You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 111.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Hi, my strong friends. Hey, relationship struggles can completely derail your business life, your professional life, and even your personal life. And looking from the other side, your struggles in business, professional life, or anything in life can derail your relationship. So what do you do?

 

Your relationship is important to you right? Now, when I talk relationship, I'm talking about any other human in your life that you have a relationship with. This can be your partner, a friend, a parent, a child, a teammate, a boss, an employee. Maybe a business partner, or even a customer.

 

I have a variety of clients I work with. Some are getting their businesses up and running. Some have some work stress that they're dealing with, that they're trying to smooth out so they could actually enjoy their life. And others are going through some kind of a transition point in their life.

 

It's amazing to me, how no matter what reason one has come to me for help that as we go along, relationship stuff always comes up. It could be something that's happening right now. Or it might be a relationship from the past that you can still hear echoes of now and it's impacting the rest of their life.

 

I thought that I would share with you that the steps can also be used for relationships. For all relationships. The clarity steps process for anyone that is not familiar with this, this is my seven-step process that I use with all of my clients to help them achieve any goal. It's a really great foundation to have because it rewires your brain on how you approach just about anything in your life.

 

So even my business clients, as we're working on their business, we're doing clarity steps, plus other tools so that they get that full complete package. But if relationship stuff pops up and it's something that is significant, derailing them or changing the quality of their life, then we may switch and start another clarity steps workbook just on the relationship. It's whatever is most important to my client at that time. And right now I have several clients, both existing and new that were having some relationship challenges.

 

So I thought, what better gift could I offer, but to do a whole episode on how the clarity steps can help you in your relationship.

 

See, when I was a coach in biotech, I had to coach hundreds of people. There were a thousand people at the site. So you can only imagine how many relationships were there. How many relationship dynamic challenges existed. Using the clarity steps, even on them, either one on one or in a team environment, it helped them to a lot of that conflict and be able to get along with each other and be able to be productive.

 

For some of my clients when I was there, they were not being very productive employees because they had some kind of relationship struggle in their personal life. Unbeknownst to other people, oftentimes I would coach them through that privately so that they could get some relief. They could improve their relationship and get to like a state of harmony. Then they became more productive employees. It was good for everybody.

 

I've also had to do this in my own personal life. As you know, I have a family of seven. Now, many of them have gone on as adults and going off into college, but we still have some that come around and some that still live at home.

 

And then of course, there's the relationship between me and my husband. We've been together for 10 years. You know, that there's been challenges in 10 years, every relationship has them. So using the clarity steps really helped us through some of our hardest times.

 

The Seven Clarity Steps

 

Let me go over first, the seven steps of the clarity step system, so that you have an overview and then we'll do a deep dive into each one and how you apply that to a relationship. So the seven steps of the clarity step process.

 

Step One: Creating Your Vision.

This is where you're going to leverage the law of attraction to get very intentional about what you do want.

 

Step Two: Metrics.

Come up with metrics, some way of measuring your progress of where you are now to where you want to be. It lines up well with your vision.

 

Step Three: The Steps Between You and Actually Achieving Your Vision.

Because you can't boil the whole ocean all in one day, you need to break it up into bite-sized chunks.

 

Step Four: Documenting All of the Obstacles That Get in the Way.

This is a big one, especially in relationships, documenting all of your obstacles, all of the things that are getting in the way between where you are now and where you wanna be.

 

Step Five: The Experiments That you do to Resolve the Obstacles.

Designing experiments to go with those obstacles so that you can resolve the obstacles.

 

Step Six: The Lessons Learned From Each of Those Experiments.

Step number six is doing the lessons learned on those experiments because oftentimes it takes more than one experiment to find the final solution for any obstacle.

 

Step Seven: Your Wins.

And then step number seven is celebrating the wins. And this is not just the win at the very end when everything meets your vision, it's celebrating your wins all along the way.

 

Okay? So those are the seven steps. Let's get specifically into each one of those.

 

Step One: Creating Your Vision

 

The very first one is creating a vision. When you have a relationship with someone else, you wanna create a vision that you both want. Now you can have components in it that are very specific to you. Some that are very specific to them, but you need to have it be a unified vision for what you both want.

