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Talk Your Way Into the New Year
The 10 Best Things to Say to Your Partner
By Chick Moorman and Thomas Haller
"Let's create an adventurous vacation."
"How about if we design the way we would like the new room to look?"
"Let's develop a plan for dealing with this child."
Planning is one activity in which healthy couples engage. They invest time in exploring each other's desires, interests and goals. They create a plan together and reach consensus. They make their plan concrete, verbalize it and often put it in writing.
Sometimes the planning takes on the flavor of problem solving: How can we arrange your mother's visit to meet everyone's needs? Other times it merely focuses on alternatives: "What are some possibilities here? Let's make a list."
Goal setting can be the focal point of productive planning: What goal shall we create for our use of this Couple Talk material? The planning conversation could concentrate on dreams or fantasies: What would our dream house look like? or Where do we want to be 10 years from now?
This is not a request to spent time thinking or analyzing. This is an invitation to get out of your heads and into your hearts.
This inner knowing has been called by a variety of names. We've heard it referred to as "inner knowing," "gut-level feeling," "conscience," "intuition," "talking to God" and "the wise part within." What you choose to call it is not as important as learning how and when to use it.
"Let's check it out inside" is a statement of self-trust. It's an admission that there is much more to wisdom than merely logic. It's a decision to consider all the data when making a decision – data that comes from the inside as well as the outside.