They do exist!
photo by kthread
Because there are. We just don’t notice them, or know what THEY’RE looking for.
Often, trying to find the right person feels like asking for a unicorn. I knew enough about the human brain though, to know how it works. The brain finds proof to match, our current, most powerful theory.. and saying there are no great _______ out there, means it’s our brain’s job is to prove us right. So when I was single, I knew there were awesome men out there and I wasn’t seeing them. After a couple of months, I found Christian. Right in plain sight in a community of other awesome men and women.
But it wasn’t just Christian.
I coach and am surrounded by great guys who happen to be single. They want a committed relationship, they know that communicating is integral to a successful future, and they want to build that future with a woman they love. Yet, all of them are baffled about finding that right woman.
And then I realize… that generally, we SUCK at dating. Not just individually.. but most of us suck at dating. At the same time, I know it just can’t be a lack of people, because I’m surrounded by awesome un-matched men who are ready to commit, if they could just find the right woman… and I know the opposite is true too.
I’m not going to turn this post into a book.. but I’m going to give you something to play with to make it easier. Because it’s about finding the jewels, and teaching your brain to become your partner in it. Start with something simple: every time you’re hanging out with someone (whether they’re single or not) start asking yourself: “How is this person attractive/awesome/great?”
You’ll start noticing really cool people around you already.
Keep the faith!
Kaye Porter
Relationship & Communication Coach
Perfection Strikes Again.
I was recently reading an article that my friend Heather pointed me towards, about Happiness and Economics. Several points stuck for me, the one I’m going to talk about here? Our need, as women, to be perfect and how it ravages our ability to be happy.
In the 1960s, options were relatively limited. Women could be great mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, girlfriends.. we could keep house and pursue limited types of work. We could raise families and keep gardens, but when it came to defining success, we really only had one avenue of status and success – who are spouses were, how many children we had, how long we’d been married, and the status of our children. She, with a doctor for a husband, who has been married for 40 years, and has three kids who are all successful professionals, with lots of grandchildren.. won.
Today, we still have all those unconscious “shoulds” running around our heads: I should be able to keep my house clean, my husband satisfied, my social life navigated, my checkbook balanced, my children taken care of, and my garden weed-less (and organic!). On top of that, we’re expecting ourselves to be flawless producers as well: I should be able to do all of THAT plus, manage a vertically climbing career, compete with my colleagues, inspire leadership, take decisive action (but not be too bitchy), and make at LEAST a high 6-figures (depending on where I live). I’m also supposed to have satisfying hobbies that generate passive income and be an artfully polished, gym-going size 4.
Talk about the fast track to collapse. We get so spun up about thinking we need to be perfect, just to survive.. it’s no wonder our health, lives, and relationships are collapsing around us. No human can be expected to sustain such driving levels of perfection and while comparing ourselves to some unrealistic ideal.
Stop.
There is only one of you, male or female. You weren’t put on this planet to be perfect. You were put on this planet to give what only you can give. If that means a tidy little garden, that’s great. If a 6-figure career makes you happy, awesome. But start with something simple… like a good night’s rest before you wear yourself into exhaustion. Then we’ll work in perfection!
Cut the Bullshit.
Yes, I will sometimes swear for authenticity.
I assert you know what you want. And you know what you don’t want. It takes a lot of courage to admit it, and it takes just as much courage to hear… because what if they don’t want the same thing you do?
I have a friend I’ve known for years. We’ve been SUPER close, but have never lived in the same state. Two years ago, when I broke up with my boyfriend, it looked like my friend and I had a chance to start up the relationship that had been brewing since I was 17 and had never gotten to really try because we’d always lived too far apart. The year before, he’d been interviewing in California, and had gotten a job offer in LA. Since I lived in Oakland at the time, we decided to continue with our lives as friends.
Now, suddenly, I was looking at moving to Los Angeles myself. I was spending more and more time in Santa Monica with friends, and was seriously looking for places to move to build my practice in Southern California. Our conversations got serious enough that we were talking about moving to Los Angeles together. Suddenly, it felt like all those years of friendship had some to a focus and a whole new future opened up.
That idea went up like a desert brush fire when I found out he was involved, and living with another woman. She and I found out about one another, and were hurt.
