If You Want A Happy Relationship, You Need To Treat It Like Your Bank Account

by Lewis Humphries

While the formative years of a relationship are usually incredibly positive, it is hard to imagine any changes later on. As feelings change and relationships grow to take on greater responsibilities, it is easy to become mired in a cycle of negativity that overwhelms any feelings of passion and love that remain.

We have all experienced this. Initial feelings of passion and excitement slowly give way to sadness, apathy, and, in some instances, resentment. These feelings can create a relationship with more negative interactions than positive ones, which exacerbates the existing issues further and places an intolerable strain on each individual involved.

Why You Should Imagine Your Relationship as Though It Is a Bank Account

In order to understand this further, let’s consider another scenario where it is possible for negative transactions to outnumber positive ones. If you have a bank account, for example, you may have experienced periods where your outgoings and monthly payments are greater than your earnings during the same period. As you will know, such a scenario will leave you in the red, either trapped in a predetermined overdraft or indebted to the lender.

This type of situation cannot continue indefinitely either, as a continued excess of negative transactions will eventually force you to foreclose on the account.

In order to avoid this, you must adopt a proactive approach to resolving the issue, while taking practical steps to build the number of positive transactions in the account and restoring a healthy balance. This requires courage and understanding, while it also encourages you to constantly work on your financial management and seek out creative methods of maintaining a positive balance.

The Golden Ratio: 5 Times More Positive Interactions Than Negative Ones

This is a principle that can be applied directly to your relationship, as research conducted by Dr. John Gottman underlines. His theory is based on the basic principle that the existence of ongoing and unresolvable issues within a relationship is perfectly normal and healthy, and that the key is to balance this with positive interactions.

According to Gottman, the golden ratio for a healthy relationship is to experience at least five times more positive interactions than negative ones, as this creates a balance that can sustain a union even through testing times.

This is often referred to as a “relationship bank account”, where an excess of negative interactions and withdrawals (or conflicts) quickly drains any credit that exists and edges the union close to zero or the precipice of a break-up. If you are able to establish a healthier balance and the type of ratio referenced above, however, you can build the credit and level of sentiment within the relationship, creating a safety net that minimizes the impact of arguments and ensures that individual issues are kept in perspective.

How to Keep a Positive Balance of Your Relationship Bank Account

While this logic holds true, however, the question that remains is how can couples pursue such a healthy balance? The first step is to recognize the realities of human relationships, which dictate that conflict is inevitable and should be embraced as a key part of adult life. From there, it is easier to manage your relationship while seeking out opportunities to build positive interactions and memories.

When it comes to forging positive interactions, it is crucial that you focus on your relationship and look to seek out shared passions and hobbies. This ensures that you spend quality time with one another, and ensures that you enjoy positive experiences and interactions that can quickly build credit between two individuals.

This requires effort and application on both sides, of course, while there should also be a willingness to set aside specific periods of time for such activity.

By managing your relationship as though it was a bank account and adhering to Dr. John Gottman’s golden ratio, you can create a positive and sustainable relationship that can survive even difficult periods of time. If you do need any more motivation to follow this path and invest time into cultivating such positive interactions, just consider the consequences of allowing negative interactions to build up and the permanent impact that this can have on relationships.

Love this article? Share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter!

What You Can Do To Fill The Missing Gap Between Passion And Success

Do what you love and love what you do, and success will come? Well, we wish.

Reality is not as simple as we want it to be. It takes more than just passion to succeed in anything.

“I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” — Walt Disney

Disney’s words echo with what I’ve recently read – an article written by Stephen Guise that talks about why you don’t need passion to succeed. Instead of needing passion to succeed, he says that you need to care about succeeding in what you want to do.[1]
Passion is just emotion; care is an action.

Wishing hard and wanting something really badly won’t give you anything.

