Love is one of the greatest and most important experiences that anyone can have. It is a gift, and it can fill up our lives. We all possess a deep desire to have someone connected to our hearts in a safe and growing relationship.

You may be single and looking for the right person, or you may be married and wanting your connection to be happier, deeper and more intimate. In either situation, a healthy, safe, exciting and positive love relationship is an important part of life. Or at a more serious level, things may not be going well in your love life. Your dating life may be in trouble, or it may be nonexistent. Your marriage may be empty or struggling with a great deal of pain and conflict.

Avoid the blame game and ask, “What part have I played in this situation?” Here are some common answers.

(Please note that that these don’t necessary apply where abuse is present. If you’re in an abusive relationship, please seek the help of a counselor and/or law...

The following was written to address general unsafe behavior and may not be applicable for situations where abuse is/was present. If you have been in a relationship where abuse was present, please seek the help of a counselor and/or law enforcement.

As any psychologist will tell you, fear is stronger when we fear becoming afraid. This is called fear of fear. Suppose you need to confront a toxic person about their attitude, but you’re afraid they might retaliate. So you stay happy and positive on the outside but remain dissatisfied on the inside.

The longer you ignore the fear, the more you will activate it. And since the fear is associated with an uncomfortable outcome, having it burrow around in your mind naturally gives you an uncomfortable feeling. Eventually you learn to avoid thinking about the fearful situation so you won’t have to keep feeling the fear. And the more you avoid feeling that fear, the more afraid of it you become. It’s a vicious cycle, and it...

While I was consulting with one of the biggest companies in North America, an employee told me, “We would be so much better off if my boss would set better boundaries on what goes on with individuals on our team. He plays the ‘nice guy’ role too much, and as a result, the team suffers.”

Surprisingly, a lack of confrontation goes in the other direction as well. One vice president told me something I hear often as a consultant: “I wish my people would come clean with me. I wish they would tell me what they really think. I wish they would be more open and direct. But they are scared to do that.”

If you are like most people, you spend a lot of your life at work. Work is a place with many possibilities for stress, conflict, risk, and loss. It is a place where you put in the best of who you are. You are serving, and at times sacrificing, trying to please, and also establishing friendships on the teams with whom you work. So it naturally follows...

Life is full of traps. Sometimes this fact is never more apparent than in our relationships with others. One of the biggest traps that we all fall into at one time or another is getting stuck in the whirlpool of unnecessary drama.

You know what I’m talking about: that friend who may have lots of good attributes, but always manages to trigger an argument whenever you’re together; that coworker who seems to only ever want to talk about your mutual colleagues and the zillion ways they’re doing everything wrong; that fragile friend whose feelings get hurt no matter what you do or say; or what about that person who you’re always having to save from the assorted troubles that seem to follow them around wherever they go?

Getting bogged down by these kinds of people and issues can be seriously demotivating. They zap you of your energy. Left alone, these relationships will end badly.

Most drama is avoidable by laying down solid boundaries.

Boundaries are an invisible...

There is no shortage of things in life that can cause you to bury your heart and soul.

If we are going to invest in our lives, it’s going to take some deep digging inside of ourselves. And to dig deeply means that we must face some fears and obstacles. What can you identify in your life that has caused you to bury your treasure? Was it harsh parents? A tough relationship? A lack of opportunity or resources that caused you to give up? A subculture that put you down? Other people who did not like what you brought from the inside of your heart and soul?

The truth is, that those who succeed in any aspect of life have not allowed those influences to keep their dreams and desires hidden. They have dug them up, faced their fears, taken risks, failed, gotten up again and found that they could indeed build something beautiful.

And I believe you were created to do amazing things in your life. 

The fruitfulness of our lives will come from our hearts.

Developing our inner selves helps us prioritize our lives. When we look to our inner selves, we begin to be a guardian of our hearts, making sure that they are strong and healthy, because we know that the fruitfulness of our lives will come from our hearts.

Our hearts will determine the “issues” of our lives. And we all have a lot of “issues” in life. We may have dysfunctional relationships, floundering careers, burnout, stress, lost dreams, debt and more. But the truth is that many of those issues come as a result of whether or not we are tending to and guarding our “inside life,” our heart, mind, soul and strength.

I want to show you how to guard your heart.

We repeat patterns in our lives without knowing that our pattern is creating the problem.

We could be going back to the same toxic relationships, giving it chance after chance. We could be indulging in the same bad habits that aren’t good for us, thinking it won’t affect us is the same way.

But don’t be discouraged. Strive for progress, not perfection. Go back and look at what could be different — look at what you ultimately have control of, yourself. Research shows that change happens more consistently and lasts longer when our goal is to get better, not perfect. And it get better, that takes time.

When we understand that change is a process, then when we do fall short, we will see it as a necessary part of the path and not as a dead end. We will be able to take a setback in stride and continue going forward. So remember, we’re not aiming for perfection, just progress.

Playing fair will destroy every relationship in your life.

Fair is giving good things to others as long as they give good things to us. Then if they fail us in some way, we respond “fairly.” We give it right back to them, either at the moment or soon thereafter. Either our words or our actions say, “That’s not fair. Therefore, I am not going to do good to you any more. In fact, I’m going to give you exactly what you’re giving me. Then you can see how it feels.”

The problem is that operating by the principle of playing fair, all it takes for any relationship to go sour is for one person not to perform, then the other one will do the same. There is an interlocking dependency: the other person must be good so I can be good. In this kind of dynamic, we need the other person to be loving in order for us to love them, or to behave maturely in order for us to behave maturely toward them. And no one ever performs perfectly, so that is why all it...

Simply put — You get what you tolerate. In text, it can look like a harsh truth, but let me explain.

This phrase holds true whether you are raising a puppy, a child, a direct report or a spouse. (Hopefully you’re not raising a spouse, but it happens.) It holds true when you are negotiating a deal, working with an account, or supervising an employee. It will come into every context of life in some form or another. Many times it is innocent, like in very good relationships. One person will have a habit or practice that is not a problem for him or her, but is a problem for the other person. If the other person tolerates that behavior and does not talk about it, then it will remain in place until the other person finally says, “Excuse me, but you are stepping on my toe.” And in good relationships, the ebb and flow of the relationship is to talk to each other about what you would wish not to have in the relationship, and then you will not have it. That’s...

Safe relationships are centered and grounded in forgiveness. When you have a friend with the ability to forgive you for hurting them or letting them down, something deep occurs in the transaction between you two. The healing process begins to liberate both people of the harm that was done. Guilt, shame, hurt and fear start to dissolve, so receiving forgiveness when we know we’ve truly blown it is a humbling and growth-producing experiencing. It’s the only thing better than forgiving someone else.

On the other hand, an unsafe person who is unable to forgive can be very destructive. Unsafe people are often good at identifying your weaknesses. They can quote the minute and hour you hurt them, and recall the scene in intimate detail and living color. Like a good attorney, they have the entire case mapped out. And you are judged as “guilty.” And while we need to be confronted of our weaknesses, unsafe people, however, confront us not to forgive us, but to condemn...