 

What I also recommend is having at least one summarizing sentence, because it's going to be something that you use with each other all of the time to form that alignment. That this is what you're both after, and that's why you're willing to go through the clarity steps together so that you can have this relationship.

 

For example, in a personal relationship, your one-sentence might be, I wanna spend the rest of my life with you and enjoy our time together. That simple. If it's something that you can say together, and you're both on board like this is really what you both want. It's always gonna bring you back together. Even though there's all of the tough stuff that you know that you're gonna be working through it, it's like a commitment that you're making to each other.

 

Now, when you're coming up with your vision, for what you want your relationship to look like, this is where the law of attraction comes in. You wanna be very intentional with your words, talking out what you do want.

 

Now, oftentimes when I start working with my clients, they're telling me everything they don't want. They're saying everything that's not working in their relationship. I don't want this. I don't want that. I want them to do this and that, right?! But that's where we have to slow down a little bit. Like you get to have that venting session, of course, but let's flip it around.

 

What is it that you do want? And we're gonna get really, really specific. If someone says, I wanna be treated with respect, well, let's define what does respect look like? There might be different definitions by multiple people on what respect looks like. A quick mini example of that someone might think being respected is that people offer to help them. And for somebody else, they might think respect means that the other people would recognize that that person is capable of doing things on their own and that they would stop pushing their help on them.

 

You have to get specific as to what are your definitions, what does it look like?

 

When you're coming up with your vision, this could be just words. You could do a vision board with pictures. I like to use the Canva app. It does all sorts of graphic designs. It has all the pictures in it. You can create a vision board there. If your vision includes scheduling, we spend so many days together so much time together, you might even wanna consider using a Google calendar to capture that.

 

I've gone into it and I blocked off time for when I was spending quality time with the people that were most important in my relationships. For another person that you have a personal relationship with, it might be that you wanna do more events together where you can enjoy each other's company, right?

 

It might not be that you wanna spend the rest of your life with them. That might be for someone who is your partner. Somebody else say like a parent or an adult child. You might decide, I want to spend X number of events with this person every year. And I want to enjoy their company while we're together. You can even be specific as to what types of event, right? This is your vision. You get to paint it.

 

If this is for a business partner, it might be that you want to leverage each other's strengths and work autonomously. So you don't have to check in with each other, or it might be that you really enjoy having that collaboration on every activity. You get to define what is it that you actually want with this relationship.

 

Step Two: Metrics

 

Once you have defined your vision, you need to go on to step two. Which is creating some type of a measurement system because you get what you measure.

 

If you're not going back and checking these things, you might just be throwing words out there. And you never know if you've actually made progress because a lot of times we'll do that black and white thinking of either we have it, or we don't.

 

But there's progress along the way. And the clarity steps have you doing lots of experiments. And so it's incremental progress. Having a measuring system is very helpful. It's kind of like when you're going on a cross country trip, you wanna know, am I there yet? Well, if you know how many miles it takes for the whole trip, you know when you're at that halfway point because you're half of those miles.

 

When you look at your vision, what is it, what are some of those measurable things that you would wanna track? Now, you don't have to go crazy and create like hundreds of these pick the first three that are most important to you.

 

And eventually, once you have those ones moving on and meeting their target, then you can start to add in some of the other ones that are maybe not as important, but they're still important.

 

If you were looking at the number of times that you get together, that could be something that you track. You have a target of once we are there at the vision, we'll be spending 12 events together per year. Then you record what your baseline is. How many are you actually doing now? And then over time, you'll see that that starts to add up. You get closer and closer to your target.

 

Now, the enjoying each other's company, that one you might wanna measure in minutes. Have you ever had a relationship where things had gotten so strained, maybe you could do two or three minutes together. And then after that, like one of you gets triggered about something and then neither of you can enjoy your time together?

 

So tracking those minutes it's is helpful because when you can start to identify each other's triggers, then you have something that you can work through because nobody wants to get triggered. You don't wanna get triggered and have uncomfortable emotions. You don't want the other person to get triggered and have uncomfortable emotions. These triggering events are really good. It's like that emotional flare gun that helps you to find what's set trigger so that we can work through it together.

 

How you know, that is by how many minutes you can spend together. You'll set a target of what you want it to be like. Maybe you have someone where the relationship is so strained that being able to spend two hours together and enjoy each other's company, almost seems like an impossible goal. Put that as your target.

