25. The 5 Biggest Relationship Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Relationships are complicated because people are complicated. We are all dynamic, constantly changing, and the people in our lives don't necessarily change and grow along with us. That's why, this week, it's time to let you in on the five most common relationship mistakes, whether they occur in a friendship, with a romantic partner, your work colleagues and bosses, or literally any relationship you're a part of.
If you want to make any and every relationship you have better, we dare you to listen in to learn the five most significant mistakes you can make in any relationship, and most importantly, how you can avoid them.
Tune in this week to discover five things that, if you stop doing them today, you can significantly increase your enjoyment of your life and your relationships. We discuss why your relationships are all about your thoughts, why you have the power to transform any relationship, and we show you exactly how you can start cultivating higher-quality relationships and friendships.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How the quality of your relationships is determined by the quality of your thoughts about the other person.
Why it only takes one person to create a positive, fulfilling relationship.
5 relationship mistakes that make your relationships feel challenging.
Why you can't change other people, but you get to show up how you want.
How to avoid these mistakes in your own relationships, so you can genuinely enjoy them.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Nina: I think we could describe just about any relationship in our life as complicated because the truth is, people are complicated.
Kelle: Yeah, we’re all dynamic and changing and the people in our lives, they’re not necessarily changing in the ways that we want them to change.
Nina: That’s why today we’re letting you in on the most common relationship mistakes. And when we say relationships, we mean any relationship.
Kelle: Yeah, it could be your relationship with your partner or your kids. It could also be your boss or your co-workers.
Nina: Maybe your mother or your mother-in-law or a friend.
Kelle: Okay. Are you ready to make any relationship better? We dare you. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. As we’re recording this, it’s nearly back to school here in Park City. For me at the beginning of summer, it sounds dreamy to hang with the kids, go to the pool, ride our bikes, relax, hang out and connect in ways we don’t in our everyday busy lives.
Kelle: Yeah, it’s been fun-ish to have the kids around so much of the summer. We have the privilege of doing a lot of free ranging here where we live. There’s several parks within walking distance from my house and my kids, they’re just not really camp kids. They kind of like to tornado around the neighborhood with all their friends in this huge pack.
Nina: Yeah, I don’t know about you, but by this time of summer, all of the togetherness can feel a little too togethery.
Kelle: Yeah, with the kids being around so much this summer, I’ve been kind of like, okay, time to go back, time for routine. And then my summer begins and the kids go to school, we work for a while, and then we meet friends at the pool or take a walk or a bike ride in the afternoon before the kids get out of school.
Nina: I totally think September is my summer, that’s when my summer begins. It’s the best around here. Anyway, alright, let’s talk relationships. We’re going to go deep and do a whole relationship series at some point, but for today, we’re going to cover five common relationship mistakes.
Kelle: Yeah. These are the five things that if you stop doing them today, you could significantly increase the enjoyment of your life, the enjoyment of any relationship.
Nina: A big part of what we do when we work with clients is help them in relationships. We help them deal with difficult people in their lives, whether it’s family, friends, spouses, partners, work partners, older children.
Kelle: Yeah, co-workers, bosses, clients, the board, strangers, I mean literally anyone. Relationships, being in relation with other people is a big part of life for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are herd animals, we humans are herd animals. We are hardwired to be with others, to belong, to be in relationship with. So, let’s talk about the definition of relationship for just a moment.
Nina: And listen, before we dive in, we ask that you be open minded here. As with a lot of our concepts, we suggest an offer, most of us, we’re not socialized to think this way. So, it’s likely going to feel different to how you were raised and what you already know. You may have a little push back here and we totally get it, we just ask that you consider what we have to say here.
Kelle: Okay, here’s a simple definition I found online. Relationship is the way in which two or more people or groups regard and behave toward each other. So that’s a standard definition, how people behave towards each other. We like to go a step further and define relationships as the thoughts that you have about another person in relation to the thoughts that they have about you and the interaction of those thoughts.
Nina: Yeah. So, we like to say, the quality of your relationships is determined by the quality of your thoughts about the other person.
