034: Creating More Love in Relationships

Today, we are continuing our theme of love! So let me ask you: Is it possible to improve our relationships without the other person changing at all?
So often we want to evaluate or assess relationships by what we imagine the other people might be thinking about us. But we don’t have control over what other people think. Paying attention to our own thoughts about someone else and understanding those thoughts is what makes our relationships so powerful.
In this episode, I am sharing an important exercise to help you understand how you interact with people and sharing examples from my own life to help you create a manual for creating more love with the people around you.
What you’ll find in this episode:
A segment on a creative breathing exercise
How to start noticing your thoughts about others
Boundaries and why they are important
Examples on how you can create more love
Read the transcript of the episode below:
 Episode 34 - Creating More Love in Relationships

Is it possible to improve our relationships without the other person changing at all? This is episode 34, Creating More Love in Relationships.

Welcome to the Committed to Create Podcast. I'm Lisa Funk and I am so excited to hang out with you here as we talk about the power of creating with our hands and our minds. I like to keep it real, remind you that you are not alone and share specific ways that creativity and mindfulness can help us live even more meaningful and joyful lives.

I am so glad that you're here.

Hello my friend. and welcome back to the Committed to Create Podcast. I am so glad that you're here. And today we are going to be talking about relationships. This could be a relationship with your partner, it could be with children. It could be with a sibling, a parent, a friend, a neighbor, anybody in your life that you have a relationship with.

And I'm really excited to talk about this because these concepts have really changed my relationships and the way that I experience relationships in my life. But before we get to that main topic for today, I wanted to do a segment called Mindful Creativity Moment.

So for today's Mindful Creativity Moment, I wanted to share something that I have started doing, and that is combining doodling with breathing exercises. So my Apple Watch reminds me to breathe every once in awhile. And it's really helpful because taking a nice deep breath is really cleansing. It might seem silly, but even doing that just a couple of times a day can be so helpful.

And sometimes we don't realize how shallow we're breathing. It's like, wow, I have not taken like a good deep breath for a while. And doing that is really just kind of grounding and helps me to just have a moment of relaxation that I really appreciate.

So you know that here on the podcast, I really challenge you to commit to creating every day. And even if it's grabbing a scrap piece of paper or the back of an envelope with a crayon or a pencil, anything. Doodling, drawing, without any need for it to look a certain way or become something, just allowing your mind to just scribble and doodle.

I have shared a few times recently, my cute little toddler, just drawing and scribbling on paper and how he isn't worried about whether or not it looks good, or if he's doing it right, he just loves the process. He loves the feeling of grabbing a marker and putting it to paper. And I wish that all of us could just embrace that same childlike quality of enjoying the process so easily instead of spending the whole time wondering if we're good at it, or if we're going to get better at it or what other people are going to think about it.

And I'm not saying that toddlers don't get to a point where they appreciate, you know, positive feedback. But at this point, my cute little, two year old, he just loves doing it. He is not doing it and then making sure that I think it looks great. It's so fun to just watch him love the process so much. So I am always encouraging you to do that. To just doodle, to just kind of free draw, to let your mind just kind of relax while you, you know, take a pen or pencil to paper.

And recently this week I started doing that and incorporating breathing exercises together with it. So there are many different types of breathing exercises. One is inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds. And I just took my pen and I started at the bottom and created just like a curve or a wave.

So on the inhale I went up and then on the hold I just was doing the curve around the top and the exhale I just drew back down. And it just kind of helped me to focus even more on my breath and combining it with using my hands to create was really fun and helped me to kind of focus on this and follow through with it.

And so even if you're not necessarily doing this exact curve that I did, you could write the numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4 for your inhale. And then you could write 1, 2, 3, 4, while you're holding whatever type of breathing exercise that you want to do, even if it's not counting. Even if it's just focusing on taking deep breaths while you're maybe doing swirls or circles or just relaxing doodling.

And I'm sure it might sound kind of silly to just do that, but even if it's just for a few minutes, take that moment to not just doodle, but also to do some deep breathing and allow yourself to kind of be still for a moment, even when there's noise around you, even when there's chaos, it's possible to find that moment of stillness. And it's really powerful when we can tap into that.

So that is something that I did this week, and I thought this was kind of nice and a great way to incorporate mindfulness together with creativity and something that you might enjoy as well. A small, simple thing that we can do. And that is our segment for today.

