It is really easy for us to create dysfunctional and destructive relationships when we haven't learned how to respect and honor others' personalities, preferences, and perspectives.  These three things are at the heart of who people are, and when we reject these things, we reject them.  And when we reject them, we shut down the opportunity to create deeper friendship and intimacy ..read more

John Gottman is a brilliant relationship expert who has done an amazing amount of research on what makes marriages successful.  He has identified four elements of dysfunctional behavior in marriages that are especially destructive, and he calls these The Four Horsemen.  These four elements are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  In this podcast we are digging into these four behaviors and learning how to identify and clean them up in our own relationships ..read more

Our primitive brain does some amazing things for us.  However, if we aren't paying attention, it can keep us stuck and struggling to create the kind of life we really want to have.  When we learn to manage our primitive brain and engage our pre-frontal cortex, we have the capacity to really show up for our life in the ways we want.  On today's podcast, we're learning just how to use your brain to do what you really want to do ..read more

I think a lot of us grew up believing, at some level, that love was a reward for good behavior.  And yet, when looked at through the eyes of God, love is never a reward.  Love is actually the first and greatest commandment, it is a law. The law of love teaches us that regardless of how others act, regardless of how we're treated, regardless of what is said or done, our responsibility in every situation is to learn how to love.  That's a tall order, to be sure, and it is also the way to find our greatest happiness and best relationships ever ..read more

Many of the people I work with who are struggling in their marriages find friendship with their partner to be elusive.  It was there when they got married, and over time, they have become more and more distant, negative, and dismissive, until they find they just don't have a good friendship with their spouse anymore.  And this is a huge problem.  Dr. John Gottman, a relationship expert has said, 'happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. . . a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.'  It's time to rekindle the friendship in our marriages, and in ..read more

I hear so many people who just want us all to get along.  What many of them are meaning is, why can't everyone have the same opinions and wants and needs?  Why doesn't everyone just do things the way I want and then it would be easy?  Of course that would be easy, it would also defeat a huge part of the reason we are here on earth, to learn to be more loving and accepting and respectful of other people's agency.  So, maybe we're actually not all supposed to get along, maybe we're really supposed to learn to love and accept other people for who they are and honor their agenc ..read more

When we feel safe in our relationships, we feel we can show up with more vulnerability.  When we show up with more vulnerability, we create more emotional and physical intimacy.  But oftentimes, the behaviors we are engaging in in our relationships put the other person into protective mode rather than feeling safe, and so we struggle to create the connected relationships we really desire.  In this podcast we will talk about ten ways we can create more of a safe space for our person ..read more

So many of us did not learn growing up what it means to be in a relationship.  If you're like me, you thought that growing up and getting married would mean that you would have someone to love you, to shore up your insecurities, to validate you, or to agree with your opinions.  If you're like me, what you wouldn't have thought was that a relationship is a place to learn how to be more loving and kind and show up in a space of US rather than a space of ME.  In this podcast we are digging a little deeper into what it means to show up in relationship to create a safe space for our ..read more

When I really got serious about dating in my 50's, I used something called the 90-day Relationship.  An idea baby of Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, I took it and ran with it.  Basically, you're all in, fully committed, and figuring things out for 90 days.  It was a brilliant process for me to figure out relationships more and to find my person.  Through this process I discovered some of my most destructive patterns of behavior and was able to clean them up.  Check out this podcast to learn more about why this process worked so amazingly well for me ..read more

Dating in the middle part of our lives is a different ballgame than when we were in our 20s.  Thank goodness!  We have a much better understanding of who we are and what is really important to us in a relationship.  And using the tools you learn here on the podcast you will be able to create something very different.  I'm going to be sharing with you some of the ways that I showed up dating in my 50s that I feel made a huge difference for me finding such an amazing partner.   ..read more