Kelle: Alright, let’s imagine for a moment, think about someone you have an amazing relationship with. Just think about that person and why you think you have an amazing relationship with them. And now think about their attributes. What are three things you really like about that person? So, you might think something like, they’re just so fun and they make me laugh. They’re really generous and they’re really kind.
Nina: As you say those things, you’ll think you’re simply describing that person. But what you’re actually doing is describing your thoughts about them. We don’t know anything about that person, so we’re going to take your word for it. But now take that same person and imagine there being another person that doesn’t like that person. How is that possible? We have the exact same person.
So, you just described them in this amazing way. How could this other person not describe them that way? The person hasn’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is the other person’s thoughts. Maybe they think the person is too loud or annoying or ingenuine or they talk too much.
Kelle: I mean, who’s right? Who’s right about that person? Neither is right. You have your thoughts about that person and the other person, they have their own thoughts about that person. So, this person that has their thoughts about that person, they’re going to have a different relationship with the exact same person based on their thoughts about them.
Nina: Yeah, you’re going to have an amazing relationship with them. The other person that doesn’t like them is not going to have such an amazing relationship with that person because they have different thoughts about them and that person has different thoughts about them.
Kelle: But hang on, we have the best news, empowering news for you. It only takes one person to have a great relationship. You only need one person to have really positive, amazing thoughts for you to have those positive, amazing thoughts, for you to have a great relationship with them. All we have to do to prove this another way is to look at the political climate.
Here in the US, we have an election coming up, some people love one candidate and completely hate the other. And someone else on the other side hates the candidate you like and freaking loves the other candidate. So the same candidate that we’re talking about, it’s just different people having different thoughts about them.
Nina: Yeah. Or maybe you can’t stand your boss, for example. Someone else thinks they’re okay. And then a third person, the third person thinks they’re the most incredible boss ever. You’re all thinking about the same person. It’s just that you all have different thoughts about them. Do you see what we did there? We hopped right over politics and back into what we like to talk about.
Kelle: Okay. We wanted to lay the foundation for relationships. Now that we did that, let’s dive into the five relationship mistakes that once you change these, you can dramatically change your relationships. Whether it’s a good relationship and you want to make it better, or it’s strained, or maybe even downright difficult, and you want to be able to have an easier time relating with that person.
Nina: Yeah, we all have challenging relationships. There’s always one.
Kelle: There’s always one.
Nina: So, here’s mistake number one, focusing on what you see as their flaws. It’s hard to have a good or positive relationship when you’re focusing on what you see as someone else’s downfalls, their flaws, their character defects. Which is totally subjective, because what you see as a flaw is not necessarily the truth about the person. It’s your thoughts about the person.
Kelle: Yeah, we have thoughts and then our brain, our amazing brains look for evidence to confirm the thought. So, our brains are always scanning, always looking for evidence to prove what we’re thinking. So, we have these thoughts and then we think that they’re truths, but really, they’re just our interpretation of what is happening in the world.
Nina: Yeah. So basically, if we’re focusing on someone’s flaws, you guessed it, that’s all we’re going to see.
Kelle: I was guilty of this for a really long time. My husband’s a physician. He would come home from a long day of seeing patients and complain about how annoying his patients were. He’d complained about his office staff and how they took too long to do things or didn’t do them correctly. He’d complain about the insurance companies he had to work with or how he felt like an administrative assistant trying to get medicines and procedures covered for his patients. He would complain about the traffic coming home day after day.
He’d come home and complain, go on and on and this was a while ago when he was seeing 33 patients a day. Now his practice is membership based so he only sees 10 patients a day. But back then he had a lot of hard days, practicing medicine and then coming home and complaining about it. He’d walk into the house from work and I would brace for the complaining to start, because that’s all I saw after a while. It got to the point where I stopped asking him how his day was because I knew what he was going to say.
And let me tell you, our relationship suffered tremendously, not because of his complaining, but because of the thoughts that I had about him and what I saw was complaining. Because to him he thought he was just kind of giving me a download of the day, he was just telling me about his day and I labeled it as complaining. I thought, here he goes again and I’d just tune him out and we did not build a connection. Let me tell you, those years were rough.