 

When you're looking at your vision, you get to pick what your target is. So if it's two hours, then put two hours as how much time we can spend together where we're enjoying each other's company the whole time. Now, I mean really enjoying each other's company, not tolerating each other, not sucking it up, but actually enjoying each other's company. And what is your baseline now? It might just be two minutes. It might be three minutes.

 

I've had this myself. I really could not enjoy their company. They couldn't enjoy company. So we had to use the clarity steps on how can we slowly build up to it and what are some of those experiments so that we could have even more time together. You know, goes on from five minutes to all of a sudden, the next time we'd get together, it'd be 30 minutes that we could enjoy before someone would get triggered. And even it was like, okay, now an hour and a half.

 

Wow. That's some great progress. It might not be at two hours yet, but an hour and a half is significant when compared to where someone starts.

 

You might have something in your vision around equal task responsibility or equal financial responsibility. You could come up with an end measurement on what exactly that looks like. If you know what the tasks are, then you can define I'm doing these tasks, the number of them, the type of them, and that this person is doing these tasks all the time. If it's a financial thing, it's okay.

 

What is the financial contribution of one person? What's the financial contribution of the other? Just so that you have a target, because if it's an unknown... You're just like, well, I just want it to be equal. Okay. Well, what if you don't know what the full number was?

 

How do you know what your part is? You get very intentional on what it is and then what is your baseline? And there's gonna have to be experiments on the way there so that you can both get to those end targets.

 

Step Three: The Steps To Achieve Your Vision

 

Step number three of the clarity step system is coming up with your customized steps. Now, you already know from the get-go of a bunch of the obstacles that you already are facing. So although step four is getting into the nitty-gritty of the different obstacles before you come up with the steps you're gonna wanna do that high level what are the obstacles that we already know about. And write those down. Now, notice I said that we know about. Something I wanna clarify is that you can improve your relationship all on your own because sometimes we don't always have a willing participant that wants to do all of this work together.

 

It really only takes one person. If you really, really want your relationship to work, it's quite possible that you would go through and do all of this. You'd probably be asking them questions and getting their input here and there. But if they don't want to do all of this, that's okay because you're going to be doing the experiments they're involved, whether they realize they're involved or not. And some of this is gonna be your own evolution.

 

There might be things about you that you don't even realize are contributing to the dynamics of your relationship. We're gonna take a look at all aspects. This is not a blaming thing for anybody. This is all just self-exploration and exploration of your relationship of really what's not working. And then what are some of the techniques that we can do? The different tools that we can use to try to resolve that.

 

Even if you're doing this by yourself, it's okay. And any changes that you make to yourself as personal evolution, it's always going to start off their change curve, too. Whether they were planning on doing any evolution at all, it automatically happens. By you changing in their life, it starts off that chain reaction of something else changing the other person. And that they evolve to adapt.

 

Go ahead and write down all of those obstacles that you know, right off the bat, that you can think of obstacles you think they might be having. Hopefully, they are participating, and they're gonna tell you some of the obstacles, write these things down. And you can write 'em down on sticky notes, or you can write it as a line item. If you want to. I personally like the sticky notes because now we're going to categorize them and then form them into those customizable steps for you.

 

So let's say you have 30 post-it notes written down. One obstacle per post-it note. You're gonna look to try to see do any of these fit together. You may have something that is a time component. It Could be that you're not spending enough time together. It could be that you set times to get together and the other person doesn't show up. It could be that you don't have any communication with each other. It could be that the other person is always running late. All of those things are time components. So you could put those together in one category.

 

And then you're going to come up with a sentence for that on what it would look like once all of those obstacles are resolved. So again, within the steps were even going to leverage the law of attraction to get very specific on what would it look like when all of this part is taken care of?

 

For the time part, it could be that we come up with times together, we're on time, we always show up.

 

Don't say something ambiguous, like we always respect each other's time. Get really specific that we schedule time. We schedule events ahead of time. We always show up and we show up on time. That's very specific.

 

You'll continue to do that with all of your post-it notes. Just putting them together into categories and then creating some type of a sentence, a header for each of those, flip it and creating a sentence that is describing what you want this to look like after you've resolved all of these obstacles. Get very specific.

