Hanna:
Hey friends and brain lovers!
Welcome to episode 10…”Relationships are hard”
I disagree strongly with this thought but I am getting hard just thinking about what’s coming up on the show in the next few months.
I’m going to do ten episodes with a focus on love, sex, & relationships. Can I get a rawr?!
So most of you know by now that I coach women privately in my transformational intensive…a coaching partnership where we learn to manage our minds, heal our inner wild woman so she can come out and make big authentic moves and smash goals….and we always always end up doing some type of relationship work. Literally every time. I talk to clients about their relationships a lot.
So I have a secret, next year, I’ll be launching an online coaching program, with the same name as this podcast, let’s talk dirty, and it will be a mastermind membership program, focusing solely on creating better relationships for life. I am so excited I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, which is actually really unlike me. I’m serious awesome at secret-keeping but this one relates to this ten episode Relationships series I’m starting here today so I just wanted to tell you to stay tuned in 2022 for that party!
I believe that relationships and how we connect with other people and with ourselves is the backbone of life and what we ultimately create here on earth. So with my clients, we go deeeeep down and dirty on the relationship you create with yourself and with others. All good things come from loving yourself and loving other people…even your crazy mother in law or your bossy ass friend. Learning how you create relationships in your mind and what you can see in your life stemming from those relationships can be tough work. I tend to coach people hard on relationship stuff. What I mean by hard is like I hold your capacity for epic love to the highest level, I love you so deep, like let’s swim in the underworld together, deeply, through your thoughts about the WORST relationship shit you have…because I know that love, respect, appreciation, compassion, are always a beautiful choice even when it seems like there might be a better option. So this is one of those times when I need a disclaimer: I love you unconditionally and because of that I see your power over your relationships and I see your glory so I won’t always go easy. Sometimes it hurts a little but It’s also like a massage for your biggest sex organ—I’m talking about your brain you pervs. Relationships with your person, your family, your boss, people who aren’t even around anymore, and probably most importantly your Self are the glue of life. So I’m not pussyfooting around here like this ain’t no thang. Ultimately connections and relationships make up a HUGE portion of our thought capacity. And with so much of our brain spaces utilized to analyze and try to sort out our stuff with others and with ourselves, I decided I needed to dedicate some show time to relationships. So these next ten episodes are literally for everyone. They are for you. They are for love.
To lose weight you need to work on your love relationship with you. To make money you need to work on your relationship with money. To learn a new skill you need to work on your relationship with your brain. Like I said, anything you want in this world comes back to a relationship with SOMETHING or SOMEONE. Plus coaching on relationships is one of my most favorite areas of expertise AND it’s what people ask me about most often.
I’m going to be sharing ten common dirty relationship thoughts for the next two months right here on the show!
If this is your first time here, let me be clear: what I refer to as “dirty thoughts” are not like me thinking about Shia leBouff naked…even though I could 100% talk for an entire episode about that…dirty thoughts, as we define them here on this show are the common thoughts that humans think that keep us stuck. They are thoughts that don’t serve our evolution or our highest capacity for growth. They are seemingly innocent thoughts that run unconsciously through our minds and create all sorts of unwanted and unintentional results. Feeling shitty, acting shitty, getting shitty results in your life.
That’s what I do in my coaching practice: I show you your mind so you can tell it to pipe the f down if it’s gettin shitty and help it get to work on changing your life experience. If you want to work with me on changing your life, head over to my website hannakokovai.com and schedule a free consult.
And stay tuned people! Being part of a community, with real time goals and real time coaching opportunities is even more powerful when you want to create big change in your relationships so I hope you’ll join the online coaching program when it comes available in 2022. For now though, keep listening right here each week cus it’s fo free and if you feel a little tingle …in your brain… come see what’s possible when you hire someone to love you hard enough to make some serious fucking changes in your life.
Alright, we’re kicking this series off with a very simple, very powerful dirty little thought, “relationships are hard”.
If you’ve been listening for a bit you might guess that I’m about to debunk this thought right off the bat by just saying, no, they are not hard. We know relationships are not hard because not everyone in the world would agree so this does not a fact make. That’s the test right? When you’re thinking something that makes you feel bad, ask yourself would everyone else agree on this? If no, then you’re in luck because it’s totally up to you if you wanna keep thinking that or try something better.
Before we go through the intricacies of this thought, “relationships are hard” and what it creates and where it comes from I want to tell you what relationships actually are.
Relationships are just a collection of thoughts. Relationships are defined by the thoughts we have about another person.
Relationships live in our brains.
And they don’t mingle with other people’s thoughts. Even though you sometimes think they do because you and your boo are so connected and you share thoughts. Nope. You have your thoughts. They have theirs. Sometimes they are the same. Sometimes they are not the same.
Sometimes you and your partner both think “we have a great relationship”. Sometimes one person thinks that and the other person thinks “we have a bad relationship”.
The circumstances that happen between two people is not the definition of their relationship. That’s why two people, seeing the same exact things happening between them, can have two totally different definitions of that relationship.
A relationship is the thoughts you have about a person. It’s your own thoughts, that you believe, about you and another person. Or about people.
