important. And this is not something that you just leave to chance. So you're always looking for little ways to make the other person feel important. Sometimes just a positive statement or a compliment, sometimes helping them out to do something, sometimes just listening patiently without interruption when they're talking tells the person how important they are. It's an interesting discovery, is that we always pay attention to what we most value in life. And so when the other person in your life wants to talk or needs to talk or is doing something, and we pay total attention to them, we pay them value, we raise their self esteem, we make them feel important in our lives. And what happens is, if your relationship is solid, everything else in life can be turbulent, which it will be. But if your relationship is solid, it's like an anchor that holds you throughout life. And in retrospect, when you look back, you'll find that everything else comes and goes, but the relationship is more important. So the main thing is to make the main thing the main thing. And your relationship with the most important person in your life is the main thing.