Once I stopped focusing on his flaws, once I stopped labeling him, talking about his day as complaining, and started thinking about him as just reviewing the day. I realized it wasn’t all complaining. That’s just what I had been focusing on. And listen, being a doctor these days is not easy. I have so much compassion for my husband and for all the doctors out there. They have an incredibly hard job.
I mean, their entire job is essentially listening to other people complaining, bringing their chief complaint on why they’re at the doctor’s office in the first place. So, if you’re a doctor and you’re listening to this, big, big thanks and appreciation goes out to you. Okay, let’s move on to mistake number two.
Nina: Mistake number two is trying to change the other person. I feel like we don’t need to spend too much time here because we’ve talked about this a lot, specifically in episode 21, so go check that out. It’s all about control and controlling other people and how to let go of that control.
But then again, we talk about it and somehow we all still want to change all the people to be more like the way we want them to be. This takes some practice and some curiosity and an open mind, this concept. We want our kids to listen better and be kinder to us and appreciate us and thank us for all we do for them. We want our boss to recognize us more and see us for all we contribute to our team and to the company.
Kelle: Yeah, we want our spouse or our partner to stop complaining. We want our spouse or partner to do the dishes and actually clean the counters and put the food away. If they say they’re going to do the dishes, clean the whole kitchen. We want them to pitch in on running the kids around without us asking, get the sports app, whatever. Shall we keep going on all the ways we want people to change? It’s kind of fun.
Nina: Oh my God, we could do this all day. We want friends to change too, though, to call us more or call us less or invite us to things or stop inviting us to things. We want strangers to be more courteous and open doors for us and drive better.
Kelle: Definitely drive better, yeah.
Nina: It’s fun to fantasize and think of all the ways people could change so we could have a better life and a kinder world. But the truth most of the time, that’s just a fantasy. Trying to get someone else to change is exhausting and it doesn’t work.
Kelle: Yeah, we cannot control, fix or change the people in our lives. When we actually let other people be themselves, which, by the way, is so nice of us, it makes life so much easier for all of us if we just said, “Listen, you do you and I’m going to do me over here and then let’s see if we’re still a want match. Let’s see if we still like each other and we want to be around one another”, whether we’re partners or friends or it’s a relationship at work or your kids. Then we get to make decisions from there. More on what we mean by want matches later, but for now, see how it works when you let the people in your life be exactly who they are.
Nina: And the best part here, when you let other people be who they are, you can also give yourself permission to be exactly who you are. You get to be fabulous, wonderful, imperfect, messy, and perfectly you just as you are.
Kelle: Okay, now that we’re all fabulous onto mistake number three. I think this is my personal favorite because I cannot stand when people do this, this drives me bananas. It’s digging up the past. So, everyone has a past and everyone’s done things in the past that they wish they could take back, they wish they could change.
Nina: And we all have stories, often different versions of past events than other people do. You tell the story differently than they do. However, it goes, if you have some kind of story in your past with someone and they don’t like or appreciate the story, maybe it’s embarrassing or there’s some kind of drama they wish they wouldn’t have been involved in, or some way they acted that they don’t like and you keep bringing it up. You tell the story again and again.
When you keep retelling, reliving the stories over and over, you know what it does to your relationship with that person? It keeps the relationship stuck in time where that story happened. It does not allow you, the other person or your relationship to move forward. And I have a funny analogy. I think a friend of mine described herself as a bulldozer with a filing cabinet once, because that’s the way she was in her relationship. Always pulling up files from the past and bulldozing, pushing forward. I’ll never forget that image.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s not a fun way to go through relationships for sure. Staying in the past with old unhelpful, un-useful stories is awful because no matter what they do, they can’t change the past. So, if they wronged you in some way, or if they mistreated you, or if they said or did something to you, and that’s how you think of that person, you will not be able to fully move forward. Your relationship will not be able to fully move forward.
And listen, we’re not saying forget all the bad things that happened. We’re not saying just forgive everyone. We want to offer that if you want a better relationship, you have to move beyond the stories of the past and practice meeting people where they are today, in the present moment, where life and your relationship with that person is actually happening.
