How do you show up in love and business?

How you show up in love and in your business may be more connected than you realize.

You may have heard the saying, “how we do one thing is how we do everything,” and that can be especially true for how we show up in our relationships with our partners and how we show up in relationships with our businesses.

Today I’m asking you to examine the way you typically show up in both.

How do you handle challenges?

How do you resolve conflicts?

Even though someone may invest more of themselves in their businesses or their relationships, there are often similarities between how they show up in both areas.

There are a limited number of strategies that we have when feel disconnected to our partners.

My sense is that these strategies apply not only to relationships with our romantic partners, but with others in our lives as well, including our businesses.

Ideally, of course, when we feel disconnected from our partners, we reach out, try to re-connect and all is well.  But when that doesn’t work, what options are left?

There are basically 2 strategies we employ to deal with a disconnect in our relationship, or some combination of them.

Many of us have a preferred way of dealing with this disconnect and so our strategies become habitual.

Can you identify with either of these strategies?

1.) You turn things up.  If you are feeling discounted or disconnected from your partner, you turn the heat up.  You become louder, move toward them, try to talk things out, possibly become more critical and maybe even hostile.  If you are feeling unheard, you will raise your voice and wave orange flags in attempts to be heard.

2.) You turn things down.  When you feel a bit hurt or disconnected from your partner, you might freeze things out.  You will just deal with it on your own, turn away or deny that it effects you.  You may be quick to give up in fights because you feel like it’s useless to bother.  You might feel helpless.  Your strategy is shut things down in order to make them go away.

Essentially – some of us pursue with a tendency to get frantic; some of us withdraw with a tendency to freeze.

Some of us employ a combination of the two strategies.

How do you show up with your partner when you’re faced with disconnect?

Do you find that you tend to gravitate toward pursuing or withdrawing?

How do you feel like your partner shows up with you?

Take a look at how your strategies may complement each other – and perhaps reinforce each other in a way that only leads to a greater disconnect.  Understanding problematic patterns that exist between couples can be helpful in understanding your own pattern together.

Do you see any similarities in how you deal with your business?

Do you tend to feel frantic, overwhelmed and go 100 miles an hour when things aren’t going well?  Or do you back off to some degree and pretend it doesn’t matter?

In other words, do you make things into a bigger deal in your mind than they really are, or do you not quite address them at all when you should be?

If you identified with either of these strategies in business and/or love, let me ask you this:  How are they serving you?

Sometimes these strategies don’t quite work.

A better strategy is just to be present to the situation at hand.

If it’s a disconnect with your relationship, notice that and how it feels at a really basic level.  Express that to your partner.

If it’s a problem in business, notice that and how it feels at a really basic level.  Then deal with it.

It’s tricky in relationships because it requires a kind of emotional awareness that hasn’t been cultivated in many of us, but it’s a similar emotional reaction that might come up in business.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and whether you identify with either strategy and how you show up in business and in love.

Please leave me your comments and let me know what you think.

Cheers to thriving in business and love,