How to become the person you need to be in a relationship

What's up, guys? So today on the series of Reinventing Yourself, today we're going to delve into how to become a better person in your relationship, how to become the person that you need to be in your relationship so that you can strengthen your relationship, so that you can have things to look for, so that you can actually build ultimately the most fulfilling relationship that you could ever have. Welcome to Reinvent You. My name is Travia Steward, and I am a performance and life coach. As a coach, I work with people to build confidence, to help them communicate with clarity, and to build strong, thriving relationships. This is the show for you if you want to transform and change your patterns of behavior and how you show up in the world today to better align with what you really want to do in this life. This show is about transformation, and not until you transform yourself first will your relationships, your business, and even your health change. On this show, I encourage you to be honest with yourself about who you are right now and who you want to be, and I can help you find a path to getting there. Welcome to Reinvent You, your guide to connecting authentically, living with purpose, and having no regrets. To begin with, first off, I'd like to throw a shout out to one of my clients who, you know, I was working with. He's a male and he didn't know how to communicate on a level in which the female, his girlfriend, wanted him to communicate. So we worked together for about 6 months and now I congratulate him and his fiancée that they're in love again. So to begin with, let's talk about the stage one of a relationship, right? Most of the time couples get together, they're excited, everything is great, there's a lot of passion, they can't wait to see each other and spend time together. They want to spend every waking minute together. Also during this time, they overlook red flags that when you look back on it probably were there to begin with. But we have a tendency to ignore those things, you know. We have a tendency to overlook them and not think they're as big as a problem as they are. And then later on in a relationship, sometimes these things become elephants in the room, right? So in the beginning of a relationship, we operate from a place of what we want our partners to see in us. Like the vision of how great I am, how great you are, how great you are so that your partner doesn't wanna go off and be with someone else, right? And so in our minds, we become the person who we think we need to become in that relationship. But the problem is, for most people, it doesn't last long. Once the newness wears off, once, you know, the romance wears off, and once you start, you know, using the bathroom with the door open, and, you know, you start farting on each other and, and talking to each other any kind of way, it usually doesn't last long. That's when we enter a stage of, of, of fighting, of bickering. You know, we're no longer laughing together. We're no longer getting up in the morning of, I can't wait to spend the day, I'm so thankful I get to wake up to this person. More often than not, a lot of the problems that relationships encounter begin with communication. Many couples stop communicating openly, and generally the reason why they're still even in it is usually because maybe you have kids together. Maybe it's because of the finances. Maybe it's just easy to stay where you are, and, and, you know, you don't want to have to put yourself out there to go date again, to start all over again. So you're willing to settle for being unhappy, being stuck, feeling unimportant, and feeling like this relationship, even sometimes this marriage, does not fulfill you. So how do we reinvent ourselves? How do we get back to the point, even after your relationship feels like it's gone off the rails, how do you get back to the point to where your relationship is loving and caring and appreciative instead of feeling like your partner is a pain in the ass? Well, today I'm going to tell you about some things that you can start doing today to reinvent yourself in this relationship, because most people, due to popular demand, most people think that it takes both people in a relationship to change the trajectory of that relationship, to change the path, to fix it, to save it. But I am a believer that one person— if one person gave 100% and committed to this— that's not to say you're doing all the work, but you're leading by example. And if that relationship is built on the foundation of love, you just have to find that love again. Then one person doing the work to begin with initially could totally help. So first of all, the very first thing that is absolutely important is, as an individual in a relationship, you have to figure out what are your needs and your wants. What are the things that fill your cup up each and every day? We generally experience unhappiness or encounter some type of problem because it's coming from a place of we have a need that's not being satisfied. So in your relationships, you have needs and wants, but first of all, you have to be able to figure out exactly what that need is, figure out how to get it satisfied. And the most important part of that is you can't expect people to satisfy your needs for you. You can't expect them to fill your cup. So if you have a need of significance in your relationship, that you really want to feel important, yeah, it