Passion (NOUN) – “strong or barely controllable emotion.”
Care (VERB) – “Feel concern or interest; attach importance to something.”
Passion is a “barely controllable emotion”, and emotions’ not always reliable. Care is different, it implies actions.
In today’s world where people always talk about finding your passion, it still seems vague to many. On the other hand, if you’re asked to find something you care about, it’s easier for you to name it.
You can choose to care anything at any time. When you care about something, you see that thing as really important to you and you’ll do what you can to protect it.
I know some of you may then say, “But Steve Jobs said people with passion can change the world and he really did change the world with his Apple products!”

Steve Jobs is undeniably a passionate entrepreneur, and he’s passionate about making an impact on this world. But he also had his down times when that passionate emotion would fade. What’s left in Steve Jobs when the passion’s not there suddenly? There’s definitely a lot more than passion in him.

Like it ≠ Good at it

There’s a lot of work to do besides being passionate. For example, you can be passionate about painting, but if you don’t have any art sense and painting skills, you can hardly become an expert in painting. To become an expert, you need to be always learning and improving your skills.

The perception that you’ll do it well anyway when you like it is just an illusion.

Let’s say, I like eating and I eat quite a lot; that doesn’t mean I can just become a food guru and know how to analyze the quality of food and write good reviews for restaurants and dishes. To know how to rate foods, I have to learn the basic of what makes up good quality of food. I need to study the nature of different kinds of food like seafood, meat and vegetables etc. and understand the different types of cooking methods. I also have to learn the word usage and tone when writing a review for public to read.

Becoming an expert is one thing, becoming successful is another thing. To succeed, you need a pinch of luck too besides working hard.
What you do gotta be able to connect with what the world needs.

To be successful in anything, you need to get to the overlapped sweet spot of the three aspects: what you care, what you can do and what the world needs (where a bit of luck maybe needed).

Don’t get turned off, luck doesn’t play everything here! When you do enough research to understand what the world needs and try to think about how you can utilize your strengths, you will meet that sweet spot. Making the seem-to-be uncontrollable factor controllable is definitely possible.

Now you understand that merely passion is not enough to lead you to success, what to do next?
Make what you care a Focus Foundation.

After you’ve figured out what you care about most, make that your focus foundation.[2] Being passionate about something can be a kind of motivation to make things easier because it helps you focus on what you want and care about most.

Passion fuels resilience and provides you with the ambition to learn and strive to become more competent at what you do. Most importantly than anything else, it affords you the ability to focus.

When you’re clear about the very thing you want, you know what things are actually distractions that stop you from reaching your goal.
Learn not just what you care about, but what’s around that too.

When you’ve got your focus, try to map out the skills you need to get better at that.

                                 
Steve Jobs loved design so much that he took a calligraphy class just for the fun of it. He believed that the dots would connect in the future, all he did was to follow his heart to learn and let himself exposed to all the related stuff he was interested in.

To kickstart mapping out the skills you need, try to get yourself a skill chart. This is suggested in Jon Westenberg’s framework to keep track of your skills learning progress after finding what you want to do.
It’s easy, you just have to create a table with these columns:
A column that lists the skills you have to learn
A column for Research
A column for Action
A column for Progress

Research and write down the things you need to do in the “Action” column and estimate how far you are from taking up the skill in the “Progress” column.

When you have the learning plan ready, apply that course you need, get yourself the tools required and kickstart learning and practicing.
Aspire to make a difference in the world with your strengths.

When you’ve become really good at what you care about, you can start to think about the connection between your strengths and the world’s needs.

You’re good at something and you need the world to know. The best way to do that is to find out what the world wants and needs most at the moment and connect that with your strengths.

Steve Jobs thought the world needed some different technology to make life easier. Technology used to be so inconvenient, everything was too big to carry around. So he created ipod-nano, ipod touch and ipad.
Success is way to go, but you can start right now.
                              
Passion alone doesn’t guarantee success. But if you’ve already got your passion, that’s good enough to make that your foundation and motivation to keep moving.

Start mapping out the skills you need and take actions. Instead of passively letting your passion wander around, be proactive and do something that will push you forward.