 

Now you're gonna figure out what sequence would you want to put these different categories in? Does it make sense for you to work on one of these things before going on to the next category? Does it make to work through one of these categories first, before going on to the next category? Or would there be some other sequencing?

 

Once you figure that out, you'll put those in order. These are your series of steps that you would work through. And now once you work through your very first step, you'll have resolved any of the obstacles underneath those, any other ones that you guys come up with. And hopefully what you'll see are the metrics that you've come up with, that those will have moved. They would've gotten a lot better. They're getting closer to your target metric.

 

Step Four: Documenting Obstacles

 

Okay? This is where we get into step number four, the obstacles. You had your highest level obstacles that helped you form that step, now is the time where you really get to listen to each other.

 

You're going to ask each other for that one step, what are the obstacles that get in the way for each of you? Now, why I want you to constrain your focus to the one-step is because you'll have less of a triggering event. If you try to tackle everything in your relationship and talk about all of the obstacles, all of a sudden, if you're getting in the nitty-gritty, you might have like a hundred or more obstacles, and both of you are gonna start to feel this despair.

 

There's just no possible way to overcome any of this. But when you can focus on just one part to start with that one first step and to find what are all of the obstacles and hold space for each other, allow each other to describe what it is.

 

Now, one of the things that I like to help you with is to get very specific on the facts. What was the noun and the verb and what was it about it that worked? What is it about it that didn't work? In the very beginning, you might not be totally skilled at this. So when you talk about one obstacle, it could be a five-minute-long dialogue. It could be longer, but then you try to summarize it into a one-sentence type of thing. What was the noun and the verb? What was it that worked? What was it that didn't work?

 

And you're gonna have a couple of different line items. You might even have of 10 or more. Make sure that you're giving each other equal air time. This could be triggering for you because if you haven't learned how to manage your mind, using the mindset model, which I'm gonna teach you, or learning all of the different ways that you can look at things from a process perspective, you might get triggered by what the other person has to say.

 

You may take everything personal and make it mean something about you. And then all of a sudden you're having these defensive feelings or anger or hurt or whatever. In the beginning, that's normal. You don't know all of these skills, I'm gonna teach them to you so that this becomes an easier process as you go along. Because having that objectivity, it's gonna help you so that both of you can talk to each other without triggering each other.

 

But in the very beginning, as you're writing out your separate obstacle list, you may even wanna do this in separate rooms. Allow each other to write down the list and then exchange it. And you might read these lists in your own separate spaces because if you do get triggered, you're gonna want to give yourself room to be able to process your emotions without triggering the other person.

 

This is important because we don't want to shut down the lines of communication. You may even notice that one person comes up with a really long list. And one person comes up with a list that has maybe one or two things. It's usually because the person that has the very shortlist, they've learned the hard way that if they're honest with you and they tell you all of these things that you get upset at them. That's why if you're in separate rooms, they don't have to be subject did to you getting upset with them because we have to learn what the obstacles really are.

 

If we don't put it all out on the table, how will we know what to work through? Eventually you'll get to a place where you can do one obstacle list together, and you may choose to keep this in an electronic format.

 

When I work with people, I use a Google sheet workbook of the clarity steps, where we record everything. I even have one client who is doing this with her family, and they have a whiteboard somewhere in their house and they know what their vision is for their family relationship. And they're starting to write down the obstacles on the whiteboard so that everybody has an opportunity to write it down. They can write it down at any time. It doesn't have to be during like a sit-down meeting or anything. It's just if something comes up, they put it down, they acknowledge it.

 

Something else that will help you so that you don't panic when you look at the obstacle list is to know that you may not have to do a whole lot of work on every single one of these obstacles. At some point, you will prioritize which one of these obstacles is the most important to work on.

 

And you might come up with the list. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of your priorities. There may some things that, yeah, they're an obstacle, but they're like a little pebble of an obstacle when you're walking on a path, as opposed to like a huge giant boulder that prevents you from going forward.

 

You may even wanna consider are some of these deal-breaker obstacles? Are they a must-have a nice to have, or a delighter type of an obstacle? If you came up with those solutions for those is that a must-have, a nice-to-have, or a delighter? And then the deal-breakers. You really wanna know what those ones are because it's possible at some point that you guys realize that that deal-breaker one, it really is a deal-breaker. And it just means that you're relationship isn't a good fit.