feels good to get that from someone else. But if you're only getting it from someone else and you're only dependent on getting it from your partner, getting it from outside sources, then we have a void when other people are not stepping up and doing that. So to begin with, you have to figure out how do I make myself feel significant? How do I celebrate myself? How do I give myself appreciation and love and connection? How do I treat myself like a queen or a king? So once you have those things figured out, then you feel like a more complete person, a person who is whole, who can full— who can 100% give to the relationship, right? You can't expect another person to fill those voids that you haven't filled yourself. And then the next thing, number 1— and these things aren't necessarily in order, they're just a list that I put together based on what I have found that works for my clients and getting them back on a path of laughing together again, loving each other, feeling like they are reinventing their relationship and falling in love all over again. So what's important is figuring out where your relationship is to begin with. So doing a relationship check-in. Some people find it beneficial to do it once a month. Some people need to do it more than that, like once, you know, biweekly, once a week some people do, you know, so that they don't get to a point to where they feel completely disconnected. And so checking in could look like asking each other, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, I like scales, 'on a scale of 1 to 10, where do you think our relationship is in your opinion?' And if your partner says, 'I think it's a 6,' well then ask them, 'Well, what will make it a 10?' And then they, you know, if you have open communication, they'll tell you what it is that it will take to get that relationship a 10. And then you break it down even further, you know, because again, I led a few minutes ago about feeling significant in a relationship. So you can also ask your partner, how significant, how special, how supported do you feel by me in our relationship, in our marriage? And then allow your partner to ask you the same thing. On a scale of 1 to 10, am I meeting that need at a 7? What would make it a 10? You know, and then also what's very important is Your level of intimacy, and I'm not talking about just sex. How intimately are you connected? And so again, asking, do you feel emotionally connected to me? Do you feel an intimate connection outside of sex? You know, and then maybe the second part of that is what could make our sex life better? Is our sex life, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, where is that? We all have needs. You know, we have needs that make us feel primal from time to time, but we all have needs that need to be satisfied. You know, we can look at our emotional needs on a scale of 1 to 10. How satisfied are you in my ability to be there for you, to appreciate you, to be the person that you can turn to, to help satisfy your emotional needs from an outside person? And then again, flip that again. And then figuring out, you know, what is it that we could do that make— that could make our relationship a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10? You know, how well do we communicate? How could I communicate better with you? And so that's another part, that's a second part that's so important, is figuring out where you are to begin with. The third very important factor, and it really is the basis of, you know, the foundation of a great relationship, is being able to communicate openly. And communicating openly means that you eliminate negative language. I've never been a proponent, a person who believed in talking to the person that you supposedly love in a very ugly way. Like, I'm never gonna call my partner an asshole, You butthole, you're stupid, you idiot, you know, oh, I'm just kidding. No, those words are not loving. And I would not want anyone to come back at me with those, with that type of language. And so even if you come from a point of, oh, we're just joking, sometimes there's some truth to that. There is some truth in how you really feel and you're using it maybe in a passive-aggressive way. And so very first, in order to communicate openly, you want to also communicate lovingly by eliminating the negative language, by eliminating all the things that make you or your partner feel less than. In order to have that weekly check-in, you need to set aside some time where you are going to connect with each other. That probably should be like once a week. Some people like to use that as a date night. Some people have, some couples have kids to where they cannot have like a per se date night, you know, but you can utilize the time that you do have in order to connect with your partner, to connect with your husband and wife. And that could be you're spending time while you're cooking dinner, even if your child is in the room, you're still connecting on a level of where you have made time for one another. You have made time to fulfill that need of companionship, of maybe even intimacy. But making time, establishing that routine once a week, really at a minimum, is so vitally important. And it's even better if it's just the two of you. Maybe you go out, you know, on a date. I know we're not doing a whole lot of that right now because of COVID you know, but things are opening back up. You know, you can sit on a balcony. You can always just go for a walk. You