Love Lessons from High-Performing Leaders Part 2

Hello, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lisenberry Christensen.

I'm a relationship and sex coach who's worked for 23 years with executives and business founders because they've gotten great results in business with my guidance and support.

And they wanted their relationships to be.

As high performing as their careers. Clients ask me more and more to help them with their intimate relationships. That's been a focus for my work for the past dozen years. Now these extraordinary leaders have blessed me.

With a wealth of knowledge about how.

To create relationships that are not just successful, but truly great. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help.

Every listener create those same world class results in their relationships.

Now, last episode we went into how.

I became a relationship coach when my executive coaching clients, whose relationships were already pretty great, already asked me to come home with them, to work with them and their spouses to do for their marriages what we'd already done together in their successful careers. We looked at the 12 keys that they taught me about how each of us individually can create an extraordinary relationship. You can go back and listen to that part first or you can continue.

On now with our topic for today.

On this episode, we'll talk about what the most successful couples do together to create the passion, the connection, the erotic heat, the communication and the partnership that all keep deepening throughout their lives. Here's what already successful couples do to co create an extraordinary relationship. Key number one they grow together. A lot of couples tend to think in terms of their own individual goals, their individual growth, their evolution as a person. And often people will come to me.

And say, I feel like I've outgrown my partner.

I feel like we're just growing apart. Well, quite intentionally. The couples who are the most successful choose how to grow together on how to spur one another's growth, how to use their relationship as the catalyst that grows each of them so that they grow more close and interconnected as the years go by rather than growing apart. Key number they make space and time for love. As you know, life is busy. There are lots of demands on our time, lots of things that will insert themselves into not only our schedules, but into our energetic makeup that will draw down our reserves of mental space, of emotional energy, of physical vitality. And if we don't prioritize relationship, if we don't put it in first and build fences around it, protecting it pretty vigilantly from those outside influences, our relationship kind of falls off the bottom of the list. It gets put on the back burner, and then it slides off the back of the stove. So the most successful couples ensure that their relationship doesn't get deprioritized in that way. Key number three, the most successful couples nail the systems that make their life their home, their family, their fitness, their finances, and other aspects of their lives that are important to them work well. They are sticklers for schedules, budgets, planning. As a client said recently, I prune that stuff like it's a bonsai tree. They're always tinkering with their systems to make sure we that their lives work well. You know, they say what we measure grows, what you're attending to gets better over time. And if you're running some important aspect of your life in a haphazard way, that aspect will be a drain, a drawdown on the resources that other aspects of your life could use. So nailing all those systems is one of the keys. Key number four. They get support to keep on growing. They seek coaching, counseling, training, education, inspiration, and personal support. They look for other extraordinary couples to connect with so that they can grow in an ongoing way and so they can do it with ease. When your friends are really cool, conscious couples, too, it's like they say, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So these couples really look for other couples who can mentor them and who they can mentor, who they can talk to about the things that are challenging and who they can celebrate with and the things that are great without worrying about that ill will that a lot of people find with family members, neighbors, friends from high school or college or graduate school that may not have as great a relationship. So surrounding yourself with other people who support your ongoing growth and who also know that the sky's the limit is one of the keys. Key number five. The most successful couples pay it forward. They give to other couples what they've received in wisdom, love and support. They understand that none of us gets a great education growing up or from our own families of origin about how to have the kind of love and sex that you really want. We get an education in how to kind of maintain how to have an okay so so relationship, or maybe how to make relationship last, but not how to have an extraordinary one. So these couples really pay that forward. Key number they know that the sky is the limit, that their relationship, their adventures, their spiritual connection, their emotional experiences have no bounds. They know that life can keep getting bigger and more beautiful as they reinvest the dividends of all the devotion and effort they've brought to it. So they Keep their aspirations high and growing, not in a way that's pressured, but in a way that keeps them inspired. Key number seven, they give one another permission and invitation even to confront them with love on their blind spots and to invite them to the next chapter of their growth. This lesson has been so poignant for me, and I was talking with my son about it the other day because he's been talking about hypocrisy lately. And I said, I've learned that even if someone who's giving me feedback is being hypocritical, my job is to hear through that and look at whether the feedback is useful to me. And that's what these couples do, is they find the place where, even if their partner's feedback to them is coming in kind of a rotten package or coming in a way that says as much about their partner and what they need to change as it does about them, they look for what they can learn from it, for where the invitation is for them to grow. And they take that invitation up. Rsvp yes, enthusiastically. Key number eight, they stay on their learning edge as a couple and individually, always growing and expanding and busting out of their comfort zones with courage and resilience. So comfort zones are tremendously seductive. We really like to get into our groove and