All right. Let's get to the meat of this episode. Today, we're talking about creating more love in relationships. And this is in combination with the month of February, we are talking about love. And like I said in prior weeks, even if you're not super into Valentine's Day, love is always a great thing to talk about and increase in our lives.

So we're talking about it in connection with the Daily Mindful Lettering book that includes 30 days of lettering affirmations about living with love. So the first week of the month we talked about self-love and then last week we talked about loving your life more, even more. And this week we're talking about relationships.

So again, this could be with a partner. It could be with your spouse. It could be with your children, other family members, friends, neighbors. And I hope that it's powerful.

So the affirmation from the Daily Mindful Lettering book is I see through the eyes of love.

So I want to talk about a few tips for creating more love in our relationships.

And the first is understanding that our relationships with other people are really made up of our thoughts about them. So if someone were to ask you, how has your relationship with your neighbor? And you might think, well, let's see how much do they like me? Are they happy with me? Do they come and talk to me? Do they do this?

We might base our evaluation of our relationship on the actions of the other people. Or we might base our evaluation of the relationship on what we think they might possibly think about us. They may never have even said anything, but we may say, well, I don't know. I think they might be kind of annoyed that we don't put our trash cans back right away or that my kids' bikes are always out on the porch, but have they even told me that? No, they haven't.

But so often we want to evaluate or assess relationships by what we imagine the other people might be thinking about us. And it's so easy to believe they're judging us and thinking all kinds of negative things about us.

But number one, we will never know exactly what they're thinking. Even if they tell us they might be thinking something else and that's okay. Because our relationship with that person is based on our thoughts about that person. If you think about a friend that you have, that you absolutely adore. This is someone that you just think is the best. They're amazing. And you love them and you can't understand how not everyone in the entire world would feel the same way about them that you do.

But the truth is that not everyone in the world does feel that way about them. So does that mean that you have it wrong because you think that they are the bee's knees and not everyone feels that way. No, it means that you have different thoughts about this person than other people do because our relationships with other people are our thoughts about them.

So going back to my relationship with my neighbor, for example, I can say, I have an amazing relationship with my neighbor because I have amazing thoughts about my neighbor. Now, does this mean that I talked to my neighbor every day and have deep conversations all the time? No, it doesn't necessarily mean that. But I can decide what thoughts that I want to have about my neighbor and about my relationship with my neighbor.

And I find that there's no downside to doing that. No one is coming to me and saying, well, hold on, if you believe that you have a great relationship and that you love your neighbor, that is a huge problem. I don't really think that that's a good idea.

For me to have positive thoughts about the people in my life, in my experience, only enhances the interactions that I have and the feelings that I have moving forward. What's interesting is that whether or not someone loves or hates you doesn't have to change your relationship with them.

In episode 16 of this podcast, I talk about what other people think and that we never actually know what they think. Even if they tell us they could be thinking something different. Even if they tell us something positive, it could be that they don't feel that way. Or if they tell us something negative, they may not actually feel that way.

People have a lot of reasons for putting up a defense or feeling insecure, and they may say things that they don't actually mean. So it's impossible for us to know exactly how people feel or what they're actually thinking. And what we are trying to do in these situations is that we want to have good relationships, which means controlling that person. We want them to like us. We want them to act in a certain way in order to feel like we have a good relationship, but we don't have control over other people.

I know this seems really obvious, but it can be our hard pill to swallow. The only thing that we have control over is the way that we think and act, right? So paying attention to our thoughts about someone else and understanding that that is what really creates our relationship to them is so powerful.

And I love using lettering affirmations as a reminder to get into this head space. Where I get to choose. And so that affirmation of lettering "I see through the eyes of love" is so powerful because it's saying that we see through our own perspective, our thoughts, our thoughts are the way that we connect to and experience the world.

So if our thoughts create the relationship that we have with others, then I think it's really powerful to see what our current thoughts are about other people.

So I've done this where I have taken different relationships with my children, with my spouse, with other people. And I just free write. I just write down what are the thoughts that I have about this person and about our relationship. And are they serving me?

Are they helping me to have the type of relationship that I want to have with this person? But it's super powerful to allow yourself without judgment, to just free write what your current thoughts are about people.

