We often assume that we’re in a relationship, so we’re going to have a level of closeness with our partner. But is this always the case? Could we be in a relationship AND still feel really disconnected and lonely?

Today we’re going to be looking at what happens when our relationship is in fact a LONELY place, and at 5 steps that we can take to re-connect.

Reece Stockhausen & Jodie Milton are internationally recognized relationship and intimacy coaches, award-winning bloggers, and co-creators of Practical Intimacy. Since 2014, they’ve helped hundreds of couples and over 1 million readers with their unique intimacy-focused approach to modern relationships and personal development.

We’re going to be looking at:

- What is emotional intimacy and why is it so important in our relationship?

- What are the signs when we are missing emotional intimacy?

- Why do couples struggle to create emotional intimacy?

- How can couples start to build emotional intimacy?

- How emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy are connected

- What to do when one partner is more committed to change compared to the other one

- The challenges of working together as well as having an intimate relationship too

You can find out more about Reece & Jodie’s work at:

https://www.practicalintimacy.com/

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a pattern that is detrimental to ourselves or the people around us? How could these limiting patterns impact on our relationships and our lives, especially when we find ourselves going around in circles. What do we do when we have the realisation that something needs to change but we don’t know WHAT to do?

Today I’m joined by mindset coach Adelaid Goodeve who works with clients to show up consistently at their best in their lives both professionally and personally. She’s been on a journey of recovery and growth from hitting rock bottom with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and building herself up to create an amazing life.

Questions we are going to be looking at include:

- What would be the signs that we ourselves might be stuck in one of these loops and how would it be impacting on us

- How Adelaide broke free from a challenging life-long medical diagnosis with chronic fatigue syndrome by shifting herself by training her brain to create change

- How our negative inner voice can lead our brain into a place of being stuck and prevent us from bouncing back in the way we otherwise could

- How do we arrive at the threshold of saying enough is enough where something has to change

- 5 incredible BRAIN HACKS that can help us to shift and to get unstuck!

You can find out more about Adelaide’s work here:

https://www.adelaidegoodeve.com/

https://www.instagram.com/adelaidegoodeve/

What are the costs of poor sleep on our relationship and on our life? Do we either take sleep for granted or maybe consider it like the weather - something we can’t do anything to influence? How has the science of sleep evolved over recent years and what opportunities do we have to improve it?

Riley Jarvis is the Founder & CEO of The Sleep Consultant - an organisation that helps CEOs, entrepreneurs, and high performers transform their sleep to significantly boost their productivity and energy levels.

We’re going to discover the 5 tips that can revolutionise your sleep!

Highlights today include:

- Why is sleep so important for our wellbeing?

- If sleep isn’t working, how could that play out especially in your relationship?

- How does REM sleep impact on emotional intelligence

- Could a shorter working day be more productive and happier?

- What stops us from sleeping well?

- 5 tips to revolutionise sleep

You can find out more about Riley’s work at:

www.thesleepconsultant.com

When our relationship isn’t working, it can be hard to cut through the negativity… nothing seems to work! So what can we do to shift ourselves from that negative place and back to a more positive one?

Today we’re going to be looking at the number 1 habit hack that can get us to shift in the quickest possible time! We’re joined today by Jimmie Stephens who is a sought after author, speaker, relationship coach and founder of The School of Marriage and Relationship based in Atlanta, Georgia. Jimmie also serves as a senior pastor at The Light International Church and he shares his message on value principles for a life of growth in leadership as well as personal relationships in churches, schools and organisations.

Highlights include:

The impact on our relationship when we get into a negative emotional state

How we can create a shift into a more intentional and rational position where we can resolve things better

Recognising when the other person’s experience is not our intention and how we can modify our behaviour and to improve our communication to deepen our connection

The fit and alignment between our faith journey (in whatever religion we may practice) and working on our relationships

The NUMBER ONE habit hack that can shift us into a more positive state where we can experience an incredible relationship

Content can be seen on Youtube, FaceBook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter.

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/@atlantasomar/videos

Website:

https://schoolofmarriageandrelationship.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jimmie.stephens/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/152614286195672

If we can’t show up as ourselves in our relationship, we’ve got little prospect of making it work sustainably in the long term. Surely if we’re hiding aspects of ourselves we’re going to cause ourselves a lot of stress and difficulty in keeping those things away from our partner or others around us.

Today I’m joined by Stephanie and Jennifer PageWise who are Relationship coaches and Spiritual Revolutionaries working with the LGBTQ+ community. Their mission is to bring more love to the world, one relationship at a time.

We’ve going to be exploring:

- How the masks start to show themselves after the initial period of relationship infatuation where we may not even be aware that we have these masks

- What it means to hit rock bottom in our relationship and how we can pick ourselves up from the mess we find ourselves in

- How attachment wounds from our past can show up to shape our relationship success, creating unhealthy systems from which it can be difficult to find a solution

- How we get triggered by different external stimuli to wear our masks for the purpose of safety and self-protection, and what the results are

- How a our system reacts to difference in general and heteronormativity in particular and causes us to wear masks to cope with a sense of being an outsider and prevents us exploring our life as a whole including our sexuality

You can find out more about Stephanie & Jennifer’s work at:

www.enchantedawakenings.org

www.Facebook.com/groups/enchantedawakenings

When our relationship fails it can be overwhelming. Where do we start? We may want to get on the first dating app we can find and start connecting with people. Are there any benefits of hitting the pause button at this point and taking stock before jumping in?

Today we’re going to be looking at the steps we need to take to ensure that we don’t get caught in a cycle of making the same mistakes, with a similar looking pattern that we’ve been running for a while?

