Helene Lerner's Blog, page 41

Making Date Night Fun Again

The term “date night” has become ubiquitous. I’m so glad to see that many of us are eagerly embracing an activity that has so many positive benefits.

Clearly, we understand the premise that connecting with our spouse as an adult is a necessary ingredient toward keeping a marriage healthy and vibrant. Plus it’s a great way to ensure that romance will live on.

There are so many good reasons to have a regular date night on your calendar. Date night should be something you and your spouse enthusiastically plan for and look forward to. View it as a special moment in your hectic lives when the children and other stressors are temporarily shelved. Plus, studies show that when couples do new and fun things together it actually builds new neural pathways in their brains, which allows them to connect in deeper ways.

Enticed? I hope so! Now get to work. Here are a few great places to start:

"My Turn, Your Turn” dates. Women often complain that their husbands never put any effort into planning dates. Put him to the test and take turns planning something new and unique to do with each other. Keep it a secret until the day of.

Do a fun activity together. Don’t just go to dinner. Go dancing, see live music, attend a cooking class or a sporting event. When you do something you really enjoy with your partner, it stimulates your brain’s “feel-good” zone and actually makes you happy!

Tease your brain. Plan a date out of your intellectual comfort zone. Take a class together. Attend a lecture. See a play or a foreign movie and discuss it with your partner afterward.

Make a commitment to have some sex date nights as well. If you’re in a rut, putting a sex date on the calendar is a really good thing. Try not to make excuses ("I’m tired’’ or "I’m stressed"), and remember that once you get started, it’s always fun.

Tennis anyone? Exercising with your partner is a great way to burn calories and get your competitive juices flowing as well. Book a court, join a sports league, or hit a yoga class.

Find time to kiss. Kissing is so romantic, erotic and fun. It’s a great non-verbal way to say, “I love you, I’m attracted to you, and you are important to me.”

Volunteer for a good cause together. Sign up to assist a cause that is important to both of you. You’ll spend time with each other, but you’ll also make a difference and help others.

Can’t find a sitter? Try a date night at home. Put the kids to bed. Then, crack open a fine bottle of wine and cook a delicious meal together. Eat it slowly by candlelight.

Schedule a couple’s massage. Benefits of massage abound. Plus relaxing together with your paramour is really special. If you’ve done this already, go again. And if you’ve never experienced it, book it now.

These are just a few ideas from my personal repertoire. Challenge yourself and create some unique traditions to keep date night exciting for you.

 

 

 

 

- RACHEL A. SUSSMAN, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, writer and lecturer with a private practice in New York City. For more information visit her website:  http://www.sussmancounseling.com

7 Quotes to Help you Unleash Your Inner Beyonce

7 Quotes to Help you Unleash Your Inner Beyonce

“I don’t have to prove anything to anyone, I only have to follow my heart and concentrate on what I want to say to the world. I run my world.” 
- Beyonce

"It's about being alive and feisty and not sitting down and shutting up even though people would like you to." 
- P!nk

"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it." 
- Roseanne Barr 

“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.” 
- Madeleine Albright

“If you want to succeed you must never stop learning, never stop trying and just keep being yourself. You are your own person. You make the choices in life that affect you.” 
- Ruby Rose

“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.”  
- Oprah

“I’m tough, ambitious and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, Okay.”
- Madonna

Should You Date Your Best Friend?

Are coed friendships really just the beginning of flourishing relationships? According to a recent report released by online dating sites ChristianMingle and JDate, 54 percent of singles would prefer to go on a date with someone who shares similar interests rather than any other trait, including humor, attractiveness, intelligence, and success. With the majority of singles looking for someone who shares their interests, dating your best friend can seem like it makes the most logical sense. You get to skip the awkward getting-to-know-each-other stage and jump right into a comfortable relationship with the person closest to you. But before you decide to declare your undying love for your bestie, you should seriously think about whether you’re ready to put your friendship on the line.

