Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  Second, get busy working on yourself and your goals. Develop your unique talents. Get good at what you do. The better you do the things that are important to you, the more you like yourself. And the more you like and respect yourself, the more comfortable and effective you are with others. Nothing succeeds like success.

  Visualize, affirm and act the part. Work on yourself as if your future depended upon it, because it does. You can become one of the most positive and effective people in your world, and you will when you put these ideas to work in all your relationships.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mastering Personal Relationships

  One of the characteristics of the fully mature, self-actualizing person is that he or she has the ability to enter into long-term, intimate relationships and maintain those relationships for long periods of time. Men and women with the healthiest personalities, those who are the most together as human beings, are those who seem to have the greatest capacity for these loving relationships.

  The choice of a mate, and the quality of your home and family life, determines your success as a human being as much as or more than any other factor. Your relationships are a direct expression of the person you really are. The Law of Correspondence states that your outer world of relationships will correspond exactly to your inner world of thought and feeling. If your inner world is positive and loving, your outer world of relationships will be happy and satisfying.

  Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister of England in the nineteenth century, once said, “No success in public life can compensate for failure in the home.” Your personal relationships should take precedence over everything else. As you grow and become a better person, your relationships should grow and improve as well, and in the same proportion.

  By the Law of Attraction, you will attract into your life the kind of people who are very much the way you are, the kind of people whose ways of thinking and behaving correspond to your dominant thoughts and feelings. As you become more positive, optimistic and loving, you will naturally attract into your life more positive, optimistic and loving people.

  By the Law of Sowing and Reaping you will reap exactly what you sow, and there is no area in which this is more true than in your relationships. You see it all around you, in all your interactions with others.

  You get out of your marriage or your romance exactly what you put into it. The more of yourself that you put into a relationship, the more love, satisfaction and joy you will get out of it. Men and women are born incomplete, and need each other to become whole. They are born with complementary qualities and characteristics. Each one needs the other to fulfill his or her human destiny. Happy relationships go hand in hand with peace of mind, long life, health, happiness and abundance. Men and women with poor relationships, or no relationships at all, have more ill health and die younger than men and women who live happily together.

  In fact, according to Ronald Adler and Neil Towne in their book Looking Out, Looking In, socially isolated people are two to three times as likely to die prematurely as those with strong social ties. Divorced men die from heart disease, cancer and strokes at double the rate of married men. The rate of all types of cancer is as much as five times higher for divorced men and women, compared to their single counterparts. If for no other reason than your desire to live a long and happy life, you should be very serious about building and maintaining excellent relationships with the most important people in your life.

  WHERE IT BEGINS

  Your self-esteem, how much you like and respect yourself, determines your personality and your level of happiness. High self-esteem leads to high performance and success in every area of life, while low self-esteem precedes and accompanies most failure and frustration.

  The first part of self-esteem is the purely emotional component, the way you feel about yourself, separate and apart from anyone or anything else. The second part of your self-esteem is determined by your perceived level of competence in what you do. It is how well you feel you perform in the important areas of your life. This is called performance-based self-esteem, and it is an essential element of your personality.

  When you feel that you are good at what you do, that you perform well, you enjoy high self-esteem in that area. This feeling reinforces the other component of self-esteem, your sense of personal value. If you do well, you feel good; if you feel good, you do well. Each is dependent on the other.

  Because your relationships are so central to your entire life, for you to enjoy sustained feelings of self-esteem, you must know in your heart that you are capable of entering into and maintaining a positive, healthy and constructive loving relationship with another person.

  Feeling inferior or incompetent in your relationships undermines your self-esteem and self-confidence. Everything you do that enables you to get along better with the important people in your life improves your self-esteem. Effectiveness with others makes you feel more competent and complete and frees you to more readily become more effective in the other areas of your life.

  There is a direct relationship between the quality of your relationships and your level of self-esteem and self-acceptance. You can only like yourself to the degree to which you fully accept yourself, and how much you like yourself is largely determined by how much you feel you are accepted by other people.

  Most of us are raised with a form of conditional acceptance, and often rejection and disapproval from our parents. As adults, we seek the unconditional love and acceptance of others, and especially one special other, to compensate for what we feel we lacked as children. Our mental health depends on it.

  SELF-ACCEPTANCE

  You can never feel free to genuinely like yourself until you accept yourself completely, until you accept both your strengths and your weaknesses. And the key to accepting yourself is being accepted unconditionally by at least one other person whom you respect and admire, and even better, love. It is only when someone else accepts you, “warts and all,” that you can relax and accept yourself as being a valuable and worthwhile person.

