Everyone is looking for their soulmate, their BFF, or a loving relationship with their parents. But, it’s not always easy to get the balance right and unhealthy relationship characteristics can surface without you even realizing it’s happening!
Building healthy relationships is possible when you know what to do to avoid codependency, physical or emotional abuse, or control. Relationships undergo a lot of changes in one lifetime and maintaining closeness and love is hard work especially when one or the other partner is experiencing personal growth and development.
One of the best ways to build and maintain healthy relationships is to hire a transformational life coach. We’re trained to empower our clients to become self-aware, install practical tools and techniques, and understand what constitutes for a solid and stable relationship.
Keep reading to find out how life coaching is the key to building a loving and deep relationship with another person.
7 Ways Life Coaching Helps You to Build Healthy Relationships
1. It Begins With You
If you don’t know who you are let alone show yourself love, respect, and self-care, you can’t expect someone else to demonstrate healthy feelings towards you. Having a strong and healthy relationship begins with you. This means establishing a personal and loving relationship with yourself.
Practicing self-love is the key to growing your sense of worthiness, confidence, and contentment. Understanding your basic needs, your personal core values, and what beliefs keep landing you in poor relationships is essential for cultivating love and respect with another person.
A well-designed and structured life coaching program will help you unpack your belief system, explore your needs, and create your ultimate personal values statement. With these tools in place, you can start to build a healthy relationship with yourself before securing meaningful connections with other people.
2. You Learn How to Install Healthy Boundaries
Meaningful, loving, and caring relationships with partners, friends, family members, and even work colleagues aren’t possible if you don’t have healthy boundaries in place. Unhealthy boundaries result in people abusing your personal space, people-pleasing, control, and codependency.
Whenever I think of healthy boundaries I visualize them as my consensus circle. This is my personal sacred space in which I only allow those close and dear to me inside. These people respect my boundaries, needs, and values. They don’t exert their own expectations on me but rather choose to accept me for who I am.
Healthy boundaries tell other people what you want from a relationship and if they break your rules, there will be consequences. Through life coaching, you’ll learn what are strong boundaries and how to install them to build beautiful relationships.
Read the book written by Anne Katherine, "Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin - How to Recognize and Set Healthy Boundaries" to find out how to define your own consensus circle.
3. You Develop Strong Communication Skills
Having strong communication skills grows and deepens special relationships. You discover how to manage difficult conversations to avoid conflict and have positive outcomes instead. Effective communication involves understanding each party’s needs and meeting them in a healthy way that serves everyone involved.
Having strong communication skills includes:
Understanding psychological projection
Using your intuition
Showing respect, openness, and loving-kindness
Life coaching explores the different aspects of communication skills, helping you to understand what the other person wants and needs. Interacting with a life coach will show you the value of being heard and understood, key aspects for a successful relationship with anyone in your life.
Coaching empowers you to respond rather than react, making for better connections with others close and dear to you. Developing strong communication skills will build healthy relationships in your personal life area as well as in your workplace.
4. Setting Goals Give You the Action Steps to Building Healthy Relationships
Building healthy relationships takes time, effort, and lots of action steps! Setting a goal to improve and grow relationships be it with your romantic partner, family, or friends will help you define what you want when connecting with others.
Goal setting includes essential criteria such as the specifics, timeline, evidence, and milestones. From the goal, you can identify action steps that’ll bring you closer to building the relationship of your dream. A life coach will show you how to write an effective goal that details exactly what you want and need from a relationship.
A structured life coaching program includes time to review your action steps, understand why you didn’t achieve some of them, and how to face any fears that have surfaced. Through working with a life coach, you’ll work on aspects such as emotional and mental issues that could be hampering your relationship goal.
5. Defining Your Personal Core Values
Having your own set of personal core values is akin to having a compass that guides you throughout your life. Your values determine what is most important to you, those feelings that you hold close and dear.
Violating your values is a catastrophe and something you could end up doing if you aren’t in tune with what’s essential to your existence. Defining your personal core values system is an invaluable tool that can help you build closeness, mutual respect, and love with others.
By helping my clients identify their personal core values, I’m equipping them with a guiding tool that’ll help them make the right choice when engaging with people. When you have a strong sense of what your values mean for you, you're able to determine who should be in your life. Those that go against your core values don’t belong in your tribe! It’s that simple.
6. Your Behavior Makes or Breaks a Relationship
Have you noticed how certain actions can destroy a relationship while others cultivate loving and deep connections? Your behavior will determine whether a relationship survives or not and if it’s healthy or unhealthy. But, what causes you to act in a certain way?
Behavior comes from our emotions which are driven by our thoughts or beliefs. A positive, open mindset results in self-motivating behavior that builds constructive experiences. The exact opposite happens when you listen to your negative thoughts.
Not meeting our basic human needs such as certainty (survival), love and connection, significance, and variety can result in poor and destructive behavior. This spills over into our relationships, causing them to become unstable, abusive, and dysfunctional.
A life coach will help you explore your behavior patterns and how to shift them into positive actions so you can build stronger and more meaningful relationships. You’ll discover what needs aren’t being met as well as what limiting beliefs or thoughts are holding you back from having the loving relationship you desire with another special human being.
If you're prone to codependency, read Melodie Beattie's book, "Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself." The title says it all!
7. Your External World Mirrors Your Internal World
Coming back to the beginning, doing the internal work will reflect what your external world should include. Having confidence, self-respect, healthy self-esteem, and worthiness attracts like-minded people into your circle. Removing the “doormat” neon sign on your forehead eliminates abusers, manipulators, and gaslighters from your life!
Life coaching entails going on a journey of self-discovery. What you find may need some radical transformation before you can welcome loving and respectful people into your life. But, once you’ve done the inner work, you can watch your relationships bloom and grow into close and deep connections.
A skilled life coach will guide you through the process of self-awareness and empower you to change thought patterns that have held you back from having meaningful relationships. You’ll learn how to install good habits to grow your confidence and worthiness.
The more internal work you put in, the more your external world reflects what you need and want in a healthy relationship.
Final Thoughts
People who have healthy relationships are happier, more vibrant, and more content with life. They know what they want and how to meet their needs in a healthy way. Close and meaningful connections with other people grow your sense of worth and belonging in a community. You feel less alone.
Life coaching provides you with empowering tools and techniques to help you build deep and loving relationships in all spheres of your life. But, it begins with you and a willingness to explore who you are and what you want from a relationship. Contact me today and let’s talk!