Bringing your "A-game" to your relationships (with Annie Lalla)

1. View Relationships as a Dojo

See long-term relationships as a “transformational crucible” or “dojo” to build emotional fitness, measured by your speed of emotional recovery from distress. This perspective fosters growth and resilience by viewing conflicts as opportunities for the relationship to grow stronger.

2. Embrace Conflict for Intimacy

Understand that conflict is essential for forging intimacy and is a “collaboration trying to happen.” Navigate conflicts correctly to create “microscopic tears” in the emotional muscle, allowing the relationship to grow back stronger and deepen mutual understanding.

3. Hire Partner to Carve You

View your partner as a “Michelangelo” hired to “carve away everything that is not you” (defense mechanisms, wound-driven strategies) to emancipate your “masterpiece” self. This reframes feedback as a developmental opportunity, not criticism, leading to personal actualization.

4. Cultivate Selfhood and Othering

Recognize that successful long-term relationships require proficiency in both autonomy (selfhood, knowing your needs) and empathy (othering, attuning to others’ needs). Actively work to develop your underdeveloped skill to achieve relational balance and wholeness.

5. Bring Your A-Game

Treat every romantic interaction, whether dating or in a relationship, as practice to bring your highest self (emotional sophistication, dignity, care). This habituates your best self, myelinating the pathways for optimal relational behavior with your life partner.

6. Identify Your Relational Polarity

Determine if you instinctively empathize more with yourself (“me-centered”) or with others (“we-centered”) by observing how easily you express your needs when out of rapport with your partner. This self-awareness guides your developmental path towards balance.

7. Practice Inner Game Technology

If you tend to be “we-centered,” practice dissociating from others’ requirements by imagining putting their needs “in a nice basket on a shelf in my mind and I close the door.” Then, tune into your own truth to identify your needs and wants without external influence.

8. Prioritize Your Own Needs First

For “codependent empaths,” practice “affirmative action for self-care” by serving your own needs first, as if you’re the first in line at your own shop. This ensures you’re nourished and can sustainably produce value for others without resentment.

9. Be Sole Caretaker of Partner

If you are “me-centered,” practice empathy by imagining you are the sole caretaker of your partner’s wellbeing, responsible for tracking their needs and wants. This trains you to attune to others, which is often the missing link for successful relationships.

10. Elevate Self-Esteem via Opposite Skill

Increase your self-esteem by cultivating your underdeveloped relational skill (either self-assertion or empathy). This widens your “window of tolerance,” allowing you to cope with a broader range of experiences and attract healthier relationships.

11. Make Decisions for Relationship

When making decisions, consider three votes: what you want, what your partner wants, and “what would serve and nourish the relationship” as a higher-order emergent entity. Prioritizing the relationship’s health often leads to an upgrade for both individuals.

12. Recognize Relationship’s Breathing Pattern

Understand that a relationship, as a living entity, needs to “breathe in and out equal amounts” of communion (connection) and separateness (autonomy/individuation) to sustain itself. Conflict often arises from an imbalance in this breathing pattern.

13. Risk Current State for Growth

Be willing to risk the current state of your relationship to achieve the next level of growth. As you move towards the “center” of selfhood and othering, the relationship may “molt” or transform, potentially collapsing old structures to build new ones.

14. Evaluate Requests for Self-Admiration

When considering a partner’s request, ask yourself if doing it would make you “fall more in love with myself, my life and the world” or make you “a more extraordinary version to myself.” If the answer is yes, it’s likely a developmental opportunity.

15. Reframe Abuse as Collaboration

For those in abusive relationships, understand that “abuse or toxic behavior is always a collab” where you’ve “trained your partners how to treat us.” Taking ownership of your role in tolerating the behavior empowers you to desist from the dance and regain agency.

16. Integrate Trauma for Growth

View past traumas as a “curriculum to transcend” and an “edification educational platform for your greatness.” Actively work to integrate and assimilate these experiences to transform them into sources of strength and skill.

17. Lead Yourself Out of Victimhood

If you feel like a victim, actively seek ways to “wrestle your power back” and stand fiercely for yourself. This involves taking ownership of your agency and identifying with actions that build self-esteem, rather than remaining disempowered.

18. Use ‘Extraordinary Woman’ Heuristic

When unsure how to act, ask yourself, “What would the most extraordinary woman in the world do? The most emotionally brave woman?” and then act accordingly. This heuristic helps you align with your highest self and make courageous choices.

19. Translate Complaints into MLK Invitations

Instead of giving “WTF” (What The Fuck) feedback laced with shame and blame, “alchemize it into an inspirational invitation” (MLK - Martin Luther King) to your partner’s greatness. Frame your request by aligning it with their values and showing how it serves their internal sense of self.

20. Give Feedback While Preserving Dignity

When giving feedback, especially in sensitive situations, ensure you do so in a way that allows the other person to “retain their self-esteem and dignity.” This enables them to sit with their “endogenous conscience” and make internal changes, rather than collapsing in shame.

21. Feel Your Own Pain to Inspire Change

To effectively communicate your hurt and inspire change in others, you must first “be with your pain” yourself, rather than using blame and shame to avoid it. Standing in your pain with “open kimono” courage is what truly inspires others to “wake the fuck up.”

22. Research Partner’s ‘Keywords’

Learn your partner’s specific “keywords” or values that motivate them most (e.g., respect, safety, contribution) and use these in your “marketing campaign” when asking for behavior change. This tailored approach increases the likelihood of them “buying in” and acting.

23. Practice Real-Time Self-Care

Understand that true “self-care is not bubble bath” but rather “attuning to your nervous system in real time and trusting that data as the most important data in the universe.” Prioritize this internal attunement to shepherd your own wellbeing.