Empathy in a marriage

It is difficult enough to make a marriage good, and when it is void of empathy, it’s really difficult.  So, what do you do?  If you think about it, what you want to do is get out of your shoes and get into your partners shoes and try to imagine what they are feeling like.  Rather than getting defensive and immediately getting to that contest of who’s right, instead, say something like this, “That must be difficult” or “I can appreciate why you think that way.”  When you spend more time empathizing on the front end you’re going to get much better results on the back end.  Just simply spend more time empathizing before you come up with your idea.  You will have by far better results and a much happier marriage.  

Listening

Listening is so essential in marriages, between supervisors and supervisees, and between customer service reps and the market. Very often surveys point to the fact that people really fail to listen. What we need to do is spend more time listening. The way you do it is you listen to what people are saying to you and then you play back what they said, particularly when it is important. So somebody says something and you say, “Let me see if I understand what you are saying, what you are saying to me is… this or that.” When you play back to the person what you thought they said, particularly in the beginning of important conversations you are much more likely to get on track and people will get a lot less defensive.

The Perry Plan

Are you an emotional eater medicating with food?  That’s insane – would you take a laxative for a skin disorder?  No… so why would you eat a gallon of ice cream because you are lonely?  
It’s time to pull yourself together!

Dr. Mitchell Perry  

THE PERRY PLAN
“Winning the Losing Game”

Something is clearly missing!  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) says that a third of the country is currently obese.  Obesity is overtaking smoking as the biggest threat to our health and the numbers continue to rise every year!

Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, some cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, and arthritis.  The CDC has concluded that obesity causes about 25,814 deaths annually in the United States.  Moreover, the financial costs to healthcare are staggering!

The price you pay for being overweight is huge!

Your self esteem
Your relationships
Your wallet
Your health
Your productivity
Your quality of life

The “Perry Plan” places the onus for losing weight back where it belongs — with the participant — rather than on quick fix diets du jour.  Instead of concentrating on what goes in your mouth, concentrate on what is between your ears!

So, how do you sabotage your own commitments to lose weight?  

Loss of control
Emotional or situational upset
You discount any improvements
Your defeatist attitude prevails
Lack of accountability either internal or external
Small setbacks trigger feelings of total failure
Learned helplessness and chronic powerlessness
Unable to stick with your commitments
Therefore, you give up and feel pessimistic!

The Solution:  THE PERRY PLAN.  It will give you the tools to insure your power to stick with your commitments to change your life for good:   

LOCOMOTION:  The power to move and keep moving.

OBSERVATION:  The skill to eat only when you are hungry.

The awareness of why you are eating.

MOTIVATION:  Inclusion – The OPTIMISM skill for POWER  to stick with your commitments.

RECOVERY FROM SETBACKS:  The power to get back in the saddle when you sabotage yourself.

At last, a proven program that will teach you to reprogram your state of mind to one of OPTIMISM and POWER.  When you are powerful you will stick with your commitments, lose weight, keep it off, and change your life for good.  

 

How you overcome a guilt trip

Sometimes people will make you feel guilty to try to get what they want. Somebody might say, “If you really cared about me you would be here this weekend.” Well, you ever notice that you feel guilty and you are likely to cave in and do their bidding? So how do you overcome that? What you do is divide up the message, after they say it. So, if they say, “If you really cared about me you would be here this weekend.” What you say is, “What are we talking about, how much I care about you or are we talking about the fact that you want me here this weekend? “ When you do it that way, the person is likely to get immobilized at which point you can actually solve the problem without feeling guilty. The key is to off-load the guilt to get to the real point so you can be less hostage to feeling so bad.

Manipulation

Do you ever notice people will go to their neighborhood travel agent and book a guilt trip and give it to you?  “If you loved me you would be here.”  “If you really cared about me you would give me some money.”  Do you have family members who do that to you, they guilt you into getting what they want?  Well, it’s counter-productive and it’s manipulative.  So, how do you counter-act that?  What you do is play back to the person what you thought they said.  So, if they say, “If you loved me, you would be here this weekend.”  Then you simply say, “Let me see if I understand you correctly, are you telling me that if I loved you, I would be here?”  At which point, they are very likely to say, “well, no, that’s not exactly what I mean, what I really want you to do is be here.”  If you play back exactly what they said you often will immobilize them and that will get results.  

Always and Never – Absolutes

Do you ever notice that you use the words always and never and you get all kinds of incendiary results?  People will do that to you.  Your kids will say “You are never home.” “You are always gone.”  Your first thought is, “Wait a second, I’m home often.  What are you talking about, always gone?”  The reality is that when you speak with always or never, those absolutes create all kinds of drag and resistance.  So to get people to be more interested in listening and less defensive, you want to change the word always to frequently, often, or much of the time.  Change the word never to once in a while, infrequently, or rarely.  When you change always and never to these other kinds of words you are going to get by far better results and as a result, people will listen with a lot less defensiveness.