Relationship Coaching

Relationships – family, romantic, love – are an important part of human life. It would seem that they should be uplifting and inspiring, but in practice this is not always the case. Mutual insufficiency and dissatisfaction, nagging and quarrels can ruin the lives of even loving people, and sometimes – and lead to a nervous breakdown. Is it possible to fix the situation, or is it better to go on a break? Is there a chance to improve the relationship with your partner? Find answers to these questions will help coach personal relationships. This is a work with a specialist that involves regular meetings (both in person and in an online format).

A relationship is a system of interaction between two people, and the main connecting link is communication. It is in the manner of communication that we can see what is happening in the relationship system. The format can be anything: friendly, business, family, couples. Relationship coaching can work in three ways: with past relationships, present ones or future ones. Yes, future relationships, because we all have bad relationship experiences. However, is there an understanding of what kind of relationship will make you happy? Is your desired future formed?

Coaching helps you consciously build a relationship through a deep understanding of your own and your partner’s needs, fears and goals. As a result, one’s understanding of self and other is expanded, communication is established, and there is an opportunity to improve that system.

Family coaching – a way out of a crisis

If there is no harmony and understanding in the family, sooner or later relations come to a standstill or a deep crisis. Communication can come down to constant scandals, shouting and fighting or icy silence – depending on the temperament of the partners. Sometimes each spouse starts to live their own life, not taking into account the interests of the other.

However, even in successful families there are crisis periods. In psychology there are such stages of crisis: one year, three years, seven, eleven years, twenty-three years of life together. During these periods, couples can decrease mutual understanding, there are conflicts. To save the relationship and survive the crisis without loss, you can take a special training for couples or work with a coach. What kind of specialist is this and what is his help?

The task of a coach is to help clients achieve the goal, for example, to establish relationships, to make them harmonious. Coaching is different from psychotherapy or psychology. The main focus of a coach is not to give a ready recipe on how to make a relationship happy and strong, but to help a couple to make a decision on their own, to get out of a crisis situation, to realize what led to it and how to avoid similar “exacerbations” in the future. In fact, a coach does not solve problems for people, but helps them to solve them themselves.

Coaching is a very broad field, so relationship specialists usually have a narrow specialization.

If a woman has a lot of negative experiences and her romances follow the same sad scenario, a relationship coach can help her understand herself and what the main problem is.
Sometimes problems and crises occur in newlyweds. A specialist who works specifically with such families will help you get out of a crisis situation.
If a couple has made the decision to break up or is one step away from divorce, it is worth getting help from a pre-divorce relationship coach.
Some specialists work with middle-aged, elderly patients – often their personal crisis is superimposed on their family difficulties.
The duration of the relationship work is determined individually by the specialists. It depends on the request that the couple came to the coach with, as well as on the result that people want to get. Having worked through the request, the specialist develops an individual program. It may include weekly sessions for the couple as well as individual meetings of the spouses with the coach.

How is relationship coaching different from psychology?

First of all, the methods of work and approach, and the requests may be the same. The psychologist is in the position of a doctor, the client is in the position of a patient who needs help. In coaching, there is another connection: the partner-partner.
Second, the focus is on the temporal axis. The coach is focused on the future, where the client’s goal is. He, in partnership, helps the client create the desired future.
Third, a relationship coach works with mentally healthy people who are motivated to change and willing to work on themselves to build harmonious relationships. That is, they understand that it is impossible to change “the other” and that it is better to start with yourself.
Differences in the work with married couples
Coaching a relationship between a man and a woman in the family can find answers to the most pressing questions:

spouses are tired of routine;
mutual understanding has disappeared, each partner is fixated on himself or herself;
the couple do not have the skills to communicate, people do not know how to negotiate with each other;
the couple does not see a joint future.
The specificity of family coaching is that many people perceive the partner as property or an unchangeable given. Sometimes lovers, when starting a family, think that the other half should guess their thoughts or understand obvious (to them) things without words.

The task of the family is not just to conduct a joint household or raising children. For harmony, both partners should develop, and do it together and with pleasure. If at least one component is missing (joint development or development in general, pleasure), there is a conflict.

It is a mistake to think that conflict is something terrible that should be avoided by all means. All married couples have conflict, and that’s perfectly normal. Coaching helps not to avoid conflict, but to get through it with dignity, to resolve such situations through partner negotiation.

In addition, coaches help couples get to know each other more deeply: not to remember the person with whom you once decided to build a family, but to realize how the person has changed, what their goals and desires are at the moment. It is important to avoid a common mistake: the belief that you can change your partner. You can’t force a person to change if he doesn’t want to. Awareness of this fact allows you to reduce the degree of dissatisfaction, to make relationships harmonious and productive.