can be really, really creative and maybe go on a picnic. You know, you don't have to worry about anybody with COVID if you're going on a picnic and a hike or something like that, right? Putting yourself outside where, you know, you're less likely to catch COVID because there's not a bunch of people around. And then the third thing in communicating much more openly and lovingly is actually listening more than you talk. How many times Can you think right now that when your partner starts talking, that you interrupt them, that you try to finish their sentence, that you get defensive, that the criticism comes up, maybe sometimes even a little bit of contempt, and then you start stonewalling, you start, you know, becoming defensive? Most of the time when a relationship is at a point of where you're not communicating, if you're having a serious discussion, the person who's talking is just talking out there to a target, and your partner's thinking, oh, I've heard the first 3 words of that sentence you just said. And now all they're thinking about is, what's my next comeback? What's the next thing I'm going to say? Because I'm not going to take this, you know, I'm not going to take this shit from him or her, right? And so you're always thinking, how can I be one step ahead instead of just listening? And so a tool that's really, really good with couples is, and it kind of says, you know, I'm listening, is if you allow your, you know, your partner, one person to go first and they say, you know, I feel, you know, you always start with I, don't start with you because that's accusatory because that's placing blame. And that's, you know, people feel attacked when you say, well, you did this. Well, you didn't take out the garbage. Well, you made me feel so. You always start with, I feel, even if that is, you know, I feel unappreciated because I've been doing all this stuff, because I feel like your love language is acts of service, and I've been doing all this stuff, and I feel like you haven't really noticed, and I— so I feel unappreciated. Your partner should come back and, and paraphrase that so that there are no misunderstandings. So your partner should say, so let me get this right, you feel like you've been doing a lot of acts of service because you know that's my love language, but you feel like you've been doing all of this stuff and I haven't noticed, and so you feel unappreciated. And then he or she should say, did I get that right? Then the person speaking should say, absolutely, then the other person should say, "Was there more? Have I heard all of it?" And then if that's it, then that's it. You stop there and then you allow your partner a turn. And then, then there's no interrupting. There's no time to be defensive. There's no time to go, you know, tit for tat. You're actually listening and reflecting exactly what it is that you heard them say so that you all are on the same page. But most importantly, listening more than you talk. And then the next thing I wanna share with you is probably, it's step number 4. Step number 4 means you can't expect your relationship to keep growing if you're still just doing all the same things that you've always done. You can't be doing the same things you did in the, you know, from day 1, unless it's a level of love that you always want to get back to, right? But you got to keep reinventing. You have to keep bringing in new things, you know. Get to a point of, I want to impress my partner, I want to inspire my partner, you know. What are the needs that I used to meet so easily, but those things don't work anymore? How can we meet each other's needs that is innovative, that's different, that's going to actually take our relationship to a different level. So in this, in this area, start exploring things. Start traveling to places together that you just would never have thought of traveling to, but finding new ways to meet each other's needs. And then number 5, is to figure out some things that you could do together so that you actually grow together rather than grow apart. And that can be things like going for a walk together, you're gonna maybe do a workout together, maybe you're gonna cook together, maybe you have this big project, maybe you could do— you're, you're putting a garden, you're building a garden in your backyard, and maybe you're doing that together. But having a destination, something that you both can feel inspired and motivated to do, so that it also gives you something to look forward to, something that brings you closer, and you look forward to doing it every single week or every single day. And in growing together, going back to step number 1, when I said, you know, filling your own cup is finding a way to fulfill your own needs and wants as part of growing and evolving. You don't want to be two people in a relationship who do every single thing together. You have to have your own identity. You have to have things that are just separate that you do from your partner. So therefore, when you come back together, you're still that same person. Because if you just do every single thing together, then you're just going to merge. You merge and you become one, and then that's where most people figure out Oh, I feel like I've lost myself. All these years in this relationship, I've been doing everything that you want to do, and I never spoke up. Well, why didn't you speak up? Well, I didn't want to make you mad. Well, you know, it's this whole list, this— we just run down this