What others are saying
"It's easy to go on automatic pilot in relationships, taking them for granted or falling into unhelpful patterns. Jenny Olin's 30 Tips to Healthier Relationships can serve as a wakeup call, renewing your relationship and making it much better each day. Spend one month using these simple but useful tips and you'll find out for yourself."
- Bill O'Hanlon, LMFT, author, Love is a Verb and Rewriting Love Stories
"Jenny Olin's new book 30 Tips to Healthier Relationships is a must read. It is concise, informative and an easy read. As a pastor I consider it required reading for couples preparing for marriage and others wanting to treasure the relationships they share.
"Jenny flavors her everyday, down-to-earth tips with doable and common sense solutions. The accompanying workbook serves as an invaluable tool to keep you planning and monitoring your daily success.
"I can identify with the author's closing remark, 'My passion is creating and keeping healthy relationships. I invite you to make it yours.'"
- Reverend Bonita Bates - 38 years creating and keeping a healthy relationship with husband, Rick.
30 Tips to Healthier Relationships:
A guide for couples and anyone else who has relationships to treasure
Jenny Olin, MSW, LCSW
Published by Jenny Olin at Smashwords
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30 Tips to Healthier Relationships:
A guide for couples and anyone else who has relationships to treasure
Copyright 2010 by Jenny Olin
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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30 Tips to Healthier Relationships:
A guide for couples and anyone else who has relationships to treasure
Table of Contents
Tip #1: Share appreciations every day about the good you see in others.
Tip #2: Recognize non-verbal ways you are shown appreciation.
Tip #3: When someone is talking to you, focus on what they are saying.
Tip #4: Treat another’s concerns seriously.
Tip #5: Ask permission, and get it, before offering advice.
Tip #7: Go with what you value rather than what you feel.
Tip #8: Watch out for Facebook.
Tip #9: Being right isn’t a priority in personal relationships.
Tip #10: Look for the exceptions to problems.
Tip #13: Look for the best in people.
Tip #15: If you have a complaint with someone, express it to him or her privately.
Tip #16: Make your most important personal relationship a higher priority than yourself.
Tip #17: When you make a mistake, instead of giving a gift to “make up,” ask for forgiveness.
Tip #18: Tip the first domino in the right direction.
Tip #19: Practice good sleep habits.
Tip #21: Choose the best time to bring up a problem.
Tip #22: Live from this day forward.
Tip #23: Be a successful mind reader.
Tip #24: Spend quality time together.
Tip #25: Take a break from your relationship problem.
Tip #28: Seek solutions to relationship conflict sooner instead of later.
Tip #30: Celebrate life together!
Forward: Your journey doesn’t end here.
Dedication
To my oldest cousin, Bill Bunnell, who, from my earliest memory of him, has modeled for me life’s purpose as expressed in Micah 6:8: “O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” (NLT)
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the members of Bill O’Hanlon’s Next Level Group for their encouragement while writing this e-book, and to Bill, himself, for his generosity in sharing his knowledge, experience, and patience each step of the way. Thanks also to Emily Muller, Esq, for legal comment, Reverends Bonita Bates and Deborah Rose for their valued reflections, and my faithful feline friend Joy for good-naturedly keeping me company through marathons at the keyboard. It takes a lot of support to see even a small book through from beginning to end.
“Royalty-Free Clip Art Images” Clip Art Designs © Graphics Factory. Used with full legal rights. www.GraphicsFactory.com.
You have several options for using this book.
• You may want to start by reading all the way through and then pick any of the remaining options.
• Read and practice a tip a day. Once you have worked through all 30 tips, start over again and repeat on a monthly basis.
• Read a tip, practice it until you have “nailed” it, making it a new habit, before moving on to another tip.
• Start with what you consider an easy tip – where you expect to experience immediate success.
• Start with a tip that addresses your greatest relationship concern.
Recommendations for what not to do.
• Avoid skipping a tip because you think it might be stupid or irrelevant.