Here are five things to consider if you’re trying to decide whether it’s time to turn your BFF into your BF:

Think about his feelings. Before you do anything, seriously consider how you think he feels. Are you confident there is a mutual desire on both sides of the friendship for something more? You don’t want to get in a situation where he really only thinks of you as a friend, but feels pressured to give a romantic relationship a try because he doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.

Prepare for your relationship to change. If you do start a romantic relationship, realize that things will seriously adjust in your relationship. You aren’t going to be able to tell your best friend about that hot guy you keep running into on the subway or vent about your love life once he becomes the person you’re dating.

Be honest with yourself. If this person is your best friend, you probably know everything about his sexual history. Are you the type of person who will go crazy with jealousy knowing all the dirty details from your boyfriend’s past? If you know this is something you won’t be able to move on from, it might be smarter to stay friends.

Ask your mutual friends for input. In the report, singles stated that their friends have the greatest influence on whom they date. In this situation, your friends’ insights will be even more helpful than usual, as they are probably very familiar with both of your personalities and pet peeves. Get some honest feedback from your shared group of friends on if they think that love connection will work between the two of you.

Examine his past relationships. Sometimes a great guy can be a horrible boyfriend. Think about your BFF’s past relationships. For example, did he treat his past significant others with respect? Changing old habits is hard, so don’t ignore any red flags! As much as you may want to think everything will be different when you are his girlfriend, you don’t want to enter a relationship knowing there are qualities you’re looking to change.

Dating your best friend doesn’t have to spell trouble, and there’s a little risk involved in any new relationship. Just be sure to think it through thoroughly before taking the plunge, so as not to dismantle a great friendship.

 

 

 

 

- RACHEL A. SUSSMAN, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist, relationship expert, writer and lecturer with a private practice in New York City. For more information visit her website:  http://www.sussmancounseling.com

5 Reasons Confident Women are Never Fake

5 Reasons Confident Women are Never Fake

A confident woman doesn’t feel the need to prove herself. She has been through tough times and has come out on the other side. She knows the only one she has to please is herself.She knows that authenticity is more attractive than putting on a mask. She has learned from experience that it’s better to be honest than to tell lies. Most of the time, people can see through that.It is really a waste of time. Fake people have to remember what they told one person, and know that was different than what they told someone else. A confident woman knows it takes a lot of energy to remember the “right” story, and that energy could be put to better use.When people are putting on an act, it’s easy to forget who they really are. And when people start to lose themselves, they start to feel a lack of self-esteem.She is a mentor to other women and what she projects needs to be something she’s proud of.  And she’s come to accept the whole package—her “strengths as well as her weaknesses.”

What You Should Never Put Up With in a Relationship

We all go through a lot to make a relationship work, but we have to draw the line somewhere. Here are 4 things a confident woman will NOT put up with in her professional and romantic relationships.

Lack of communication. Openly discussing your feelings, fears, and goals is important in all good relationships. If you don’t think your partner will listen to you and share his or her thoughts in return, you will begin to lose trust. If your boss is talks over you and doesn’t listen to your suggestions, your job will become frustrating. A confident woman walks away from relationships when she feels she can’t make an impact.

Unreliability. Your significant other cancels dates regularly. Your boss never accepts your meeting requests nor responds to emails. These are red flags to a confident woman, who values her time too much to put up with someone she can’t count on.

Little or no support. When you have a tough decision to make, you want to know that your partner has your back no matter what. When you have a dispute with a fellow team member, you need the guidance from your boss to help you resolve the conflict.

Someone she can’t grow with. You go through many phases in life. You aren’t the same person you were 1, 5, or 10 years ago. As you go through changes, you will lose and gain people. A confident woman knows when a relationship reaches a plateau and it’s time to move on.

