What is a Relationship Coach?
When you’re struggling in your marriage you just want someone to help you fix it, or fix him or do whatever it is that’s going to help you stop hurting and feeling hopeless.
That’s what relationship coaches do, but most people are more familiar with marriage counseling as the resource for a struggling marriage. So what’s the difference?
Here are 3 secrets that Great Relationship Coaches know that you can use to fix your own relationship:
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1. What does a relationship coach do?
When I was struggling in my marriage and I had my “Eureka!” moment of figuring out that I had the power to make my marriage either playful and passionate or tense and distant, I was both horrified and elated! Horrified that I had been making it tense and distant for so many years, and elated that I now knew what to do to make the future playful and passionate.
The problem was, I couldn’t sustain my new practices at first.
It wasn’t until I started talking to other wives about how to make their marriages shiny again that those new practices started to sink in and become my habits.
Paying it forward to other women had the effect of giving me guardrails on either side of me that kept me safely on the road that I wanted to be on.
I remember thinking I had to clean up my side of the street because that’s what I was asking the women in my tiny support group to do. I felt that frightening but motivating feeling that I was accountable to those women to be accountable in my marriage.
So I stretched a little further and got a little braver and apologized a little more and used a little more duct tape to keep myself from saying things I would regret.
That made a big difference in my success!
In other words, encouraging them to use the Intimacy Skills in their marriages spurred me on to develop the habits that created the sweet marriage I have now.
That’s why paying it forward is one of the pillars of the Connection Framework that we know contributes to lasting success with fixing your marriage.
2. There’s no such thing as working on the relationship.
There’s only two people working on themselves.
Sometimes your husband doesn’t put in the work you wish he would on the relationship, and that’s hurtful because it makes you wonder if he even cares.
Of course he’s equally responsible for making things work in your relationship, but relationship coaching is about what you as a wife can fix.
The best part? He doesn’t even have to be on board.
In fact, it’s powerful and important to stop focusing on what he’s doing so I can focus on what I’m doing.
What am I doing to make myself happy today? Am I focusing on the experience I want to have instead of the experience I don’t want to have?
Am I cleaning up my side of the street, regardless of how messy his side of the street looks?
Those are the million dollar questions that lead to the breakthroughs we hear about all the time where he comes back and apologizes and holds your hand or spontaneously says he loves you.
3. The problems in your marriage are what makes you qualified to be a relationship coach
Relationship Coaches are mere mortal women who have struggled in their marriages and have some valuable experience to share.
Sometimes women come into coach training thinking they are complete frauds because their marriages are still struggling and they’re not sure how it’s ever going to get better, but they want the highest level of support for their marriages that’s available in Relationship Coach Training.
But having a breakdown is part of what makes you qualified to be a relationship coach.
And working through those challenges in Relationship Coach Training is the best way I know of to fix your relationship because you’re immersed in the Intimacy Skills and our unique coaching methodology, which is all about creating emotional safety and a sacred space for another woman.
You don’t need a perfect marriage to be a great relationship coach. What makes you qualified is that you’ve had transformation, and that can start with a big breakdown.
Training to be a coach when it’s still broken down is a great way to set your intentions to becoming a ridiculously happy wife.
The best relationship coaches in the world struggled in their relationships and then they took action to create a better response from their husbands.
That’s what makes them more effective and credible than the most impressive diploma on the wall could ever be.
