HOW TO ASSESS YOUR RELATIONSHIP

Hello readers, I’m here again with another insight on how you can make the best out of your relationship. You know, that your personal relationship with people be it your friends, family or your spouse to some extent affect how far you can go in life, especially the kind of relationship with your spouse. So, if you are always receiving support from these people you love, it boost your confidence, balances your psychology and gives you a calm but positive mental attitude. This positive mental attitude of calmness and confidence helps to give you the belief that there is a power greater you that can make you achieve anything.

In the words of John Maxwell, “relationships help make us to define who we are and what we can become. Also, most of us can trace our success in life to pivotal relationship”. Thus, the kind of relationship you are into can either make you or destroy you. The choice of relationship you go into is yours.

Now, my question is, what kind of relationship are you into right now? Does it promote you and your values/beliefs or does it demote them? Does it make you feel like you have arrived in life or does it makes you think of when you will actually start up your life? I can go on and on, but the essence of these questions is to help you assess your love life. Furthermore, questions like, how far will I go in life if I continue in this relationship? Should paint a clearer picture of what your relationship is like or what exactly do I want from it and I’m I getting them?

After you have answered these questions, here are the few simple steps you can use to assess your relationship.

1. Take a pen and a clean sheet of paper, write down the things you value most and believe in,

2. Put down your goals and dreams that you want to achieve. Here you can also break them down into long term and short term goals and give specific periods of time you want to achieve these goals and dreams. ( to read more on goal settings visit www.ndantiobong.blogspot.com)

3. Pick another clean sheet of paper, write down the things you have achieved so far in your relationship. Here, you must be very sincere with yourself and not allow sentiment cloud your sense of judgement after all, its your life you are trying to define and not some other person’s own.

4. Compare your achievements so far with your goals and dreams then score yourself. If it is below average, then you’ve got a problem that needs to be fixed. This problem could either be you or your spouse.

5. To know where the problem is from, ask yourself this question, what have I really contributed to this relationship? How much time have I committed to the success of this relationship? What have I done to improve my relationship? If you are not satisfied with the answers you get, you know you have not done enough that is expected of you to do to make your relationship better, you can then ask, how can I improve my relationship?

Note: you will be tempted to shift of the all blame to your spouse and pretend to have done everything possible to make it work and that your spouse always end up spoiling things. The fact remains that, until you accept mistakes, you can never make corrections. Accepting your mistakes is the first step to correcting relationship. This piece of information is not to make you feel bad about the mistakes you have made already but to help you correct those mistakes. You must understand that life is a ladder of progression, a sequence or errors and corrections. Sometimes, we don’t get it right on the first trial, so don’t give up because here is an opportunity to get things back to normal.

Below, I will be sharing with you few tips you can use to make your relationship better that what it is now.

1. Be honest with yourself first before others. Like our famous English quote, that “honesty is the best policy”. Indeed it is still the best policy. Most people go into relationship with dishonesty and thus building their relationship on lies. Even the scripture warns, that “when the foundation is faulty, there is nothing a righteous man can do”.

There is only one thing I know about telling lies and that is, if you tell a lie, you will always try to cover it up so that the person you told will never know and the only way to cover it up is by telling more lies. But, if you are always telling the truth, you will not need to remember what you said three months ago because that was the truth.

The truth is the last person we should ever lie to, is our spouse but the fact remains that most of us tell more lies to our spouse than to any other person. When you tell a lie to someone you love, when the person happens to find out the truth, what do you expect? More love from him/her? The question is, how would you feel if your spouse betrays you by lying to you? I don’t want you to answer that, but just try to be asking yourself this question, it each time you want to tell a lie to your spouse.

However, if you started or built your relationship based on stories that were not true, why not sit your spouse down and tell him/her the truth. If he or she truly loves you, will respect you more for the courage and may even share his/her own untrue stories with you. This will go a long way to foster trust among each other.

2. You must understand that the success of your relationship depends more on you than it is to your spouse. How true is this? If you and your spouse understand this very step, both of you will always treat your relationship as a very important commodity that is of high value.

In the words of John Maxwell that, “people will always move towards people who increases and values them and away from people who devalue them”.

3. In your relationship, you look for potentials and not perfection. The way our creator made us was to complete one another. So, your weakness may be my strength and your strength my weakness. If you are always looking at your spouse’s weakness, your relationship will not thrive but if both of you are always looking at your strengths, nothing can stop you two from achieving what you want. Remember, love is not about two similar people looking at different directions but two different people looking in the same direction.

Finally, after you have apply these few tips, watch out for your relationship. Your relationship can even improve faster if you place this information where your spouse can see and read it. Better still, if you make it look like he/she found out this information on his/her own.