5 Ways to Handle a Job That’s Pushing You Over the Edge

Two weeks ago a friend called me on his way home. He wanted to leave his job so much he was literally dreaming about it at night. If you’re feeling a lot of empathy for him it’s likely you’re feeling the same way about your job or you have felt that way in the past. Hopefully it’s the latter—but if you’re in a similar situation and feel like you’re being pushed to your limits, here are five things to keep in mind:

Don’t feed the negative
If you’re constantly feeling on edge, you could probably talk non-stop about what’s wrong with your job.  But that’s part of the problem—you’re talking non-stop about how bad things are—even if that talk is all inside your head. We’re all human, so go ahead and allow yourself to be negative some of the time—then move on to the positive. In essence, focus on what you want, not what you don't want.

Find the positive
Whether it’s a bad job or a bad relationship, not everything is awful about it. At the very least, the fact that you can one day leave that job or that relationship gives you a vision to move towards. You have to intentionally look for anything and everything you can that is on the positive side of things. If you can’t do that, skip ahead to the third point in this post.

Make a plan
If you’re being pushed to the edge at work, you have to take charge of your work life. Can you improve things in your current job? If so, make a plan and make it happen. If you say you can’t make things better, are you one hundred percent sure you can’t? Because if you’re right, that means you need to make a plan to get new work. Yes, I know that’s hard and it might take you a while. Do it anyway. Just don't try to do it by yourself.

Get more support
It’s really amazing how often people criticize themselves. I’m talking about bright, attractive, hard working, caring and successful people. People criticize themselves for not losing weight, not saving more money or for putting up with a loveless relationship. The truth is, they’re doing the best they can with what they have. It’s what they don’t have that’s “holding them back”—and what they don’t’ have is the support they need. Don’t you make that mistake. Get the support you need, whatever that means.

Live your life
When things aren’t going so well in one part of life, it’s even more important to draw positive energy from other areas. If work has been depressing you, resist the urge to isolate and worry about your work life. Get with your friends and have some fun, you deserve it. Volunteer with an organizaiton that is doing something you believe in. When work is not going well, that's the time to gain as much positive energy as you can from other areas of your life.

 

 

 

- Alan Allard, Creator of Enlightened Happiness. For more from Alan, sign up for his newsletter at alanallard.com.

4 Steps to Calm Yourself When You’re Anxious

The human brain is good at creating anxiety. You can un-do your anxiety when you know how you created it. If you blame it on external forces instead, your internal power is lost. Here are four easy steps to help you locate the “off” switch to your jitters, whether it’s bad stuff you’re anticipating or good stuff.

1. Anxiety is just a chemical
Cortisol is the chemical that makes you feel bad. Your body eliminates it in a couple of hours, so you will feel good again soon as long as you don't trigger more in that time. Unfortunately, that’s hard to do. Cortisol creates a threatened feeling that sends your brain urgently searching for threats. But you can find the “off” switch when you know how your brain defines “threats." 

2. Threats are just neural pathways
Whatever felt bad in your past built a pathway in your brain that turns on your cortisol when you see something similar. The pathways you built before age eight and during puberty become the superhighways of our brain, so whatever felt bad during those years wired the alarm system of your brain. Yikes! We all end up with more alarm than we really need. We all feel threatened by tiny cues that were relevant long ago. Many of those cues have value - they protect you from falling off cliffs or buying bridges from attractive strangers. But they are inevitably a flawed guide to life.

3. You can build new self-soothing circuits
Self-soothing is also a set of neural pathways built long ago. We humans are born helpless and vulnerable. The first circuit in your brain - the foundation on which later experience is laid - is the urgent sense of having needs you can’t meet on your own. You learn to soothe yourself each time a need is met, with a little help from the world around you. By the end of puberty, each brain has a cockamamy collection of self-soothing circuits. Many of them have value, but they have consequences too. If you keep repeating old same self-soothing habits, you keep getting the same consequences. You can build a new self-soothing habit, but it’s harder than you think because your old superhighways are so comfortable. Blazing a new trail through your jungle of neurons is hard work, and the trail soon disappears unless you pass through it every day. If you repeat a new behavior for 45 days without fail, a new circuit will get established. So choose a new response to anxiety and invest 45 days of your energy in it. You will like the result!

