Day 2 – What Are You Running Away From?

People who avoid failure also avoid success.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

Before I start anything, I like to take a deep breath. In order to write this chapter I need this deep breath in. Although what I write here goes beyond what motivates me, this chapter is the main motivation for many of us. When I heard the following question: “When you want something, what motivates you more – something you want to run away from or the happiness of what you get?”, I was surprised to find that the answer of all the other participants was fear, the only one who seemed motivated by joy was me. Now I want to help you understand the reasoning of this conclusion because, in fact, it is based on choices made repeatedly in the past. In ancient times, on the way home, the caveman meets a fierce animal. Because I don’t know what animals existed then, imagine that he comes face to face with a hungry and fierce lion. Well, do you think that he, the man of the caverns, continued on his way, thinking happily of the woman waiting for him at home, or he took his feet on his back and ran away, eating the earth to get rid of the ferocious lion? As soon as he reached the cave, he managed to breathe, to calm down, to be happy that he had got home safely to the woman who did not even understand the scared expression of her brave man. The caveman was motivated by fear to reach the cave. He ran away from something that could have hurt him if he had stayed put.

How does this story translate into our journey together? Yesterday you set the destination of your trip, and today you are certainly full of hope because, finally, you understand what you want from your relationship. Now everything is written, blue on white, clearly and full of more and more pleasant details. For now, this relationship is only in your imagination, but I want to emphasize that every great thing in this world started from an idea in the mind of the one who imagined it. No car you appreciate today would have existed if its creator had not imagined such a project. When I suggested you make a list of all the proofs of the perfect relationship, I told you it was just the first step – we were preparing for the road.

Today we need to find out which fierce animal you are running away from. Everyone is motivated by different things and in different ways. When you established the proofs which confirm that you have the perfect relationship, I told you that they would be different for other people. This is also true in regards to your fears.

Today’s topic is challenging because you turn your attention to your biggest fears. Depending on how your relationship looks at the moment, your answers may be easy to find if you already experience them. If your relationship is already beautiful, you will have to do some research to find the proofs that will be from today’s topic. And if you’re not in a relationship, well, you’ll think about your former relationships or what you noticed in your friends’ relationships. Whether you are a person motivated by what she wants in a relationship or what she does not want to happen, it is good to have clarity in both directions. The clearer you are about what you don’t want, the better you know where you are going.

The fierce animal we talked about earlier is the opposite of the relationship you desire. We will call these aspects – suffering. They represent the shortcomings of your life, if you do not have the relationship you described yesterday. How is your family life? How would you feel, if your relationship was not as you have already described it? You can think about what you would like in the relationship and transmute it in a negative way. For example, if you enjoy the support of your partner, the suffering would be that your partner does not offer you support. Maybe you don’t enjoy success with your partner or maybe he doesn’t support you in a professional change or maybe he is not offering you attention. Maybe you criticize him for every little mistake he makes, maybe you don’t give time to the family, maybe you don’t spend time with the children, maybe you suffer because you are not an example for your children, etc. You can find suffering by watching others. If you look at yourself and find it difficult to identify such proofs, look at other unhappy couples and notice what aspects of their relationship you do not like. Surely, coming out of introspection you will find many things you would not have thought of before. It is certainly easier to see sadness on the face of a friend who has challenges in love, but you would not have thought to write it down when you studied your own suffering. There can be quarrels or challenges as a couple, details you didn’t think about, because they weren’t your problems as a couple. Be objective – these sufferings will show you why you are running, you will know who is the monster you want to get rid of in order to get safely in your love story.

Once you identify the suffering for you and your family, it’s time to identify another facet of the suffering. They don’t just affect you and your family. It’s time to start a second list to identify how others are affected by your lack of fulfillment in your love life. The people you interact with receive the energy you emanate, and when you are not happy, what you give will correspond to your unfulfilled condition. There are aspects that you wrote down in the first list that you can translate into a second list, or there are other, independent sufferings. Maybe your friends avoid you because they don’t want to spend time with you, maybe you don’t offer them support in their projects, or maybe you spend your time searching for pity, and they’re tired of being there for you in endless discussions about your problems; maybe your friends noticed that they also feel depressed after spending time with you, so they avoid you more and more often; maybe you are the only couple who quarrel, so they invite you less and less to their encounters; maybe you do not value health and you have influenced them to eat unhealthily; maybe you do not respect the limits of space and time, etc. Aim to have the same number of sufferings identified in the two lists, one for you and your family, the other for the others (friends, acquaintances, the world in general).

All these sufferings can lead you to a state of depression, quite widespread in the world today, but denied by people, masked by a continuous state of stress, as if it is normal for each person to have all the reasons in the world to be stressed. Depression and stress intensified in an industrial society in which we are confronted with modern slavery. People sell their time, their lives, for some money that will allow them a subsistence level. How is the life of a normal man different from a slave, when he works to pay all his expenses, and at the end of the month he looks back and has only frustrations: he has no money set aside, he has no free time, he has no (happy) family. He has worked to pay taxes, to eat, to buy clothes. This book is about your relationship. The well-being of your relationship includes more complex aspects, your happiness in the couple will certainly include aspects that you have not thought about until now.

Today you have identified all the negative aspects of a relationship, as you see them now. You will notice that the steps you take on this journey will actually change other aspects of your life. You can’t change your relationship without seeing improvements in other areas of life. It sometimes happens that the first changes you notice are in areas where you didn’t even think you wanted to make improvements. For example, I met my husband at a time when I was preoccupied with my professional growth and even claimed that I was at a stage where I did not want to start a love affair.

As I said at the beginning of the book, this book is meant to transform your relationship. If you have felt that this book can help you, even if you are not yet in a relationship, do not be discouraged. This is not the time to put the book aside. I confess to you with all sincerity, I created the relationship with my husband in my mind before he became part of my reality. Thus, I know that this is possible for you as well, and this book certainly helps you prepare a quality foundation for the relationship you want, the relationship you described in the previous chapter. Maybe you had disappointments in the past or maybe you want to lay the foundations of a relationship like in a movie, before having a first heartbreak in love. No matter what your story is, you can relate to the relationships of those around you and you will certainly find examples of what you do not want in your relationship with your partner. I remember how I looked at the relationships around me and checked, in an imaginary list, the things I admired, respectively I scored on another list all the things I knew I would not accept in my relationship. Using these inspirations, it’s time to take your journal and complete this day’s exercises. Starting today, the exercises will include steps from the previous days, so I urge you to have a diary – to be able to follow the entire journey, to complete it with relevant information throughout the entire experience.

I suggest you write down the same number of points in each list, at least 10 points each. As with the proofs about the perfect relationship, note these sufferings in the present tense and in affirmative form. 

Exercises for day 2:

Complete 2 lists with the same number of sufferings, minimum 10 for each:

□ List of sufferings for you and your family, in case you don’t have the perfect relationship.

□ List of sufferings for others, in case you don’t have the perfect relationship.

Reread the intention set on the first day so that every day you can remember your goal for these 28 days.

Challenge of the day:

Choose one of the written sufferings and think about it. What does it mean to you? Acknowledge how much you would dislike having a relationship in which that thing happens or how much you dislike living in such a relationship now.

Recommendation of the day:

The movie The Secret (2006) is the first movie in a series of motivational books and movies in which the director and author Rhonda Byrne brought together personalities to motivate millions of people towards success. It is an introduction to the law of attraction and the conscious creation of the life you want to live.

Statement of the day:

Past experiences have made me strong and confident in the future