Power Up! | LQ041

Crystal Clark: 00:00:00

Welcome to our love space today. This is our last episode in our love space creation series, if you want to call it so we've talked about, really, from the beginning of the year this year, 2025 we've talked about how you can make some positive changes in your relationship and probably in your life as well. I think you know often, so often, a lot of these big picture ideas really apply to so many areas of our humanness, right, and our getting through the world, and that is great, because if we can learn it in one area, then we get to apply it everywhere else. And it's like, you know me in my two first and my three first, I love a good deal, right? A good two for one deal makes your life easier better, right? Okay, so we've talked about how you can really make positive changes in your relationship dynamic by just thinking about what behaviors are moving you towards, or what actions I use. Behavior is that, but that sounds kind of boring and technical, doesn't it? What actions are moving you toward, right, toward the love space, the relationship, the life you want to create, and which ones you know move you away from it, right? And that's just making those tiny decisions, so not even saying like a rule across the board. And I'll use dieting as an example, because that's always very difficult, at least for me. Weight maintenance that you know, even making that decision, because sometimes we'll jump into it, like with those New Year's resolutions, right? We jump right into the idea of, like, I am going to just, like, cut out all dairy, and I'm not going to eat after eight. And we start putting all these rules in. And then what happens is, we just can't keep up with them. But what I can do is I can open my fridge and go, ah, what are the choices for a snack? Well, I can, you know, have a noodle bowl, have something processed and full of like high fats and salts and sugars and things like that. Or, look, there's stuff here to make a salad, ooh, or there's an apple or Ooh, right? There's yogurt. There's something quick and easy to do. And I can make that choice just that one small choice in the moment, and the more I make of those small choices that move me towards my goal, right? So not worrying about it all day, not restricting myself all day, but just making those in the moment better choices that's going to move me towards that goal that I want. And that's the same in our relationship, right? So we thought about that first. Just think about how 2025 is not about resolutions, is not about creating all these rules for us, but just thinking about, does this action move me toward the thing I want to get to, toward the relationship I want to be in, toward the spark I want to have with the love of my life? Or does it move me away from it? Then we talked about being intentional, right for this year in envisioning a love space to create. Because once we can envision it, once we know where we want to go, then we will know, like from the from the first ideas talk about, we will know what actions, what intentions, what things, move us towards that love space that we're envisioning. If we don't have a vision, then we don't know what we're moving towards, right? And if we don't know what we're moving towards, we can't make those awesome, positive choices. Okay? Then we talked about, oh, we also talked about how envisioning our love space, you know, to throw out some of the rules that our love space is our own unique place, right? It's our own unique universe with the love of our life that we are creating, and we don't have to use anyone else's rules there, right? So, you know, again, I'm giving you some big picture, foundational building block ideas as always, but the way you fill those in, the way those pieces work in your relationship, the way you color in those details. Those are all unique and up to you and a part of your unique love space. We also touched next on reframing our ideas about communication, right? And for this piece, we really talked about, you know, that the idea of communication is just sending and receiving messages, and that these aren't inherently good or bad, and we have to let go of that idea so that we can really actively listen with an open heart and open mind and not jump ahead to conclusions that we covered our C for communication, then we touched on our A for affection, right? And really thinking of things that are keeping us stuck or blocking us from RE sparking our affection and connection with each other, right? So letting go of taking our partners for granted, letting go of, you know, thinking that affection can only happen in certain ways, right? And really thinking of times and places where we can act. Add in some of that non sexual physical contact and connection in order to kind of build up our affection pool again, right? And fill up that cup we talked about our K for kindfulness, right? Adding in kindfulness into just our daily lives, just the way we're out there moving around the world and living life, and also into our interactions, with our love of life, with our LOL, that that is going to really re energize our relationship, if we're just having that more kindful approach with each other. So our last piece and thinking about our love space creation, and how we're going to build it and move forward to it, which is our last big picture piece of cake, right? Is our E, and that's our energy. So our energy piece is really important. And actually, when people do the quiz, and I'll link the I have, like a little quiz, it takes about five minutes to do, where you can see, maybe, which part of cake you should target first, right? If it's the communication, the affection, the kindfulness, the energy. But many, many couples I talked to and who have taken the quiz, a lot of them, a lot of them, energy is the piece that's missing, right? Because we're all out filling our lives up with all of these great life adventures, and, you know, growing our work life and growing our incomes, and especially if you're like out here, you know, in the Vancouver area, in the Lower Mainland, out here in our little temperate rainforest, that you know, cost of living is so expensive. So I laugh, but it's not as actually laughable about how how expensive things are, and that, you know, many of us, many of us, are really feeling the crunch of the cost of living out here, and so that really drives us to put more and more energy and effort in to financial growth and job growth and things like that, and side hustles, and just trying to be more creative with how not to spend money on life, things that that really takes up a lot of our energy. And a lot of couples are, you know, the energy they might want to put into the relationship is being bled out in to that area. So I want us to think about our energy and sort of three pieces today. So one is our personal energy, and the next is what creates the energy that we get in our life for us, and then where we want to direct our energy? Those are kind of our three big picture ideas. So first, with our personal energy, this is something that I really want everyone to pause and think about and really be truthful and honest with yourself, because a lot of us are not managing our or not. I don't want to say managing, because actually that sounds super horrible. Are not caring for and being intentional and attentive to our own personal energy, if you're not being intentional and attentive to your own personal energy, then it is hard for you to add energy into your relationship and into your dynamic with the love of your life, right, with your LOL, and that is very akin to the Same idea. I think RuPaul said it. This is, like, one of my favorite quotes. No, it's definitely RuPaul, but I might misquote it slightly. So here we go. So the RuPaul quote is, if you don't love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love anyone else? I love it so great, and it's so truthful. And that's also the same idea with your energy, and the same idea on when you're flying on a plane, and they direct you, you know, when we're all doing the safety video at the beginning, and they tell you, put your oxygen mask on first, because then, if your child, or whoever passes out for momentarily having not enough oxygen, you will make sure that you don't pass out with them, right? You will have the oxygen on, and then you can help them out and get them going again, right? That's the idea with that. And so if you're not being mindful of your own personal energy, you don't have the energy to put into the relationship you're you're not putting your oxygen mask on first, right? You're not loving yourself first in order to have love that's going to flow out to the love of your life and to your relationship. So very important. I want you to be very honest with yourself and think about your personal energy and where it's at. You can do like a one to five scale. You can do a one to 10 scale, whatever is going to work for you to think about it. So I want you to be really open and honest with yourself and really thinking about where your energy levels at, if it's helpful for you to you know, think about it on a one to five scale, like five, I'm fully energized and feeling great, and one, I'm like a little sleepy slug,

