Are you waiting for your partner to come back, hoping things will get better on their own?
This quest for external hope might seem harmless at first, but it’s actually a trap that holds you back from taking action to change your circumstances.
In this post, I'm going to share steps to help you create your own hope and transform your relationship.
My Journey: From Collapse to Coach
Like many, my marriage collapsed. But instead of succumbing to despair, I found a program that changed my life.
I became a coach and now dedicate my life to helping others by sharing lessons through my book and YouTube channel.
Having saved my family once, my mission is to empower others to do the same (I mean, I can't save my family twice, so what else am I going to do?!)
BUT - there was a time on that journey (a bunch of times in fact), where I hoped for the best and didn't know what to do. Where I swiped on my phone or played with the kids and for a while, didn't take enough action. Every time this happened, things slowly began to move backwards again...
So what helped me to take all the hundreds of little actions that eventually added up to success? I first had to learn what was happening in my head when this pattern kept repeating...
The Trap of External Hope: Parable of the Drowning Man
Relying on external forces to intervene, on our partner to change her feelings, on the vicissitudes of fate... can often leave us stranded. The parable of the Drowning Man illustrates this vividly.
It tells of a man waiting for divine rescue during a flood.
He ignores help from a couple of boats, then a helicopter.
He's sure that sooner or later, god will save him if he just waits.
Predictably, the man drowns.
He learns only in the afterlife - the help he'd been waiting for had come and gone. Each time he'd waited for something that suited him better. For something that looked like God's hand intervening...
Similarly, waiting for fate or another’s feelings to change, keeps us hanging, waiting for the wrong kind of hope - hope from WITHOUT, from the external. This robs us of our agency, our power to do things ourselves.
And we need to learn to do things ourselves, because NOBODY is coming to save us.
Shifting Hope From Without to Within
Creating hope internally requires disciplined, consistent action.
It doesn’t need us to make grand gestures, clutch moves where we save the relationship in a day... it just needs us to keep on accumulating small, manageable successes.
When we embrace our ability to respond, our "response-ability" if you will, we shed the need for hope from without. We take concrete action, despite setbacks, and begin to feel little glimmers of hope that WE created 100% on our own. This shift is fundamental to unlocking real change.
Each step, however small, propels the journey.
To give a nerdy-ass quote from the film *Terminator,* that nevertheless is 100% true in relationships: "There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."
Your journey toward a happily married life begins with the little steps you choose to take today.
I saved my family, and you can save yours too. Stay awesome.
PS - check out the vid on this exact topic, below!
