Selecting the Right Professional  Makes All the Difference

Selecting a therapist is a careful process. I train clients, clergy and colleagues on the importance of getting connected with the right therapist for the job. I recommend carefully and prayerfully “shopping around” for the right person. What do you look for? Three things indicate successful counseling:

1. Therapist’s training, background, experience and expertise;
2. Client’s willingness and motivation;
3. The relationship “fit” between client and therapist.

If I’m the right person to work with great. If not, I’m always happy to help your members get connected with other qualified professionals I trust that may serve their needs better.

Know who you’re working with (i.e., “kick the tires”)

You have every right to know as much as possible about the professional you refer to. Browse my site. You can read my professional vita at MarriageEnvy.com/about/vita. Call me and ask me whatever you’d like to know about my background, the approaches, methods and processes used or just about me personally.

READ ALL POSTS ON THIS TOPIC HERE | RETURN TO CLERGY RESOURCE AREA

For my colleagues who desire to go out on their own into private practice, speaking business, etc. I highly recommend this GREAT article: How to Survive Your First Year as a Entrepreneur. Love it. Rings so true to my experience as an entrepreneur (minus the prostitutes). Great advice to anyone venturing into the fantastic world of entrepreneurship.

By the way, you still might fail on that first business. But now it’s too late for you. You’re never going back to the pencil factory. You’re an animal, you hunt in the wild, you dig your sharp teeth into flesh and enjoy it, and at the top of the mountain you roar like a lion and everyone cowers in fear.”

Personally, there’s no going back to the pencil factory for me (i.e., mental health agency or working for someone else in my case). LOVE working for self and CREATING!!! Tough, nerve-wracking, fantastic. If you’ve got the passion and heart to put yourself out there and aren’t too risk-averse I highly recommend this crazy wonderful life.

Entrepreneur, private practice

“Well, Jonathan, that’s easier said than done.” This is a common phrase and objection I hear from people when we talk about creating a GREAT relationship overall and/or specific strategies towards that goal. My response is, “Yep, that’s exactly why most people don’t get it done—lots of talk, little walk. Everyone says they want great relationships with spouse, children and self. However, look around. This is why most people have crap relationships, why most people complain about their children’s poor behavior and why most people don’t learn how to master their emotions. People complain about it being easy to say,  but hard to do.”

Of course, it’s easier said than done—it’s hard work. Period. Anything of great value rarely comes cheap, free or easy. Since when were great results ever easy? When did we start expecting that? Greatness, in any and every field, simply requires hard work.

Greatness Is Hard Won

Too many people buy into the pervasive, and TOTALLY unsubstantiated, myth that real/true/great love should be easy, should “just flow”, etc. Please, please, please, someone show me where this works in any part of life. Why is Google great? Did Google “just happen”? How about Apple? How about Michaelangelo’s David? How about any Super Bowl winner? Olympic gold medalists? The Cathedral of Notre Dame? Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s movements? Please show me where true and lasting greatness was not hard won?

The three areas I help people with (marriage transformation, parent training and self-mastery) all take hard work. Why should that discourage us, though? Shouldn’t we be encouraged knowing that if we work hard to learn and practice, practice, practice the best ways to create a great relationship that we’ll earn our outcomes? So, if we are going to do hard, we might as well learn the best ways to do it so our hard work is well-rewarded.

Hard and Easy or Easy and Hard?

The question then is not whether it’s hard or easy. The question is, where do you want hard and where do you want easy? We know that the convoluted and complicated habits and messes we get stuck in are actually quite easy to continue perpetuating and falling back into. Bad relationship habits are easy to continue. It’s just that the results of these patterns are really hard to live with. The work I require my clients to do is undoubtably hard to do, but boy! the results sure are easy to live with. Success story after success story keep rolling in like these two this week:

Thank you so much for helping me save my marriage! I don’t know what I’d do without my husband! He is so amazing for me in so many ways!”
—A Marriage Transformation client who loathed her husband and was ready to leave him

I can attest a LOT of very hard work went into this outcome. But the hard work is over for them. The easy part of living with what they have created, and earned, continues on and on and on.

[My wife] is amazed. You changed her life today with what you taught us about mastering strong emotions. The change in her in turn changed my life and hopefully her extended family’s lives, too. You definitely do not hide your talents under a bushel. I so appreciate you.”
—A Self-Mastery and Parent Training client

So it’s not whether the work is hard or not. It’s going to be hard. The question is where do you want the hard and where do you want the easy? Easy to keep doing, but hard to live with or hard to do, but easy to live with?

Short term: EASY to continue habits = Long term: HARD to live with

Short term: HARD to change habits = Long term: EASY to live with

Take courage. The work is hard. The results are worth it.

RELATED POST: Hard or Easy?

Commitment, greatness, Hard work

Last night in bed Kara looks at my pathetically hammered headphones (thanks kids!) that I had temporarily fixed with Gorilla Tape (think duct tape on steroids) and commented that she should’ve gotten me some new ones for Christmas. I told her, with a boyish twinkle in my eye she’s familiar with, “Oh, no! Thanks, but I’m glad you didn’t because I have plans for these.” She knows me well enough to know that if anyone can fix something and make something last that I can.