Crystal Clark: 00:09:58

and I don't have time. For anyone, or like a one to one to 10 scale, sometimes five. It's like, just not enough for some people, and you start going like, well, it's a 4.5 Well, why don't we just put it on a 10 point scale? Then you get more numbers to play with. So go for it. So maybe put your energy level on a scale. Maybe you can have some people like words better. So some descriptors of where your energy is and how you really feel about your personal energy, because that we again, we always here need to know where we're at so we can know where we can grow and where we can go, right? So I want you to think about that your personal energy level. The other thing I want you to ask yourself, and this is a bit of a leading question, but I am a very big believer in that we only have one life here, which I think is scientifically true, but you never know that we only have one life here, and do we want to waste it being constantly drained and tired, Being too tired to give and show love, and maybe even too tired to receive love. Do we want to be living our one life just in chronic stress and everything feeling like a mess? No, we don't. So if we actually think about the idea of chronic stress, chronic stress puts our bodies into the fight flight or freeze mode. Oh, got. Got through it. No problem. That time, puts it into our fight flight or freeze mode. And when we're in our fight flight or freeze mode, we're in our survival brain. So I don't know if you've delved into the positive intelligence work done by shares at Carmine yet. I know we've covered it on the podcast before, and he does have a great quiz on this. So again, I will link this quiz in the show notes as well. If you haven't taken a look at it yet, please do. It's very insightful. And so he talks in his works about the fact that we have a survival brain and a Positive Intelligence brain, and that when we are in chronic stress, we are stuck in our survival brain. In our survival brain is great for running away from wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers in things like that, but doesn't always serve us as well now in the society that we have created right in our modern day worlds. And so sometimes we get caught in chronic stress, and it activates this part of our brain. What happens is it tells our brain to be constantly looking for danger or negative things that are going to impact us, and so then that means, when we're living in chronic stress, a lot of times, our social relationships and our romantic relationships can deteriorate, not just because we're exhausted and feeling tired and gross, but because our brain is now constantly looking for dangers and problems. So instead of our brain being like, hey, going on, going out for dinner with the love of my life, or going to see a movie together, or spending time taking a bath and doing some little, you know, fun massages or whatnot, that your brain starts telling yourself, like, Oh no, that seems like it could be a danger. That thing's going to make me more tired, or I'll be more bored, or I if I go see an exciting movie, I won't be able to sleep tonight. And your brain starts making up all of these problems about things that could actually be beneficial for you. I will also start looking for negative things in your relationship. So instead of being kindful like we just talked about in last episode, which is my favorite, just really lights up my face talk or lights up my face, it just really lights my heart up to talk about kindfulness Like in last episode, because it just really is something so fantastic that we can just add to the world, right? We can add to our relationship, but if we just start acting like that out in the world, what a better world this would be if we were all just walking around with a kindful mindset and attitude. So, I mean, that's really, you know, a future wish for all of us. But if you are in, if you are stuck in your survival brain, in your relationship, you will not it will be hard for you to be kindful and you and to receive kindfulness. And you will be looking for the negativity. You will be looking for the difficulties. You'll be looking for the things to go wrong. You will be looking for the errand that got missed. You'll be looking for the dishwasher that didn't get turned on right? You will be looking for all of these things and not being able to have a kindful attitude about things and things will not you like. It will skew your perspective versus when you're in your Positive Intelligence brain, this is your more open part of your brain, your brain that has better problem solving skills is able to be empathetic and kind, right? So a lot of those things related to my definition of kindfulness. When you are in your positive intelligence side of your brain, you will automatically be looking more for the positives. You will have a more optimistic even for those of you who are a bit more of a pessimistic point of view, your pessimism will be more optimistic,