Isn’t that cool?
So that means that relationships can’t be good or bad or hard or sad or impossible or destructive or energy sucking or fucking miraculous….until you define your interaction with another person as such in your mind.
Your mind controls your relationship
and what that relationship feels like is determined by how you think about it.
So in essence, you control your relationships.
I mean we could just stop here for today right because this alone was like mind blowing to me when I first started to understand this concept. I always thought that relationships were defined by the circumstances between two people.
Like, oh look, those two people are fighting and yelling at each other in public, their relationship is messed up.
That woman doesn’t speak to her mom anymore, their relationship is broken.
I am on a diet. That means my relationship with myself and my body is bad.
When we define relationships this way we give up the power to have amazing relationships. And worse, we continue the cycle of proving that relationships are messed up and broken and bad by leaning into the label through our actions. When you think that a relationship is “messed up” one of the things you do is go look for proof that it’s messed up, by your definition, and you will always find it.
You literally make a relationship with your mind. That is all it takes to have a relationship, a mind with thinking capabilities.
Thats why you can have a relationship with someone who isn’t even around. You can have a relationship with people that are dead. It doesn’t take physical presence or physical circumstance to create a relationship. You build it in your brain. You can feel connected to someone who has NO idea you even exist. You can love someone who has no clue you know who they are.
Thats why it’s possible, like I was saying before, for one person to feel love and contentment in their relationship and the other person feels distanced or unsettled.
Same circumstances. Same two people. For one the relationship is blossoming. For the other it is stale. It’s because a relationship is just our thoughts.
This is also how we can “fall out of love” with someone. Or go from having a good relationship to a bad relationship and back again. You just change your thoughts and that’s what makes the relationship different.
Or if I think about my relationship with my mom. I talk to my mom on the phone about twice per week, sometimes more but never really less than that. I think that my relationship with my mom is perfect and I feel really content. My mom might think that our relationship is distant and feels discontent with our relationship. Then we could even bring in my sister and have her weigh in on our relationship. She maybe thinks our relationship is overbearing and her feeling is discomfort. Or maybe she thinks our relationship is stressed because she thinks we should see each other and not just talk on the phone. So you see, it’s the same circumstance. All of us have different experiences of our relationship.
Relationship = your thoughts about another person and about the circumstances with another person.
Let’s see how this works with our thought for today which is “Relationships are hard”This is a thought I held on to for a long time about relationships in general. Not any one particular relationship, but mainly love relationships I think is what I was thinking about. And I hear people say this sometimes too. Like someone is describing a situation with another person and someone will say ugh relationships are hard. I do it too. “Oh yeah I hear you, Relationships are just so hard.” So I get that it’s kinda an acceptable way to view interacting with other humans or thinking about coexisting with other humans. As hard. And when I was really rooted in this thought and really in bed with my brain on this one I thought, you know, it’s a lot of work, other people are hard to deal with…
And aside from romance, this could apply to any relationship, right? You could have this thought about relationships that are plutonic…
friendships are hard. Family relationships are harder! My relationship with myself is so hard.
So there’s this other person. I want you to get a picture of a person that you have a hard relationship with. I dare you to tell me you don’t have or have never had a relationship you think is tough. Get that person in your mind. And I want you to choose something that happened that you would say was hard between you. Like an example of why your relationship is or was hard. Maybe you had an argument or this person didn’t do what you wanted them to do or she doesn’t want kids and you do or you don’t always have an orgasm during sex or he left the toilet seat up or he likes to have the tv on to fall asleep and you like to read a book.
Whatever the situation is for you, I want you to just focus on the facts. There is this other person. They exist in the world. This thing happened.
So let’s use the example of leaving the toilet seat up because this is actually something that I used to struggle with. A lot. Im laughing because I’m feeling embarrassed because I am thinking like how stupid this was. And also that Michael’s going to listen to this and roll his eyes because he may have left the toilet seat up but I literally have never cleaned a toilet in my life haha. But that just means this is a good example right. When we can look back and be like wow that was silly AND it wasn’t stupid because it brought me an opportunity to work on my thoughts about relationships.
So there’s this person. He leaves the toilet seat up. For the 100th time, because of course I’m keeping a tally. I ask him to put the toilet seat down. He doesn’t do it.
Now my thought is, “relationships are hard”
And when I think relationships are hard, it feels ….not good. Right? I feel kinda defeated. Maybe disempowered. Or like what’s the point if they are just hard why the fuck do I even want to be in a relationship with anyone.
Where does my brain go when I’m defeated? I beat myself up, I blame the other person and then I disconnect and become indifferent and ultimately I just make my relationship harder.
Because what do we want? We want to connect, we want to feel energized in a relationship and bonded and we want to feel love.
But what’s happening here is I’m thinking relationships are hard, which leads to me just making it harder to feel love and connection.
And IM doing that, right?
I am doing that.
I am thinking that this is fucking hard and because of that thought it just becomes harder for me.
It’s not the fact that he left the toilet seat up. I think that’s why I feel defeated and disempowered. Like, my brain goes well if he would just do what I ask and put the damn toilet seat down I would love him.