4. Don’t wait too long for the world to fix it for you 
We often blame anxiety on “our society” and believe the world must change before we can be calm. If you wait for the world to reach into your brain and soothe you, life will pass you by. Remember that monkeys had the same anxieties we had fifty million years ago. They had in-group/out-group politics and they groomed other monkeys who didn’t groom them back. Social anxiety is part of being a mammal. When you’re safe from physical threats, your mammal brain focuses on social threats. It has always been this way, so don’t expect the world to change in a way that fixes it for you. Listen to the song Don’t Wait Too Long every time you’re tempted to fall back on your old circuits and you will succeed at re-wiring yourself.

Go forth and unscramble
The French have a great word for someone who manages well in a crisis: “débrouillard." It literally means a person who can “unscramble.” So when life gives you scrambled eggs, trust in your ability to unscramble them. Focus on steps that will meet your needs because that stimulates your dopamine. The great feeling of dopamine relieves the bad cortisol feeling fast, because that’s how our brain is designed to work!

 

 

 

 

- Dr. Loretta Breuning is the founder of InnerMammalInstitute.org and author of Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels

6 Steps to Building Winning Relationships with Power Players

I am sure you have often heard that “no one achieves success alone.” But you may be asking yourself how do I get those in positions to support my career to actually advocate for my career success? It is important that you create sponsorship and advocacy for your career – here is how:  

Identify the key people who can advocate for you and determine who they are influenced byPerform a network analysis to determine how you are connected to those peopleFor people you are already in relationship with craft your contact strategy based on your ask of the individual and your intended outcomes for the relationshipFor those who are not in your network determine the influencers who are connected to them and craft your ask of those influencers to get connectedIn every circumstance be clear about your intended outcome and make it easy for people to support you by demonstrating your impact to the organization when answering the question “how are things going?”Thank those who support you for their time and ALWAYS follow up to let them know how you used the counsel the provided.

Happy Networking!

 

 

 

Cornelia Shipley, April 2016 Career Coach

7 Quotes To Remind Us of the Upside of Anger

"A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity." 
- Mary Garden

"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean."
- Maya Angelou

"In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves."
- Buddha

"It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss."
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward."
- Gloria Steinem

"Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on."
- Alice Miller

"It's a joke to think that anyone is one thing. We're all such complex creatures. But if I'm going to be a poster child for anything, anger's a gorgeous emotion. It gets a bad rap, but it can make great changes happen."
- Alanis Morissette

3 Ways to Handle Someone Who Is Undermining You

If you’ve ever had it happen to you before, you’ll never forget it. I’m talking about someone trying to take credit that belongs to you—trying to steal your show. Maybe they pitched an idea to the boss, claiming it to be their idea when it was one you shared with them over lunch. Or perhaps they talk as if the team is ahead of schedule due to their leadership, not yours, when reality says otherwise. Whatever the scenario, if someone is trying to steal your show, here are three ways to handle that:

Keep your cool
Very few things are as infuriating as someone stealing your ideas or trying to take credit for your hard work. You’re going to be angry, that’s fine. Be angry, then give yourself a little time to calm down. The last thing you want is to make a bad situation worse—and that’s what you’ll do if you make any decisions in the heat of the moment.

Act quickly
Once you’ve given yourself what you need to get and stay calm, it’s time to take action. You can’t sit by quietly and let someone steal your ideas or take credit for your work. If you do that you might as well send them an engraved invitation to do it again. You’ve heard the saying, “We train people how to treat us”? It’s true. 

Be smart about it
Yes, deal with it now, but be smart about it. If it’s a first offense, talk to the guilty party in private. Let them know the only reason you’re keeping it private is because this was a first offense, not because you’re not taking it seriously. To let them know you mean that, be sure and tell them if it happens again you will bring the boss into the discussion. One more thing: Be sure to document what’ s happened—and let them know you’ve done so.

 

 

 

 

 

- Alan Allard, Creator of Enlightened Happiness. For more from Alan, sign up for his newsletter at alanallard.com.