HOW DO YOU VALUE YOURSELF?

I recently read a post in my LinkedIn page about this Father who gifted her daughter his old wreck of a car to go and sell to start her life. She took the car to a nearby yard and the people there agreed to buy it for $1,000. She then took it to one of her friends who valued it for only $100. Almost giving up, she took it to the boys club and there one of the guys looked at the car, a serious brand though old, and offered her $100,000 for it. When she came back excited with the offer, her Dad told her something profound.

“My daughter, there are people who will value you for only $100, others will value you for $1,000 while there are those who will value you for $100,000, go where you are valued not where people just put up with you.”

That’s a very powerful life lesson. I have seen people who don’t know how much their value is allow themselves to be treated like trash be it at the workplace or in relationships. They fear standing up for themselves lest they lose their job or their relationship. Especially our single ladies, who endure toxic relationships where they are abused mentally and emotionally, sometimes even physically. Yet stick in that relationship for fear of starting all over again or of maintaining status. They don’t want to be seen to be single, OR want so badly to get married that they even go ahead and get married only to live miserably thereafter.

Last week in our blog, we talked about the person you really need to get married to. That person is yourself. Ladies if you don’t value yourself, how do you think someone else will? What we have come to observe in our over 15 years’ experience working with people in their relationships is the way most ladies cheapen themselves just to be in or to remain in a relationship. They feel that a relationship is what gives them value. And so no matter how badly they are treated on those relationships, they remain stuck there. What you desperately need single lady, is to rediscover your value. Because just like that car, it is only those people who really knew its value that were willing to pay the price for it.

Single lady, a guy who does not pursue you, doesn’t call you or just texts you when they want to take you for a date or you go to their place to wash his clothes, don’t value you. A guy who is non-committal, keeps you in suspense and is saying nothing does not value you. A guy who is shy to introduce you to his friends or family, doesn’t value you. You need to know your value and go only where you are valued not where you are just tolerated!

THE PERSON YOU REALLY NEED TO MARRY

There are many single people out there who keep telling us that they are "single and searching". What they are all searching for is the right guy or right chick to become an item with. I recently watched a very interesting TedTalk by one Tracy McMillan, in which she talks about "The Person you really need to marry" I thought this would be a good title for a blog as this would easily be a hook for all those who are single and searching.

Listening to the wisdom and experience of someone who has been thrice married, I thought we could glean a few lessons from her so as not to repeat the same mistakes. Could it be that we are marrying the wrong person or are getting married for the wrong reasons? The answer is both. Why do I say that? I recently heard a very popular Lady in this Nation sharing what she had learned from her two failed relationships that left her with two children from the two men. This is what she had to say, "I realized that I was attracting the same kind of people". So as much as she alluded to the fact that the two guys were the wrong type, she also unknowingly revealed that there was something wrong with her to have twice attracted these wrong types.

Back to Tracy, she talks about how her mother was a prostitute and her Dad a drug pusher who spent most of his life in prison. As a result Tracy spent most of her life in 24 Foster homes and the thing she message she came out of this mess was "I don't want to be left alone". This drove her to get married at an early age of 17. After three years she realized that she was getting married for the wrong reasons. Are there any painful experiences from your past? What message about yourself did these experiences or relationships leave you with?

What Tracy discovered, and we have also discovered having worked with about 500 couples is that the most important person to enter into a relationship with is yourself. You need to relate well with you. Most of us have been running away from the real us all our lives and don't really know who we really are. We don't love ourselves because of what we did or was done to us. We haven't forgiven ourselves for our past mistakes. We are messed up and are looking for somebody to fill up our hole. Somebody once said that it is only one whole person plus one whole person that makes the two become one. When an emotionally hurt and messed up individual joins with another, the two become a hole and a deep one for that. And sadly that is where many of us are finding ourselves in relationships and even in marriage too.

When you find yourself not desperate of  whether he likes you or not when you are out in a date but feel good about yourself then you are on the right path. If you are trying to get security or a sense of identity from a relationship, then you are not really the person another needs to marry. If you are waiting to hear the words "I love you" or "you are valuable" from someone else, then you are not ready for marriage. If you are thinking that someone else will make you whole then you are missing it. If you are asking yourself whether he or she is Mr. or Mrs. right or not, you are asking the wrong question. What you need to ask yourself is whether or not you are the right person for them. You need to look in the mirror, you need to first relate well with you before you venture out in search of relating well with others.

DO YOU WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIP?

Our ability to interact effectively with people may be the difference between success or failure both at a personal level and professionally. Effective interaction, like charity begins at home, it begins with you, and it begins with an accurate perception of ourselves. Over the years you have built your self-perception on information received from others, but now you can get a true reflection of yourself through a scientifically proven report.