Crystal Clark: 00:14:55

if that makes sense. So I really want you to think about that chronic stress piece. And whether you're activating that survival part of your brain, and if we are, you know, if you were to step back from your day or even maybe tomorrow, right? Sometimes it's hard to, like, look back. But I bet, now that you've heard this, when you go out about for the in the rest of your day today or out about tomorrow, you'll probably, like, catch yourself just jumping into a negative conclusion or a negative viewpoint, right? You will probably catch yourself doing that and be like, Whoa. Actually, there's no reason for me to jump to that conclusion. It could go totally different, right? And so that will stop up our energy for constantly using our energy to look for negative things, right? Rather than just being in a place where we're neutral, we're just experiencing life. And you know, being open to whether positive or negative things are happening or that, you know, we're putting energy into being positive, but that's giving us positivity back, because most of the time when we interact positively with someone in the world, most of the time we get a positive social interaction or positive experience, and I would say, especially with your love of life, if you're out there giving that positivity is going to flow back to you, and especially if you guys are both listening to this, and you're both on the same page and they're like, Yes, this is our love space, and this is the direction that we are moving things towards. Right for our next piece, I really want us to think about where our energy comes from. So our energy really gets a lot of it gets created from our positive social interactions and our positive emotional experiences and also our physical health. That's really a lot where our energy comes from. So so as you know, we have our three pillars of health, and that's our mental health, our physical health and our social health. So obviously, with our mental health, you know, we need to be attentive to that. And same thing with our physical health, right? So some, for some of us, this energy creation might just be like, ah, you know, I need to, you know, go to nutritionist, go to nature path, go to a doctor, check out some new vitamins and supplements, get some movement in, right? And getting movement in and exercise in that's going to that's going to create better physical health for me, and my physical health is going to help me put energy towards my mental health or my social health, right? Usually the three pillars kind of feed into each other, right? If one is being affected, then the other ones are usually a little bit affected, because we don't have the the energy, right? We don't have the energy to put into that pillar to really hold up all of our health, right? They often draw as, like a little Roman Greek, Greek or Roman building with like three, those three, like Roman columns and like the little triangle roof on top, and the triangle roof says health. And so if we're thinking about that, that if any of those pillars are, like too short, like our running down, or stones have been knocked out of them, or whatever, our little roof on top is not going to be straight. It's going to be wonky, right? So we really want to be monitoring those three pieces for our personal energy and for our relationship energy, right for us and our partners, but we need to think about what's creating energy and one of those pieces, because this is what, this is what the piece that I really know about and I'm familiar with, I will touch on the social health piece. So for social health, we really want to be thinking about all of our social interactions. Now, again, I always think it's great that if the love of your life is like your built in bestie, right, your built in partner for this life journey, that you have someone there always to be social with. Now, of course, you want to have other friendships and expand outside of that for sure. And some of you guys will want to have one other friendship besides that, and some of you will want to have 50 other friendships. I don't know how you would maintain that. I could never, but some of you can, and that's amazing and wonderful. So what I want you to really think about is, you know, that's my built in bestie. I can create my social health energy out from that person, and then that's going to help me keep up my social health and my social connections with my friends, with our couple friends, with all of those wonderful people that are in our life, right? And that's really what we want to do, and that's really what we want to get to is that piece of having strong social connections that are going to help feed our energy, maybe into doing other things. Again, I'm not the expert on the physical health or mental health piece. So if that's where, when you're doing this kind of little personal audit on your energy, if that's where you think you need to be, then 100% I would say. There's coaches you can access, there's health professionals you can access. That's where you want to go, because you want to make sure that we're, we're being attentive, right, and intentional with boosting those up. Okay, perfect. And I will also want you to think of what your couple style is at creating energy, because sometimes you know you could be both introverts, and that means that maybe create by having quiet time at home, maybe in separate places, but maybe together. Having that quiet time at home, that's going to really help you out, and that's going to energize you so that you can put energy into each other and then out into life. For some of you who are extroverts like me and my love of life, we love, we love a good DJ show. I call them DJ shows. I don't know what other people call them, but we love to go here. You know some of our favorite DJs when they come through town. You know, we love to go out dancing. We love to hang out with friends. We actually have, there's quite a few microbials around us, and some of them have, are just such a nice community feel. You can go down there and they're like, really, like, lovely. You can just go and chat with everyone. So everyone's just down there to hang out and chat. And for us, that's a super like great energy building activity to go to, because, you know, when we get to be around lots of people in a positive space, having a good time, it really boosts our energy for the week, for the day, right, for our interactions with each other. So what's your couple style of boosting your energy? Are you a mixed couple? Are you one extrovert, one introvert? Then you will find ways to balance that out, right? That's your uniqueness and your couple dynamic. And you're going to have to see like, maybe that means that you guys have to energize separately some of the time, right? And maybe be flexible some of the time with incorporating the way the other person energizes, right? So sometimes you might have to go out to,

