SSP158: 5 Relationship Cheat Codes I Know at 30 That I Wish I Knew at 25

You know, when you've been playing a video game long enough, you start to discover the cheat codes that allow you to jump levels faster. Well, the same thing goes in relationships. And I look back at my 25 year old self, new to the game of relationships and struggling to learn these lessons the hard way. And if I go back in time and speak to him and give him some of these cheat codes that I'm about to share with you today, it would save a lot of frustration and confusion. So stay with me because in this video I'm going to give you five relationship cheat codes that I know at 31 that I wish I knew at 25. Now, my name is Jordan Cowlish and I've been in a long term relationship with my partner for the last 10 years. And the relationship with my girlfriend Amanda has taught me more about myself than anything else. And I want to pass on some of these lessons to help you jump the levels quicker, to get to a point in your relationship where it's much more effortless, more ease, more fun, less arguments, more sex, most importantly, more connection. So let's jump into these five lessons or these five cheat codes. So to save you some time and frustration. Now, one of the big things that I want to share with you, cheat code number one is all about understanding a relationship. Check in. Now, early on in the relationship with my partner, I would kind of just kind of go with the flow a little bit. And I didn't prioritize meaningful moments of connection where we set up pockets of time in the calendar where we could sit down and have conversations, where I initiated what I call a check in, which is finding out how we can be better for each other, finding out where maybe we could show up with more authenticity, show up with more clarity, show up with more confidence and support the depth and growth of the relationship. So as I've now gone into my 30s, relationship check ins are so important because my girlfriend and I do business together. And what this allows is, allows us to have more clarity on what we both need. If you remember, you should be on the same team. You should be working towards a shared vision of building a family or you're traveling or whatever your visions are, but supporting each other in your mission. As men, we have a strong focus on our purpose and our mission. But if you're not having check ins with your partner on a regular basis, how are they supposed to understand what it is that you actually need and vice versa? So the first cheat code is make sure you set up a time every single week where you Lead a conversation with your partner, ideally somewhere in the right setting where you're going for a walk or you're out for dinner, or you're out at a cafe in the morning and ask and generally tune in. Be like, hey, how do you feel like I'm showing up in the relationship. Is there any ways that I can be better for you? Or is there anything that you're needing right now that I'm missing? Or maybe you can go out of your way to start to understand how you can be leading and supporting your partner better and then present that in the check in. The check in is also another great time to bring up whatever emotional residue that you're still holding onto feelings that you haven't expressed. When you do that, you could say something like, hey, I just want to get some things off my chest from last week. I was feeling kind of disappointed or disconnected about, you know, that interaction we had. I want to kind of clear the air, you know, lead these conversations, because any emotions that go unexpressed are going to start to create this invisible wall between you and your partner. And there was many moments where that happened for me, and it could have been nipped in the bud a lot earlier. So you can both come back to this place of shared union and ebb and flow in your. In your dynamic when you express your feelings. Make sure you create a space for her to do that too. As you say, hey, sweetheart, is there anything that. That's on your heart or anything that's on your. On your mind that you just want to clear? Anything that you know, came up for you last week or anything that I did that made you feel a certain way that maybe we want to discuss right now, have these intimate conversations or hard conversations at times, because this is going to bring you closer together and it will allow. Ensure that nothing gets swept under the rug. So make sure you implement this number one, which is called a relationship check in. And if you want help kind of initiating a relationship check in, first framework. I've created an exact framework on how to do this. The link will be in the description below, and you can access it or make these conversations a lot easier to start off with. And so you can get to the point where you can just lead them intuitively. Now, the next cheat code that I Now know after 10 years of lessons and growth in my relationship is what I call the resonance bridge. It's closely connected to having a relationship check in. But for men, it's so important that you develop this ability to be able to resonate or Create resonance with your partners feelings and emotions. The resonance bridge takes up a couple of things. It's a framework that I teach inside my men's program. So if you want more support implementing something like this in your relationship, just click the link