Communication is important. Words matter, but so does tone, and intent. How do you marry words, tone, and intent to support fun communication? Use the values you and your spouse live!
What values are you holding high when you communicate with your spouse? And how does it affect your family? Stop with the overwhelming seriousness, and choose to live with a bit of fun communication.
When your spouse calls on the telephone, how do you respond? What about when you first see your spouse – in the morning, at supper, or after a business trip? How does your spouse – and your family – know what’s behind your words?
What’s behind the words?
Forget the specific words. What emotion or feeling is behind them? Are you anxious and annoyed, or enthusiastic and excited? Are you serious – or do you sound bored?
The shift to misunderstanding is subtle and often happens without us even noticing, especially if we’re not deliberate in our values, and in living our values as husband and wife.
Maybe we disagreed on what to eat for dinner or what restaurant to visit. Oh, well.
Someone forgot to pick up milk and bread. Suggest eating cake!
Maybe your spouse overlooked an important event for a family member. Invent a new event!
Or worse yet, forgot your birthday or anniversary. Make it a month-long celebration.
These are not critical or life threatening issues. It’s just part of everyday living. Not-so-nice things happen. How we respond is where the rubber meets the road.
Respond to issues with your values in mind. Especially those which promote fun communication.
When you’re choosing your values – keep communication in mind.
Lori and I have chosen three differentiating values by which to live our lives. They’re Loyalty – Optimism – Discovery.
The value which has the greatest impact on our communication is optimism. In the ebook we wrote together, “Discover Your Differentiating Values – a Guide and Workbook for Couples”, there’s a section at the back we call our personal manifesto on the values we live. Here’s part of what we say about Optimism, and how we choose to live it.
On Optimism: When a decision in word or deed is necessary, we work to be optimistic regardless of the price. Not all of life is positive. (I’m sure that doesn’t come as a surprise to you, does it?) Some stuff that happens can be really lousy and decisions from these lousy situations are a grouping of highly priced options – there’s no clear winner. Regardless of the price which comes from the decision we make – we will frame it in our hearts, words, and memories in a positive light. Even if the only positive we can find is deciding we learned something.
I’m sure there are those who find our deliberate optimism disingenuous. Or annoying. But it’s a value-choice we’ve made for our life and we strive to live it. Choosing to be optimistic has brought us much joy, even in the face of what others would name as disaster.
We’re optimistic when we speak with others when we speak with each other, and we try to be optimistic even in prayer. Does it come naturally? No. But it’s worth it!
What other values would support great communication?
Consider these values if you’re building a great way to communicate:
Not surprisingly, couples who embrace the value of cheerfulness possess something extra to deal with the normal challenges of life – especially when communicating.
Cheerfulness means noticeably happy and optimistic; bright and pleasant.
Some may view this as a Pollyanna principle and fake. Those individuals don’t understand the power of this value. We all live through times of adversity, hardships, and challenges. And when they occur, they can affect us physically, mentally, emotionally and/or spiritually.
A cheerful spouse can remind us that we don’t have to face problems alone. And our cheerful husband/wife can give us a different perspective that leads us to see the positives in every challenge.
Will being cheerful always be easy? No.
Attitude is a Choice.
If our attitude, like the values we live by, is under our control, why not pick good ones?
Far too often we take ourselves too seriously, and everything we go through can appear a life or death situation. Lighten up! What if we burn the toast, or dent the car, or fail to remember to pick up the dry-cleaning. Life is not over as you know it!
How much of our life is really that serious?
Being cheerful can help us put everything back into perspective.
However, I must acknowledge – there are limits. As Lori often reminds me: no singing in the morning!
How can the value of cheerfulness benefit your marriage?
(Welcome to Robert’s readers from FergusonValues.com)
However…
Couples grow out of their relationships because they’re not working on them together. <– Tweet this!
(That’s a quote from a book I first read last year, and have re-read this year, planning for a series of posts here on Encourage Your Spouse.)
If you want to encourage your spouse – or – have your spouse encourage you, both spouses need to be moving toward something.
Are you moving toward something in your marriage? Or are you moving on auto-pilot? Encouragement rarely happens when you’re meandering along on auto-pilot in your marriage.
Are you on relationship “auto-pilot”?
If you’re on relationship “auto-pilot”, maybe it’s time to flip the switch?
Maybe it’s time to flip the switch to “INTENTIONAL”.
Yes. I know.
There is a lot going on in your life. You’ve got a huge to-do list!
Time is at a premium.
There’s nothing urgent in your relationship – why should you use your precious time – now – to work on your marriage?
Why?
Take time for your relationship now –
because if it’s not growing…
it’s dying!
Be Intentional and Grow
Grow your marriage – but how?
In the next few weeks, Robert and I will be writing about the process of setting goals. Goals as a married couple…
HEY there! Don’t tune me out! (and stop rolling your eyes)
Goal setting as a couple doesn’t have to be painful or boring.
It’s just a process. And it can be painless, and entertaining… really.
Step ONE – Reminisce and Reflect
The first step is to do a bit of reminiscing and reflecting.
To help you do this, Robert and I have created a short ebook – it includes some instructions and 29 questions for you and your spouse to have a date – an afternoon, morning or evening – to grow your relationship.
Click below to go to Gumroad (it’s a site where we’re hosting our resources) and get this ebook.
Well – there are 29 questions. Twenty of the questions are there for a bit of Reminiscing about your marriage in the last year. Nine are Reflecting questions. And there are two – I guess you’d call them essays – about each section. I wrote the section on reminiscing, and Robert wrote the section on reflection.
It’s a very short ebook. A book-let. Tiny. It has 12 pages, and most of them are the questions. Maybe it would be better labeled as workbook…
Why did we write this little booklet/workbook? Two reasons:
One reason was our websites were not working for a time because we moved them to a different hosting company (technical stuff). We couldn’t write posts for a while on this site, yet still wanted to write.
The other reason is because Robert and I are being more intentional in our writing this year. We want to create more resources, and offer tangible gifts to you.
Lori and I have chosen three differentiating values by which to live our lives. They’re Loyalty – Optimism – Discovery. 
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