Soulmate Skills

How can you tell if you’ve found your soulmate?  One essential clue is that you feel awe at this person.  We mean a feeling of wonder at your partner.  Amazement at their qualities.  You feel fortunate to have found someone you value so highly.  In fact, it’s a transcendent feeling.  Beyond the ordinary.  You may have had previous relationships with nice people, but those evoked more a feeling of pleasant friendship.   Soulmates are altogether different.  They fulfill your criteria for a partner.  They have it all.  Being with them is an experience in gratitude.

If you like the sound of connection, you’re going to have to do one more thing–pursue each other.  We mean seek each other out for verbal, emotional, and physical connection.  That involves initiating contact; bringing up issues; introducing topics.  Pursuing each other is the engine of high-voltage relationships.  And it’s a mutual process; both partners need to do it.  It’s fun.  So, if you’re in a relationship, try it today.  If you’re soulmate questing, observe potential partners.  Are they pursuing you for connection?

Note:  We’ve posted new entries to Our Story.  Visit that page for how Jim began to debunk relationship myths for me.

Our dear friends, we have a request.  We’d like to have your comments on “Have You Ever Been Through Relationship Pain?  How Have You Overcome Relationship Heartbreak and Moved to Freedom?”  We’ll respond to your comments here.  We think we’ll all benefit.  What we’re asking for is connection.  That is a basic high-voltage relationship communication skill.  When Jim and I were first married, I’d do a lot of one-way talk.  We call it “broadcasting.”  But Jim taught me how much more pleasure we could have if we had a connected conversation.  The heart of connection is where one asks or says something and the other responds directly to it.  Will you join us?

After your last relationship ended in heartbreak, you swore, “Never again.”  Perhaps it was “Never again will I pick someone who doesn’t value me.”  Or “Never again will I stay in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to connect with me.”  Or even “Never again will I choose someone who won’t work on their anger.”  Yet you may have done little to make that happen.  In order to make your declarations of “Never Again” a reality, you’ll need to do at least two things:  one, get specific with the indicators (the red flags) of the qualities you now are determined to avoid; for example, rage-y eyes indicate a chronically angry person.  And two, interview them early on with a specific question that targets the behavior; for example, “Do you value analyzing any feelings of anger you might have so you can learn how to be free?” (Are you getting that we’re empowering you to live from your Executive Self?)

Now what if you’re in a dead-end relationship?  Or have ended one but are tempted to go back?  It’s your illusions that are the problem.  When we have illusions about a relationship that’s full of pain and going nowhere, we ignore red flags.  We do this thing called “overlooking.”  We keep hoping for the best.  We get stuck doing this, because we hold to a dream–the dream of a profound love; a soulmate love, and that in itself is a worthy goal.  But if you’re in a dead-end relationship, it means your dream is starring the wrong person as your romantic lead.   And that just results in pain.  So hold on to your dream.  But let go of illusions.  Face the reality that you’ve miscast the romantic lead.  Then you’ll be free to find the fulfillment of your dream.

Navigating your way through the soulmate quest process, you may be spending too much time in dead-end relationships.  What can you do?  Start asking the all-important qualifying questions right away.  Don’t wait.  Don’t hesitate.  Some questions you might ask are:  “Do you like to talk about feelings?”  and “Do you like to talk to your partner about your relationship?”  A “Yes” answer indicates a possible soulmate.  A “No” answer lets you know this has all the markings of a dead-end relationship in the making.  Don’t waste your time.  Onward with your quest!

The soulmate quest can be an exercise in patience.  And in loneliness.  Jim and I know about this.  Jim was 59 when we met; I was 37.  He had been divorced over 20 years; I had been divorced 13 years.  So how do you weather the hours, days, or years of loneliness?  Here are two suggestions you can implement today.  One, make a list of people you love to be around.  Start calling them–maybe just to talk; maybe to make plans to do something.  And two, make a list of things to do that give you pleasure–from feeding the birds to going out to lunch to taking a trip.  Pick one, and do it today.  As you live your life connecting with people who give you pleasure and doing things that make you happy, the hours and years of soulmate questing will be full of a happiness all their own.

It really is true.  What we value is what we get.  Values are about what we hold as important; what guides our life.  If we value revenge, we get revenge.  And that’s cold comfort.  If we value being closed off and guarded to protect ourselves from pain, we get loneliness.  But if we value love and connection, that’s what we get.  And that’s where the pleasure is.  So today, choose love and connection.

If you’re going to live from your Executive Self, you’ll have to do one essential thing:  Get free from hostile takeovers.  By that we mean, you may have been living with someone else as the executive authority in your life.  It may have been a parent or a spouse, even a brother or sister.   As a soulmate quester described it to me, “He’d point, and I’d go.”  To get free from this pattern, you’re going to have to get free from your Inner Critic.  It’s your Inner Critic* that’s told you that you didn’t have the right to be your own executive.  So, here’s how to take back your rights:  Declare and grow to believe–”I have the right to be the executive in my own life.  I have the right to make my own decisions.  I have the right to go after what makes me happy.” 

*For much more on getting free from your Inner Critic, order our book, Disarming Your Inner Critic.  It’s available from the Products page of this website and from Amazon.com.

We’re complicated.  So, when I said yesterday that you need to be the Chooser, the judge, I need to add something:  It’s not just *any* part of you that can be the judge.  It can’t be your little love-starved inner child.  It can’t be your disillusioned, give-up inner figure.  It has to be your Executive Self.  That’s the part of you who’s like the executive of a company–wise, skillful, and who has the company’s best interest at heart.  A wise executive knows not to hire the angry applicant nor the alcoholic nor the “I couldn’t care less; I just need the money” person.   The effective executive hires the person who values highly working for this company; who is gung-ho about doing a great job; and who can’t wait to get to work.  So, it’s your inner Executive that you want picking your partner.  It’s got the wisdom and measured thoughtfulness to recognize your soulmate.