Personal Empowerment, Developing human potential, Fostering interpersonal relationships

Personal Empowerment

Developing human potential and fostering interpersonal relationships

Why Do Marriages Fail (Part 8)

Loving relationships are based on positive feelings between partners. Expressing approval of your partner conveys such positive feelings. Approval can be divided into instrinsic approval of your partner as they are or approval of what your partner actually does. Intrinsic approval involves situations constraints such as looks, wealth, education and so forth. When given, such intrinsic approval is more of a reflection of your partner’s circumstances and by its very nature has less significance.

Approval of your partner’s actions, however, is more significant as it directly reflects on how you actually view your partner’s behaviour. Here people make two major mistakes. They often misjudge their partner and such misjudgements tend to be negative. The other mistake is corollary of the first wherby they don’t give even partial credit.

People mistakingly believe that only full credit should be given because they expect their partner

to confirm exactly to their standards. This is not withstanding that their standards are often relative and subjective making the concept of peferction very ambigious and by extension very elusive to achieve. The result is that one’s partner, no matter how hard they try, is never given any credit for their actions. They are thus demotivated from even trying at all.

Partial credit not only is more inclined to motivate one’s partner - it is both a more realistic assessment of one’s partner and also of the subjective nature of one’s own perception. To motivate one’s partner and endear oneself to him or her the following guidelines should be used:

Use every opportunity to say thank you to avoid your partner being seen as being taken for granted. Acknowledging what the other party does encourages mutually contributions to building a relationship. Try a simple exercise of doing some of the small things which your partner does to gauge what effort they are really putting into the relationship.
Gloss over misdemeanours and detail praises. Though this may sound imbalanced, especially if misdemeanours are more significant, detailed praises are more likely to motivate a person to continue doing the right thing while making him or her more receptive to listening to any criticism which, as noted, should be kept brief.

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