to be in circumstances and situations that are comfortable and familiar. The upside is we're cozy. The downside is we get into ruts and our world shrinks a little bit every time we shy away from an edge. And when that starts to happen sexually, when that starts to happen romantically, we lose that sense of variety, of spontaneity, of vitality that keeps the spark alive. So the hottest couples know that they have to cultivate that novelty and spontaneity and keep busting the comfort zone in order to keep everything vital. So they do. Key number nine. They acknowledge the different chapters of life and the changes in needs and desires, roles and patterns of power that accompany them. And they flex and renegotiate their relationship every time that happens. So a lot of times, this is what brings a couple to me, is that they've crossed a threshold into a new chapter. Their kids have come along or entered school or left the house. Each of those transitions brings changes in a relationship. Or often someone you know, if you're together for decades, one of you is going to run into an illness that is significant and has you confront your mortality. And often that precipitates the necessity of revisiting and rejiggering how your relationship agreement works. There are Changes in career, changes in location, all of these rewrite the architecture of our relationship. And the strongest couples acknowledge that they can't expect things to be the same on the other side of those. So they let go of the marriage they knew to create a new marriage with the same partner. Key number they find ways to grow their erotic connection as they pass through chapters of life and as their bodies and minds change, they have a fluid definition of sexuality that allows them to enjoy heat and shared pleasure through a range of circumstances and situations. See, a lot of couples have had a strong erotic connection earlier in their relationship. But then as their bodies and minds change, as their life circumstances change, they lose that connection because they don't have a fluid way of thinking about what sex means, what sexy means, why they're attracted to each other. If we can rewrite our erotic connection and our erotic synergy over time, then our connection can get deeper, sweeter, and even hotter over time, even as we pass out of the range of what the marketing industry would say is sexy, and we can become fluid, abundant sexual creatures throughout the entire lifespan. That's been tremendously inspiring to me to see. Key number 11. As they suffer loss and embrace changes, they bear with one another and they're different, though, both healthy ways of coping with change and loss. The statistics on what happens to couples as they endure, for instance, the awful experience of losing a child or as they walk through one of them having a chronic illness are heartbreaking. Losses and changes are always metabolized differently by any two people. And the most resilient couples find ways to honor the differences between the ways that they process, to not make one another wrong for those differences and to be supportive of one another. This is tremendously delicate, challenging territory, but it's beautiful to witness as couples navigate those opportunities to actually deepen their relationship, rather than letting their relationship be torn apart by such challenges that are definitely a part of every single life. Key 12. They approach their inevitable parting with equanimity, with celebration, and with gratitude. You know, my clients are people who are often health conscious. They work to extend their well being and the number of days they get to spend spend on this planet. But they also have a healthy relationship with the truth of their mortality. None of us gets out of here alive, right? And by contemplating the finitude of their time together in these bodies, the people with the best relationships squeeze all the juice they can out of their days. So These are the 12 keys that I've learned so far. I guess it's about one per year. Over the years that I've been working with couples. But every year I learn even more from my clients and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to study from such an intimate vantage how these super intentional, devoted, conscious people keep refining their self awareness, how they keep growing their capacity to give and receive love, and how they keep pushing the envelope on what's possible for their contributions in the world. So my question for you today is in what ways are you an extraordinary couple already? What have you learned about how to create the connection and the shared pleasure and the communication and the collaboration that it takes to grow a legacy love? And what are your learning edges as a person and as a couple? In this regard, I hope you took some actionable ideas from today's podcast and some real inspiration. I know I do every time I'm.

With a client or connecting with a.

Member of our Secret Society. Creating a Legacy Love marriage is an ambitious undertaking as much as a remarkable career or raising healthy, happy children is, it doesn't happen by luck or by accident, as my clients will tell you. In 20 years of marriage and 23 years together, my husband Kurt and I have learned ourselves that as soon as you get one aspect of happy, easeful relating under your belt, something new arises to challenge you or to give you fresh delight. Either way, it is never boring. I'm so grateful to get to be your mentor on this journey, if only through these episodes. I hope you'll take the next step deeper by joining the Secret Society of Turned On Couples. It's totally free and totally advertising free on a private network that you can find@society.lizenberry.com Our secret society is a great place to ask your questions, share your experiences, and join the conversation about creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. I do weekly live Q&As and we can't wait to welcome you to the conversation.

It's all happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in.

The show notes@lizenberry.com Episode 021 if you've.

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Please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and hit that subscribe button so that you always get notifications of new episodes each week. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you next week with episode 22. We're going to dig into those conversations that probably shouldn't have happened because one of you was really not in the right space for it, but they did.

Anyway.

I'm going to share what to do about it and how both partners can help.

Until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.