LESSON 3
THE SECRET TO ALL RELATIONSHIPS

RELATIONSHIPS

Humans are often very confused about how relationships work. We’re under the impression that we have to control the world (and everyone in it) to feel good. We have so many rules for our relationships that we’ve stopped experiencing them and are locked into our expectations of how these relationships should be.

Relationships are thoughts.

You are never in a relationship with a person or a thing, you are only ever in a relationship with your thoughts about a person or a thing.

Your relationship with anyone, including the one that they have with yourself, and the relationship they have with other people, your past, and your money are dependent on the thoughts you choose to think.

THE MANUAL

A manual is a “book” of rules and expectations of what we think should happen in a relationship. This manual is often unspoken and acts as a barrier in creating loving relationships.

Knowing that we have manuals, and dropping these manuals, is the best first step in any relationship where you might be having friction.

You likely have manuals for yourself, other people, and your past.

The list below is of some common expectations you may have and ask them what other expectations they have.

? I should be better at this
? This technology shouldn’t be so difficult
? I shouldn’t fail
? I shouldn’t be so scared all the time
? I should be further along than I am
? She should call me back when I call her
? She should listen to me for as long as I listen to her
? She should tell me she loves me
? My job should provide money for me
? I should be more successful
? That shouldn’t have happened to me when I was a kid
? Life should be easy
? Life should be simple
? Life should not require discomfort

These examples are simple and brief, but the truth is that most manuals are pages and pages thick. They are complicated, intricate, and detailed.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

I cannot begin to tell you how important and transformational the concept of unconditional love can be.

Most people think that unconditional love requires sacrifice and should only be expected of saints, but I teach my students that unconditional love is a gift to give themselves, other people, their past, and their money.

Unconditional love is for YOU and it makes your life easier, not harder.

Love feels good. If given a choice, most of us would choose to feel love toward someone over any other emotion, yet most of us don’t consciously choose to feel love. Instead, we choose to feel disappointment, anger, or frustration. We have expectations of people and ourselves and when they or we don’t meet those expectations, we use that as an excuse to feel bad. This makes no sense. We create rules that set us up to feel negative emotion instead of feeling something wonderful.

Every time you dislike someone or something, you are choosing to feel dislike. Dislike doesn’t feel good. It’s not a wise choice—it’s a painful choice—but we pretend it isn’t a choice at all. We act as though we don’t have any control over how we feel toward someone else and that their actions control how we feel. This isn’t how life works. Ever.

Remember, your thoughts about others’ actions will determine how you feel, and when you choose negative thoughts, you will then feel negative emotions. You can feel good whenever you want because love is an emotion you choose for yourself.

YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOURSELF

Having an amazing relationship with yourself is simply a commitment to thinking awesome thoughts about yourself. I am fully aware and acknowledge that it sounds easy and is very hard for most people. The reason is because our brains are designed to look for the bad and to judge. The brain is a problem-solving machine. When we turn our brains on ourselves, our brain find problems that don’t exist! We spend so much brain energy judging ourselves that we often have very little energy left to love ourselves on purpose.

I want you to start thinking about yourself as two people, or ‘roles’. There is your true self, the fullest version of you, the best version of you, your Alpha State – this is “the boss”. Then, there is the brain, the thoughts and beliefs systems, the programs, the conditioning, the Beta Condition – this is “the employee, or technician”. As the boss, you are responsible for the vision of your ‘business’ (life) and the overall success or failure of the ‘company’ long term. You also know that the value and success of your business depends solely on your employees, or technicians.

As the boss, you employ the technician. As the technician, you are responsible for the technical side of their business (which is operating the thoughts that create the desired result for the boss, or company). This is what your brain does; it thinks thoughts.

When you don’t have a relationships with yourself, it’s like the employees are all running around the company screaming, “WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO?!” and there is no boss to give them direction. Technicians don’t have vision, they just operate the last program they were given – which for most of us came from childhood and all the lessons we learned from our parents and teachers and adults around us. Without a boss running the company, we are all child employees running around being unproductive and, sometime, sabotaging the company unintentionally.

I want you to step into the roll of the boss – your Alpha State. What expectations do you have for your technician (“the employee”)?

ASK YOURSELF:
? What are some thoughts you think about yourself as the boss?
? What kind of relationship are these thoughts creating?
? What is the impact of these thoughts on your relationship with others and with your past?
? What are the expectations and job description of the boss in your ‘business’ from the perspective of the technician?
? What are the roles, expectations, and job description of the technician in your ‘business’ from the perspective of the boss?

YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER PEOPLE

I want you to remember that other people are a circumstance. They, like your past and everything in the present (like money, as you’ll see below), is neutral. Other people are good and bad, likable and dislikable, capable of the most horrible atrocities and the greatest levels of compassion. The full range of behavior is within each human being. Human’s are capable of anything, literally anything they can think of. Volition allows for an infinite possibility of action from any human at any time.

What we choose to see in people is the relationships we form with them. The more we get ‘to know’ someone, the more we add to the story we tell ourselves about who we think they are. We look for evidence to support the story we tell ourselves about them and when something ‘goes wrong’ in the relationships, it’s when they behave in a way that is different than the story we tell ourselves about who they are.

