How to Enhance your Relationships

Yesterday I looked out of the window at my house and chuckled as I saw these two pigeons who clearly were not too happy with each other.  It reminded me of how we use our rapport building tool-kit in NLP to improve our relationships.  Let's start with our primary relationship in our lives.  Is yours  where you want it to be?  Are you focused on enhancing it?  Where do you to start?

In NLP we talk about our deep love strategies which are often held outside of conscious awareness.  They essentially answer the question 'what do i need to see, hear, feel to know i am deeply loved'.   If we are unaware of our own deep love strategies and those of our partners things can move from initial attraction and appreciation to disappointment pretty fast. Here is an example that demonstrates this.  It shows how things can begin to go down hill quickly!  

One partner arrives home early and is hungry so they make themselves a snack from leftovers and get cosy on the sofa watching the latest series they enjoy on Netflix.  Their partner comes home shortly afterwards and sees the other partner on the sofa.  In contrast, they have been visualising them both going out for dinner and have been getting excited about this. When they see the other one on the sofa they are disappointed and feel let-down.  They assume that the behaviour of the other means that they didn't stop to consider what the other partner wanted to do that evening or doesn't even care about them.  Feeling bad they think to themselves 'I never get what I want'. The partner looks up from the sofa and asks 'how are you?' and gets the answer 'what do you care?'. 

When you start to attach a meaning to another's behaviour you can often get it wrong as it's based on assumption and what is important to you.  In NLP, we identify three deep love strategies. Check out which is the preference for you.  Ask yourself the question 'In order for you to know that someone deeply loves you is it absolutely necessary for you to:

• Visual strategy - To be bought things, taken places or be looked at in a particular way.
• Auditory strategy - To hear a particular tone of voice or certain words?
• Kinesthetic strategy - Be touched or held in a particular way or place?

In the story, the partner who makes pictures of going out to dinner that evening has a visual strategy and the other who just wants to get cosy on the sofa has a kinesthetic strategy.  If partners do not know each other's strategies they can make massive assumptions and get it wrong.  This starts the journey towards disappointment.

This week why not establish a dialogue with your partner to identify each other's deep love strategies and then ensure you fill them up for each other!

If you want to learn more, find out about our next NLP Practitioner course programme now!

Have a great week.

Lindsey and the team at Team NLP.