And this might be something that you really focus on in regards to a specific relationship that you might be struggling with right now. And I think that that's a great place to start. I think it's also really valuable to do it with the people closest to you, your immediate family. And I know that for me, when I've done this exercise, it's really helped me to see what are the default thoughts that I go to automatically. And are those thoughts that I want to hold on to, because those are really the basis for what is creating my relationship to that person.

So, as you probably know by now, I am certified as a life coach through the life coach school. And one of the concepts that I loved learning from my mentor, Brooke Castillo, is about the manual, which is a concept and an idea that we have a manual for people in our lives.

So of course we can think about a manual that we might have for like an appliance or TV or a computer. We have this manual of exactly how that appliance is supposed to work. You can push this button and it's going to do this thing, and this is how it functions. And if it goes off of that manual, if it deviates from that manual, you know that something's wrong, it needs to be fixed. You need to call someone to fix it or look up how to fix it or take it in because the manual describes exactly how this appliance or machine is supposed to work.

So the idea of the manual in relationships is that we come up with manual for other people. And we don't necessarily realize that we're doing this. This may come from years of observing other relationships. It may come from conditioning that we hear from people around us of how relationships should be or how other people should act. The word "should" is the main component of a manual for somebody else.

So in a relationship you may have beliefs that form your manual that are things like, you should compliment me, you should take out the trash, you should put your laundry in the laundry bin. You should always be home at a certain time, or you should text me if you are not going to be.

And I want to make it very clear at this point, when we're talking about manuals, that I think that should for sure have expectations of people in our relationships. I don't believe that we can just let people walk all over us or not treat us well. I think that it's very important to have expectations.

So this is not me telling you that you should be subservient or not stand up for yourself or be unhappy in your relationships. This is just a very powerful tool to look at how we are interacting with other people that we are in relationship with.

And so some questions that I like to ask myself about the manuals that I have for other people is, did I write this manual? Have I let them read the manual? What happens when they don't follow my manual? And how do I feel when someone has the manual for me? Let me just tell ya. I do not like it.

What's funny about a manual that we might have for someone else is first of all, we all have them for other people. And you're not a bad person if you have a manual for someone else, because we all do. But what's interesting is that we often don't even realize what the manual is, these expectations, and we probably haven't communicated what those expectations are, what is included in our manual for the other person.

Now, I'm not saying that they should just read the manual and say, okay, sure. I'll do whatever you say. But a lot of times they don't even know. Sometimes we don't even know, or we're not conscious of the expectations that we have for someone else.

I know that there've been times when I would get really sad and down, and I couldn't even pinpoint the fact that I was disappointed that, you know, my husband hadn't lived up to my manual, even though I didn't even know exactly what I had written in the manual or what society had written in the manual because of what I had heard from someone else. I hadn't really put it all together.

And so it's actually really helpful to write down what your manual is for the people in your life. I'm going to tell you right now that it's kind of embarrassing to do this, if you're really honest with yourself, but being really honest with yourself is where the freedom comes from.

So for me to realize, wow, I really expect that my husband is going to take out the trash as soon as it's full. I don't know that I've ever even talked to him about this, but I just, for a long time, just expected that that was part of his job. And when he didn't follow the manual, it felt like something had gone wrong.

I also really wanted him to give me words of affirmation because that's my love language. And I just thought that that's what would happen. All the time every day. And he does give me words of affirmation, but it's not necessarily the most natural way for him to show love. He is a huge acts of service person.

So he is always doing amazing kind things for me. And I do find that it's easier for me to give love in the way that I like to receive it. So I am huge into giving words of affirmation, whereas that's not necessarily like super, super meaningful to him where he would probably really appreciate if I were a little bit more into acts of service. I do do lots of nice things for him.

But the point is that we kind of have a manual and it comes from lots of different places. One might be based on the way that we receive love, the way that we like to give love. And so we expect them to know that and it can be really hard when they don't follow it.

I have also gone through this exercise of writing down the manual that I have for my kids. And how I expect them to act. Because the interesting thing about manuals is that our brains get really nervous and really worried when someone is not following the manual. And we think that maybe we need to take them into the shop or something, something's gone wrong. They're not behaving how I would like them to behave.

And what I find with manuals is that we don't allow for people to be human. We do sort of expect them to. Behave like an appliance that's extremely predictable that hopefully is going to respond the exact same way when we push the same button on the remote control. When in actuality, I don't think that's actually what we want. To just be able to control someone.

