Partnership
Is your partnership in trouble? Or is it great and
you want to make it better? Couple coaching can help you have better
relationships. Couple Coaching offers complete models
for pre-marital counseling, marriage and for long-term business
partnerships. You can both check your goals, roles, habits, rules and beliefs.
We can help you solve relationship problems.
Conjoint Therapy & Systemic Coaching
During conjoint therapy and systemic coaching, a coach
assists partners or family members simultaneously. Soulwork systemic
coaching provides a complete methodology of conjoint coaching. This includes contracts that describe relationship
goals and responsibilities. Wishes & Demands
Almost every partner has ideas or wishes that he or she believes would make
things even better. And almost every partner has some demands - non-negotiable requirements
that must be met for the relationship to continue. A wish may be, "I ask that you kiss me before you
go to work"; while a demand might be "Unless you sell
that python
by the end of the month, our partnership is over"! Couple Coaching Agreements
If you are committed to a partnership, you can use
agreements to clarify the quality of your relationship.
This often clarifies strange partnership behavior and unexpected
events, and provides a focus for
effective coaching when a person, a partnership, or a family is in
trouble.
- Define your concepts, expressed and
unexpressed, of your partnership responsibilities
and of the benefits that you
expect to gain from your partnership and from your partner.
- Write what you and your partner expect to give and to
receive in exchange.
Contracts can deal with every aspect of family life:
relationships with friends, achievements, power, sex, leisure time,
money, children, and etc.
- Write a contract based on both of your needs and wishes.
These will include your healthy needs and plausible wishes, as well as
neurotic needs and conflicting wishes. You may find that your attempts to
fulfill your partner's needs assume that your
own wishes will be fulfilled.
Partnership Wishes
Although each of you may know what you want, you may be less
aware of your partner's wishes. You may assume that the other agrees to a
certain point. Then, if some wishes are not fulfilled, the
disappointed partner may react with anger, anxiety, depression or
withdrawal. (This is likely when one partner believes
that he fulfilled his obligations but that the partner did not.)
- Together explore both contracts, and find conflicts
- Resolve those conflicts and integrate their
wishes
While creating an integrated
contract, a relationship coach may help a couple:
- determine what they want from one another
- determine what they offer to another
- test the realism of their fantasies and
expectations
- create partnership
contracts that meet their needs
Case History: David & Susan
I asked them to write their responsibilities and wishes
separately, and not to discuss them until both had finished. If they wished to
read or discuss the contracts after that, fine. If they made any changes or
additions, they should leave the original words and note any changes that they
added later. They seemed delighted with the idea. Some simple suggestions:
- to write their individual contracts
separately
- to read their written responsibilities and wishes to each
other
- to avoid any forms of complaints, criticism, blame or
justification
- to take turns initiating and playing out each other's
wishes
- the initiator would play out his or her own wish
- they later check the written contracts to be
sure that they fulfilled them
Soon, each could use the other's wishes on his or her own
initiative, without childish questions like, "What is in this for me?",
or "Does my partner get more than me?" Instead, the question
evolved to "How happy can we be together?" |
Sanity & Success
It is obvious to our senses that the world is mostly flat, and
that the sun moves over us. The Polish astronomer Nikolaj
Kopernik (Copernicus) overturned that notion - at
great risk to his health. Sanity changed. Galileo, Newton, Einstein ... many people risked
the labels of insane or heretic to change our paradigms of reality.
And these paradigm changes became a source of technological success. Count Korzybski - in his
book Science and Sanity - provided a paradigm for clarity in
communication. Dr Clare Graves provided a hierarchy of human
development. Dr Gregory Bateson gave us a hierarchy of abstraction. Systemic
coaching integrates these into a paradigm of human development. |