 

It doesn't mean that you're a good person or a bad person. It doesn't mean that the other person is a good person or a bad person. It just means that it's not a good fit.

 

Something to think about with obstacles, all obstacles are either a mindset obstacle or a process obstacle. With the mindset obstacles, we'll use the mindset model. That's where you have your circumstance, thoughts, feelings, action, and result.

 

And we'll start to look at what are your thoughts that are creating the feelings that are creating your actions and your actions could be those words that you're saying to each other, and what are the results that you actually want? We'll do work with that.

 

If it is a process thing, then there are multiple process tools that we can use. And some of them are a behavior process, too. But that's in other episodes and in other things that we'll do together. So I won't go into too much detail here. Just know that all obstacles are either a mindset obstacle or a process obstacle.

 

There are different tools for each, depending on what type it is.

 

Step Five: Experiments

 

Once you have prioritized your obstacles for the one-step, remember we're constraining focus so that we can make progress and move forward, you're going to go on to step number five, which is designing your experiment.

 

You know what specific obstacle you're trying to resolve, you're gonna ask yourself and possibly the other person in your relationship, what's the outcome we actually do want? You want that obstacle to go away, of course. But what is that result that you're looking for?

 

And remember to put this in a positive tense, it's not, I don't want this, I don't want that. Because that tends to be human nature for us to all default to talking about what we don't want, switch it around. What do you want? The Law of attraction comes in, again, being intentional with what you do want.

 

Then comes your requirements. This is you asking what is important for you in a solution? And what is important for the other person in a solution? This is where you finally get to voice what your needs are. This one can be kind of tricky. Most people haven't slowed themselves down to really think about what really is their need. Some people haven't voiced their needs. They've had incidents in the past where if they try to speak up about their needs, there might be some negative repercussions.

 

We want to give space in a little bit of time for both of you to talk about what your needs are. It can't be one-sided, there are two people in this relationship. Make sure that everybody's needs are considered.

 

Now once you know what the outcome is that you're looking for and what those needs are now, you're going to design your experiment.

 

Once you've defined your outcome and your requirements, then you're going to design what your experiment is. It's really interesting when you go back and you're looking at what those needs are. It really changes what your experiment is. If you hadn't paused to do that requirement collection, your experiment is gonna be something that's just like right off the hip. You're just gonna go do something and it might not even be relevant to hitting those requirements.

 

So go back, look at it, tie it together. Some of your experiments might require some of the extra tools that I teach to you around mindset or process, or other things that we could get into. Some of them are going to experiment where you're getting out into the real world and doing things together. Or having conversations with each other. Then you're gonna get really specific on your experiment.

 

Is it timebound? What location is it happening? What activities are going on? Put all of the details in there. And then of course you have to actually get out and do your experiment.

 

Designing experiments is great, but it doesn't actually pay off until you get out there and you do the experiment. If you're a Brené Brown fan, like I am, she uses that phrase of get in the arena. And she has a famous TED Talk out there where she talks about it. She even shows a little picture where it's like a bullfighter has gone into the old dirt rings like inside of a Coliseum and they have to face the bull.

 

Now in your relationship, there may be times where it feels like one of you is the Matador and one of you is the bull. But you're both just people just people. Remember that. Have compassion for each other, but you have to actually get out there and try it.

 

And know that your very first experiment is gonna be messy and you might get a little roughed up. It's part of the process.

 

Now keep yourself safe. Don't do anything really crazy. Of course you don't wanna risk either of you, but you actually have to get out there and do it. And know that the first time it might not be your final solution. This is just you each trying something.

 

Step Six: Lessons Learned

 

Because after you get done with that experiment, being in the arena, we're gonna go into step number six, which is doing the lessons learned on that experiment. We're gonna first talk about what result did you actually get?

 

Now, of course, you're gonna look back at the outcome that you wanted, is that the outcome that you got? And if it was, describe what it looks like. If it wasn't the outcome you wanted, we need to describe what that looks like too.

 

If it was a different location. If it was a different conversation. If there were different components of it. Include all of that, because that'll help us to learn.

 

And that's what the lessons learned is all about. You're going to uncover so much gold about yourself, about the other person. Even those requirements that you laid out for yourself, you're going to be looking at your results versus those requirements. Did we actually hit all of the requirements with that experiment? Was everybody's needs met? If not, then you're going into the rest of it.

