Let me recap; I had you ponder self love as the first layer of love. Consider that as connecting to your heart. Then I challenged you with the notion of unconditional love. Perhaps that was an intellectual process for you where you had to think about letting go of the expectations you have created about those you love.

Now, consider the third layer of love as putting it out into the world – sharing it. The great philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas said that “To love is to will the good of another.” That’s about being intentional with your thoughts. Pass on the good vibrations I say!

How can you be love in the face of adversity? In a conflict? When a loved one is irritating the hell out of you? To transform any situation and improve relationships is to come from a place of love within yourself. It’s about finding peace in the moment. The person, be it your lover, child, friend, or parent, is your trigger and your opportunity and your teacher. Can you see that? Be intentional in your thinking, attitude and actions – are they grounded in love or charged with emotional over-reaction? Are they empathetic, supportive and hopeful about the person  in front of you? You can choose how to feel and the emotional energy to pass on in any encounter.

Love is about being complete within yourself. See your own perfection in your imperfect human-ness. Be intentionally loving in all your encounters tomorrow and this Thanks-Giving weekend. What you put out will come back to you. Commit to become a better version of yourself – only YOU can do that. As that shampoo commercial says, “you’re worth it!”

To your continued growth, well being and prosperity,

Todd Keeley

Executive Leadership and Personal Coach

Owner and Founder of Fruition Strategies Inc.

www.fruitionstrategies.com

Consider the second layer of love as being unconditional love. That’s loving your boyfriend, your wife, your parent, your close friend with NO conditions.

Our human-ness and egoic thinking does not make this a free and easy process, does it? It is much easier to measure how others are giving to us and reciprocating the love we put out to them.

Dr. Raymond Lloyd Richmond, PhD says, “unfortunately, contemporary culture tends to think of “love” as a way to find personal fulfillment in life. That is, each person in a relationship expects the other to fill up the existential void in his or her life.” The definition of unconditional love is far from the “what can I get” or “what I expect” thinking. So many intimate relationships turn into power struggles because of these misunderstandings about love.

Love without conditions, hmmm… without expectations or without judgement – now there is a challenge.

Try this on this week – just feel love by seeing the beauty in all your close relationships. Choose to connect to that simplistic and focused thinking. What do you notice within yourself? An energy shift? A calm feeling? Fear? Whatever you feel is OK , just be with it, allow it.

Coaching questions for you:

What do you need to do to let go of expectation, to let go of requirements and rules and regulations that you would impose on your loved one?

Can you see and appreciate their uniqueness and inner-beauty when you aren’t getting what you want from him or her?

What do you need to do to shift your thinking?

Wondering what the third layer of love is? Remember, what you put out in life comes back to you in greater abundance – it is a law of physics.

He’d be perfect…if only he was someone else.

Clichéd or not, it’s worth repeating. 2 ears : 2 eyes : 1 mouth… use proportionally!

Seems easy right? We should spend twice as much time listening and watching as we do talking. But is it that easy? Do we really value listening and observing?

Let’s think about that for a minute. When’s the last time you came home from a party, a night out or some other social function and said ‘wow, that Scott is a really good listener.’ Probably never.  On the other hand, the life of the party is the person telling jokes and keeping things going. So do we value speaking over listening?

Absolutely!

And we can look further than our social worlds to know that’s true. Think about work, for instance. Who gets ahead – the person who speaks up or the person who listens carefully? I would argue that our whole society is structured to reward the best communicators.  Despite some prevalent ideas about how important listening is, we’ve come to define successful communication exclusively in terms of what comes out, not what gets in.

And that makes my job as a therapist and coach even harder! I’m the person who must listen and observe to do my job properly. By virtue of necessity/experience I see the incredible value in listening over talking. But convincing others of that is not so easy.

How many times have you heard yourself or someone else saying ‘if he had just said that in the first place’ or ‘why didn’t she tell me that’s what she wanted’. We all have. And we all nod our heads in agreement when we hear this. We understand how frustrating it is when others aren’t communicating with us effectively.  Or maybe they are and we’re just not listening?

Communicating isn’t only about talking. It’s also about listening. Instead of nodding our heads in agreement or making those statements ourselves what would happen if we said ‘what was he trying to tell me’ or ‘was there something I might have missed?’

In other words, what would happen if instead of putting our misunderstandings on the inability of others to express themselves we started thinking more about what they’re trying to tell us and how they’re saying it?

My guess – based on a lot of experience in my own life and the lives of my clients – is that we’d start hearing things we thought weren’t there. These are typically things we don’t always want to hear and I’m pretty certain they’re going to be said in ways very different from the way we’d say them but the messages are there if you do the math: twice as much listening and watching as talking! And as painful as it might be in the short term to make this change our understanding of others is bound to grow exponentially.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not letting those strong silent types off the hook. You gotta use your words too. But they have to be willing to take that on as their own growth challenge just as much as you have to be willing to take on your difficulties in the listening department. Change starts at home.  So before you point the finger at others take a minute to focus on yourself first. The results will be amazing.

Scott McGrath, M.S.W., R.S.W.

Coach – Therapist – Consultant

www.scottmcgrath.ca

“His love completes me. I don’t know where I would be without him,” a twenty-something year old woman once said to me in a session. “I would die without him. I know he’s the one!”

Do you remember that intensity in feeling and did you ever hold that limited perspective about love? As a forty year old executive leadership and personal coach, I have certainly heard a great deal of drama and mistaken understandings within relationships. I spent my late twenties believing I could fix the “significant other” in my life at that time. Oh how I see and experience love differently now.

First and foremost, when I worked with that “incomplete” young woman I was quickly made aware of her lack of self love. Isn’t that the deepest layer of love? Growing up I heard and read that you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself first. My thirties taught me that that expression is absolutely true. To have an authentic sense of self-esteem, you have to believe you are lovable. The question is, how does one do that?

Developing and cultivating self love involves heightening your awareness about your limited beliefs about yourself, about what you want and about how you view others. It is a process of letting go of the negative inner dialogue – research has shown that each of us has more than 60,000 thoughts a day and more than 80% of those thoughts don’t support our own growth and well-being. Replace that critical dialogue with acknowledging your strengths, your gifts, have gratitude, laugh at yourself and see your own perfection in your imperfection.

I don’t mean masking your thoughts with pride. I mean finding positive affirmation in who you are and committing to become a better version of yourself. Strengthen your heart.

My coaching questions for you are: what is your understanding of your own self love? How are you finding belonging and acceptance within yourself?

More layers to come in future articles.  Stay tuned.

Todd Keeley

Executive Leadership and Personal Coach

Owner and Founder of Fruition Strategies Inc.

www.fruitionstrategies.com

todd@coachfs.com