I know it feels like we do, like, wouldn't it be nice if I could just ask this person to do this thing and they would always do it and never forget? And also wouldn't it be nice if they could also read my mind and just know what I want them to do and would like them to do and would appreciate without me even knowing myself what that might be, or if I do know that they just know without me having to even say anything? Wouldn't that be amazing?

So one thing that I realized with my kids was that I had this manual, that they would be able to, you know, regulate their emotions and treat each other kindly all the time and never hurt each other in any way. And that was the manual that I got, I don't know, do we all get that manual for our kids? And it's so silly, because it's not who kids are. It might be this hopeful expectation of how they will act when they're their best selves, but who is their best self and perfect all the time? No one.

So if a manual is how someone is actually expected to act, then a manual for my children should include, loses their cool. Gets upset. Doesn't like it when their siblings take their stuff. Doesn't always want to do their chores. Okay? Like all the things that I wish that they did, we have to account for them being human.

So what if our manuals looked like allowing people to not want to do what we always hope they'll do? To not necessarily take out the trash when it's full. I take out the trash now. Okay. Everybody, not all the time. My husband still takes out the trash and majority of the time I would say, but I just have to having the manual that that was only his job. And that I needed him to do that in order to be happy. I can take the trash out myself. It's really not that big of a deal.

And so now I do that. I don't have a manual. That's just his job. And is it okay to have roles and to decide like, you know, I think I would like to do the artwork, or I would like to do this. Of course, I'm not saying that we cannot have expectations or that we can't ask people to do things so that they can't expect that we're going to do things.

But when our manuals are getting in the way of our happiness, it's helpful to just know what they are and to adjust them if it's going to serve us in our relationships. Because, I can tell you what, I do not necessarily want anyone to have a manual for me where they expect that I'm going to be happy all the time, or that I'm going to have an after-school snack ready every single day.

I mean, I do like to do that every once in a while, but I don't want someone to expect it of me every day. I am not an appliance. I am not a robot and neither are our kids or husbands, our neighbors, our friends. And so when we have these manuals for them, it's just helpful to know what they are.

And so we can say, huh, is that something I need to communicate? Is that something that I want to change? Because it's getting in the way of my happiness. Because us having manuals for other people doesn't necessarily affect them, but it affects us. And so I think it's helpful.

Now I do want to talk for a second about boundaries, because boundaries come from a loving place, or I think that they really can. Having love for other people does not mean that we accept their behavior no matter what they do, that is not true by any stretch of the imagination.

We need to decide what is acceptable for us and what we expect, and those things can be a part of our manual. They can be boundaries that we set. And one really helpful thing that I learned in my coaching training was about how boundaries actually should work.

If we have a boundary quote unquote, where we think that we can just tell someone else how to behave, that's not actually a boundary that is more of a manual. The boundary is when we understand what control we have, and so we decide what action we will take when someone does something.

So a boundary is saying, if you do this. I will do this. So if there is something that's completely unacceptable to you, you can let that person know. You can communicate the boundary and say, if this happens, then I will leave or I will call this person or whatever you decide the boundaries should be, but it's an action that you can take because it's impossible for us to force other people to act any certain way.

And that's why this type of boundary is so powerful is because we are taking action when we believe that someone has crossed a boundary. So for example, if someone were to cross the boundary of your house, your property come into your house, you can say, if you are to do that, I will call the police. I will ask you to leave. Whatever it is that you want to be the action that you are going to take, because if you just tell someone that your boundary is that they aren't allowed to come in your house, then they might say, well, too bad. I don't care what you say. I'm going to still do whatever I want. And that is where the problem comes in because we can't control other people. It's so annoying. And I wish that we could, but not really because, we want people to be who they are. We want them to have agency and we don't want to be controlled.

It's so funny because we always say, I wish we could just control other people and make them do what we want, but we definitely don't want other people to do that to us.

So we all get to decide what our boundaries are. What's important to us. And then for, as far as the manuals go, I'm going to tell you that there are a lot of things that I've had on my manual that are not a big deal and that were really helpful for me to let go. And allowing us both to be human and to experience emotion and allowing that emotion to be valid and accepted is so powerful.

There have been times when, you know, maybe I was upset about something or my husband was upset about something and I didn't want anyone to be upset because I don't like when people are upset. I want everyone to be happy. Or if I thought that I was in the right, then the other person didn't have the right to be upset.