We at Two Ships Solutions in partnership with TTI (Target Training International) Success Insights of South Africa are happy to announce to you that we are offering a Relationship Insights with a Comparison report that is great especially for Married Couples. This Relationship Insights report was designed to quantify information on how you see yourself. How you use this information will be directly related to your success in significantly improving your personal relationships.


This report will help you identify key areas for improving interpersonal relationships like

·        Your current wants, people are motivated and influenced by the things they want,

·         What you need to relate more effectively with others and especially your spouse

·         The specific talents and behaviors that you bring to a personal relationship,

·         How you like others to communicate with you and the communication skills you need to develop

·         Possible hindering factors with regards to relationships.

We have been offering this comprehensive reports with a debriefing session at $150 per couple and $100 per individual, but are now offering it at a special COVID-19 discount of only $50 (Kshs. 5,000/=) per couple and $30 (Kshs. 3,000/=).


This offer is only till 30^th June 2020 so hurry and get you and yours report before this deadline!



For more information

Contact us at +254 – 733 55 44 93

Email address: - barnieachoki@gmail.com or info@twoships.com

#STAY HOME

This COVID-19 thing has brought with it certain dynamics in our marriages. For some ladies this is a good time to see and spend time with their hubbies now that they are working from home and with curfew have to be home by 7pm. That means spending more hours together, them getting to be involved with the kids, and having dinner as a family, a rare occurrence these days. But for others it is a nightmare because they have grown used to him not being around so feel that their space is by intruded upon and are wondering what to do with him. How do they relate as they have become strangers with each other. 

For most men, this situation has put them in some awkward position. All of a sudden they are at home every evening something they were not used to. Trying to adjust to this new normal isn’t easy for them. This coupled with the fear of being confined at home coupled with the fact that they aren’t sure of their future anymore in terms of their jobs, must be raising their stress levels. So though they may be at home, they are not there (you know what I mean), or are there but not fun to be around.

So to make the most of this crisis, ladies, please try and understand that this could be something new to your man. So be patient with him and make it easier for him to settle down into this new normal. Don’t put a lot of demands on him at once and please let him really feel at home know. Don’t make it look like sasa amepatikana (now we have you where we want) but rather as an opportunity to connect or is it re-connect with him. Give him some space too to go into his cave from time to time as that is important to guys.


For the men, please see it as an opportunity to reconnect with your kids and more importantly their mother. Look for creative ways that you can enjoy time together as a couple. This is the time to resurrect some of those old rituals we had, like taking a walk together in the evening, cooking together, sitting on the verandah and sharing stories of your childhood etc. It may also be an opportunity to start some new ones, who knows, after this thing is over, you might just look back and be thankful for the two of you became one again!

IS YOUR WELL DEEP OR DEPLETED?

With the scarcity of water in the city, many real estate owners have been left with no choice but to sink bore-holes to supplement the supply of water to their customers. In the rural areas and in the ancient days wells were a common source of water for many communities. The deeper the well the better was the water supply. Our energy levels are like a well, the deeper they are the healthier is our lives after all water is life, and the better our lives the more productive are both at a personal and professional level.

Several years ago I was not a nice person to be around as far as my wife and kids were concerned. I was very impatient and always angry at home. Every evening I got home exhausted and was of no earthly benefit to my family. I was totally disengaged, reactive and very negative. At my place of work things were just routine, I didn’t have a vision and was simply going through the motions at my work place. Things that used to excite me no longer did. What I didn't’ realize was that I was experiencing a burn-out.

According to Professional Certified Coach (PCC) Delaney Tosh, when our energy outputs exceeds our energy inputs, we can become chronically exhausted. This leads to impatience and reactivity at work, and a lack of energy for the second shift at home and family life. In other words what Delaney is saying is that we cease from being effective both at work and at home. Our output at work is greatly affected and there’s a lot of strain in our marriage and relationship with our kids. Delaney goes ahead to state that our thoughts, behaviors and emotions all have an energy consequence which can be negative or positive, depleting or renewing. Various demands of life requires your energy thus drawing down what she calls your “well of resilience”. If you do not have energy habits that refill your well, and if your well is not deep enough, you run the risk of draining your well resulting in a burn-out as I experienced.

