The Secret of Bringing Out the Best in Your Mate: Marriage Tips

I think the whole idea of marriage emerged from the instinctual understanding that you can accomplish more WITH people than without them. A couple in harmony produces two unstoppable individuals. An inharmonious marriage, on the other hand, drains the partners of motivation and self-respect. Marital stress literally makes the marriage partners sick. If you're married, to achieve your highest goals in life and to fulfill your own glorious potential, you need the support of a harmonious marriage.

If you are married with children, the quality of your relationship with your mate becomes even more important because when Mom and Dad are not getting along, Junior simply cannot behave well. The child acts out the marital trouble. Marital harmony goes a long way to solve and avoid child behavior problems.

And yet, while getting along with our mate supports us in every way, what we do to achieve it usually backfires. Basically, we blame our mate for our dissatisfaction with the relationship.

We want our mate to treat us more kindly, to be in better physical shape, to dress nicer, to be a better listener, to speak more forthrightly and succinctly, to be more fun, to be more responsible, to be more intelligent, more creative, more self-reliant, to be more inspiring, more forgiving, more giving, more prosperous, more spiritual. If you don't want that now, just wait. The bloom on the rose will fade and you'll be wanting your mate to change soon enough.

The fact remains, though, that we don't have the power to change another person. And the harder we work at it, the more we feel like a failure, and the more our relationship seems to fail us. So what's the solution? Well, here's your Lancer Answer: While you can't change your mate, you can become a more effective leader in your relationship with your mate, and that can make ALL the difference.

One role of a leader is to bring out the best in others. That serves the leader because it surrounds the leader with the best people. To be a great leader in your marriage means that you help your mate to fulfill his or her own great potential, which gives you a great mate. To do this, relate with your mate in a way that supports his or her beautiful best. Particularly when your mate makes a mistake in your eyes, respond in a loving, patient, confident way that nurtures and inspires higher performance rather than cuts down. When you express harsh, critical, impatient dissatisfaction, your attitude undermines your mate's self-confidence and motivation to do better.

Now you see why so many marriages are doomed. We react in destructive ways that spoil the marital harmony, betray our mate's trust, and chip away at our mate's morale and belief in himself or herself.

When your mate makes a mistake in your eyes, your responsibility is to respond in a way that helps your mate do better. As you do this, you have a more powerful teammate helping you to achieve what you really want in life, and supporting your fulfillment of your own higher potential.

Marriage offers two people a wonderful opportunity to combine forces to achieve more of what really matters in life to both of them. Think about what really matters most to you, what you really want to accomplish, and realize that you empower yourself to achieve it to the extent that you relate with your mate in a way that preserves your marital harmony and supports your mate's fulfillment of higher potential.

Is this always easy to do? No. You have to work against your own critical habits of negative emotional reaction. Every time your mate errs in your eyes, that gives you an opportunity to practice, and so to strengthen, your ability to respond more responsibly, more constructively, for a better result. For you to have a great marriage takes more than your commitment to staying together. It takes your endless commitment to getting yourself together, to grow into a more loving source of support that helps your mate do better.