You’re in the home stretch! You’ve been reveling in what you created in the last year and learning how to enable the coming one to deliver what you most desire! The way to do that is use what you’ve learned for the good of your future relationship.
This part of the 3-step process, adapted from Marie Forleo’s Year in Review is when you get to decide what you no longer need to carry with you. See the thing that has been stopping you from creating the enriched romantic relationship you truly desire with the high-quality man you deserve – and let it go!
Marie provides the Q’s, I create the structure for you to take it into the realm of dating so you can discover your most useful A’s.
Ready? Set? GO!
1) What is one limiting story you’re going to let go of?
What do you believe, how do you behave, what has happened in the past? Is carrying forward your beliefs, behaviors, and history useful to you? You see it as a part of you, something so familiar it’s like your most comfy pair of slippers. They’re fabulous companions while walking the floors on a cold winter’s night but are comfy slippers useful when you set out to hike Mount Everest? No.
What if you’re stuck because there’s something you decided long ago that you ought to do and just haven’t?
Continuing to believe you ought to have or do the thing you wanted 10 years ago is just as limiting as continuing to do the thing that no longer serves your desires now.
That’s why you need this process – to make it apparent to you that if you want to create a different outcome in dating, relationships, and love, you have to be willing to be different than the way you’ve been single.
Me? This is the year I stop thinking I ought to have already learned how to speak French. That’s it, I’m done. Why? Because that thought “I should have done this already” keeps cropping up in every other area of my life and manifests as a constant chorus of, “what’s wrong with me, I’m lazy, if I haven’t already I never will…”
2) How can you relate it to romantic relationships?
Would you wear a dress on a date that you loved when you bought it ten years ago, even if it doesn’t fit you well now? Then why would you keep thinking a thought or displaying a behavior that doesn’t suit who you are or help you achieve what you want now?
Have you had an experience in your past where someone you trusted turned out to be very different from the way you thought he was and ever since then you don’t trust men?
If you believe you can’t trust men, and you believe trusting them will hurt you, and you believe the problem is outside of you – it’s the men – you won’t be able to create a different result because you will continue to act in ways you think protect you.
The thing is, though, relationships consist of connection between two people, and true connection involves intimacy, and intimacy is attained through vulnerability on both your parts, and to feel vulnerable you’re going to have to trust – yourself and him.
Refusing to trust men doesn’t keep you safe, it keeps you separate, and staying separate is not the route to love and marriage.
3) How can you break this pattern that’s keeping you from love?
Whether it’s a belief or a behavior, once you’ve left it by the side of your relationship road you’ll see how it was getting in your way because you’ll begin to feel a sense of ease around dating and all your relationships!
It’s taken me a long time to fully understand that whether the thing is meeting a new man or learning a new skill, if I believe I ought to already know how to be perfect with it, or I ought to have already done it that doesn’t make me want to run toward it, it makes me want to run away.
If you’re someone who has never dated, how can you enjoy yourself if you believe you ought to already have been in a relationship? If you’ve never sustained a relationship past the first few dates, how can you know how to nurture your love into 6 months, or 12 or more? You can’t and telling yourself that “everyone else does” isn’t the way to create self-confidence.
Whether you follow the words of Rumi and “Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop” or Elsa and, “Let it go!” try it, what do you have to lose?
If that thought or thing really is like an old friend and you miss it too much, you can always pick it up again where you left off.
A happy, safe, peaceful New Year to you! ❤️