Save Your Close Relationships With This ONE Small Change

Hey guys, so I'm gonna try and keep this video a little shorter than I have been recently because I'm aware that the length of my videos has been kind of creeping up. But I am going to talk about something that has had a lot of my mental energy recently, which is the relationships in our lives, not necessarily our intimate relationships, but with our sisters and our brothers and our Parents, daughters, sons, all those relationships in our lives where we know they're important to us, but over time in some way they may have grown distant or they may have just departed from the type of relationship we always wanted with that person. I think that with certain people in our lives we have or at least started with an ideal of how we wanted that relationship to be. And over time, it may have gone adrift. So my message is simple this week, and it's this: It's never too late to change the dynamic of a relationship. I think that so many of us are terrified of changing the dynamics of one of our relationships because it involves us being vulnerable. We might have to do something different than we normally do with that person. Might be someone in your life who's not used to getting physical affection from you, and it's giving them a hug. And that's really vulnerable for you because you don't know if they'll look at you strangely if you do it. It might be saying to someone, by the way, what you did today was amazing. Great job. And it's the person that you never give praise to but really needs your praise and who would really appreciate it. It might be just asking someone a question, a meaningful question, instead of skimming the surface with them all the time and saying, how's your day going? It might be asking them a deeper question and really finding out about their life and what their passions are right now, because you don't feel like you know them anymore. I find that the little things in our relationships are often the hardest to do, especially when they are a departure from what we normally do or from the habits we've formed with that particular person. Sometimes we make relationships about the big stuff, like I need to go up to that person and apologize for all of these years and what I've done wrong and so on. I need to write them a letter or an essay on what I feel about us. But very often starting to change a relationship begins by one small action. You know, if there's someone who's always used to be you being late for everything, just getting there early once and when they say you're early, you say, yeah, I wanted to be on time for you. That's a moment where you show someone that you're trying and don't expect them to immediately receive with open arms whatever little change you give them. If you're not being affectionate with that person for the last five years and then all of a sudden you get a little affectionate, don't expect them to suddenly take to it. If you give someone praise who you never give praise to, don't expect them to say, oh my God, I'm so happy you said that. I've been waiting for that. They might look at you funny and say, what's wrong with you today? When little changes catch someone off guard, they will have strange and sometimes even hurtful reactions to those changes because they're not used to it and it's part of their defense mechanism to protect themselves in this moment. It's part of their defense mechanism to be suspicious. or sometimes cynical of certain changes that you make. That's okay. Don't be fooled into thinking that everything they show on the surface is everything they're feeling underneath. Because when they see that you're trying and when they see that you're attempting to do something that's not comfortable for you, on a deeper level that gets appreciated. And I've found that a lot of the people that we think have given up on us are secretly rooting for us to change and to stick with those changes. so many of us have become cynical of the idea that people can change because we look at people around us and we say, no one, no one I know really does change. But here's the gift you can give to yourself. If you take a relationship that's important to you, and even if it's tough, even if that relationship has been a certain way for years or decades, you change one little thing about yourself in that relationship to make it better and to really try it. And you keep Sticking with that change, you'll show yourself that change is possible in people because you will have done it even in some small way. Go for it. That's my little challenge to you this week. It takes courage to do the little things. It takes courage to be vulnerable and treat a relationship slightly differently and do something you wouldn't normally do. But it's so, so worth it and you might just be surprised with how much it means to the other person. even if you think they've already given up on you. I'll see you next week. Thank you, guys.