What kind of requests can work with a family coach

As the popular wisdom says, “all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. But looking at any situation in terms of personality structure, you can find universal components of the psyche – levels of feelings, thoughts, desires, needs and conflicts. f we are talking about business relationships, perhaps the emphasis shifts to thoughts and understanding of the situation, yourself and your partner, conflicts and goals. If it’s a personal relationship – friendships, family, couples – the focus is on the same components, but the emphasis is on feelings and emotions.

So, what are the kinds of requests that can be handled by a coach:

recurring destructive behavior and response scenarios;
All relationships end in a similar way;
The relationship is over, but emotionally and mentally you continue it;
An accumulated weight of negative emotions keeps you from moving forward;
loss of a partner;
loss of contact or communication breakdown;
“dead-end” situations or situations of difficult choices;
maintaining a relationship;
conflicts have become the norm;
how to take the relationship to the next level;
partner of another nationality;
a big difference in age;
it is difficult to develop the relationship after acquaintance;
poor understanding of one’s needs, desires and goals in a relationship;
do not know what I want from a relationship.
How to work with a married couple
The first meeting with a coach is a very important stage of the work. During the session, the coach identifies the request the couple has come with. This determines the goal that the couple wants to reach.

It is important to understand that not always the request formulated by clients is true. For example, an insult of “my husband doesn’t give me money for new clothes or self-care” may turn out to be insecurity about the partner when working with a coach. This is why the specialist first clarifies the request and identifies the partners’ true desires. This is the most important stage of coaching, which largely determines the result of the joint work of the coach and the couple.

Having determined the true request, the coach develops a program with further meetings, techniques, and session schedules. Meetings with the specialist can take place online or offline. Sometimes both partners attend them, sometimes the husband and wife attend separately.

The latter option can be very effective if the level of mutual understanding between the couple is critically low. Physiology is worth considering here.

Women are often dominated by verbal expression of emotions. That is why in conflicts wives often rush out with accusations and criticism. This is a way of getting rid of stress, it is how women vent their emotions.
Men tend to verbal expression of emotion is less peculiar. In the “flow of words”, which falls down during a quarrel, the man is not always able to distinguish the main thing, to understand the reason for the conflict and present a picture of the relationship as a whole. Often emotional statements of women become the cause of men’s stress, and then the husband simply stops perceiving what his wife is telling him, his logical thinking is cut off.
Coaching on gender relations takes into consideration the physiological characteristics of men and women, so if the specialist sees that joint meetings with a couple at the initial stage will not bring results, he may suggest that the spouses work with them separately. Later on, when the partners define their true goals, the sessions can be joint: the husband and wife learn to listen to and hear each other, to come to an agreement, to find mutual understanding.

What do the relationship trainings provide?

The result of working with a coach depends not only on the specialist’s qualifications, but also on the efforts made by both partners. If the couple is set up for productive work and ready for change, coaching becomes really effective help. Many people notice changes in themselves, in their partners and in their relationships after going through coaching and coaching programs. What results does coaching help achieve?

Each of the couple begins to better understand themselves and their own feelings.
People begin to look at things from a new perspective, distracting themselves from routine and daily life. Often they learn to see their own partner in a new way, learn about his true desires and aspirations.
Motivation increases, and the couple better understands how to inspire each other.
Joint goals are developed, partners learn to negotiate, resolve conflicts productively and discuss the main aspects of the relationship.
During coaching sessions and work on themselves between meetings, the couple becomes aware of the value of their own relationship and determines the foundation upon which it is built.
Often after working with a specialist, love, warmth and trust return to the family. It is as if couples are transported to the initial stage of falling in love, when there is no one around but the person they love, and they learn how to maintain this feeling.
An important result of working with a coach is the realization of one’s own “I” and the development of an equally valuable “We.
Joint coaching sessions help partners better understand each other, which in the future makes it possible to smooth out conflicts and avoid critical situations and scandals.
Relationship coaching. Useful skills
Relationship coaching not only helps to better understand oneself, the other and the situation, but also to develop very valuable relationship skills. That is, to apply understanding at the level of action.

Full acceptance of oneself and the other person with all the characteristics and “cockroaches”.
A factual approach instead of speculation. The ability to see the real picture of what is happening rather than projecting one’s own fears or unconscious shady qualities onto the other.
Distinguishing between areas of responsibility. Yes, we can only be responsible for our own thoughts, feelings and behavior. We can’t be “angry” or “upset,” we do that ourselves. And it is also important to formulate everything you want through the lens of your own zone of responsibility, it is impossible to change the other person.
The skill of positive communication, which comes from the fact that the intentions of people in any relationship are always positive.