• Avoid attempting to learn several tips at once. Otherwise, you might set yourself up to be overwhelmed.
• Avoid pushing this book on your partner, telling him/her they should follow the tips, too. Lead by example.
Recommendations for what to do.
• Stay with it. Stick with the changes that seem hard. Don’t give up. You’ll be glad you persisted.
• Ask a trusted friend to help you be accountable for getting unstuck and staying on track. You don’t have to do this alone.
This tips book is designed to give you great tools to create healthier relationships with your spouse or someone else who is significant in your life. It is not intended to be psychotherapy or counseling, or to replace psychotherapy or counseling.
Share appreciations every day about the good you see in others.
Sharing appreciations is a great way to bring a smile to someone’s face and warmth to his/her heart. We like to hear genuine compliments and thanks.
Experiment with expanding your expressions of appreciation. If you are a person of few words, you might find this challenging at first. Once you see the results, you’ll be glad you took the challenge.
Here are a couple of examples:
OK: “I appreciate your making dinner tonight.”
GREAT: “I appreciate your making dinner tonight. Driving home from work, I had no idea what to cook. When I walked in the door and discovered you were already cooking, I felt so relieved I would have turned cartwheels if I knew how! Thank you so much! I love you!”
OK: “I appreciate your not giving me a hard time about going out with the guys last night.”
GREAT: “I appreciate your not giving me a hard time about going out with the guys last night. I know you weren’t interested in going to the hockey game and I really wanted to see it. I needed the break in routine. After the game, it was nice to come home and crawl into bed next to you.”
Practice keeping your appreciations clear and concise. Using too many words can dilute your message. Also, if your message is too long, the receiver often stops listening and doesn’t hear your appreciation.
Be sure to keep your appreciations real. We usually see through fake ones.
What real appreciations will you share today?
Recognize non-verbal ways you are shown appreciation.
In Tip #1 you learned about sharing appreciations verbally. Saying appreciations with words has a lot of value. In reality, most women prefer to both give and get them with words. We have learned most men prefer to give and get appreciations through actions. One style isn’t better than the other is, only different.
The husband who cooks dinner for his wife, for example, may be saying: “I appreciate your having sex with me last night. I know you were really tired and you made the effort for me. By cooking dinner today, I’m saying ‘I noticed’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘I love you.’”
You teenage son offers to wash and wax your car. The unspoken message could be “thanks for the advice you gave me on how to interview for the job at the electronics store. I sure am going to like working there better than the job I had washing dishes at the restaurant.”
It is easy to miss non-verbal appreciations if we expect words. At times, they are expressed in ways we have difficulty seeing the link between the non-verbal appreciation and a specific event. Often the action appreciation is delayed. Look around you and tune in to the actions of others. Unless we stretch our capacity to “hear” these actions, we are likely to feel unhappy or despair because we believe who we are or what we do is not valued, noticed, or loved. How wrong we can be!
If you do not get an immediate response, wait. We can miss the cause and effect between our and another’s behavior because the response comes several hours, days, or longer, afterwards.
Become a good detective to track your action to another’s appreciation reaction. You may not make the connection until you’ve repeated a similar behavior several times and had a positive response several times.
As with the less verbal person stretching himself/herself to use more words, once you see the results of noticing non-verbal expressions of appreciation, you’ll be glad you took on the challenge.
Will you look for non-verbal expressions of appreciation today?
When someone is talking to you, focus on what they are saying.
Hearing another person speak without listening to what they say is something many of us do much more often than we realize or care to admit.
Not listening happens for many reasons. Two significant ones are:
1. thinking we know what the speaker is going to say, so we find no reason to listen,
2. turning to our own thoughts in preparation to respond to the speaker.
When we know someone for a while, we may think we can predict what they will say next. Impatience and/or assumption lead us to believing we know the ending. While it is possible we are right, it is also possible we are wrong. Commonly we stop paying adequate attention to the speaker; we tune them out. This creates a problem when what we believe we will hear is not what is said.
