There are many factors to having a strong and effective relationship. This can range from understanding love language, staying out of the crazy cycle, and understanding each other’s goals and values. Though these are the common ones people know about, I go further in my relationship coaching sessions with clients. The three different areas I will share today will help you build a stronger and more effective relationship.

The Three Areas For Effective Relationships

1. Self

2. Family

3. Career

The three areas we will discuss today are Self, Family, and Career. These three areas will make a relationship harmonious or create a divide that causes one or both individuals to feel disconnected. Yes, there can be other factors like infidelity and abuse, but today we will all have solid mindsets and be in supportive relationships.

Stepping away from gender roles, we will generalize these three areas. It doesn’t matter if the man or woman in the relationship has different focuses on either Self, Family, or Career.

The only thing that matters is keeping a balance through these three areas. If not, the relationship will struggle in some manner. Even in healthy and happy relationships, these three areas are often overlooked and can cause trouble if they are not addressed or balanced out naturally.

The first area is Self, which will discuss your personal life. This area can and does get a lot of misplaced hate. People think that working on yourself is selfish, but it is the wisest thing one could do. Think of it as an offering from a plate that is full or a cup that is filled. You will have enough to share and still have some for you after giving. People think they must sacrifice to show someone they care or are loved.

The flip side is you can give so much more love if you come from a place of abundance. This is where the area of Self shines because if someone is self-sufficient and is at 100% or close to it, they will bring that to the table. I find that many people will sacrifice in their relationships, and that sacrifice adds unnecessary tension to the relationship. This concept is akin to the emotional bank account. If you withdraw too much, you will soon have a negative account.

The idea of self is more than worrying and paying your way without bothering someone else. The idea of self is to ensure you are ready in all aspects of your life. That can mean emotional, physical, and mental. Though some people crave the attention and love of their partner, understand that you need some codependency in the relationship. This is where the idea of self shines. You have a power couple when you unite two strong and stable people.

When you work on yourself, you will work better in a team. This is true for almost every area of life. This is not to be confused with order placement or being selfish and only worrying about what you need. This is the understanding that what you do or need will significantly impact the team or relationship now or in the near future. We do not want to say you must work on yourself for ten years before you can begin loving your partner because the idea of self is a neverending cycle. You will continually be growing in this area.

The Second area is Family, which will discuss your relationship in the family dynamic. This includes being a mom, dad, husband, wife, brother, sister, daughter, son, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, etc. Regardless of your title, the family has a bond or connection that is more than just a regular Joe on the street. Though the family often holds more significance than a regular friend, we must know that family in this realm is universal to relationships.

Family is one of the more accessible areas to navigate because you know who to focus on. For example, if you have a newborn or young child, they will need more attention from you. The good news is that they will eventually grow up and hopefully leave the house. This means you will have to learn to live life again for the second time. Think of it as being a parent will require you to coach yourself out of a job one day. Though you will always be a parent to your children, the duties change once they become adults.

Knowing that parenting is a lifelong commitment, but that our kids will not need us long-term, we must identify what family means. This can range from daily calls and texts to Sunday dinners at grandma’s house. Regardless of your ideal family life, you must find ways to reach, maintain or attain this status level. I find that time and communication are essential in the family area.

The third area is Career, which discusses your work/business life. In this area, you will focus on the quality of work, relationships at work, and your duty specifics or projects. Your career also doesn’t have to be a 9-5 job where you work for an employer and get a paycheck at the end of the week. You might find that your career can be your side hustle or the business you created. Regardless of your career view, know it is in this area.

A career for me is about hobbies that make me money. Yes, my work is a hobby, not a job. Though I do not do coaching as a hobby, I treat it as such because the term job has a negative connotation. We were told we needed a job to get a better life and pay for the things we wanted and had. There is a saying that if you find love in what you do, you will never work a day. The same is true for hobbies. Hobbies can be for pleasure, like skiing, but people have turned their hobbies into streams of income.

Money and acts of service are how I will present the area of my career. This will take away from self and family, but it will play an essential role in developing your relationship. At least one person in the relationship has to have a career-centric focus, or there could be issues of finance that spring up. This is not to say that people who do not have jobs have to work. Some people get it made and do not have to work a day. However, the people who do not have to work but decide to go to work will tell you more about what it means to have a career than money alone.

As you can see, these three areas have no number one spot. That means someone can have a career as their number one and self as number three and be content in life. However, if you look at the quality of life and through the eyes of a mindset coach, there is one clear winner in the number one spot: Self. The reason is that if you are in excellent physical and mental shape, you can do more in the other areas of your Career & Family than if you place Self in the last place. Though the Self might be the winner, it doesn’t mean the self should be first.