The funny thing is, I’m not angry at him. I know my friend. He can’t bear to hurt anyone. He deeply loves people, and wants to make them happy. What upsets me, is that this is a pattern and good intentions or not, everyone ends up hurt. Nobody is happy. Nobody wins.
He’s not the only one who does this. Men… Women… People are afraid of speaking up. We fear that if we have intimacy, we can’t have boundaries. We’re afraid that if we admit we’re not happy, that we’ll hurt our partners. We shut people out of our lives, because we’re afraid they might get too close. We don’t know how to re-work our deals, and create space where everyone wins.
I don’t know if my friendship will ever be the same with him… because I’m not sure he knows who he is. If he couldn’t be honest with his partner, how can he be honest with me? And if he can’t be honest with himself about who he is, there is no place to create something together.
Be real with yourself, and your partner. You can’t transform a relationship until you’re ready for the truth. Yours and theirs. This isn’t a truth to hit someone upside the head with. It is a gift of recognizing you both have the opportunity to bring something, which will create change and make your partnership great. Besides, ultimately, everyone else knows who we are. All those things we think we’re hiding show up anyway (and often when we least want them to!).
Good luck!
Kaye
P.S. For those of you in LA — remember to join us at Creating Satisfying Partnerships this December 10th at 7:30-10pm. Contact me for the location address!
Do you have the courage to have an amazing relationship?
Challenging, dialogues bring opportunities to grow together, and create closeness. They provide a place to shine a light where things could be improved, and allow for more fun, sharing and satisfaction.
Be proactive.
My classes are for people who don’t “need a workshop to have a great relationship.” And they’re for people who’d love to discover great information, that will help them to create fun, amazing relationships.
Are you:
- Single and ready to inspire lasting partnerships.
- Married, or dating and ready for change in your current situation
- Married or dating and want to turn an already good situation into an even better one.
JOIN ME at Creating Satisfying Partnerships
December 10th — 7:30-10:30pm
Space is Limited!
$15 – in advance (PayPal: kaye@kayeporter.net)
$20 – at the door
Location: Highland Park (RSVP kaye@kayeporter.net, now for address)
Your Expectations Count – but not always in the way you think
Ever been in a situation where you feel like the cards were stacked against you before you even walked in the door? Interactions are shaped all the time, by the expectations of the people involved. This happens when we’re dating, and it happens in our ongoing relationships.
In The Luck Factor, Dr. Richard Wisemen discusses the importance of expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies.
“Let’s imagine you are going on a blind date… you don’t know the person that you are going to meet, but your friend has told you that your date is likable, friendly, and outgoing. Let’s analyze how these expectations might influence your behavior.
Imagine that you walk into the restaurant, find the right table, and sit down opposite your date. A number of things then happen amazingly quickly. First, because you expect your date to be friendly, you are feeling happy and so you smile. Second, your date sees you smile and correctly assumes you are pleased to see him. Third, he feels more positively toward you because you seem to feel positively toward him. Fourth, because your date is now feeling positively toward you, he returns your smile. Fifth, you see his smile and this reinforces the notion that he is indeed a friendly person. All of this happened within a few seconds of the two of you meeting, without either of you thinking about it and before anyone has said a single word.”
This works the other way around too. Time and time again, I’ll be working with a wonderful guy, who comes to me confused after a first date. Chances are he didn’t do anything wrong, and she is responding to hurt in the past. But the experience of the present leaves him wondering if he could ever make her happy, or wondering if she ever saw who he was begin with. At that point, chances are slim there will be a second date.
It isn’t just women that do this – I have a close male friend who has been asking me for dating advice. I love the guy dearly, but have had a hard time trying to help him see that even though he has a lot to offer, it would be hard for anyone to get past the first date with him. When he starts out, he expects to be shot down. The entire date is torture for him, because is just waiting for her to decide she is done with him. A couple times we went out as a group, and the entire date was torture for me too, because I could keep seeing him shooting himself in the foot. I can only imagine how uncomfortable it was for her.
While there is no sense in ignoring intuition, maybe the guy really IS a slimeball… or maybe she really is a psycho barracuda. It is work taking a moment to check in (before the date) about what our expectations really are and what we would like to see instead: Am I expecting the guy to be an insensitive jerk because I’ve been hurt by men in the past? If so, it is unlikely I’m going to smile at him. He won’t see me being happy to see him, and unlike the above, he isn’t going to smile back. This is likely going to reinforce the idea that a potentially great guy is an insensitive jerk… before we’ve even said hello.