Related, when someone is talking on a topic about which we expect to disagree, instead of hearing his or her point of view, we tend to stop listening. We tune the speaker out and focus our thoughts on planning our counterpoint. When we turn to listening to our own thoughts, we cannot be a good listener for someone else. How will we ever know for sure we hear someone correctly if we are not listening to them attentively? Some people say they can “multi-task” listening and planning at the same time. In reality, it doesn’t work so well. Listening becomes impaired when our attention is divided.
Here’s a twist. Have you ever heard two people have an argument over something, not realizing they agree with each other? This comes from not listening well to what is said, then assuming disagreement and creating conflict where none exists.
What is your experience when you are tuned out and assumptions are made about what you say? Is this an experience you actively want to create for someone else?
Are you ready to have fewer unnecessary arguments and misunderstandings? Will you focus on hearing accurately what is said to you? What will you do to practice being a better listener today?
Treat another’s concerns seriously.
Accept the worries of others, although you cannot relate to them. Discounting someone’s concern because you don’t understand or can’t relate to it puts a wedge between the two of you, blocking connection in your relationship.
Since it is impossible to know totally the inner path someone else is traveling, we cannot fully know his or her experience. We can, perhaps, come close or make a good guess, but we will never truly know.
Who are we to pass judgment on the importance or validity of someone else’s distress when we haven’t walked in their shoes? We may not see the reason for someone’s concern; even so, it is their concern. Discounting, mocking, or criticizing a person for their unease can be shortsighted, thoughtless, and just plain mean. It hurts both the other person and your relationship.
What concern are you not accepting in someone you value because you don’t understand it or can’t relate? Will you stop and listen to their distress today and acknowledge it is real to him or her?
Ask permission, and get it, before offering advice.
Ugh, almost no one likes unsolicited advice, no matter how good it is. Most of us have, or think we have, great advice to offer at least now and then. We’ve been there, done that. Or, from a distance, the solution seems obvious.
Your advice may be right on target, or it might totally miss the mark. Either way, no matter how right you are, experienced you are, insightful you are, or how good your idea is, if someone is not ready to hear it, your counsel won’t help. Instead, it could hurt. It is another way to shove a wedge between the two of you.
Ask first if someone wants your advice, to hear what you have to say. If they tell you “no,” keep your mouth shut. Oh yes, it can be painfully hard to do! Excuse yourself from the situation if you need to, in order to restrain yourself. Surprisingly, the same person may come to you later when they are ready, to ask what your advice is. When an adult hasn’t given you permission to butt in, it is in both your best interests to butt out.
If you want to offer advice today, will you ask for and wait for permission before you give it?
Practice goodwill.
Follow the Golden Rule. A mean spirit hurts both others and you.
You don’t have to “get religion” to value this advice: “Do to others the same as you want them to do to you” (Matthew 7:12a). By consistently showing goodwill towards your partner, you help set a tone – create an environment – for kindness, friendship, trust, and genuine intimacy. By showing kindness – practicing goodwill – we live an example that often is both reciprocated and passed on to someone else. Showing goodwill towards another individual has the potential for exponential growth for promoting goodwill in our families, workplaces, schools, places of worship, neighborhoods and communities, our country and our world. You have the potential for a whole lot of influence when you make the decision to practice goodwill as a lifestyle.
What act(s) of goodwill will you do today?
Go with what you value rather than what you feel.
Feelings can be deceiving. We have them in response to what we are experiencing (thinking, doing, happening to us) in the moment. Values, while they may change with maturity, are highly consistent over time.
Consider Amy, an elementary school child, who becomes upset because her “best friend” Erin played with someone else at recess. Amy’s feelings are hurt and she decides out of her hurt Erin is no longer her best friend. The next day, Erin plays with Amy at recess and sits with her at lunch. Amy forgets yesterday’s hurt. They are best friends again. The feelings of the moment passed, but the lasting value of their friendship survived the “crisis.”