  SELF-AWARENESS

  For you to experience self-acceptance, you must first develop selfawareness. You need to understand why you think, feel and act the way you do. You need to be aware of the impact of the formative experiences of your life. You need to understand how and why you have become the person that you are today.

  Only when you achieve a higher level of self-awareness can you move to a higher level of self-acceptance. You must to be more aware of who you really are before you can accept yourself. And it is only with a high level of self-acceptance that you can enjoy self-esteem—the key to a happy, healthy personality.

  SELF-DISCLOSURE

  Self-awareness, in turn, is based on self-disclosure. You only truly understand yourself to the degree to which you can disclose, or share yourself, with at least one other person. Appropriate self-disclosure means that you can tell someone else, whom you trust completely, exactly what you are thinking and feeling, with no fear of disapproval or rejection.

  Psychotherapy is based on self-disclosure. Psychotherapists are successful to the degree to which they can get the patient to open up to them and tell them exactly what is causing them to be unhappy or ineffective.

  One psychologist said recently, “If everyone learned to really listen to other people, 75 percent of the psychotherapists in the United States would be out of work by next Wednesday.” To honestly disclose yourself to another person, you need to trust that other person. You need to know that the other person cares for you, and that he or she will not judge you or condemn you for something you have said or done in the past.

  The great emotional problem of the twentieth century is guilt. Guilt arises from a feeling of worthlessness as the result of destructive criticism and mistakes you feel you have made in the past. Most of us have done and said things we regret. We have hurt other people, and we are sorry about it. We can begin to free ourselves from these negative feelings by the act of telling someone else what we did or said
. This form of catharsis, or cleansing, liberates us and allows us to get on with the rest of our lives. Repentance is not only good, but essential for the soul, for long-term happiness.

  Honest self-disclosure is sometimes scary. It requires that you take a chance, that you make yourself vulnerable. But it is the basic precondition for mental health. When you disclose your thoughts and feelings openly and honestly to another person, you understand yourself better. You become more aware of who you really are. You see yourself and your life in a better perspective.

  As you become more self-aware, you become more self-accepting. When you accept yourself unconditionally, you enjoy higher levels of self-esteem and self-regard. You feel better about yourself in everything you do. You liberate yourself from negative feelings that can hold you down and hold you back. With self-disclosure, you can get things off your chest and get on with your life.

  INTIMACY AND GROWTH GO HAND IN HAND

  One of the purposes of marriage and intimate relationships is to give you the opportunity to evolve and grow to your full capacity. In a fully trusting relationship, you feel free to tell the other person things you have done in the past and what you are thinking and feeling in the present. In sharing yourself honestly, you develop a deeper understanding of your own humanity. You become more tolerant, more accepting and more compassionate toward the human frailties of other people. You develop parts of your personality that would have lain dormant in the absence of a fully loving relationship.

  Much of what we do in life we do either to get love or to compensate for the lack of love. Everyone needs to be loved and accepted unconditionally by at least one other person. It is only when your need for this form of emotional security has been satisfied that you feel free to turn your mind and heart to accomplishing what is possible for you in your external life. Love is like money: If you have an ample supply, you don’t think about it very much. But if your supply is cut off for any period of time, you think about nothing else.

  The cruelest punishment inflicted on prisoners is locking them away from all other human beings—putting them in solitary confinement. Depriving a person of human contact, of human interaction, is the worst thing that can be done to him or her.

  Your highest aspiration should be to evolve and develop into the kind of person who attracts an ideal loving relationship into your life. This relationship makes it possible for you to enjoy the happiness and joy for which you were created.

  Everything in the previous chapter on mastering human relationships is applicable to your loving relationships. In addition, there are many other things you can do, or stop doing, that can dramatically improve the way you get along with the important other person in your life. Let’s start off with the six rules for success in relationships.

  SIX RULES FOR SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS

  The first rule is that similarities attract. You will always be the happiest and the most compatible with another person whose interests, tastes and values are similar to yours. The Law of Attraction states that you will be attracted to a person whose attitudes and beliefs are in harmony with your own.

  The first area in which similarities are necessary in marriages and relationships is in attitudes toward money—how it is earned, how it is saved and how it is spent. The second area is attitudes regarding children—whether to have them, how many, and how to raise them. The third is attitudes toward sex. The fourth is religion, and the fifth is attitudes toward political and social issues. Attitudes toward people, social activities and how to spend leisure time are also important measures of compatibility. Similarities attract in spiritual areas as well, and this area can sometimes be more important than any other.

