Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs
In my book, “Renew Your Wows”, I devote a great deal of time and space to address the matter of who we are in relationships, adding tips and suggestions on how to improve them. However, while the book is clearly a relationship book, it is not cut from the same cloth as so many other such books on the market because it focuses the most attention on who we are as individuals. In fact, a central theme of the book asks these three key questions:
Who am I?
What do I want?
What will I do about it?!?
Often, people become engaged in a relationship and make assumptions as to what the relationship is supposed to be rather than what the relationship actually is. They don’t always consider what they truly need or want in their own life before they are involved with someone else. While it is absolutely true that most of us don’t have definitive, one-time answers to the three questions we must have “working” answers! The responses to these questions may change of course. Hell, they may change in five minutes! Yet, without basing at least a premise or hypothesis upon which your life rests and from where your actions originate, you set yourself up to potential chaos, confusion or even depression.
Have you ever considered the reason you are in relationship?
You know, what’s the point?
What do you see as the goal of relationships in general?
If the answer to that is, “I want someone to take out the garbage,” then you’re starting from a premise of expectation that’s going to inevitably lead to great disappointment. Your partner will likely never meet your expectations under these circumstances.
As Jobs suggested, having the courage to follow your heart and intuition is a beautiful premise. We do ourselves a disservice, however, when we attempt to follow our hearts from a place of reaction (typically to others) rather than from a heart at rest….
Being fully aware, really present, allows you to experience the difference between yourself and that “something else.”
It also gives you the opportunity to have a unique, personal interpretation of that experience. You have to be committed to understanding and getting to know aspects of your own sense of consciousness, which you experience in various ways: the voice in your head, the unique way you feel about things in your life, and the way you personally experience your heart loving someone. This then gives you the opportunity to know the difference between what you know to be true in the world and what someone else knows or feels. Although we may have similar ways of relating to the world, your unique version or texture of understanding will never be the same as someone else’s.
Isn’t that delightful?