train track of, I wish I would have spoken up then. I wish I would not have, you know, I wish I would have spoken up then. I wish I would not have put my life on hold. And stop doing the things that I love doing. And I wish I would've kept my friends so that I can have my identity. And then number 6, number 6 is most people in a relationship have expectations. You generally, you as in we, expect your partner to know what you want, to know your needs, but also to treat you the way that you want to be treated when you haven't even communicated what that is, right? And so if your love language is physical touch, well then your partner needs to know that. They can't read your mind. They can't guess these things. And how is it that you want to be touched? If it's words of affirmations, if it's acts of service, gifts, quality time, whatever that is, you have to communicate that need. But then you have to also not set expectations that it's gonna have to— that it's gonna happen automatically. You make agreements. An agreement is, for example, when I'm feeling down on myself, when I need someone to pick me up, I am an advocate for physical touch. And so when I'm feeling disconnected from my partner, I need her to come over and give me a hug. I need her to say, you know, I'm proud of you, I believe in you. I, I, I need some words of affirmation and physical touch. That's an agreement that we've made. That's because we openly communicate with one another. And so knowing your partner and what your partner needs every single day is so very important, because what's going to happen is if you don't give— you know, they satisfy these needs themselves, true, but when you're in a relationship, if you're not satisfying any of those needs, what's going to happen? Your partner, your husband, your wife, they're going to go get that mean— that, that need met somewhere else. And then that's when we have cheating, we have adultery, we have people getting their needs, their needs met outside of the relationship. So you want to make sure you are a person who is making agreements and you are meeting your partner where they need you to meet them. And then the 7th thing I'm going to talk about is having fun together, right? So we've explored communication. If you have communication and you have good chemistry, right, do you have collaboration? Do you enjoy spending time together? And so what are ways that you can grow and, and keep your relationship alive? One of the activities that I love to, to do and give my clients to do is something like, like, let's say you know, both of you write down 10 things that you really enjoy doing, and then you fold it up on a little small piece of paper and you put it in a jar and you put a lid on it, or a hat, a bag, whatever it is, right? And so once or twice a month, you know, it's like, okay, close your eyes, you know, let's pick from, from the jar. And whatever that is, then you commit that you will do it, right? And so that could be something from, you know, that you're going on a drive. Maybe this time you're gonna pull out that we're gonna go and hike, do an indoor hike on this huge, you know, 100-foot wall, you know, whatever it is. But exploring and having the fun and do these things with your partner takes your relationship to a different level. Also exploring new places, because one of the best— what I find that that is one of my top 5 things to do is to— we go for a drive, we go and explore craft beer. We go and explore places that we've never been, but we always remember that we are there with each other, and it's our time to also connect. But we connect through the experience of a new place, of meeting new people, and actually trying new beer. And so another thing is you can appreciate your partner. Make them feel like they are the person that they were when you first were lit up at the very beginning of your relationship. Make them feel significant. What they have to say is so vitally important. Appreciation and significance goes a long way for keeping people happy. Okay, so If your relationship isn't where you want it to be, it's not too late. I believe that it's never too late if two people really love each other. It's never too late to start with these simple steps, but you got to do it 100%. You can't have one foot in the door and one foot out, and you can't do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not Mondays and Fridays. You have to be consistent. And you have to do it from a giving place, a giving heart. Consistency is key. And again, if one person starts taking action in a relationship and you're doing it 100%, your partner should witness what's happening. They should witness the changes, how you're reinventing yourself, who is the person that you're becoming. They should witness that and then maybe start taking action to change themselves. So contrary to popular demand, it doesn't always have to take both people in a relationship to fix that relationship, to put it back on the path of love and kindness. You can start with you, and starting with you could make all the difference. But start today. If you like what you're hearing and perhaps you're interested in having a complimentary conversation with me, click the link at the bottom of the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. If you even want to know more about what I'm up to, head over to traviestewart.com. And if you like seeing the videos of the podcast, every episode is on my YouTube channel. Take care, guys.