And I've just learned that again, since we can't control people, it's much nicer to allow them to feel how they're going to feel, because guess what? They're going to feel that way anyway. And so allowing them is just something that we're doing in our own minds.

But it's really funny that we say that we're going to allow them to do that because, of course they can do it, they can do whatever they want. But it's really giving us a lot of freedom because we're not trying to even control what they "should" be doing or what we think they should be doing in our minds. We're releasing that resistance and we're allowing them to just be who they are and feel what they're feeling and saying.

It's okay for them to be upset about that. They don't have to love that I feel this way or that I've done this thing. And I don't have to feel amazing all the time either. I can get upset and that's okay too.

I kind of have this natural inclination to want everything fixed and want everybody to feel good and happy and love each other. And so that has been very powerful for me to get to a point where I really can allow for emotion and for us to be human and to have feelings and to allow for upset and to allow for frustration and to know that that is part of the human experience and that it's okay. And it doesn't mean that anything's gone wrong.

Because in our manuals, we want to believe that we should always get along and that everything should be happy all the time. And then we get really annoyed when our lives don't follow that manual or people don't follow those manuals. And that is where we get into trouble is because we got mistaken and believed that maybe we were machines and not humans and humans have emotions and are somewhat unpredictable and get upset.

And it's all okay. And so we're not going to beat ourselves up over feeling this way. We're just learning about how to accept things and embrace our humanity and the experiences that we have.

I also want to say that one way that I feel so much more love and less resentment in my relationships is when I take care of myself.

If I make a big list for someone else about all the things that they need to do in order for me to be taken care of, I generally get into trouble. Because I'm putting all of my happiness in someone else's hands, and I allow them to really make or break how I feel. And it doesn't really generally work out that well.

So when I take responsibility for my own wellbeing, for my own self, it is so much better and it's so much more fun.

And also realizing that my partner, or other people that I'm in relationship with, are really the only ones who can manage their own happiness as well. And encouraging them to take care of themselves, whatever that might look like can, be so powerful because then we're both taking care of our own needs and then just having a bunch of fun together.

The last exercise that I wanted to offer or share is writing a letter to someone that you're in a relationship with and how powerful that can be.

And I find that writing this letter is the most powerful once you have already done the work of writing down the thoughts that you have about this person, the manual that you have for this person, how you might be able to allow them to be more of themselves. And kind of thinking through some of those things and how you want to feel, how you want to show up in that relationship.

It's so easy to talk about the other person and how they are behaving towards you, and what they do. The truth is that the only thing we can control is how we show up in a relationship. And so I find that it's much more productive to focus on that question: how do I want to show up?

And once you have kind of worked through some of this process, I find that it's really therapeutic to write a letter to this person. And this is a letter that you probably will never send. Maybe you will, if it feels like the right thing to do, but it's not necessary to send the letter. It can be really healing.

And this could be for someone that you never talked to, this could be for someone who's passed away, because again, our relationships with other people are the thoughts that we have about them.

So in this letter, you can write what you admire about them. What you're thankful for about them, a memory that you have together, something that they've shown or taught you, something that they've told you that's special, something you're grateful for about them and why you love them.

And of course you can do this in any way that feels right, or it feels like it would serve you, but I do think that it's really powerful. And our relationships can change without the other person changing. And again, I don't mean that it's okay to accept unacceptable behavior. I just mean that I have noticed in my relationship with my kids and with my husband, that I feel so much more love for them when I pay attention to the thoughts that I'm having about them. And I hope that that's helpful.

For me, using these affirmations that you find in the Daily Mindful Lettering book are so helpful to make sure that my brain isn't just going to the default thoughts that I might have, because so often our brain defaults to negativity. I want to plant these positive mantras and affirmations in my brain before has a chance to go down a negative spiral.

Especially when it comes to my relationships with other people, I know that my mindset is huge.

So if you haven't already gotten your Daily Mindful Lettering book, I hope that you will head to the show notes and find the link to that. And I just love interacting with you when you leave a review of the podcast or send me a message. Knowing that you're listening and that it's making it a difference really keeps me going.

So, I love you and I'm glad you're here and I can't wait to talk to you again next week.
Links:
Daily Mindful Lettering Book
016: What Other People Think
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034: Creating More Love in Relationships

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