1. Stop spending money to impress people, by picking up the tab to impress others, or yourself. Plan on when you’re going to pick up the tab before you even go out, then ask yourself why you’re doing it.
2. Start investing in the things that you value long-term, such as retirement, kids’ college, a trip to Fiji with you wife
3. Agree to make time with your spouse to have a “Money Talk” every month, say on Sunday morning, and talk about not only money logistics, but fears, concerns and stressors associated with money or work.
4. Carry cash: this way, you’ll see your money going out of your hands steadily, and not be divorced from the process of spending money by using a debit or credit card. You’ll have a greater appreciation for the money that you’re making, and parting with.
5. Break the deficiency mentality: This is harder, because a lot of our messages around money we’ve inherited from our parents. If you live in the deficiency mentality, you’ll always feel impoverished and feel like you’re living paycheck to paycheck. Seek out help, such as counseling, to bust up those difficult messages from your family of origin.
6. Before buying a new car or house, ask yourself, “Could I be happier with something less? how will this purchase bring me increase happiness?” Maybe the difference between buying a $35,000 new car, and a $20,000 previously owned car isn’t really all that different. It’s possible that you could be happy with the $20,000 car, and sack away $15,000 into a retirement savings account and achieve a different sense of happiness–one that promotes your long-term well-being.
7. Minimize indulgences: a lot of the time we indulge in things that we don’t really need, simply because we can or we think we should treat ourselves or indulge ourselves. If we train ourselves to buy ourselves things to make ourselves feel good, and don’t really need their own those things, we set ourselves up for trouble. When were feeling blue, or scared, or happy, we then seek out the thrill of buying something new, which only works for a limited time.
8. Remember that people don’t like you or hang out with you for your money, even if you think so. and if they do, it’s probably time to reconsider your friendships. You may be allotting a lot of money towards a lifestyle that is designed more for impression, and less for your own personal satisfaction. Is this you? If so, it may be time to start reconsidering how you’re spending your money, and if the lifestyle you’re living is truly aligned with your own values, or designed to impress others.
9. If she loves you, she’s not always can need to spend money on her. If she’s the right one for you, you will need to bust your ass to buy her things and shower her with gifts. There are plenty of ways that you can show her love, caring and affection that aren’t about gifts, meals, trips or shopping. In fact, most women want you to be able to be emotionally giving, which usually doesn’t require spending money. Guys mix this up all the time. They try to show their carrying affection for women with material things or doing things for them. Save yourself a little the cash and start to tune into what she really wants from you.

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Meditation is an ideal practice one can apply in stress management, and has a host of other perks. Developing a regular meditation practice can reduce depression and anxiety levels, improve sleep functioning, and promote an overall sense of well-being and relaxation. Meditation improves the way we relate to ourselves, and others, as we can learn to experience and accept difficult thoughts and emotions that are inevitable functions of living.

Ronald Siegal, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recently came to Phoenix to deliver a weekend mindfulness training, and he summed up mindfulness in this way: mindfulness connotes awareness, attention and remembering. Mindfulness includes non-judgment (of our feelings, thoughts or experiences), as well as acceptance.

There are many forms of meditation out there, and some traditions include visualization practices, among other things, but mindfulness meditation is different. When we practice mindfulness, we practice sitting with what arises in the present moment in our inner experience. We’re not changing anything, or pushing out any unwanted thoughts; we’re simply tuning into our immediate experience, which happens to include our thought stream, emotions and everything else that’s happening. It’s not a ‘touchy-feely’ as one might think, and you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate. Anyone can do it, and plenty of guys find this really helpful in reducing their stress.

The old adage, “what we resist, persists”, is applicable to how we sometimes ineffectively deal with our problems. When we sit in meditation, we can greatly reduce the experience of suffering by letting that ‘which persists’ just be as it is. In mindfulness meditation, we learn to sit with what “is”, or the thoughts, feelings and sensations that unfold from moment-to-moment in our inner experience.

This is different from how most of us live our lives: we often are hurried, mindless, and sometimes reactive to others. We sometimes live on auto-pilot, and forget that our behaviors and actions are the products of thoughts and feelings that drive them.

Here’s what to do when starting a mindfulness meditation practice:

1. Start simply: try sitting for five minutes at a time in a quiet spot, either in your office or outside
2. Get comfortable, in a chair or on a cushion.
3. Close your eyes, and start to settle into your body.
4. Start with bringing your attention to your breath: slowly inhale, and let go of your breath on the exhale
5. Bring attention to other parts of your body, including your shoulders, neck, heart, stomach. Notice the tiny sensations each of these parts of your body produces.
6. When your mind pulls you away from the breath, let it. The mind will do this many times in the course of one sitting, so part of meditation is to allowing it to do that, and to step back out of the thought stream to observe it. We’re not changing, avoiding, or pushing away any thoughts, good or bad.
7. Use your breath as your anchor. Keep coming back to your breath each time you become aware of a thought.
8. Try this for five minutes for the first couple of days, and keep going if you can. Don’t make this such a big deal: making it a chore will make you not want to do it.