Nina: Alright, let’s move on to mistake number four. And this one hopefully brings a smile to your face because we all do it. Mistake number four, we call mind reading. You know how this goes. You think you know what they’re going to say so you don’t ask, you just guess. Last week a client was standing on the sidelines of their kid’s soccer game. She got a look from a friend who was also on the sidelines, but the friend didn’t actually come over and talk to her. They didn’t connect at the game and the rest of the day. And days later our client went over and over what the look could have meant.
Kelle: Yeah, her brain was making up all the stories about maybe she was mad at her. She wracked her brain about what she could have done. Maybe she’d said something last time they were together, trying to figure out what the look meant, she was guessing and she really was trying to mind read.
Nina: We do this all the time with our partners. We don’t make requests or ask what a look means or ask for what we want because we think we already know what they’re going to say.
Kelle: Yeah, I used to do this all the time. If I had a night that all my friends were getting together. I would wait to tell my husband because I knew what he was going to say. He was going to be annoyed. He was going to ask me, when he needed to babysit the kids, which always drove me bananas. I would be so annoyed ahead of time. I would wait until the very last minute and then he would be annoyed because I wasn’t asking anymore. I was basically just telling him what I was doing. And I see my kids do this too. They’re like, “Mom, oh, never mind. I already know what you’re going to say.”
Nina: Totally. Going back to our client and the friend on the sideline, though, at the soccer game. While we were coaching her, we asked her why she didn’t just check in with her friend on what was going on in her head. She said, “I don’t know, I just didn’t.”
Kelle: One of our queens, Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind.” So sometimes we don’t ask for what we want. We don’t say what we need to say because we think we already know how the person is going to respond. What if instead of guessing or assuming we actually just checked in? Nina: Yeah, those assumptions can be relationship killers. And someone asked me the other day, they were like, “Would you prefer someone be direct with you or indirect?” And I was like, “Duh, direct.” But we all are indirect.
Kelle: Yeah. So much of the time, it’s true.
Nina: It’s so interesting. Anyway, when our client checked in with her friend, when she asked her friend what the look was all about, her friend had no idea what she was talking about. And her friend told her she’s had a hard day at work. There was a transaction that didn’t go the way she wanted it to and she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. That look our client assumed was for her, wasn’t even a look. It wasn’t even a thing. And the friend on the sidelines wasn’t upset at her at all. She was in her head about something that had nothing to do with our client.
Kelle: So, if you want a better relationship, do not mind read, do not guess, do not assume, just ask, be clear because you know what? Clear, it’s kind. So that’s mistake number four. Let’s go to mistake number five, comparing one person to someone else. Comparisons. Comparisons may feel like some subtle form of measurements, a way to gauge how one person is versus another. We compare our kids, my daughter is more responsible than my son or my son is better at math than my daughter. We compare our partners with other people’s partners.
Nina: Yeah. The problem here, when we’re comparing one person to another, we’re often comparing one person on their average day to the next person on their best day. We’re comparing them with some idealized version and that ideal version, it’s almost never the complete picture. We talked about comparison in episode 24 if you want to go back and check that out.
Kelle: Yeah. And that was really comparing yourself to other people and it was a really good one so, yeah, go back. When we compare, you completely miss the unique qualities that make that person in your life, well, them. And that person you’re comparing them to, we’re going to bet that they have their own flaws and imperfections because no one is perfect. None of us comes without our set of issues or what people may see as issues or what we may see as issues.
Nina: Yeah, instead of cultivating a positive relationship with that person, comparison can lead to insecurity, self-doubt, and emotional distance. And we talked about this again in last week’s episode, or rather in episode 24, how comparison is human nature. Our brains were built to compare. It’s how we respond to comparison that’s so important.
So, when you find yourself doing this, it’s not a problem, you just listen to the other episode and we’ll give you some steps and a framework to work through this. But comparison doesn’t have to be a problem, it can just be data. So, we just want to offer that. If we want healthier, more fulfilling relationships, it’s crucial we stop comparing people in our lives with others. Just by having awareness around the thoughts you have about your relationships, you’ll start to notice your relationships changing, evolving and growing.