The Brain, and why you get more of what you got
Starting a businesses can be uphill battle. Not because of the strategies or the economy, but because of the brain’s relationship to survival.
To get simplify something pretty geeky, there are three major parts of the brain: the lizard (survival) brain, the emotional brain, and the thinking/rational brain. While it may sound like we have three brains, we don’t. These are just three major systems that have smaller sub-parts; like the amygdale, or hippocampus. Most of the time the lizard brain, and emotional brain talk behind the logical brain’s back for survival sake, “that guy seems sketchy, walk on the other side of the street!” We may not logically think about why we’re crossing the street, we’re simply responding based on millions of little data points we’re not even conscious of.*
While this is great sometimes, it can trip us up when we’re to learning new skills, trying new things, and developing new relationships, because our brain rapidly filters our sensations, and puts it in buckets related to survival… based on our emotional state and what it knows we’ve already been able to survive, “Hey, you’ve never survived implementing a marketing strategy! Wouldn’t you like to watch Dr. Who instead?? We know we can survive that!” So, even though I know reaching out to people who’ve already -asked- for my services won’t kill me… there is a whole fear/resistance process to get through before that phone call.
This is why people often don’t change, until what they’re doing starts to really hurt. We have to convince our own brains that we’re going to survive the new behavior. This is why practice and the collaborative process has made such a huge difference: I get to be surrounded by people successfully navigating the processes I’m afraid of. We develop strategies of dealing with the fear. It becomes easier to keep moving forward, when I see Dena, Heather, and Sheila surviving too.
Which is good, because even though I like Dr. Who, I don’t like it -that- much. Next time, tips for dealing with the lizard!
Good luck!
Kaye Porter
* To learn more about this process, read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink
(cross posted to thework101.wordpress.com)
“Courage is not the absence of fear…”
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” — Ambrose Redmoon
This post was inspired by my friend Lily, and there are many people in my life who I’ve seen display amazing courage. They didn’t go off to war, they didn’t settle uncharted territory, or sail to a distant planet. they’ve had the courage to relate with another human being, on a level that leaves them vulnerable.
Early in my relationship coaching career, I took a class with a Mark Micheal Lewis, who said something that has lived within me ever since that class. He said, “intimacy stops when we stop communicating.” The thing is, is that intimacy requires so much courage, that sometimes I’m amazed that any of us have relationships to thrive in. The kicker is that sometimes by the time we gather the courage to share ourselves, there is so much pressure behind it, that it is like trying to share water from a fire-hose – all the power to put out flaming houses, but hard to drink from.
Relating openly, takes an extra level of faith/trust/recognition/enter appropriate word for your understanding here:
Faith that you’ll be safe
Faith that you’ll be welcomed and accepted
Faith that there is a place to share yourself, and
Faith that there are people out there who won’t accept anything less — because they love you THAT much.
When I first started this as a note on Facebook, Lily also added that there is a huge place for faith in yourself. I’m just going to quote her directly because she says it so well:
I feel there’s so much to be said about faith in oneself too: faith that you know your self, faith that you know what you want, faith that you can articulate it to someone else, and… the most important for me, faith that when I cannot know myself, cannot know what I want, or cannot articulate it, my partner will be patient enough to help me know it to myself and to him (or her).
As I’ve grown in my work helping others, I’ve had to grow in my own courage. Time and time again, I find myself upset, or facing a problem, that I’m scared to share, scared to admit that I have a problem, with my problem. But that is why, before I started seeing Christian, I decided I wasn’t going to date someone who couldn’t also be my best friend. A friend who would keep honesty, and intimacy in the forefront of our relating. Because, well, if we couldn’t be honest, why the heck were we here?
But part of the secret has been finding someone who spoke the same language (and I don’t mean English, necessarily!), had the same commitment, capacity and who was willing to learn to translate, as much as I am. The other part of the secret was realizing that people have more space to respond to me, when they’re responding to something that is about me: it is my hurt, my fear, my need. It is communicating that my emotions are about me, not an attack against them.. and an open request to find out what they need, to partner with me in finding the solution.
So thank you to everyone who has, and continues to show courage in relating – you inspire me.
Christian & Kaye in San Francisco, 2008 with the courage to love
