Episode 156 – Five-Star Relationships for Professional Women with Paula Price
My most recent episode of The Marriage Life Coach podcast is a special edition, it was originally recorded for The Joyful Practice for Women Lawyers with Paula Price (you can visit her website here).
Paula is a life coach for lawyers, and I worked in a law firm for almost ten years before I was a life coach. We had so much fun making legal analogies and talking about how to have relationships that feel good MOST of the time – because that’s really what five-star thriving is all about.
We hit on so many interesting, valuable concepts and I knew they would really help you, too. So I published the episode myself to make sure you can access the perspectives and teachings I shared for creating your own five-star relationship.
Keep reading to learn more about:
- How perfectionism impacts your relationships
- The role of self-care in your marriage
- Why appreciation and gratitude are so important
- The foundational theory that ALL my work is based on
If you’re a woman in a relationship with a partner you love, but you feel frustrated more often than you feel delighted (I know you, I see you), then you’re going to get SO much out of our conversation.
How perfectionism impacts your relationships
Paula mentioned that a lot of her listeners are professional women who have perfectionist tendencies. She asked if I saw the same tendency in my clients, and if so, how perfectionism shows up in marriages. And let me just say: yes. As a coach, I am no stranger to perfectionism, whether it’s recognizing it in myself or seeing how it affects my clients!
What perfectionism actually is
Ultimately, perfectionism is the idea that if we get something done perfectly, we are somehow worthy or safe or okay. It’s very much a coping mechanism. Often I help my clients figure out what perfectionism is a coping mechanism for. When we can get to that root cause, we can really loosen the grip of perfectionism over whatever is going on.
How perfectionism shows up in our lives
Both in unrealistic expectations of ourselves and of our partners, perfectionism impacts our relationships deeply in many ways.
On an individual level, one really common way perfectionism shows up is when we talk ourselves out of doing things out of fear that we’re not going to do it well. Whether it’s asking for a raise or joining an art class or bringing up a tough topic of conversation, we hold ourselves to so high a standard that we shut down and convince ourselves we don’t want what we actually want.
Similarly, one way perfectionism drives a wedge in marriages is when we have an idea of what our partner should be doing at any given moment. When they’re not doing it, they’re not meeting our perfectionist ideal of what should be happening. So we get mad, we get angry, and we get bitter, and we often end up shutting down here, too.
What we don’t do is pause to question why we’re invested in that specific outcome. Why does it matter? What are we making it mean when they take the action or don’t take action? When we get curious about it, we can start to loosen the grip of perfectionism.
It’s like Paula said: “When we’re all holding ourselves to super high standards, there’s no room for a real relationship.”
The role of self-care in a happy relationship
People who are socialized as women also have a lot of cultural narratives about what a wife should be, what a mom should be, and all the things that we should do as people and to create a happy relationship.
Part of the next evolution of what marriage or long-term partnership can be is questioning all of it. We take on a mental load, an emotional load, a bunch of responsibilities because for a variety of reasons, we think we’re supposed to. Now we’re in a stage of womanhood where we get to question and change things and move things forward.
That’s where self care comes in.
It doesn’t have to be complicated – it’s about creating a very deep relationship with yourself. Most people who come to me for coaching want to have a deeper relationship with their partner. My response is that if you want a deeper, more intimate, more connected relationship with your partner, let’s start with having a deeper, more intimate connection with yourself.
A lot of us think of self care as getting a massage or manicure, but very often it can start with our self talk.
It can start with not berating ourselves when we miss a day doing the intention that we set. It can start with not over-scheduling or over-committing ourselves.
Self care is being in relationship with yourself as if you cared about yourself. So if you cared about yourself, how would you work? What would you commit to? What would you say yes or no to? What would you eat? When would you go to bed and wake up?
You get to create that practice, and then you get to take all the benefits of that practice to your dynamic with your partner and use it to create a happy relationship.
Why appreciation and gratitude are so important
Gratitude is like the glue that brings people in relationships even closer together. Emotional connection, which is what gratitude creates, really helps a marriage overcome the things that are hard.
If you imagine that you had a boss who, no matter how many times you turned yourself into a pretzel to meet a deadline, win a case, or submit paperwork, never appreciated it.
It would be zero fun to work for them.
Now imagine you had a boss that every time you did any little thing, they’d say, “This is great work.” How much fun would it be to work for that person?
Gratitude helps you connect with what you appreciate about your partner. So if you’re in a long-term relationship and find yourself wondering, “Why am I still here?” make a list of your partner’s virtues. What are the things you love about them that allow you to deal with the things you don’t love as much?
What’s really cool about gratitude is that it creates such a delightful experience for YOU as the one practicing gratitude, and what creates a delightful experience for your partner is when they receive your gratitude. You both get to lighten your day and have something to look forward to, and you both get to feel like the winner.
So if you imagine that your relationship was held together by lots of wonderful gratitude glue, if something goes wrong, you’d stay intact. Without that glue of gratitude, when something goes wrong, often it just breaks.
The systems theory that all my work is based on
The fundamental theory or hypothesis that my work is based on is called systems theory. In systems theory, when one element of a system changes, the other elements in that system respond to that change.
It’s like when the first person in a family goes to college, and then everybody else in the family starts going to college. There had to be a first person to break the four minute mile, and now many people have broken the four minute mile. It’s like when someone at work brings donuts and everybody’s vibe shifts. Conversely, it’s like when a coworker says, “They just announced an all-hands meeting for today,” and everyone gets tense.
One person doing one thing can have such an impact. That’s the power of one. It’s not that you do all the work. It’s that you go first.
And that’s why I help one partner be the change they want to see in the world – or in their relationship – and come to their relationship with a new perspective on what they want to create.
Learn the tools you need to create your five-star relationship with a relationship coach
When marriage or couples counseling isn’t an option because your honey thinks everything is fine or is reluctant to participate in that kind of support, you don’t have to convince them or wait forever for a solution that might never come.
You can stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and decide how you want to respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be in your life and in your marriage.
This is the work we do inside The Marriage MBA and you are invited to join us. All the details are here – The Marriage MBA.
The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school. It helps you reimagine marriage, so you can have a relationship that works for you.
What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.
You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for years to come.
If there is a foundation of love in your marriage and you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you. Use the link above to apply today. The application itself is quick and simple, but deep and powerful, and designed to give you more clarity about how you can move your relationship forward.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: