Five Leadership / Partnership Principles for Couples Therapy
That you pledge to follow to honor your team / family members
These are 5 leadership principles for any team, including a marriage and family.
This post is meant to provoke your thinking to see if these principles are being lived out
in your circle of relationships. If you would like to talk more about it, please reach out and contact me.
If you were to use this as a way of identifying how you see your partner, you can begin to identify areas of growth you can take to improve your relationship. Of course, its probably pretty easy to slip into identifying the ones your partner doesn’t do with you. We will work towards addressing that in a productive way.
1. I will always seek to respect you, to value you, and to appreciate you for everything you do that is good, positive, or useful for our team.
2. I will work to be attentive to discover your gifts and talents and to share my insight with you in a way that will increase your self-awareness of your awesomeness and incredible potential.
3. I will work so that I never demean you, never put you down, never make you feel unimportant, un-trusted, or that your opinion does not count.
4. If I catch myself at having demeaned you in any way, I will apologize to you.
5. If you should feel that I have demeaned you or lessened your values as a person, you should share that with me. I will apologize and will make every effort to seek the root cause in myself. Thereafter, I will work ever more attentively to treat you with the full respect, honor and dignity that you deserve as a person.
However, if you should continue to feel demeaned, you have my permission to speak directly to _______________________.
That person has already been instructed to speak to me so that I might better understand and make a more appropriate apology. In that process, I will make every effort to seek the root cause in myself. Thereafter, I will work ever more diligently to treat you with full respect, honor, and dignity that you deserve as a person.
Note: Even though I try very hard, I might still demean you or make you feel diminished in someway. The reason for this is because you have undeniable dignity, absolute worth and inner beauty. Therefore, it is almost impossible that I (and others) will always treat you with the respect, honor and dignity that you deserve. This is not an excuse; it is simply an annotation that sometimes I act inhumanly towards others and not in a human manner as I should. It is also likely that you will experience the same difficulty in treating me and others at all times and in all situations with the respect, honor and dignity their being a person deserves.
[Written by Edward Santana-Grace, Ph.D]