As adults, not only do we have feelings in reaction to the present moment, we have them in response to memories and in anticipation of the future. If we are not careful, our feelings – particularly those of anger, hurt, fear, and sadness – can take over and we lose sight of our values.
Too often we become caught up in our feelings and respond to our current situation, forgetting the lasting value we have received in a relationship. We forget we are friends, not enemies. Our feelings snowball and overshadow our values. Those feelings can deceive us and prevent us from remembering why we chose to be with a particular person, and from remembering what we value from this relationship.
What relationship are you currently discounting its long-term value because your feelings are getting in the way of tuning in to what you value? What is one thing you will do differently today to help you get back in touch with what you value in this relationship?
Watch out for Facebook.
Oh, yes! Watch out for Facebook. Many currently consider it one of the most boundariless places in existence.
As soon as you “Friend” one person, you have essentially lost control of what you post on your Facebook pages. Even with the new control options, you give up a great deal of control. Many people are putting themselves in relationship trouble because of what they indiscreetly post on Facebook. Serious hurts and misunderstandings are occurring.
Is Facebook all bad? No. It can be an opportunity for long-lost friends to find and reconnect with each other. Families connect easier because everyone has access to the same information.
And… old flames are reconnecting too. This can be one of the “bad” parts. Perhaps reconnection is innocent at first. However, since Facebook and other social media sites have become popular, relationship psychotherapists report a startling increase in the number of people seeking help resolving trust issues stemming from emotional affairs and other unhealthy personal interactions. While acknowledging additional contributing factors to increasing trust issues in relationships, they attribute them as originating, in part, with social media Internet contact.
Protect yourself and your important relationships. If you don’t want the world to know something, don’t put it on Facebook. If you are in a relationship with someone and connect with an old friend of the opposite gender, tell your partner. Be completely open about it. Some, maybe most or all, of these people need to be removed from your “Friend” list so they are removed from your temptation list.
Use social networking to your health and not to your destruction.
What do you need to remove from your Facebook pages today? Whom do you need to remove from your “Friend” list today? Will you commit to these actions?
Being right isn’t a priority in personal relationships.
We like to be right. It feels good. But have you considered an investment in being right can hurt personal relationships?
Insisting you are right can contribute to feelings of inadequately in the other person, and to disagreements and defensiveness, creating an atmosphere of underlying tension and ill will. Each contribute to emotional distance. If these are consequences of being right, how do they affect your desire to win at the “I’m right” game?
Remember Tip #7 “Go with what you value rather than what you feel”? You may feel like proving you are right, although your value may be healthy personal relationships. When you value fostering goodwill (Tip # 6), you focus on a choice to support others in feeling adequate, and you help create emotional closeness.
Does this mean you should say you are wrong when you believe you are right? No. What you can do is hold back from pushing your belief onto someone else. Let them have their opinion and acknowledge their point of view.
Being right doesn’t mean you win if it hurts a relationship. When you put your energy towards the health of your relationship, both you and your relationship win.
Think about it. Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy, close, and connected with your spouse or other significant relationship? What action step will you take towards your choice today?
Look for the exceptions to problems.
“Is your glass half empty or half full?” Most people are familiar with this question.
When we have a problem and spend our energy focused on our glass being half-empty, we fail to see the exceptions – when the problem is not happening. Instead, our focus stays on the problem, frequently sending both our emotions and the situation into a downward spiral. Simply stated, things get worse.
Fortunately, we have an option. We can look for, and find, exceptions to a problem. Few situations are rarely the extremes of “always” or “never” we assign to them. A baby who cries most of the time doesn’t always cry, although it may seem this way. When you look for the exceptions when the baby isn’t crying, the “always” belief disappears. Then by discovering what is different during those times, you have the opportunity to create an environment to lessen the baby’s need to cry. The situation begins to spiral up. Things get better.