Crystal Clark: 00:21:19

you know, a thing with your your extrovert partner, and then sometimes your extrovert partner might have to stay in and snuggle down and read a book or do some quiet time sort of thing, right? Or, you know, be comfortable to be by themselves. Well, you are doing a quiet time sort of thing, right? So really, what's your couple style of energy that's going to give you some good ideas of next steps and how you want to care for your own energy in the relationship, and how you want to be mindful. And again, because I got love a good two for one, these ideas of how you create energy can be rolled into, can be incorporated into your Mega moments of love, right? Like, like I would say, me and my partner, we love going out and listening to live music. So if we choose a live music thing as our mega moment of love, not only are we enjoying each other's company, we're making memories. We're having a great time, but we're also boosting our energy, right, and our positive emotions and our positive experiences out in life. So again, if you can make it a two for one, if that's in in your couples dynamics capability, then 100% do that. The last piece is really to think about where we're directing our energy. And again, for some of us, this may be very clear about where we're misdirecting it, right? So sometimes, if you go to like life coaching, they'll talk about energy gainers and drainers, right? So the things that give you the energy and the things that drain your energy, and that's definitely something you might want to list out and brainstorm as a couple. Are things in your life, what gives you guys energy? And this is like, similar to thinking about where your positive energy comes from, but what's giving you that positive energy in your relationship, and what are the things that are draining it, and of the things that are draining it, what can be cut out or what can be minimized? Right? Really thinking, right? We have one life to live. What can be cut out and what we don't want to waste our time and our energy on is very important, right? Keeping things simple. The other thing I will direct you towards is thinking about your relationship foundation now, having our big picture pieces in alignment and coming together, those are actually going to create energy, right when our cake is tasting good, right when our communication, our affection, our kindness, our energy is starting to get some traction with each other. We're starting to have more positive instances in all of those areas that's going to create energy for our relationship and for our life, right? Like if our communication is going smoothly or pretty smoothly or pretty well, right? And we're not wasting time in miscommunications and angry discussions and frustration and annoyance, which drain our energy, right? If we're not wasting our energy in those things, and things are, I mean, they're going to pop up once a while, but from our day to day, mostly everything is flowing smoothly. That's going to give us more energy if we are able to be affectionate with each other. We all know that our physical affection, whether it's sexual or non sexual, release. You know, our body releases our serotonin, our dopamine and our oxytocin, out into our bodies, and that is going to help us balance out, right? That's going to give us better sleep, that's going to give us more positive experiences during the day, and that's going to draw us together and make us feel more connected and safe with each other. And it also, as we know, helps lower our stress hormones that's going to help take us out of our survival side of our brain and help put us into our Positive Intelligence side, where we're able to be open and more kindful with each other. Fantastic. If our kindfulness is moving along and going well, well, we all know that's going to create positive interactions and emotions, and that's going to keep us energized and Yeah, and if we're thinking about our energy, which is this whole piece, right, if our if we're being mindful and intentional and attentive to our energy and where we are directing it, then we're going to make sure it's going to most useful places. So so my direction, my kind of lead here, would be to make to put your energy into these pieces first. And again, I have that little quiz that you can do. It's fair. It's very brief. It just gives you a brief idea of, like, should I start with communication, affection, kindfulness, or energy. Like I said, a lot of couples, this energy piece is most important, and that's where we might start wanting to start fix some things. But the little quiz will give you an idea of where we need to focus in first to be sparked, and once we get that foundational piece going, that will make the other foundational pieces so much more easy to come into alignment, and then we can start building more on top of that, right? So my recommendation, we need to have a strong foundation, just like our three pillars that I was talking about, of health, right? We need to have almost like these four pillars of health for a romantic relationship, for it to be sparked.