VIVA LA DIFFERENCES

A person's greatest need is to be significant, accepted unconditionally, to really matter to someone else. It is so easy, especially now, to get caught up in the blame game. It's SO much easier to blame someone else for our lot in life but our self integrity rises when we put the blame back to where it really belongs, on ourselves. If it is change you want, start within.

Instead of complaining about the differences between men and women, let’s celebrate them. Yes, we’ve all heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but we also know that we complement each other in so many ways. And let’s face it, we want to be mated. It’s built into our hard wiring. That is God's little joke in my opinion.

So why not appreciate each other’s differences instead of trying to make them into our clones? And how do we do that you might ask? We need to change our expectations of how our mates SHOULD look, SHOULD act, SHOULD think, SHOULD dress, SHOULD etc., etc. We can “SHOULD” our partners to an early grave, but will it make us any happier? Of course not. Quite the opposite.

If we just allow our mates to be who they are, and look for and find the reasons to celebrate their differences, we’ll all benefit in the long run. It’s not that complicated. There is no greater gift than allowing people to be their authentic selves.

Of course we can still grumble a little silently to ourselves on occasion. After all, we wouldn’t want to take away all the fun.

For Diane Ford’s humorous views on the differences between men and women check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSwT744azR4

Right on-Dr. Phil!

I have to confess that I’m not a Dr. Phil devotee. In fact, I’ve never watched his show, but today a friend who had been complaining for some time about her husband and who had even gone so far as to suggest that she had made the worst mistake of her life by entering into a marriage contract with him, suddenly and unexpectedly changed her tune. She walked into my office grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat, and when I asked her what could possibly have provoked that look of bliss, her answer was simply: “Dr. Phil. He’s amazing!.”

Now this is a very active and involved woman, so I was quite surprised to hear those words coming out of her mouth. As far as I know, she rarely watches television, so it never occurred to me that she would have called on Dr. Phil to solve her marital woes, but this is precisely what she did. And she informed me that it would behoove me to be charitable about this wise man and check him out myself. She even suggested that I might get a few pointers for my clients.

So, being an open minded (but I must confess, skeptical, woman) I looked at his web site, and was delighted to find some real wisdom about making a marriage work. He has a list of relationship rules that are pointed and actually quite profound. For anyone struggling with female/male issues (and who doesn’t?), this link will provide some bullet points worth memorizing and following. Check them out for yourself. These are keepers.
http://drphil.com/articles/article/53

And thanks, Dr. Phil, for putting that smile back on my friend’s face.