relationships | The Caleb Barney Collection

Love

“One of the greatest things a father can do for his children is to love their mother,” Howard Hunter said.

It only takes a moment to do, but your kids will remember your words long after you say them and your actions after you do them. It will impart on them how to treat their future spouses.

Do you want your kids to be loving, generous, and grateful? Make sure you try to display that with your actions daily. If you diminish what your spouse says or does, if you treat them poorly or with indifference, or if you don’t show them respect, your kids can pick that up and do the same.

If you aren’t willing to work for it, don’t complain about not having it.

This is a simple, but true statement:

“If you aren’t willing to work for it, don’t complain about not having it.”

The truth is, many of the things we desire most in life won’t come easy. If you want the best marriage, an extremely successful career, lots of money to save/invest or to spend on things you want, amazing health, etc., you’re going to have to work for it. It doesn’t just naturally happen, especially when it is in our programming to embrace being comfortable.

Society has contributed to making our lives as comfortable as possible. It’s kind of a double-edged sword. It’s nice that society has made much of life easy and convenient, but oftentimes, what is easy and convenient is not what’s best for our long-term goals. There are too many exciting things vying for our attention and making us lose focus on what’s important, too many delicious treats/junk food to add to our expanding waistlines, and the affordability of those items seems relatively low. But that’s part of the genius of any good company’s marketing plan…Because, on a case-by-case basis, most of it IS inexpensive. But when these actions are compounded daily – when it becomes the norm to go on a shopping spree instead of saving money, to binge on a Netflix show instead of working out, to going on social media instead of reading a book, or to eat fast food instead of making a healthy meal – that’s when it really costs us a lot.

Our goal should be to get better every day. Whether that’s 10% better, 1% better, or 0.1% better…if we can improve ourselves everyday, we will look back 20 years from now and be amazed at all we have achieved. The key here is to start with your next decision. It can seem overwhelming if you have to make the right decisions all day. But if you just do what you feel is right for your next one, and build momentum from there, you’ll be alright.

Remember that we have choice in everything we do and there are consequences to those choices. Do we want a positive result or a negative one from the decisions we make? Is the short-term pleasure going to outweigh the long-term effects of it? Many of us subconsciously complain about lacking what we desire – a lean body, a big bank account, a perfect marriage – but we don’t put in the effort that it takes to achieve those things. The way I see it, you have two options…Option one is to change your habits and to work hard for what you want. Option two is to stop complaining. You didn’t want the result badly enough to act on it, so stop complaining. Nobody wants to hear you complain anyways – at least not those who have already achieved what you want to achieve.

The key to having less conflict in relationships

“In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

If you want to have less conflict, don’t go looking for it. Choose not to be offended and you won’t be. Stop trying to listen for things you don’t want to hear. If you’re on edge (in marriage and in life), and looking for things to be upset about, you can always find them. Let the little things go. Forgive more. Nobody is perfect – including you. So get off your high horse and accept your significant other as they are.

Your happiness starts with YOU

“To be happy together, you first have to be able to be happy alone.” – Mark Manson

You can’t rely on someone else to make you happy – it has to start with you. If you don’t like yourself, how you look, how you act, what you do, or how you do it, how can you expect someone to else to make you feel happy?

It starts with you. You have to like yourself – to be able to enjoy being by yourself and not always needing someone else to be around to distract or entertain you. Once you do that, you can have lasting happiness with someone else. Otherwise, they can make you forget for a moment, but they can’t make you happy “forever.”

Don’t base your happiness on being with someone else. You need to have a base level of happiness with yourself, then you can add others in the mix (like your spouse/significant other, family, friends, co-workers, etc) to amplify it.

Controlling your responses to negative stressors

Everyone feels the same emotions…fear, insecurity, heartache, hunger, tiredness, anger, joy. What separates our role models and heroes from those who we do not look up to is how they respond to those emotions.

If you want to be the best version of yourself, take a look in the mirror. How do you respond under stress? Do you take out your frustrations on others or treat them poorly? Would you want your kids to act like you do when you’re stressed?

If you want to be more like your role model(s) or to become a role model, the first step is to be aware of how you’ve seen others react under stress. Are there people you would like to emulate?

After you’ve seen the responses of others and determined which actions you deem commendable, the next step is to be aware of how you currently react under stress. What behaviors, actions, or words do you say/do that you’re proud of and what do you want to stop doing?

After taking note of what you already do, start monitoring how you’re doing from this point forward. Be strict, but forgiving with yourself. You want to start taking the right actions right now. But if/when you mess up, own your mistakes/actions, apologize if necessary, and move forward.

Cut yourself some slack, especially in the beginning, because it takes a while to form a new habit (of responding appropriately to any/every situation). But remember, if we want to be the best version of ourselves, if we want to be a role model to our kids, if we want to make others around us feel better about themselves, and if we want the world to be a nicer place, it all starts with us. We can’t control what other people think, say, or do, but we can control ourselves. It just takes practice.