There’s an old pioneer saying I’ve always admired that goes as follows:

Use it up, wear it out,
make it do or do without.”

The modern-day version being:

Reuse. Repurpose. Recycle.”

Thus, this morning in 10 minutes with a few rivets and a saved bracket from a prior project I not only have very sturdy and highly functional headphones (saved from the landfill, and money saved in my pocket) I also have a simple and enjoyable, “Cool! Look what I did!” sense of pride.

Then there’s Kara. No one can find a deal like Kara. She is one of the most well-dressed (read: smokin’ hot!) people I know. She stays fashionable and current. Always lovely. She wears nice clothes of fine quality. She can walk out of pricey Banana Republic with a an excited gleam in her own eye for some ridiculously awesome deal she found: She wears $300 outfits for which she’s paid $30. How does she do this? She has a careful eye for great fashion, high quality and awesome deals combined with the patience and contentment to wait for just the right moment to pounce. “Instant gratification” is not in her vocabulary. “Wisdom,” “ingenuity” and “cleverness” are though.

Speaking of which, she is one of the most contented people I know. She’s said many times, “I can have it all, just not all at once.” This is good, because for most of our marriage it was tiiiight financially.

To further illustrate her resourcefulness, one of our grad school friends, who were also as dirt poor as we were, had near-to-nothing left in their cupboard. She asked Kara to come over to help her figure out dinner because, “Kara can make something out of nothing!” It’s true. No matter how poor we’ve been we’ve always eaten extremely well.

As a team, we’ve taken pride in our ability to figure things out. In our house, you frequently hear the above quotes above along with the following:

Make the best with what you’ve got.”

The fine art of ‘making do’.”

and

Necessity is the mother of invention.”

For us, individually and as a couple, frugality, contentment and creativity have done a lot to strengthen not only our characters but also our marriage.

In the age of excess we live in there is still (fortunately) plenty of room for, and plenty need of, frugality.

Q: What correlates do you see in this frugal/resourceful principle in regards to your relationships with partner and children? (Give your answer by clicking the quote bubble at the top of this post).

Contentment, mindfulness, Peace

As a marriage and family therapist, sex therapy is a common part of my practice. Often, people (men) worry that they aren’t having as much sex as they used to when they were first married and that must mean there is something wrong with their marriage. This often leads to conflict in the marriage. The drop-off in frequency is a normal (and believe it or not it’s not even bad) change in the normal development of a marriage. However, in our over-sexed (yet under accurately sexually educated) society anything less than lots of mind-blowing sex all the time = “there must be something wrong.” Anyway, while there’s a lot more to this issue, here’s one very interesting finding about testosterone in Dads and why the dip in testosterone is not only NOT a bad thing it’s actually quite a good thing: Dads Have Less Testosterone

I think it’s nice to know that men ARE built to also nurture and not just be aggressive. There are many examples of this in other more “primitive” cultures. I believe clearly that many “advanced” cultures have clearly got it wrong where we teach men to be be mostly in tune with aggressive/tough emotions while teaching us to be strangers to our more nurturing/sensitive ones. Both have their place and value. Again, balance vs. extremes.

Your thoughts?

Fathers, intimacy, sex, testosterone

Been bopping around Disneyland the past few days with the fam. Disneyland in my opinion is Customer Sevice Mecca. If you care about customer service like I do (as a relationship strategist I teach and coach on it in the corporate world as well as teaching the customer service mindset as a core relationship strategy in marriage and family work) then Disney not only practices what they preach, they eat, breathe, walk and talk it. They even have a musical number centered around the concept:

Watch “Be Our Guest” from the movie Beauty and the Beast.

“Be our guest, be our guest!
Put our service to the test.”

I was. And I did.

And once again I was wowed! And once again reminded about how to do relationships, any relationship, right.

Watch the vid. This is how they approach it. The amazing amount of people pressing in on these people is astounding. Yet they remain energetic, enthusiastic, talkative, engaging and persistently patient and pleasant. Even when dealing with moronic or obstinate customers they treat them with kindness and respect (i.e., the classic “When’s the 3:00 o’clock parade?” question).

Just as in the above clip, they like to not only give great customer service, they also like to show it off and have fun doing it. They like to make a big deal out of great customer service. And what do people do? They, like me, talk about it. And we want more. And we come back for more. Again, and again, and again. Sounds just like what most marriages need (especially with such crappy stats)…

Q: So how do you apply, or think could be applied, “Be Our Guest” customer service in marriage and family relationships?

Customer Service, GR, The GREAT Relationship

Instead of “goodbye” I often say to my clients as they leave, “You be good to you.” We tend to be so hard on ourselves, and while we can remember to be good to others we forget to be compassionate to our own selves. It’s so simple, but we create a needless double standard where it’s right to be understanding of others but okay to be harsh on ourselves. Beating oneself up is not noble. No one was ever motivated into long-term healthy change through verbal abuse. It doesn’t work with changing self either.