Resilience, which is the ability to cope and rebound quickly, is dependent on the balance of our energy renewal versus daily energy drains. It is thus important for each of us in both our professional and personal lives to develop energy renewal habits and be aware of our daily energy drains. Even our Savior Jesus Christ Himself knew this that’s why after a busy energy sapping day meeting the needs of the multitudes, could often times draw away from the crowds to re-energize. How we do that may differ from person to person, for example introverts like me are energized by pulling away from the crowds and spending time alone while an extrovert is re-energized by being with others. One of the ways we can re-energize is by having good sleeping habits, doing some physical exercises, recreating by doing a road trip, reading a book or watching a nice movie, and yes by silencing your inner critic as well.

DO YOU KNOW WHY YOUR SPOUSE BEHAVES THE WAY THEY DO?

The Ten Commandments can all be summed up into loving God and loving your neighbor because if you do so you won’t break any of those commandments. “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus was asked. In responding to this question He tells the story of a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who is mugged by robbers who strip him of all he has, beat him up and leave him half dead. A priest comes along the way, sees him and does nothing about it. And so does a Levite who passes by a few moments later, but a Samaritan on his journey when he sees this wounded man stops and does something. He bandages this man’s wounds, pouring in the oil and the wine, takes him to an inn and pays the inn keeper to take care of him.

Grace loves this parable, “The Parable of the Good Samaritan”(Luke 10:25-37) because it depicts clearly what happens in marriage. We all like the sojourner, in our journey in life have been beaten up, stripped and left wounded by what we have experienced. According to Linda Graham, Marriage and Family Therapist, if the earliest experiences we had of reaching out for connection were met with non-responsive, indifference, disregard, dismissal, or with anger or critical blaming and shaming, that experience of reaching out gets paired with a feeling of hurt or rejection or confusion. We withdraw back in to ourselves for protection and this is how we come into. Yesterday during our men’s forum, a guy stood up and confessed how he had dismissed some things that happened to his wife when she was young (she was molested by a relative when she was 7), thinking and telling her that she was very young at that time and should have outgrown those things by now. What he didn’t realize until this point was that we don’t outgrow such painful things. Instead they become etched in our brains and that affects us in our adult life. Negative things that happened even thirty years ago have the potential to cause havoc in our relationships many years later.

We ought to be our spouse’s neighbor, the Good Samaritan for each other. How? By not being judgmental, or wishing away certain things that happened to your spouse those many years ago. Instead we have to be keen enough to seek to understand how that has impacted their lives and their relationship. Look for any signs of rejection and shame from your spouse and reach out to them. Bandage their wounds and pour in the oil and the wine by offering them unconditional love and acceptance. Give them in abundance the opposite of that thing they missed or hurt them growing up. Affirm and appreciate them constantly if they grew up starved of affirmation. That is the reason you are there in their life. Like the Good Samaritan reach out to them with compassion and do something to reverse the hurt and bring healing to them.

ARE YOU SECURE IN YOUR MARRIAGE?

In sharing your innermost feelings with your spouse, especially those things that hurt you, your failures and fears, do you feel safe or scared? Do you make your spouse feel safe or scared to share with you their innermost feelings? Do you know what your spouse’s greatest fears are and why they struggle with them? Are the secrets your spouse knows about reasons for shame, or reasons for drawing you closer?

So why do we struggle to share with our spouse our innermost feelings? The fire and the fear of marriage is the fact that we can know each other so intimately yet this great blessing can also be the site of its greatest danger. Someone who knows us this intimately can either love us at depths we never imagined, or can wound us in ways we never fully recover from.  So often it is our spouse who can hurt us so badly till we resolve within us never to share with them our struggles or stresses. We fear they will reject us or look at us differently because of what we shared with them. We even fear that what we share with them at our most vulnerable state might be used against us at a later stage.

Sometimes those fears have nothing to do with our spouse but everything to do with our past. Probably your best friend, brother or sister or even parent betrayed you, laughed at you, belittled what you told them when you shared with them something so intimate to you. So you vowed never to do that again no wonder you are struggling to open up to your spouse.

How can we get to open up? We need the courage to do so knowing that this might just be the door to greater intimacy. Where our fear lies so often is where our greatest opportunity lies as well. What you fear might just be an opportunity for your spouse to get to know you better, empathize with you and even forgive you. It might just unlock that door into a greater intimacy. We can also on the other hand offer a safe space to each other by loving our spouse to the point that they are safe with us.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”- (1 John 4:18)

God knows us so intimately, He knows secrets about us that we even hide from ourselves, yet He loves us at a depth we cannot even fathom. He accepts us the way we are. The atmosphere in your marriage must be one of freedom not fear. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, your closeness should intensify your intimacy. Being “naked” and “not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25) should exist in the same sentence, right in your marriage – physically and emotionally. In marriage we have the opportunity to wrap all the private information about our spouse in the protective embrace of love.