Kelle: And listen, don’t try these all at once. Start with one, what’s one relationship you’d like to change for the better? Where do you want to start? Pick one person, one area, one mistake and take it slowly. Remember, the quality of your relationships are determined by the quality of your thoughts about the other person. And keep in mind these five relationship mistakes. Make these shifts with the people you want to have better relationships with and watch your relationships flourish. Alright, thanks for being here, we so appreciate you.
Nina: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. See you next time.
Kelle: Yeah, see you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
Kelle: Yeah, we’re all dynamic and changing and the people in our lives, they’re not necessarily changing in the ways that we want them to change.
Nina: That’s why today we’re letting you in on the most common relationship mistakes. And when we say relationships, we mean any relationship.
Kelle: Yeah, it could be your relationship with your partner or your kids. It could also be your boss or your co-workers.
Nina: Maybe your mother or your mother-in-law or a friend.
Kelle: Okay. Are you ready to make any relationship better? We dare you. This is Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. As we’re recording this, it’s nearly back to school here in Park City. For me at the beginning of summer, it sounds dreamy to hang with the kids, go to the pool, ride our bikes, relax, hang out and connect in ways we don’t in our everyday busy lives.
Kelle: Yeah, it’s been fun-ish to have the kids around so much of the summer. We have the privilege of doing a lot of free ranging here where we live. There’s several parks within walking distance from my house and my kids, they’re just not really camp kids. They kind of like to tornado around the neighborhood with all their friends in this huge pack.
Nina: Yeah, I don’t know about you, but by this time of summer, all of the togetherness can feel a little too togethery.
Kelle: Yeah, with the kids being around so much this summer, I’ve been kind of like, okay, time to go back, time for routine. And then my summer begins and the kids go to school, we work for a while, and then we meet friends at the pool or take a walk or a bike ride in the afternoon before the kids get out of school.
Nina: I totally think September is my summer, that’s when my summer begins. It’s the best around here. Anyway, alright, let’s talk relationships. We’re going to go deep and do a whole relationship series at some point, but for today, we’re going to cover five common relationship mistakes.
Kelle: Yeah. These are the five things that if you stop doing them today, you could significantly increase the enjoyment of your life, the enjoyment of any relationship.
Nina: A big part of what we do when we work with clients is help them in relationships. We help them deal with difficult people in their lives, whether it’s family, friends, spouses, partners, work partners, older children.
Kelle: Yeah, co-workers, bosses, clients, the board, strangers, I mean literally anyone. Relationships, being in relation with other people is a big part of life for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are herd animals, we humans are herd animals. We are hardwired to be with others, to belong, to be in relationship with. So, let’s talk about the definition of relationship for just a moment.
Nina: And listen, before we dive in, we ask that you be open minded here. As with a lot of our concepts, we suggest an offer, most of us, we’re not socialized to think this way. So, it’s likely going to feel different to how you were raised and what you already know. You may have a little push back here and we totally get it, we just ask that you consider what we have to say here.
Kelle: Okay, here’s a simple definition I found online. Relationship is the way in which two or more people or groups regard and behave toward each other. So that’s a standard definition, how people behave towards each other. We like to go a step further and define relationships as the thoughts that you have about another person in relation to the thoughts that they have about you and the interaction of those thoughts.
Nina: Yeah. So, we like to say, the quality of your relationships is determined by the quality of your thoughts about the other person.
Kelle: Alright, let’s imagine for a moment, think about someone you have an amazing relationship with. Just think about that person and why you think you have an amazing relationship with them. And now think about their attributes. What are three things you really like about that person? So, you might think something like, they’re just so fun and they make me laugh. They’re really generous and they’re really kind.
Nina: As you say those things, you’ll think you’re simply describing that person. But what you’re actually doing is describing your thoughts about them. We don’t know anything about that person, so we’re going to take your word for it. But now take that same person and imagine there being another person that doesn’t like that person. How is that possible? We have the exact same person.
