When I really got serious about dating in my 50's, I used something called the 90-day Relationship.  An idea baby of Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, I took it and ran with it.  Basically, you're all in, fully committed, and figuring things out for 90 days.  It was a brilliant process for me to figure out relationships more and to find my person.  Through this process I discovered some of my most destructive patterns of behavior and was able to clean them up.  Check out this podcast to learn more about why this process worked so amazingly well for me.

Dating in the middle part of our lives is a different ballgame than when we were in our 20s.  Thank goodness!  We have a much better understanding of who we are and what is really important to us in a relationship.  And using the tools you learn here on the podcast you will be able to create something very different.  I'm going to be sharing with you some of the ways that I showed up dating in my 50s that I feel made a huge difference for me finding such an amazing partner.  

Divorce is a major life event, and one that can leave us feeling as though our whole world has been upended, because, often it has been.  It can be really tough to get our feet on solid ground with all of the emotional and even physical turmoil that divorce creates.  How do we start to heal from all of the pain?  And how do we move forward into the life we imagined waited for us outside of our terribly dysfunctional marriage? 

If ever there is a time in our lives when our self-worth seems like it's up for grabs, going through a divorce is it.  It's a time when we question our judgment, our wisdom, our value, our loveability, basically, we question so much of who we are and the choices we have made.  And yet, having a strong sense of self is so vital to our abililty to move forward and heal and grow.  So, how can we hold onto, or even grow our sense of self-worth?  How can we see our value even in the midst of one of the toughest decisions in our lives?

One-upping and one-downing in our relationships is so normal and expected for most of us, that we can often have a tough time recognizing when we are doing it. Here are two things to look for to help you be more aware: resentment and contempt. When we are putting ourselves in a one-down position, we will often feel resentment. When we are putting ourselves in a one-up position, we will often feel contempt. When we can learn to recognize these thoughts and behaviors, we can then start to figure out how to approach our relationships from a much healthier and happier equal place.

Validation is something that we often seek from others to shore up our sense of self.  And this never really works, because SELF-worth is something that can only be created within ourselves.  Validation in our marriages and relationships, however, is a very important tool.  It lets the other person know we see them, we acknowledge them, we accept them, and it creates connection and intimacy.  In this podcast we are discussing how we can better validate our relationships to create greater connection.

It's hard to know what to do when you're in a tough marriage.  You have tried so many things to make it better, and often it seems that despite your best efforts it's getting worse.  You're stuck in limbo trying to decide what to do and whether you should call it quits or keep trying.  What can we do to make it better?  How do we know what the right decision is?  How do we make a decision we can feel confident in?  All that and more in this podcast.

Our natural tendency as humans is to go into a one-up or a one-down approach in our relationships, especially when there is conflict.  And yet, this tactic is incredibly ineffective in helping us to communicate clearly and get on the same page.  In addition, when we engage with one-upping or one-downing the other person, we are attacking our own sense of self-worth, which then exacerbates our tendency to go up or down.  Let's clear this up, shall we?

Miscommunication is a silent killer in our relationships.  The tricky part is, we often don't even realize we are miscommunicating, and yet it causes so many fights and so much frustration for us.  When we can understand why miscommunication happens, we can behave in ways that will clear up what both of our expectations are about and we can preemptively stop most of the fights before they even start.  

When we talk about betrayal in relationships, we most often think of the really big betrayals such as infidelity.  But just as important are the small betrayals that can occur over and over in our relationships that erode trust over time.  Trust is such a vital part of our relationships, and when it's not there, we also don't have emotional intimacy or partnership.  Learning to recognize our small betrayals and clean them up is vital in order to create stronger relationships.