in the description to learn more about the men's group. Specifically for guys in relationships or looking to enter a relationship with this new level of consciousness and leadership and emotional leadership, which is what the resonance bridge is all about. It's made up of four things. Speaking your truth needs articulation, understanding your partner's needs, and then most importantly, being able to empathize with them. So let me break this down. Like, for so many of us men, we struggle to communicate what we feel. We struggle to develop empathy because we're not practicing getting in contact with our emotions. The first practice in this, in this process or this framework is learning to get in touch with what you're feeling and then letting your partner know, hey, this is what I'm feeling. Or this is what came up for me today. Or hey, if I'm a bit quiet this afternoon, that's okay. It's nothing to do with you. I'm just feeling quite anxious and overwhelmed from the day. I'm just going to take some space. What many men do is they just kind of be silent. They kind of withdraw and pull away when emotions get intense and heated. Now that doesn't create resonance with your partner at all. She's actually left guessing what's he experiencing. And it creates distance in the relationship. I really struggled with this early on growing up in Australia. Didn't have a lot of spaces where I could express my feelings. And the default was to kind of just like shut down a little bit and isolate. So in my romantic relationship, I had to kind of relearn this skill, right? And then so that's all around speaking truth. Understanding your truth is what you feel. And the better you can get at expressing your truth, the more authentic you will be. And that's going to create more resonance with your partner. So it's a huge cheat code that if you can master this early, relationships become a lot easier. Connections going to go much deeper. You're going to have way less fights because there's just more emotional connection going on. Now the needs articulation part is like, once you're good at speaking your truth and it's about understanding what are these underlying needs that are back there, how can you communicate your preferences to your partner so she can best support you or he can best support you, right? And it's almost like the relationship check in. The quality of your relationship check in will come down to the quality of your clarity with these things. Your feelings and your needs. Right? And then the other part of this framework is understanding or comprehending your partner's needs, seeing what they need sometimes before you, before they even know. So if you can get this framework dialed and you, you see what they need, then you can actually intervene and support them and then help them discover clarity. Now this is huge, like, but that requires a deep level of presence and connection with yourself before you can get to that point. And then the other element being the emotional safe space that's required to allow that. So you must get in the, in the habit of feeling your emotions, processing your emotions, so you can provide that safe space so that your partner cranks and express theirs. Now that's going to create a strong level of resonance. And that's what I, why I call it the bridge. You know, you allow each other to cross this bridge into each other's world where each other can feel seen, heard and understood. And that, my friend, is the magic that allows relationships to go the distance. Now the next cheat code here that I wish I knew earlier now, as I've discussed, developed as a man and growing my business and traveling a lot and spending a lot of time with my partner, there was moments throughout this period where, you know, I noticed that my attraction towards my partner would decrease. And I speak to a lot of men and they go through this as well in long term relationships and they doubt themselves, they doubt the relationship because, like, I'm not as attracted to my partner anymore, you know, maybe, maybe it's her. And it can be quite a confusing and scary time if you go through that because it's uncomfortable to bring that up to your partner. But this is the cheat code here. What I discovered is there must be a healthy balance between time spent alone, time spent with your partner, time spent with friends, and then time spent with other couples. If you can get this balance right, the attraction towards your partner will be sustained and even deepened. And it's very possible to keep this honeymoon phase alive where you just, you just intensely attracted physically, emotionally, spiritually to your partner. If you can get this balance right. If you get the balance wrong, then you're spending too much time around them. Everything gets enmeshed. Your emotional world gets enmeshed with theirs. You lose touch of the roles that each other are meant to be playing in the relationship and it dilutes the polarity very quickly. You spend too much time around your Boys, you know, too much time around the girls and not enough time with your partner, then she's going to feel left out. She's not going to feel important to you in your life, right? And then that's going to create dysfunction in the relationship. Now we throw in the one time alone. Because time alone as a man especially, is how you get clear on what. What version of you do you want to show up