I want you guys to really understand this Alpha Tenet:

We are never in a relationship with a person or a thing, we are only ever in a relationship with our thoughts about a person or a thing.

Every relationship you have with another person is based on a trifecta of cognition; the thoughts you have about yourself in the relationship, the thoughts you have about the other person in the relationship, and the thoughts you have about the relationship itself. Period. Full stop.

It’s true – the other person has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE RELATIONSHIP YOU HAVE WITH THEM. You NEVER have to change or fix another person to change the relationship you have with them. You couldn’t do that even if you wanted to (which is why trying to control, fix, or change other people creates so much conflict)! The best news is that you DO HAVE 100% control over what you CAN DO to change the relationship you have with them.

Review the sections on The Manual and Unconditional Love.

Reflect on whether you’re showing up with love for other people or not. When you create Unconditional Love for yourself, the more you express that love for other people, the more you’ll show up as more of who you are, and the more value you will create.

Creating amazing relationships starts with deep connection and love for other people.

ASK YOURSELF:
? What do you think about other people?
? In what ways do you want your other people to be different?
? How do you want to show up around other people?
? What difference do you think it will make to show up in this way?
? How would you describe a difficult person? What do they do or not do?
? What if that behavior didn’t get labeled as a ‘difficult person’, in what simply neutral behavior/action? How would this change how you show up?

YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PAST

The relationship you have with your past is just like any other relationship you have in life. It is the relationship you have with your thoughts about your past. Nothing that happened in the past is affecting you RIGHT NOW. What is affecting you RIGHT NOW is the way you’re thinking about your past RIGHT NOW.

There are no old thoughts. What you choose to think about in the moment is what creates the feelings in the moment. It is not your past that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW, or what you were thinking at that time in the past that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW. It is what your thinking RIGHT NOW that is creating how you feel RIGHT NOW.

Have I said ‘RIGHT NOW’ enough yet?

Look, your past no longer exists. It is as extinct as the dinosaurs. In some ways, it never existed, like the unicorn. The only place your past remains is in your memory – in YOUR brain for YOU TO CHOOSE how you want to think about it.

Do you want to choose thought that build you strong or break you down?

Imagine your past as a person.

How do you speak about your past? What do you expect your past to have been like? What is your manual for your past?

Love grows as you accept your past as it is, allow it to have a balance of highs and lows, and believe in its perfection for bringing you to this moment – the present. This is what we want to do for ourselves, for other people, and for our future. Love unconditionally just because it feels good to love. The more you love your past and yourself, the more you will succeed.

ASK YOURSELF:
? How do you think your past should be different?
? What are the conditions you have placed on loving your past?
? What would be different if you loved your past unconditionally?
? What would you be thinking, feeling, and doing differently?
? What is your past trying to tell you?
? What is the thought that you currently have about your past that is most holding you back?
? What new thought are you going to practice about your past from now on?

YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR MONEY

Money is a…

Circumstance!

You’re not is a relationship with money, you’re in a relationship with your thoughts about money.

The way you think about money is what will determine how much you have. Many of our current money beliefs are learned in school or by accepting our parents’ belief systems. Like with all other beliefs, I want you to see the benefit of exploring and questioning current money belief systems, in order to develop the exact money relationship you want to have on purpose.

If you don’t feel good about money and if you don’t feel like you have as much of it as you would like, you can challenge all your thoughts about it.

Most people believe they’re limited in how they can earn money, and that it’s only earned over time and by effort, but the real way you create wealth is by creating value.

If you believe that money comes from time and effort, you’re going to be sitting there with your hand out, waiting to get paid. You’ll want to get paid the most you can for the least amount of time and effort, but that will backfire. People who over-deliver always get it back ten times over, not only in their self esteem and in their self confidence, but in their willingness to receive. When you’ve given such quality to the world, you’re open to receiving all the gifts, and all the abundance the world has to offer. When you’re constantly living from a place of scarcity, trying to get paid for every single thing you do, you stop creating value. You’re just doing your time and getting your paycheck, and you’re never going to blow your own mind in terms of money—ever.

Money is actually very easy when you clean up your beliefs about it. When you allow yourself to imagine breaking out of the time and effort money prison, you’ll open yourself up to so much more possibility. Most of us think we get paid for our time, which has a limit, and think there’s a maximum amount we can make based on our education.

ASK YOURSELF:
? What do you believe about money?
? Why do you have the amount of money you have right now?
? What are your thoughts about making more money?
? What is the maximum amount that you believe you can make? Why?
? Is it based on your thoughts about your time? Your education?

Listen to the way your think about money. Notice if you have any thoughts like the one’s below. Notice how your thoughts create your current relationship with money.

? I don’t have enough time to make money.
? Money is hard.
? Money is scarce.
? People don’t want to pay me for what I have to offer.
? I’m never going to have enough money.
? I don’t have the right education.
? I don’t know how to create value.
? I don’t know how to make money.

Now that you have a better idea on your money beliefs, ASK YOURSELF:
? Are these the thoughts you want to be having on purpose?
? What do you want your thoughts to be?

WORKSHEETS

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