OK, this is Wayne Brown, Life Alignment Specialist with Life Back On Track.

I wanted to talk to you today about relationships. Now. Relationships are one of the main drivers in our life, not just our intimate relationships, but the relationships we have with our family. We have with our friends. We have with our partner, our children, work colleagues. We have many relationships in which we want to connect with people. We want to get to know them. We want to understand them. We want to be a part of their lives and we want them to be a part of ours. The problem is that a lot of us when we start out, we don't understand how to build connection. We don't understand how to have conversation that connects. We struggle to deal with conflict. We have perceptions and beliefs about relationships that can make things a lot more of a struggle than they need to be. 

And the reason for this is as we're growing. When we're very young, we are exposed to modelling, which is the people around us displaying how they do relationships. Now, if someone is a good modeller, they have good relationships with the people around them. They use good communication. They deal with conflict effectively, they build connection. Then we ourselves will tend to have that sort of behaviour, that sort of mindset when we have our own relationships and then on the other end. If you have someone who's poor with their communication, they're not very good at building connection. They're not very effective at dealing with conflict. Then you will tend to have that same poor range of tools to use with your own relationship. So it ends up being this self repeating problem. 

And also it's our beliefs, our mindset that we're given about relationships. So if you grow up, either male or female being told that the opposite gender is a particular way. So if you're a guy and you're regularly hearing things like women are confusing, they're hard work, they're bitches, all of this sort of thing, then you're going to grow up with that mindset. And conversely, if you're a woman and you grow up with this mindset given to you about men that they're only after one thing and they're untrustworthy and they're lazy and this sort of thing, you're going to have a very poor mindset for relationships, and all of these things contribute to our quality of relationships. 

Now I know for myself growing up, I wasn't necessarily given negative modelling or negative mindset from my parents. However, there were other contributors which affect all of us. So we have the media, we watch sitcoms. And if the sitcoms are couples who have poor relationships, that tends to be our modelling. It contributes to our overall mindset or viewpoint regarding relationships. Now the thing that's probably most damaging about these is if that's the only mindset you're given, you don't know any better. And unfortunately, if you don't know that you don't know, you can't correct it. It's only once you become aware that you don't know that you can actually do something about it. So being able to utilise new knowledge, new skills, new tools, new processes, new mindsets, new attitudes that's when things start to change for the better. 

Now I know for myself my relationships were certainly struggling when I was younger. I didn't have good communication skills. I certainly didn't have good conflict resolution tools. That is for sure. My relationships tend to err on the side of struggling far more than working. So any interaction I had wasn't inclined to build connection. It was inclined to have conflict that was never resolved. It caused more pain than it healed. And sadly, I look around now now that I'm able to look around because before, I was very insular in my situation. Now I can look around, and I see it very often. Where people struggle to communicate, they struggle to be honest, they struggle to be open, they struggle to be real. And that is a really damaging thing because the relationship you crave and you want, and as a part of you that knows you deserve it. 

Because of this, that relationship becomes harder and harder to achieve, and you end up sort of giving up. And if you're in a relationship because of those poor tools and everything, you're causing more damage, which tends to make the relationship go down rather than up like it should. As a relationship progresses. So ultimately, what this means is the alignment between yourself where you are now and the ideal relationship that you seek with the person who's the best match for you tends to be. That chasm tends to be getting larger and larger rather than closer and closer. And this is a a common occurrence because of those influences and the fact that we don't know that we don't know. 

So for myself, I'd never experienced a high quality relationship. So when I went out with my new system to try and create that relationship, it was only through initially me aligning with myself, me finding my worth, my value, the things that I bring to a relationship that make it a great relationship. It was only once I discovered those things and became aligned with them, that I actually raised my own value and therefore attracted a better quality partner and now consequently have that high quality relationship that I always sought. So what I'm saying to you is, if you want that high quality relationship and I meet lots of people that say they do, the first thing you have to do is align with yourself. You need to find out what it is that you bring to a relationship that makes it high quality. What is it that you contribute to the relationship that the other person thinks to themselves? 

I'm so glad I met this person because until you realise what you bring to a relationship, the value, the worth, the skills, the attitudes, the mindset until you are aware of that and become integrated with that authentic version of yourself struggle to achieve that relationship will always be very real and very present. Once you become more aligned, it becomes so much easier to become that person. Sorry, that was today's recording, I suppose where I want to get you started moving towards being that fantastic partner you can be so that you can have that relationship that you've always sought and you can actually have by being first aligned with who you authentically are. 

OK, that's it for now. Have a great one. Have a think about the things that you bring to a relationship. Start making a note of it, start becoming aware of it. That's the first part of any journey. Is the awareness becoming aware of what you don't know? So you can actually move forward? Uh, so, yeah, look after yourselves and take care