We’re joined by John Kenny who is The Relationship Guy. He helps clients to create healthy loving relationships… John Kenny is a Relationship Coach to People Who Want to Attract or Create Healthy Loving Relationships. Author of The P.E.O.P.L.E. Programme, Speaker, Documentary Maker and host of The Relationship Guy Podcast. He has been involved in the field of personal development for over fifteen years and in that time has not only helped thousands of clients, but has also completely changed his own life.

We are going to be exploring:

- The benefits of not knee-jerking back into a relationship, but taking our time to reassess before jumping back in to assess what was really going on

- How we can find relationships to enable us to relive our existing patterns, even when we know that they may not be a good fit

- The difference between counselling and coaching, and how they can support us make sense of our relationship journey

- The importance of prioritising the things that we ourselves enjoy, even in the midst of our relationship to ensure that we stay in a good emotional place

- The importance of acknowledging and processing our feelings rather than pushing them away, and the impact on future relationships when we do no… but without languishing and becoming the victim

- The importance of becoming aware of our self-talk and how it could be affecting us negatively

- The need to avoid beating ourselves up, but to see how we might have contributed the way things broke down in the past

- How to avoid the comparison trap where we judge ourselves against the outcomes that others are experiencing, falling into self-criticism

- How to get clear on what our boundaries or red flags might be, so that we’re clear next time!

- How to ensure boundaries are working and identifying gaslighting, versus situations where we simply have a different point of view

You can find out more about John’s work at:

https://www.facebook.com/johnkennycoaching

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-kenny-coaching/

https://twitter.com/johnkennycoach

https://www.instagram.com/johnkennycoaching/

Sometimes we reach a crossroads where we come to evaluate and challenge the path that we are on and the decisions that we have made.

Our guest today, best-selling author and coach Dan Stanley got to that point in his mid-thirties of what is sometimes called a ‘mid life crisis’, and it set him on a path to build on the successes and achievements to that point, and also to re-evaluate what he really wanted in life.

Having decided to separate from his wife, he re-evaluated and re-build based on some different paradigms - and now he works with men going through similar challenges.

We’re going to be exploring the top misconceptions that can keep us men stuck and how we can look to re-evaluate them.

- How our gender conditioning and cultural expectations can set us up for challenges as we progress into the middle stage of life

- How the rat race conditions us for challenges when we realise that another car or house or “trappings” can lead us to being absent in other areas of our life

- How adversity introduces us to ourselves as we confront our distractions and challenges in moving to the next level

- How we don’t tend to talk about masculinity or mens’ experiences and the cost we pay for bottling things up

- How the challenges of ‘midlife’ can culminate in the ultimate failure where we have success without fulfilment

- Recognising where seeking professional success can flip into the cause of problems in our life as a whole, rather than being the solution to problems

- What can we do to rebuild after our crisis with solid foundations that give us a chance of long term success, getting a proper focus on life as a whole rather than just work

- How we get away from any notion of masculinity as something toxic

You can find out more about Dan’s work and to sign up for Men and Mountains at:

https://www.better-men.uk/

Have you ever been really into your relationship and feeling really connected to your partner, even picturing a happy life together but then found a problem… that your partner isn’t at the same level of connection or commitment that you are at, and that they are potentially envisaging something quite different?

How do you bridge that gap and get onto the same page again?

Today we’re going to be looking at how we bond together, and specifically how men and women bond differently.

- Why our bonding style is so important when figuring out what may not be working in our relationship, and where they come from.

- How a lack of commitment and long term goals can be a symptom of underlying attachment issues.

- The secrets to recognizing our own attachment style and the types of issues that we might continue to experience in our relationship.

- How to tell whether you have attachment issues in your relationship and what to do about it.

- How our upbringing can feed into our attachment styles, and impact on relationships much later in life.

- The role of oxytocin and vasopressin in our neuro-chemistry and why men and women bond differently!

- How to avoid the conflicts that can arise from our different communication styles and solution-focus!

- You can find out more about what Adam does through his website:

https://adamlanesmith.com/

We’ll see you next time!

Susan Douglas works with conscientious, caring professionals, who are great at what they do, but who are emotionally exhausted and struggling to focus on what they need to achieve. She is dedicated to empowering sensitive professionals, helping you set yourself up for success, so you can deliver on what is important to you. Today I have the pleasure of introducing her to our podcast and we are going to focus on creating more flow in your work-life and in your relationships.

If either partner is struggling individually, it always tends to affect the relationship… as our coping mechanisms under stress tend to have side-effects.

So how do you get yourself into a good place where you don’t NEED those coping mechanisms… but instead you feel positive and filled up?

Are there any knock-on effects of our lives of relative comfort… and what can we do to mitigate those?

Were there any positives from a time before things were so comfortable, that may have given us some advantages, and how could we reconnect with those?

Today I’m delighted to be joined by re-wilding expert and founder of Red Phoenix Rewilding Sam Adams, with whom we are going to be exploring this and much more…

We are going to be looking at:

- Avoiding predictability and boredom in longer term relationship by balancing the predictable with the spontaneous, joyful and fun

- What it means to be authentic and how that can change over time

- The impact on relationships of bottling up emotions rather than directly expressing them in a healthy way

- What it means to be really seen in relationship, through authentic expression

- Ways that we can find our courage, to asset our boundaries and make difficult decisions including through difficult relationship decisions

- How we can choose to embrace and express our wildness in a healthy way that leaves us feeling positive and connected to our partner

- Differences in how men and women experience wildness, and the key issues that we each need to consider

- What can we do to reconnect with ourselves through both getting out in the wild, connecting with others, and also getting outside our comfort zone

- The relationship between positive self esteem or self-love and how we are perceived by others including our attractiveness to others

You can find out more about Sam’s work at:

https://www.redphoenixrewilding.com/