Compassion isn’t just about being nice. It’s simply the single most powerful, intelligent and logical approach to change there is. So knock off the stupid double standard and just be good to you whether you feel like it or not. Okay? Okay.

“Be Good to Yourself” by Journey is a great pick me up song related to this concept.

Compassion, self-esteem, self-worth

I always knew I had a great job. I’m happy to know that Marriage and Family Therapist made US News’ 50 Best Careers of 2011.

The author, Henry Clay Webster, wrote:

“As one of the 50 Best Careers of 2011, this should have strong growth over the next decade…. While some counselors focus on the behavior of an individual, marriage and family therapists go a step further, addressing mental-health issues within the context of the family. By counseling couples, families, or individuals, marriage and family therapists tackle a host of problems: adult schizophrenia, substance abuse, anorexia, and marital conflict. Today, marriage and family therapy is considered a “core” mental-health profession, alongside social work, psychiatric nursing, psychology, and psychiatry. More than 1.8 million people are now receiving treatment from a marriage and family therapist.”

[Read the full article here for more info on the field, pros/cons, average incomes (be sure to read the comments for some info on higher incomes, too), etc.

I remember when I started to realize that others aren’t the expert in my life. That I had something unique and powerful to contribute. That I could “let my light so shine.” It’s very empowering. It’s very true. It’s also very YOU.

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

“That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

“Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
—Steve Jobs

empowerment, influence, life, ownership, steve jobs, YOU

I am personally and professionally recommending this vid and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ExecutionOfTheCheater.

 

For years I have said that relationships will no longer tolerate sloppiness nor carelessness. Cheating is short-lived enjoyment that destroys too much. It’s like burning down a cathedral just to fry an egg. It’s time to “execute cheating” and put an end to cheating. I know we can’t eradicate cheating from the world, but YOU can choose. It’s time to take a stand and PLEDGE TO HONOR YOUR RELATIONSHIP. Honor used to mean something. It still can. Be a man of honor. Be a woman of honor. There is glory in honor. Let’s bring honor back. Listen to this song and like this page.

I have made this pledge already day one when I made my covenants with my queen. I honor my pledge to this day.

Peace, J

[Woman's voice: "What is wrong with you?! I gave you everything! I loved you and you broke me. What kind of a man does that?! I'm done. I'm done."]

Chorus:

And they say
Once a cheater always
It’s a shame
Played you like ball game
Who’s to blame
When dirts thrown on the flame
Things may never change
You swear that they are all the same
c-h-e-a-t-e-r
execution of the cheater
The cheater (6x)
Execution of the Cheater

one time for the walk of life
my hustle, struggle, and fight
put in work, earn my stripes
execution of the cheater
one with the gods, name’s Hercules
but I’m just a man, still surfacing
Then I seen this perfect queen
34-26 working jeans
conflict of interest, work with me
execution of the cheater
lemme air it out,
wife at home that I care about
a lil bit of lust in the air right now
lil bit of trust, can’t compare right now
lil bit of us, let’s tear it down
lil bit of luck, that she won’t find out
that she won’t find out
execution of the cheater
trust but verify
This is scary I
killed love by initiation
let’s be real it was imitation
and to think it was just us 3
and to think that you trust trust me
once upon a time but not long ago
I understand that u gotta go
You did your best like the honor roll
And I flunked it n I dropped out
And to say that I’m sorry is a cop out
Put the metal to my head and just rocked out

Chorus

[Woman's voice: "(?) I' can't believe you'd do this. How could you?"]

now it’s a face off
no tellin what the case costs
America! was it all a dream
I mean what is a king without a queen
Let’s see, what that look like dude
United as one, divided by who
Sprinkle on lust then it’s 2 times one
You left she left, I am the sum
I’m pleading my case like that ain’t my gun
Like that ain’t my gun
But it is my gun
Execution of the cheater
Cheating is in season
The latest fashion
If Love is war
Salute to those who made it past it
Blinded by passions
No excuses
Attachment issues
I be on my eat cake too ish
but karma’s knockin
Mark of the beast
Ain’t nothing like a woman’s scorn until she cheats
I’m still young but it gets old
What a f—ed up rough tough tattered soul
KIA, doesn’t matter though
Truth be told, shame on me
Execution of the cheater
And the aims on me

Chorus

[Woman's voice: "...(?)... I' can't believe this sh--! (?) You vowed...(?) I gave you seven years of my f---ing life... I can't believe...(?) You could've at least come home and talked to me and been a f---ing man instead of running around with a...(?) female. I'm done."]

See the background of the Execution of the Cheater song as explained by the singer, Seven2Life. Way to put himself out there, own his past and make a better life based in honor. I salute him.

affair, affair recovery, Cordan Haveron, execution of the cheater, faithfulness, infidelity, seven2life