So, you just described them in this amazing way. How could this other person not describe them that way? The person hasn’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is the other person’s thoughts. Maybe they think the person is too loud or annoying or ingenuine or they talk too much.
Kelle: I mean, who’s right? Who’s right about that person? Neither is right. You have your thoughts about that person and the other person, they have their own thoughts about that person. So, this person that has their thoughts about that person, they’re going to have a different relationship with the exact same person based on their thoughts about them.
Nina: Yeah, you’re going to have an amazing relationship with them. The other person that doesn’t like them is not going to have such an amazing relationship with that person because they have different thoughts about them and that person has different thoughts about them.
Kelle: But hang on, we have the best news, empowering news for you. It only takes one person to have a great relationship. You only need one person to have really positive, amazing thoughts for you to have those positive, amazing thoughts, for you to have a great relationship with them. All we have to do to prove this another way is to look at the political climate.
Here in the US, we have an election coming up, some people love one candidate and completely hate the other. And someone else on the other side hates the candidate you like and freaking loves the other candidate. So the same candidate that we’re talking about, it’s just different people having different thoughts about them.
Nina: Yeah. Or maybe you can’t stand your boss, for example. Someone else thinks they’re okay. And then a third person, the third person thinks they’re the most incredible boss ever. You’re all thinking about the same person. It’s just that you all have different thoughts about them. Do you see what we did there? We hopped right over politics and back into what we like to talk about.
Kelle: Okay. We wanted to lay the foundation for relationships. Now that we did that, let’s dive into the five relationship mistakes that once you change these, you can dramatically change your relationships. Whether it’s a good relationship and you want to make it better, or it’s strained, or maybe even downright difficult, and you want to be able to have an easier time relating with that person.
Nina: Yeah, we all have challenging relationships. There’s always one.
Kelle: There’s always one.
Nina: So, here’s mistake number one, focusing on what you see as their flaws. It’s hard to have a good or positive relationship when you’re focusing on what you see as someone else’s downfalls, their flaws, their character defects. Which is totally subjective, because what you see as a flaw is not necessarily the truth about the person. It’s your thoughts about the person.
Kelle: Yeah, we have thoughts and then our brain, our amazing brains look for evidence to confirm the thought. So, our brains are always scanning, always looking for evidence to prove what we’re thinking. So, we have these thoughts and then we think that they’re truths, but really, they’re just our interpretation of what is happening in the world.
Nina: Yeah. So basically, if we’re focusing on someone’s flaws, you guessed it, that’s all we’re going to see.
Kelle: I was guilty of this for a really long time. My husband’s a physician. He would come home from a long day of seeing patients and complain about how annoying his patients were. He’d complained about his office staff and how they took too long to do things or didn’t do them correctly. He’d complain about the insurance companies he had to work with or how he felt like an administrative assistant trying to get medicines and procedures covered for his patients. He would complain about the traffic coming home day after day.
He’d come home and complain, go on and on and this was a while ago when he was seeing 33 patients a day. Now his practice is membership based so he only sees 10 patients a day. But back then he had a lot of hard days, practicing medicine and then coming home and complaining about it. He’d walk into the house from work and I would brace for the complaining to start, because that’s all I saw after a while. It got to the point where I stopped asking him how his day was because I knew what he was going to say.
And let me tell you, our relationship suffered tremendously, not because of his complaining, but because of the thoughts that I had about him and what I saw was complaining. Because to him he thought he was just kind of giving me a download of the day, he was just telling me about his day and I labeled it as complaining. I thought, here he goes again and I’d just tune him out and we did not build a connection. Let me tell you, those years were rough.
Once I stopped focusing on his flaws, once I stopped labeling him, talking about his day as complaining, and started thinking about him as just reviewing the day. I realized it wasn’t all complaining. That’s just what I had been focusing on. And listen, being a doctor these days is not easy. I have so much compassion for my husband and for all the doctors out there. They have an incredibly hard job.
I mean, their entire job is essentially listening to other people complaining, bringing their chief complaint on why they’re at the doctor’s office in the first place. So, if you’re a doctor and you’re listening to this, big, big thanks and appreciation goes out to you. Okay, let’s move on to mistake number two.