 

The next part is doing what worked because there's a bunch of stuff that did work. Sometimes we're just gonna focus on, ugh, the experiment didn't work, because it wasn't the final solution. But you might have been 80% of the way there. So write down a few line items. What was everything that actually worked for you in your relationship with that experiment?

 

The next column is what didn't work? And get specific. This might help you to uncover some requirements that you didn't even know that you had or that you didn't even know that they had, or there might be other obstacles out in the world that both of you had not anticipated.

 

You're going to write down all of the things that didn't work. Next is you're going to come up with, what would you do differently next time? Now, if this was your final solution if you got the outcome you wanted if all of your requirements were met. Your final solution, like you found it, is fantastic. So what would you do next is do that solution all the time, right?

 

Write it down that yes, we would do this. We'd do it four times a year or you know, whatever it is, write that down of what would you do differently next time. If you don't have your final solution, now you're gonna start writing down your ideas for the next stuff that you would try or the next set of requirements that you would want to include in your master requirements list.

 

After you've done your lessons learned, you're going to make that decision on, do you need to do another version of that experiment and make some tweaks to it?

 

Because if you don't have your final solution yet, you keep going. And you might have to do several passes of this experiment and each time you're gonna learn new things and you're gonna get closer and closer to that final solution until you actually find what it is. And at that point it's like, cause for celebration.

 

Step Seven: Your Wins

 

That's leading us into the final step, which is the wins. Step number seven is the wins. Now don't wait until you're all the way at the end and you have a final solution on everything in your clarity steps, celebrate the wins along the way.

 

One of the things about human behavior is that we adjust our behavior based on the consequences that we experience. We're pretty familiar with there being a negative consequence. We don't want the negative consequence, therefore we're gonna change our behavior. But did you know that you can reinforce behaviors or even motivate behaviors to change by using positive consequences?

 

That's where the wins come in, the win and actually celebrating it, acknowledging it helps to reinforce the behavior. All of those things that worked when you did your lessons learned, celebrate all of those things. All of the things that you learned about yourself, you get to celebrate yourself.

 

When we work together in the clarity steps, I have you write down what are all of your wins? And we do that every single week because you have wins every single week. And then you have to figure out how you wanna celebrate that, right? Because writing it down feels good, celebrating it with a high five, a cheer, a song or some other thing can really reinforce this.

 

Now you're gonna go back and repeat this process, those steps. Now, to get you all the way from where you started all the way to realizing that final vision, that that becomes your new reality. You're gonna repeat many steps of this process.

 

Once you've completed one of your experiments and you have the final solution, you're gonna go back, just go check your steps again.

 

What step were you working on? What are the obstacles that go with it? And are there any new obstacles that have popped up for that one part? Because remember we're constraining the focus until that one step is resolved for you. That's your new reality. Because remember you wrote it in a way of what you wanted for your relationship for that one step.

 

For any of the obstacles that go with it, you're going to prioritize it. And if you need to reprioritize it each time you go back and look at it, that's okay. The frequency at which you go back and look at this could be once a week, it might be every couple of days, but this is something that you wanna make a lot of progress on, so pay attention to it. Get in that routine of coming back and checking it.

 

What's the next obstacle that you wanna start doing experiments on? Is it a mindset obstacle? Is it a process obstacle? And then go design your experiment, get in the arena, do the experiment, do a lessons learned and keep going until you have the final solution.

 

You'll keep doing that for your obstacles. At some point, you're gonna look at the wording on that step. You're gonna be like, yes we are absolutely there. That is our new reality is that we've stepped forward. When you look at your metrics, you'll see that some of those numbers have now moved. They're a lot closer to your target. Celebrate that, that's progress, right? It's we're not gonna do black and white thinking that either everything worked or everything didn't work. We're not gonna do black and white thinking where it's either the whole relationship works or the whole relationship doesn't work.

 

We're looking at incremental progress. As long as we're making progress and moving forward, everything is great. It's on track.

 

Then you would go on to your next targeted step and do the same process of identifying what are the obstacles for each of you, designing experiments to resolve those, doing lessons learned, and celebrating the win.