as? Or what is this next chapter in your life looking like? So time and solitude in nature ideally will sharpen that sword, the sword of presence. You know, the sword of energetic polarity will be sharpened when you're on your own. Time around other couples will help you learn from other couples, will help you see how other couples are navigating certain periods in their relationship. Maybe it's having kids, maybe it's marriage, maybe it's travel. So set this up every single week. Look at your calendar. Find out where's time spent with your partner, intimate time, quality time, where's the time spent with your friends, Time with other couples, and time on your own. Guarantee it. It's going to help your relationship tremendously. Cheat code number four is have vision, alignment. You know, make sure you have clarity on the vision that you have for yourself and your life. But then, most importantly, get clear on the vision you have for the relationship. Find out your partner's vision, find themselves and then together co create something for the relationship. And if you're a man, initiate this. Lead it. Talk about where you want to live, talk about the beautiful house you want to have, the how many kids you want to have, and then plant this seed into the future. Allow your woman to get behind you, to feel that you've got control of the steering wheel, you've got control of the. Of the ship that you're steering towards this future, you know, the coordinates. And she can trust and get behind that and be like, all right, this man's got me in mind. You know, I can get behind this. I feel. I feel his leadership and guidance that does amazing things for a woman's nervous system when she can feel her man who's got control, has got a map or a plan. You know, don't just be selfish and set the vision for yourself. Do it for the relationship as well. Huge cheat code. And she's gonna love that when you do that. Now, cheat code number five, this took took a long time to figure this one out, I'll tell you that much, because when I first started dating my partner, she was a real gun at digital marketing. You know, she was working at an agency. I was kind of getting my coaching business off the ground. This was early on in our relationship, not when we first started dating. It was early on, and there was periods of time where I noticed she was wearing her masculine energy. And I was like, oh, man, maybe I need to do a better job at, like, supporting her, getting into her feminine. When she started working with me in the business, in my coaching business, kind of leading my marketing strategy and things like that, I noticed that she loved planning and being in charge of organizing certain things. And even when we traveled together, she loved to just plan on, organize all these things. And that wasn't my strong suit. At times. I was like, getting in my head thinking, man, I probably should do a better job of doing some of these masculine things. So she's not doing that. And I learned this is a really big lesson or cheat code, you could say, which is it's okay sometimes for your partner to be in their masculine if it's a woman, right? And for you to be in your feminine, as long as it's balanced out by you leading in other areas. Now, in my case, I was really good at emotional leadership, so I had a really good handle on my emotional world because I was spending a lot of time in meditation and spiritual practices and emotional development. She wasn't really in that path just yet. So I would lead a lot of the emotional complexities or the emotional changes and supporting her on that emotional level when she needed it. And that balanced out the polarity quite nicely. Now, don't get me wrong, there's always a time and a place for a man and me to step in and organize things on certain levels when it comes to traveling and things in the business and all of that. So there's always going to be this healthy dynamic. I'm not being fully passive, but I acknowledge and allow her to step into some of these masculine roles because she's really good at that. And if your partner's like that, too, notice her strengths, because maybe her strength is. Is the planning stuff and it's a masculine trait. And just know that that's okay, because you probably hear that a lot. Oh, you got. As a man in a healthy masculine energy, you got to make sure your woman's always in this submissive and passive, you know, surrendered feminine state when that's not fully true. Because if you're dating a powerhouse like me, you want her to be in that expression of her gifts, which may be masculine. But just know that if you're balancing it out in other ways through other leadership qualities, then you're not going to disrupt the attraction in your relationship. So that was a cheat code that I wish I knew earlier. Now my bro, if you resonated with this, I've got a free 5 day email course that I go a lot deeper into some of these dynamics to really help you cut down the learning curve with showing up with confidence in your relationship to lead with confidence to balance out some of these complexities. Now, if you want to get access to that free five day email course, click the link below. I'll send you the first email today. So thanks for tuning in. I hope you got some value from these cheat codes. Drop a comment below. Love to hear from you. Subscribe if you haven't already. We'll see you in the next video.