  In each case, you will be most happy and most compatible with a person whose fundamental beliefs and values in these areas are most similar to your own. Most unhappiness and disagreements in marriages and relationships come down to fundamental disagreements about these basic issues of life.

  The second rule for success in relationships is that opposites attract, but only in temperament. Nature always demands balance and harmony. And balance is most necessary in the temperaments of two people who have come together as one.

  There is a simple test of compatibility you can apply to your intimate relationships. It is called “the conversation test.” In a relationship in which you are temperamentally compatible with another person, there will be an easy ebb and flow of conversation. Each person will be able to talk as much as he or she needs to talk, and each person will have the opportunity to listen as much as he or she needs to listen.

  This balance is very important. Each person has a certain amount of talking that he or she must do to feel healthy and whole. If people do not get the opportunity to do all of their talking with the person with whom they are involved, they will seek to fulfill their communication needs somewhere else. Almost all affairs in marriages begin as the result of a need to communicate more fully with another human being.

  When people are temperamentally balanced, 90 percent of the time they spend together will be filled with easy conversation, going back and forth. The other 10 percent of the time will be filled with comfortable silences.

  However, if one person needs to talk 70 percent of the time and listen only 20 percent of the time, and the other person also needs to talk 70 percent of the time and listen only 20 percent of the time, there will be a clash over what is called “air time.” They will be continually struggling over who is going to get to talk the most, who is going to fulfill his or her needs at the expense of the other.

  In this type of relationship, there will be one person who loves more and one person who loves less. Always, the person who loves more will bite his or her lip and give in to allow the person who loves less to do all the talking he or she wants to do. The person who loves less controls the relationship.

  However, this is only a temporary solution. It inevitably leads to feelings of frustration and unhappiness on the part of the person who loves more, and who is not getting an opportunity to express himself or herself fully enough. Eventually these repressed feelings erupt in health problems or harmful behavior.

  Another example of incompatibility is when both parties only need to talk 30 percent of the time and are comfortable listening 60 or 70 percent of the time. In this case, you would have 40 percent of the time the couple is together filled with uncomfortable silences. The two people would sit there with very little to say, feeling uncomfortable but not knowing how to break the silence. This, too, is an example of temperamental incompatibility.

  The conversation test can be applied to your relationships with any of your friends, on any level, and of either sex. Your very best friends are those with whom you have easy conversations and easy silences. These are the ones with whom you are most compatible. But it is most important that you be conversationally compatible with your mate or your spouse if you want to be happy in your relationship.

  The third rule for successful relationships is total commitment on the part of both people. Total commitment requires a heartfelt determination to make the relationship successful. If the two are compatible in their basic values and attitudes and are temperamentally balanced, it is much easier for them to make a lifelong commitment. A total commitment means that neither party ever considers or discusses the possibility of separating, breaking up or divorcing. Making a total commitment requires that you burn your physical and emotional bridges and refuse to consider any other option except making this relationship successful.

  Many people avoid making a total commitment to a relationship, even a marriage, because they have been hurt in previous relationships. They feel that if they keep their options open, they will always have an emotional escape route. This lack of commitment, however, leads almost invariably to creating the exact situation that the individual fears. The relationship gradually deteriorates as one or both parties continue to hold back and to think of separation as the solution to the problems that inevitably arise between two people
.

  W. Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Traveled, gives a beautiful definition of love. He says, “Love is the total commitment to the full development of the potential of the other.” When you truly love another person, you want that person to fulfill his or her full potential, and to become everything that he or she is capable of becoming. If one or the other has the slightest reluctance or hesitation in creating or supporting every opportunity for his or her mate to grow and develop, what you have might be a relationship, but it is probably not real love.

  A wonderful thing about human beings is that we are free emotionally only when we have given up all other options and committed ourselves whole-heartedly to one other person. It is only then that we are capable of developing the high-quality relationship that we need to complete our evolution as human beings.

  The fourth rule for successful relationships is liking. It is more important and more satisfying to genuinely like your partner than to be in love. In a long-term relationship, people may fall in and out of love. The kind and intensity of emotion that each feels for the other will vary with the passing of time. But if the two people like and respect each other, the relationship can endure indefinitely.

  When one person stops liking or respecting the other person, for any reason, the relationship is usually over. Many couples fall in love and then break up and never speak to each other again because they never took the time to fall in like, to learn to genuinely like and respect the other person as an individual rather than just as a romantic partner.