I often had to shift/pivot these areas to make things work in my relationship. When I was single, I could easily do Self, Career, and Family in that order. At a point when we didn’t have a child, I would put my focus on my Career, Self, and then Family. However, times have changed, and circumstances have made me put focus on Self, my Family, and my Career. Though this is not normal every day, it is the order I often see prevalent in what I have to do.

My wife has the option to be a stay-at-home wife/mom, but she was miserable when she was doing it. She loves to have a career and work for her own money. Though I do not care if she works or not, it causes strain on the family if her career comes before the area of the family. This is ok if one person in the relationship does it, but things will eventually fall apart if two people are. For reference, my wife likes to hang out in the realm of 1. Career, Family, Self, and 2. Family, Career, and Self.

Just recently, she realized something wasn’t working for her, and she brought it to my attention. I already knew this would happen, but she needed to make mistakes before she realized what I was telling her was the truth. Her ideal zone would be Self, Family, Career, and my ideal zones would be Self, Career, and Family. If she and I began to work in this manner, life would become exceptionally easier; however, life wasn’t made to be easy for our relationship.

Having two people who focus on growth is good, but adjustments must be made when you have responsibilities like a child. I made the pivot because I knew my wife couldn’t because she didn’t see the result of her actions. That means we are losing 100-150k a year with her mismatched priorities. Yes, I already told her about it, but again, she is the type who won’t listen until something doesn’t work or breaks.

What she decided to do to keep her three areas preset on Family, Career, and Self was to delegate the role of the family to someone else. This is where she got a babysitter and even discussed moving her mom into the house. This is all for her to focus on her Career, Self, and Family. It is still not in line with her ideal zone. This means she will find more issues than benefits in the long run, but again, she cannot see it as I see it even though I tell her.

Though we are making headway in her seeing it, it is something that not only my relationship struggles with. This is something I find many of my clients struggle with also. There is an imbalance in the roles each person plays in the relationship. This stems from society telling women to go out, be independent, and not need a man or from being in an unhealthy household and having some fear of trusting a man without having a safety net. Though this might appear valid in my relationship, I know I can go to my wife and tell her to stop working, and she would.

I will not do this because if she “Feels” like she needs to work for her sake, she can work. However, I am almost 100% certain she will wake up from this misalignment and realize there are more important things to her than a career focus. It is one thing if both parents have to make ends meet to pay the bills, but when working is optional, you must ask yourself if your work is adding to or detracting from your life.

This is where many relationships could benefit from aligning these three areas with each other. The ideal mix for a relationship would be people working on themselves as their number one, one with a career as second, and one with family as third. Gender doesn’t matter as much as who does what, but I can tell you that if these areas are not in line with what the person wants, you will have to make some modifications.

My mother is the perfect example of this. If my mom could stay home and be a full-time mom, she would have, but duty calls when you need money. Even when there was a time when my mom stayed home, and my dad worked, my mom was not doing her part. However, when she added her career into the mix, she was better at her job of family. The issue when a woman does this is that they neglect Self. This might not seem like a big deal, but have you realized why they say you are big and beautiful to women?

If you guessed because they are placing Self last in the area of effectiveness, then you are correct. This movement of trying to fill in the missing holes with frivolous words will only bring unhappiness. Though I believe they should have a career, it should not be focused on until they have a solid hold on themselves and an alternative to family. This can lead to many different paths, but the end should be a relationship that works; these three areas in a relationship will be different mixes depending on personalities and culture.

Most women would like a man to pay most of the bills and have her job be optional, but will only keep her job so as not to depend on the relationship if she decides to leave. This is a common trend in today’s relationships; women leave because they do not have to be there. Yes, I know you do not have to be there, but why not find a place you want to be?

Finding a relationship can be difficult, but the clients I help find love get married and are happy sooner than those who try to look for love in all the wrong places. Do I know something that they do not? No, I believe it is that I can see mindset and the cause and effect of actions. The cause and effect for misaligned areas of a relationship will create an ineffective relationship.

To create an effective relationship, you must learn about these three areas and how to create the ideal zones for each individual. The easy way to find out is to know what you are good at and lacking, but the second would be to get a coach to help you through the process.  Regardless of how you do it, understand that if you two cannot fill in the gaps together or adjust, you will have to add another person into the mix to take over the family side of raising your child. That is why we have grandparents. They are done raising us, but now they can get their job back at raising some grandbabies.

In closing, these three areas of effective relationships range from Self, Family, and Career. You will find effortless maintenance if you can learn how to create synergy in the relationship. Yes, relationships are hard work, but they do not have to be that type of work that is stressful beyond measure and that you do not want to show up for. Take time today to learn which three areas you are most effective in your relationship and adjust to that. You can also head to the website and Sign Up for a Coaching Session to get the answer.

Until then,

Michael Rearden

Founder of Reven C