Why You Should Train Your Love Muscles Like An Olympian

I invite you to use these five keys as a personal checklist

• Passion: Chances are you have passion — Check! Most people long for the love that songs and poems are written about. Longing is passion. If you're motivated to read these words you have passion.
• Visionary goal: Some people direct that passion towards a tangible vision — a goal. This is where others fall short. What do you want from your relationship(s)? Do you want a long-term commitment? A weekend playmate? Are you looking for someone to validate you and fix your low self-esteem? Or someone to have children with or change the world?

Knowing what you want in relationships is an essential key to becoming well-informed and skilled to make it happen. So many of the things people seek outside themselves in relationships they need to find within (like improved self-esteem). Their relationships fail the same way an athlete won't win a gold running through the aisle of the grocery store.

It's interesting to note that relationships where the partners are working together towards a common goal that matters to both of them—whether child rearing, running a business or a non-profit that has a mission to make the world a better place—are more likely to stay together. When there is a goal to work toward that is bigger than the relationship, the relationship becomes bigger to meet it.

• Informed action: Speed dating won't do you any good if you don't know what you want. Volume does not imply productivity. Likewise, you cannot expect to create fulfillment in relationships by lying on your couch all day long. Action is required to manifest what you want, but it has to be well-informed action based on your goal.
• Training, practice, coaching: The emWave and Inner Balance App technology devices are one way to train, and we also have people trained in these skills to coach you toward your relationship gold. You can sign up for a free sample of that coaching by clicking here.
• Learn from mistakes: My friend and client Bonnie St. John, who was the first African American woman to win an Olympic downhill skiing medal, actually fell on a patch of ice during her pivotal race.

She described to me how at the point of her fall, with international television cameras pointing at her, she just wanted to crawl into the snow bank and hide (how many of us feel that way after a bad break-up?). She felt like giving up, but in her own words "my training and reflexes took over and I grabbed my equipment and finished the race." 

At the end of her run, she found out that all of the skiers she was competing against fell in the same spot. The only thing that separated her silver win from the one who took home the gold that day is that the gold medal winner got up faster. 

There is a quote from Bonnie on a Starbucks cup that says it all: "When You Fall Down, Get up". If you need coaching to get back in the relationship game after a fall, take us up on it here.

The Olympics is a short-lived high, even for the athletes who win. Love, on the other hand, is an event we never grow too old to grow in. It's never too late to love like an Olympian, and we have lifelong opportunities to best our own score. Click here to sign up for free coaching and learn more!