No! You see what’s happening there? We are literally giving over our power to the toilet seat. The toilet seat dictates how I feel in my relationship. I mean we’re talking dirty thoughts here. This is a reaaallly shitty one.
I think that I’m having a hard time connecting with my person because, the toilet seat.
I create an inability to connect with my person BECAUSE I choose to think relationships are hard. It’s feeling defeated that has ME showing up in blame and indifference and giving this person the cold shoulder and all he did was take a piss.
So let’s see what happens when we just think this about all relationships because you guys know I like to get down to the nitty gritty when we are exploring our thoughts like I think the more specific situationally we can get the more understanding we can gain about the specific feelings and results we are creating for ourself and then apply that to broader circumstances or see where else in our life we have similar thoughts. But let’s just say
Relationships, in general, are hard, no specific situation here just relationships.
And your thought is, they are hard.
If you’re thinking all relationships are hard what do you think is gunna happen?
You feel bad about it and you act in a way that proves they are hard!
Right so like relationships are hard
Someone might say well that’s depressing. That sucks. And from feeling depressed or sucky they don’t make connections with anyone, right when you’re feeling depressed you close yourself off and kinda hermit out, you’re not really taking care of yourself physically or mentally, so you’re certainly not showing up to attract anyone, you might stop engaging with the people already in your life, you look for more proof that relationships are hard so you can be right…but at what expense?
You make it hard to have relationships!
And we have to be really careful with generalized thoughts that we have like this one because this model that I just showed you is running in the background without your awareness and you might not even recognize how many relationships you’re destroying or not giving a chance or not building up or loving full out or having compassion in because you have this bs thought running rampant in the background about relationships in general.
I’ve heard this thought sound a lot of different ways but with basically the same sentiment right? So maybe for you it’s like “relationships are work” or “good relationships are few and far between” or “relationships are crazy” or “people are hard to deal with”.
So like when I said before about how I hear people say things like ugh relationships are hard, is that you? In one of these ways or something similar have you noticed this thought or can you notice it feeling true for you now. If it is, take a look at what that has created in your life. That maybe you didn’t even notice until right now. What has that thought allowed you to do or not do when it comes to other people?
So first lesson of this series is to notice when you’re putting labels on relationships, and how what you feel about that label directs you to prove that label right.
And that shouldn’t be a bad thing to realize you know, because if a hard relationship or a broken relationship or a messy relationship is totally created by you…then you also have the power to create a compassionate relationship, a loving relationship, an easy relationship.
Because remember, a relationship is created by your thoughts, not by the toilet seat.
Let’s look at what it might be like to decide not to think relationships are hard.
You’re like ok this isn’t useful to keep believing this, I want to feel more love!
Love is always an amazing choice I think.
And it’s readily available at any time!
So we’re trying to go from defeated to love and our old, disempowering thought about the toilet seat was that relationships are hard.
What do you think the upside to thinking relationships are hard is by the way?
Like your little minx brain, that primitive brain of yours has a good reason for this thought, always. There’s always a good intention behind our unintentional thoughts. Your primitive brain isn’t trying to kill you. It’s trying to keep you safe and comfy and alive.
I would assume that relationships are hard makes it easier to blame other people and never start emotional adulting. It’s more comfortable to be like “this is hard” than to step forward and out of emotional childhood to take responsibility for creating our relationships and the feelings we have. If we think relationships are hard we get to just not do any work to make them feel easier, and to our primitive brain that’s totally fine. We are here, blaming our emotions on everyone else, not feeling great but not dead and that’s good enough.
Bah. Is it good enough though? It’s not good enough for me and my human brain with some serious arguments about that because I want love. I don’t want indifference. Really.
So thanks for keeping us safe and all but no thanks. I want to feel abundance and belief and power. I agree to do the work. I sign the contract that says this is going to feel like hard work and I want to do it anyways.
So here we are wanting love and not defeat. What if we tried, “Relationships are whatever I want them to be.”
If that could be true, would you choose Lōve then? That might make me feel empowered.
What about, people are human, and I actually love humans?
Maybe some love from that thought or maybe compassion or even excitement.
How about “it’s possible for relationships to be easy”?
Mmmm sink into that one. It’s possible for relationships to be easy. I love that because it is really believable when I say it that way, it’s possible. If you decided to think it’s possible for relationships to be easy
And from there felt light or content
You might just, omg, just put the toilet seat down yourself!
That’s what happened to me. I decided to think, I think my exact thought was “it’s possible to choose love right now” and I literally just put the toilet seat down myself and instead of making it harder to have love in my relationship through blame and disconnect and resenting him, I just put the toilet seat down, took a pee, and moved on to important stuff, like cuddling, and laughing at ourselves for getting so in our heads about the damn toilet seat.
So which relationships in your life do you think are hard? Why are you choosing to think that? Is it really making it any easier?
My guess is no.
What intentional beliefs about relationships could you try on to help yourself feel better and show up in your relationships how you really want to?
See you next week for the second episode in the Relationships, Sex & Love series right here on Let’s Talk dirty.