Nina: Mistake number two is trying to change the other person. I feel like we don’t need to spend too much time here because we’ve talked about this a lot, specifically in episode 21, so go check that out. It’s all about control and controlling other people and how to let go of that control.
But then again, we talk about it and somehow we all still want to change all the people to be more like the way we want them to be. This takes some practice and some curiosity and an open mind, this concept. We want our kids to listen better and be kinder to us and appreciate us and thank us for all we do for them. We want our boss to recognize us more and see us for all we contribute to our team and to the company.
Kelle: Yeah, we want our spouse or our partner to stop complaining. We want our spouse or partner to do the dishes and actually clean the counters and put the food away. If they say they’re going to do the dishes, clean the whole kitchen. We want them to pitch in on running the kids around without us asking, get the sports app, whatever. Shall we keep going on all the ways we want people to change? It’s kind of fun.
Nina: Oh my God, we could do this all day. We want friends to change too, though, to call us more or call us less or invite us to things or stop inviting us to things. We want strangers to be more courteous and open doors for us and drive better.
Kelle: Definitely drive better, yeah.
Nina: It’s fun to fantasize and think of all the ways people could change so we could have a better life and a kinder world. But the truth most of the time, that’s just a fantasy. Trying to get someone else to change is exhausting and it doesn’t work.
Kelle: Yeah, we cannot control, fix or change the people in our lives. When we actually let other people be themselves, which, by the way, is so nice of us, it makes life so much easier for all of us if we just said, “Listen, you do you and I’m going to do me over here and then let’s see if we’re still a want match. Let’s see if we still like each other and we want to be around one another”, whether we’re partners or friends or it’s a relationship at work or your kids. Then we get to make decisions from there. More on what we mean by want matches later, but for now, see how it works when you let the people in your life be exactly who they are.
Nina: And the best part here, when you let other people be who they are, you can also give yourself permission to be exactly who you are. You get to be fabulous, wonderful, imperfect, messy, and perfectly you just as you are.
Kelle: Okay, now that we’re all fabulous onto mistake number three. I think this is my personal favorite because I cannot stand when people do this, this drives me bananas. It’s digging up the past. So, everyone has a past and everyone’s done things in the past that they wish they could take back, they wish they could change.
Nina: And we all have stories, often different versions of past events than other people do. You tell the story differently than they do. However, it goes, if you have some kind of story in your past with someone and they don’t like or appreciate the story, maybe it’s embarrassing or there’s some kind of drama they wish they wouldn’t have been involved in, or some way they acted that they don’t like and you keep bringing it up. You tell the story again and again.
When you keep retelling, reliving the stories over and over, you know what it does to your relationship with that person? It keeps the relationship stuck in time where that story happened. It does not allow you, the other person or your relationship to move forward. And I have a funny analogy. I think a friend of mine described herself as a bulldozer with a filing cabinet once, because that’s the way she was in her relationship. Always pulling up files from the past and bulldozing, pushing forward. I’ll never forget that image.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s not a fun way to go through relationships for sure. Staying in the past with old unhelpful, un-useful stories is awful because no matter what they do, they can’t change the past. So, if they wronged you in some way, or if they mistreated you, or if they said or did something to you, and that’s how you think of that person, you will not be able to fully move forward. Your relationship will not be able to fully move forward.
And listen, we’re not saying forget all the bad things that happened. We’re not saying just forgive everyone. We want to offer that if you want a better relationship, you have to move beyond the stories of the past and practice meeting people where they are today, in the present moment, where life and your relationship with that person is actually happening.
Nina: Alright, let’s move on to mistake number four. And this one hopefully brings a smile to your face because we all do it. Mistake number four, we call mind reading. You know how this goes. You think you know what they’re going to say so you don’t ask, you just guess. Last week a client was standing on the sidelines of their kid’s soccer game. She got a look from a friend who was also on the sidelines, but the friend didn’t actually come over and talk to her. They didn’t connect at the game and the rest of the day. And days later our client went over and over what the look could have meant.