And here’s what not to do:

1. Think of pretty images, like sunsets or unicorns, that are more visualizations.
2. Relax the need to push away uncomfortable thoughts or difficult feelings; be aware of how you push those away in your experience
3. Try to “do” anything. This isn’t a test or a race, and when you’re meditating, you’re not “doing it wrong”.
4. Avoid distracting sounds and environments.
5. Fall asleep
6. Get yourself so uncomfortable that meditating becomes too difficult.
7. Think you’re doing it “wrong”. You’re not. You’re just sitting with whatever comes up.

Meditation is liking riding a bike. It takes a little time and practice to get started, and when you do, you’ll notice the benefits quickly. You’ll develop more peace of mind, overall well-being and happiness from your mindfulness meditation practice.

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Out of anxiety or fear, guys sometimes reside in this perpetual state of limbo when it comes to figuring out if they want to stay put in their intimate relationship or marriage. Men make excuses for staying in bad relationships, like, “I don’t want to hurt her,” or “We used to be so good – there must be a way to get back to that point.” Do these questions reflect the truth of the matter, or simply make for excuses to keep us from changing a bad deal in our lives?

Often times, fighting relationships have a happy ending. And sometimes they don’t. Then there’s other times where a weird combination of the two gets created. Guys find themselves staying in relationships that they otherwise would have gotten out of a long time ago. Then, they make up all sorts of things in their head to keep them stuck in their bad situations, like quicksand. Men tread water to cope, as to not swim away or drown, but sometimes tread for some time, not necessarily unhappy, but comfortable enough not to make a change.

It’s hard to summon up the resources – courage, strength, intuition – to do a sea change in life, and negative relationships can truly be the hardest to break from. Even if we’ve gotten comfortable in our relationship suffering and misery, at least we’re familiar with it. It’s a security blanket. Change, on the other hand, is a whole separate thing. We’re not predisposed to change as human beings, and relationship adaptation is often times a  sea change that many guys are not willing to make. So, we grin and bear it, sometimes for several years or decades, and we hope for the best.

Time gets lost really quickly when we live in this state of relationship flux. When we live like this, we’re not listening to ourselves, or our true desires for intimacy and happiness. We deny both ourselves and our partner a chance to find happiness in another relationship, or just to simply to not be trapped in the current one.

Here’s some ways guys get stuck in bad relationships:

• Fear kicks in, and we think “I’ll never attract someone like her/another woman/anyone else again.”
• We “accept our fate in life” (victimization)
• Money fear kicks in (e.g. finding a new apt./condo, front bills alone, split up furniture, paying child support)
• We make excuses for ourselves and for her, and tell ourselves that our situation is better than it really is (we rationalize it)
• Head takes over (logic), and heart gets banished (gut, or intuition). The two simply aren’t talking.
• We “cope” with it, or avoid it altogether
• We wait for her to break up with us
• We tell ourselves that our partner won’t be o.k. on her own, or that we’ll devastate her if we break up the relationship.
• We tell ourselves that it will damage our children by leaving, that there will be irreparable damage to them, so how could leave then?

Strong messages take over, like:
(a) Staying a “stand-up guy”
(b) Being a good relationship partner
(c) Feeling guilty
(d) Worried you’ll “hurt her feelings” by leaving
(e) All the above

Relationships are designed for happiness, and if you feel like you’re subscribing to the message that all relationships do is bring misery upon you, you’ve committed yourself to being stuck. There is relationship happiness out there for you, believe it or not. You can surely create the right type of relationship if you’re miserable now and want to make a change for yourself. There is hope, and if it’s not in your current relationship, maybe it’s in another one. It’s dealing with ourselves first that’s the hardest part.

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It’s easy to see what a bad relationship looks like. You’re probably surrounded with plenty of anti-models everyday. But what about those really functional relationships that stick in your mind?

We all have severely idealized versions of what happy and healthy relationships and marriages look like. Sometimes, if we look closely, some people are more attracted to those fantasy relationships in their minds than they are to their actual partners. During our formative years, we are socialized in many ways (through schooling, religious institutions, friends, media) to come up with our private version of a good and healthy relationship. No one grows up thinking their marriage will grow cold and distant over time (at least I haven’t heard that in therapy).

But, what does make for a health relationship? What are the marks of a truly healthy relationship? What am I missing? I’m interested to hear your comments, and your perspectives on your version of a healthy relationship.

Here’s 15 of the most important (not necessarily in order of importance):

• Self-awareness
• Empathy
• Communication, and ability to have conflict within a safe “container”
• Love and fulfilling sex life
• Fun and laughter
• Respect of your partner
• Trust in your partner
• Shared and common interests
• Similar ideas about how to construct
• Shared power
• Understanding about money and how it’s managed in the relationship
• Supportive and nurturing; validating for both people
• Mutual willingness to work together on relationship/marriage problems
• Similar “worldviews”, or ways to create shared experiences together
• Good handoff of time together, and time apart (some couples need more, others less)

Creating a healthy relationship takes a lot of willingness, hard work and mutual love and respect, and each relationship could be optimized in its own way. There are myriad ways to relationship success, and many of the roads to relationship health are unique to each relationship, as is the uniqueness of each person. Finding what works – and what doesn’t – for your own relationship is part of the journey of awareness and growth for yourself, your partner, and your relationship.

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