Dreams! When done together can make your life wonderful!

I love “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I use to watch it every December during the Christmas Holidays. The great thing about the film is that it helps you to appreciate what you have as opposed to what you don’t.

The clip below is great theme for our next intimacy level on
sharing our dreams with our partner.

In the last intimacy level #3 we talked about the importance
of being accepted by our partners in order to share our opinions. This
acceptance by our partner helps bridge the gap to this next intimacy level
which is the ability to share our dreams.

According to Matthew Kelly’s Seven Levels of Intimacy,
dreams are the hopes, fantasies, and our deepest desires that we have for our
future. In today’s environment it takes a great degree of vulnerability to be
able to share our dreams with our partners because we often don’t receive the
acknowledgement and support we expect or need in order to work towards
fulfilling them.

To avoid that result, we often don’t reveal our dreams and
try to make a go at it alone. This procedure can diminish your effectiveness as
a couple because you wind up traveling on different paths. You often see this
happen to celebrity couples’ as their own individual dreams take precedent over
their dreams as a couple i.e. Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony or Maria Shriver
and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was at this point, there dreams were going in different directions.

They obviously weren't having dreams about one another.

Acknowledging and accepting your partner’s individual dreams
and creating mutual dreams not only can energize you as a couple, but it can
also be instrumental in achieving the dreams you have envisioned. It will also the
direction your lives may go. This level of intimacy can be very satisfying and
exciting, but your mastery to achieve this level of intimacy won’t be achieved
until you have mastered the other three levels.

So what are the components needed to have mutually shared
dreams.

• Knowing each other’s dreams is crucial. If you
  are working toward one dream and your partner is working toward another, it will
  cause conflict because how they view  the
  direction of their life is different from yours.
• Delayed gratification – understanding this and
  practicing takes a certain discipline and a degree of communication. If you
  have mutually shared dreams, you will have to put some of your own personal
  dreams and aspirations on hold for the good of the relationship. That may mean
  you delay purchasing that car in order to place the money into your house fund,
  or putting off the dream vacation you can’t afford now and save it in order to
  travel after retirement.
• Write your dreams down. There are seven areas in
  which you could dream about: physical, emotional, intellectual, professional,
  financial and adventurous.  After you
  have written them down in a journal, or on the computer, set goals around them
  with a timetable. Preferably one year. Revisit your dreams once a year and
  remind your spouse of the dreams the both of you have envisioned for your
  future.
• If you can plan a getaway to work on this, do it
  today, or set some time over the course of several weeks to get this done.

STRIVERS, get to dreaming and writing! Have a good weekend.

Coach Keith

What I would say to Arnold & Maria (Part 2) – It’s ok to have privacy,but secrets hurt your marriage.

Today Maria’s worst fears were realized. Arnold’s womanizing ways extended far beyond a few groping moments. He actually had inappropriate encounter with a woman who cared for his home which resulted in him fathering a child.

I guess when he uttered his famous phrase from the Terminator “You’re clothes, give them to me,” took on a whole new meaning.

I know as the former governor of California and a movie star, he was prone to keep things private in order to skirt scandal and humiliation with the public, and not have every thought end up on the front page of the LA Times. What is different with the latest scandal is that he deliberately withheld information from his wife in order to protect himself.

Secrets are information that we deliberately withhold in order to allow others to believe something that isn’t true. Maria believed his behavior only extended as far as a little groping on movie sets and an overseas TV show. While we may think that we are keeping secrets in order to benefit other’s i.e. our wife, our children, the State of California. Our motivation is to protect our own I’ll be Backsides.

Over the years of Arnold Schwarzenegger concealing the truth, slowly burned away anything they had left of their relationship. It was clear in his actions in their marriage as I talked about in a previous post. (See 5-11-2011)

So what would I say to Arnold this time:

1. Remove yourself from the public eye and establish what is really important in your life. You have lost your way. Between your love for power and staying in the limelight has gone to both your head (s).
2. Apologize to your children face-to-face. They will be bombarded with many emotions, questions and pain. Don’t leave it up to Maria to do it. In fact, she doesn’t even need to be present to help you talk your way through it.
3. Apologize to the woman who fell under you spell. I am not sure how much contact you had with her, or how much hush money you gave her. It’s clear that she couldn’t live an authentic life.

What I would say to Maria:

1. Nothing really changes from my post from last week. You will still need to move forward and determine what will be the next chapter in your journey.
2. If there is ever a ripple that something isn’t right, it’s probably a wave. Have the courage to explore it, no matter what might be the end result. At least you can say that you followed your intuition.