 

Keep doing that all the way through until you have realized your vision. You have your new reality. Now you might be thinking Gretchen, this seems like a lot of work. It's very detailed. This is just a relationship. Aren't relationship supposed to be easy? Like can't I just like hug the person and everything is good? Can't I just not say anything and ignore that we have problems? Well, doing all of these quick and easy solutions, they may seem quick and easy. That's what's gotten you to where you're at.

 

You've learned how to maintain the peace on the outside, but the peace on the inside for you and for the other person, not so peaceful. And these are the things that if it's left unsaid, if obstacles aren't brought out into the open, if you haven't experimented defined solutions that work for both of you, that storm on the inside is going to erupt. And cause a storm on the outside between the two of you.

 

And then you're gonna be contemplating not having the relationship anymore because when it comes to a head and it's has a lot of tension, the easiest way to resolve that tension is to sever the relationship. Now I don't think that's what you really want. If that's what you really wanted, you wouldn't have listened to this episode. You know it, you know it.

 

The clarity steps are super helpful.

 

Yes. It's very structured, but it's very effective. It helps both of you keep moving forward towards the vision that you actually want. Remember to keep reinforcing that one easy sentence within your vision so that it keeps aligning you because there's going to be times where you're thinking, oh, there's so many obstacles to work through. Or as soon as you voice to somebody, I have this obstacle or they voice to you. You might have your psychological defense mechanisms jump in and think, oh wait, you're gonna, you know, sever your relationship with me. That's what this means. No, they're just voicing the obstacle. So that's where having that one sentence will help to align you at the same time. Is that either you can share it to the other person saying, no, I'm voicing this obstacle because I want this. I wanna spend the rest of my life with you and enjoy our company together.

 

Or I want this as a business partner. And you say whatever that sentence is, therefore I'm voicing this so that we can do some experiments and try to find a win-win solution. The other person in your relationship, teach them that too, because trust me, you're gonna get your feelings hurt at times when you hear other people's obstacles.

 

It's just human nature to try to protect yourself and maybe even get defensive or try to come up with something to blame them with just calm yourself for a second, take a little pause and be like, okay, it's just an obstacle. And hopefully they can reinforce it with you and just say, I'm just voicing an obstacle. Here's what I want. They restate that vision statement too. So that you're both aligned, like, okay, it's not that they wanna sever the relationship with me. They're bringing this up because it's important that we can create this vision together and we have to voice our obstacles so that we can experiment, find a win-win solution, so that we can have that vision together. That can be our new reality.

 

All right. If you have any questions, I am here for you. You can always email me your questions. You can email me at [email protected]. Or if we're connected on Facebook as friends, you can always send me a direct message and just say, Hey, I have a question on this and just ask me. I'm more than happy to help you out.

 

And if this is something that you want to work on, because clarity steps, there seven steps to it. It's a structured thing. We can always discuss working together I have some one-on-one appointments that are available. I've updated my website to reflect that there's life coaching one-on-ones and there's business one-on-ones. If you are a business client know that relationship coaching is always available to you because it does come up. You're human, you have relationships.

 

Like I said, it could be a personal relationship. It could even be relationships with your customers. So know that any other relationships stuff could happen also within your business coaching.

 

If you're someone that is like, Hey, Gretchen, I really need help with my relationship, but I'm not starting up a business. Can you still help me? My answer is yes. That's why there is now that life coaching option for you for one-on-one. If you'd like to involve the other person, we can discuss that also on a consultation call because sometimes it is helpful. You know, the other person might not know somebody that they could turn to. We wanna give them an opportunity, too. We can discuss that during a free consultation call to see if that is something that works for you or not.

 

If you'd like to explore this option together for either life coaching or business coaching, reach out to me, you can go to my website, MyFreedomGrove.com, go to the Work With Me tab on there.

 

You'll see both of those options for either life coaching or business coaching, click on those. Whichever one is applicable. You can read a little bit more information and it gives instructions for how you can set up a free consultation call with me to get started.

 

All right, my friends take care of you. Take care of your relationships. They're worth their weight and gold. Doing this kind of effort is worth it. It's a great investment for you and for your relationships, your quality of life for yourself, your quality of life for both of you in this relationship will just grow exponentially. So have a wonderful week and I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast.  I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The Unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my freedom grove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.