Kelle: Yeah, her brain was making up all the stories about maybe she was mad at her. She wracked her brain about what she could have done. Maybe she’d said something last time they were together, trying to figure out what the look meant, she was guessing and she really was trying to mind read.
Nina: We do this all the time with our partners. We don’t make requests or ask what a look means or ask for what we want because we think we already know what they’re going to say.
Kelle: Yeah, I used to do this all the time. If I had a night that all my friends were getting together. I would wait to tell my husband because I knew what he was going to say. He was going to be annoyed. He was going to ask me, when he needed to babysit the kids, which always drove me bananas. I would be so annoyed ahead of time. I would wait until the very last minute and then he would be annoyed because I wasn’t asking anymore. I was basically just telling him what I was doing. And I see my kids do this too. They’re like, “Mom, oh, never mind. I already know what you’re going to say.”
Nina: Totally. Going back to our client and the friend on the sideline, though, at the soccer game. While we were coaching her, we asked her why she didn’t just check in with her friend on what was going on in her head. She said, “I don’t know, I just didn’t.”
Kelle: One of our queens, Brené Brown says, “Clear is kind.” So sometimes we don’t ask for what we want. We don’t say what we need to say because we think we already know how the person is going to respond. What if instead of guessing or assuming we actually just checked in? Nina: Yeah, those assumptions can be relationship killers. And someone asked me the other day, they were like, “Would you prefer someone be direct with you or indirect?” And I was like, “Duh, direct.” But we all are indirect.
Kelle: Yeah. So much of the time, it’s true.
Nina: It’s so interesting. Anyway, when our client checked in with her friend, when she asked her friend what the look was all about, her friend had no idea what she was talking about. And her friend told her she’s had a hard day at work. There was a transaction that didn’t go the way she wanted it to and she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. That look our client assumed was for her, wasn’t even a look. It wasn’t even a thing. And the friend on the sidelines wasn’t upset at her at all. She was in her head about something that had nothing to do with our client.
Kelle: So, if you want a better relationship, do not mind read, do not guess, do not assume, just ask, be clear because you know what? Clear, it’s kind. So that’s mistake number four. Let’s go to mistake number five, comparing one person to someone else. Comparisons. Comparisons may feel like some subtle form of measurements, a way to gauge how one person is versus another. We compare our kids, my daughter is more responsible than my son or my son is better at math than my daughter. We compare our partners with other people’s partners.
Nina: Yeah. The problem here, when we’re comparing one person to another, we’re often comparing one person on their average day to the next person on their best day. We’re comparing them with some idealized version and that ideal version, it’s almost never the complete picture. We talked about comparison in episode 24 if you want to go back and check that out.
Kelle: Yeah. And that was really comparing yourself to other people and it was a really good one so, yeah, go back. When we compare, you completely miss the unique qualities that make that person in your life, well, them. And that person you’re comparing them to, we’re going to bet that they have their own flaws and imperfections because no one is perfect. None of us comes without our set of issues or what people may see as issues or what we may see as issues.
Nina: Yeah, instead of cultivating a positive relationship with that person, comparison can lead to insecurity, self-doubt, and emotional distance. And we talked about this again in last week’s episode, or rather in episode 24, how comparison is human nature. Our brains were built to compare. It’s how we respond to comparison that’s so important.
So, when you find yourself doing this, it’s not a problem, you just listen to the other episode and we’ll give you some steps and a framework to work through this. But comparison doesn’t have to be a problem, it can just be data. So, we just want to offer that. If we want healthier, more fulfilling relationships, it’s crucial we stop comparing people in our lives with others. Just by having awareness around the thoughts you have about your relationships, you’ll start to notice your relationships changing, evolving and growing.
Kelle: And listen, don’t try these all at once. Start with one, what’s one relationship you’d like to change for the better? Where do you want to start? Pick one person, one area, one mistake and take it slowly. Remember, the quality of your relationships are determined by the quality of your thoughts about the other person. And keep in mind these five relationship mistakes. Make these shifts with the people you want to have better relationships with and watch your relationships flourish. Alright, thanks for being here, we so appreciate you.
Nina: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. See you next time.
Kelle: Yeah, see you next time.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
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