Do you want to know how to do your own relationship assessment? I'm Nicholeen
Peck and I teach all about relationships, good communication and parenting all through the lens
of self-government and in this video I'm going to be talking about doing a relationship assessment.
So in this video, we're going to talk a little bit about self-government because
understanding that is important for understanding the power of assessment and then I'm going to
share with you what type of assessment questions you can ask yourself on a regular basis so that
you can improve your relationships. So what is self-government? Self-government is being able
to determine the cause and effect of any given situation and possessing a knowledge of your
own behaviors so that you can control them. So, a person who is self-governing says wait a minute, I
understand that if I am kind to someone else then that person will probably be kind to me, a kind of
a boomerang effect or if I am calm with my children, they will trust my teaching. All of these
things are cause and effect. They understand that and then they examine themselves and they say am
I being calm, am I being kind, does it feel like I am? I need to be honest with myself about it. Can I
improve in any way and if the answer is no, I'm not calm enough then they make plans to improve. This
is a personal assessment that they do on a regular basis about calmness or about kindness or about
understanding other people. When a person is self-governed, they plan which type of person they
ought to become and then they regularly assess themselves as they journey through life and they
course correct again and again. It's super powerful. In fact if you deliberately do assessments for
family relationships and for yourself then you end up creating the type of environment where
your whole family is self-governing. So let's talk about how you can do a personal self-assessment
so that you can better govern yourself and get the outcomes that you want. So, the first thing that you
need to do when you are starting to have a time where you're going to have a self-assessment is
you've got to find the right place. Okay so you need to be in the quiet. When you're going to
start self-assessing for your relationship with somebody else, don't do it at a time of distraction.
Don't do it a time when you've just had a fight with the person, get yourself calm first. All right
we're going to talk about calmness at the very end here of this video and in fact, I even have
a gift for you to help with your calmness but make sure that you're calm first before you do
an assessment because if you're not calm, you will be in the mid brain. So when a person first starts
being not calm, they go to mid brain. If it gets worse and worse, they go all the way to back brain.
This is the fight-or-flight part of the brain and when you're in the amygdala or fight-or-flight,
you are not able to think clearly. Mid-brain you've got maybe 40% ability to think it up front, back
brain you've got maybe 10 percent ability to think with your prefrontal cortex and you really need to
be able to do thinking if you're going to do some good assessment. So if you're feeling emotional,
have a little bit of a cry, get yourself to a place of calmness and then start doing your
assessment and do it in a quiet spot where you can feel really comfortable. Now while you're in this
zone of preparing for assessment, start with some really obvious questions. So, the first question is
a vision question and the vision question is who am I? Who am I to this person, where am I going with
them? Where do I want this relationship to lead? So you're looking ahead at who you're becoming
as a group but also who you are individually and hopefully you'll also ask yourself who are they?
Who are they to me? Surely they're not nothing to you or you wouldn't take the time
for the assessment. Are they a part of you and if so, what part is it? You know are they part of your
hands in your heart, is that person a person that's like your happy place when you're with them or you
want them to be your happy place? Are they a person that you like to be around when you have a problem
or are they a person that you like to laugh and have fun with? Who is that person to you and what
is their value to you too? So don't just think about what they give you but think about who they
really are, maybe even to God if you're a religious person because that's really their true value. If
you can see someone as God sees that person then you can see their potential even if they're having
a problem in the minute. I had to train myself to do that as a treatment foster parent for
many years. I took in troubled teens and I would do therapeutic treatment care for them. I could
not help them unless I reminded myself regularly of who they really were to Him, to God and their
potential then I could hopefully see them as he saw them and then I could help have a change
of heart and help them have a change of heart. So when a person has self-government, that's a
time where they are having a change of heart. So we're going to talk about some other assessment
questions. In fact there's a form that I usually share with people when I'm teaching them how to
have self-assessment and we're going to go through that form but before we do, click the subscribe
button now. This channel has so many great videos that are all dedicated to you assessing you better
so that you can better self-govern and teaching your children to do the same thing. So click on the
subscribe button now so that you don't miss any of those videos. So, let's talk about the relationship
assessment. The first thing you want to ask yourself is how do I best connect with this person?
So pick one person, you can do this relationship assessment for many, many people but right now just
pick one, one person. How do I connect best with that person? Do we spend quality time together,
do we laugh together and share jokes? Do we do service together, do I serve that person and
then I feel more bonded to them, do I tell them nice things in praise and then notice that they
connect more to me? What is it that I do and maybe there's a love language that you want to consider
there as well. Then you want to ask yourself what does this person do to get my attention, do they
do negative things, do they talk back to me and debate me on everything to try to get my time and
attention or do they do kind things for me and try to make me smile and laugh? Is that what they do
to get my attention? If they are doing a negative thing to get my attention, how do I respond, that's
an interesting question to consider. Be honest with yourself. If they are annoying you and doing
negative attention seeking, what do you do? What do you say? Do you detach from them, do you get angry,
what is it that you do? In those moments, how do I try to get that person to do
what I want them to do, so when you maybe are engaging in power struggling, what is it that
you do and hopefully you don't engage in power struggling some people can take some very good
calm steps to try to help the person get calm too so that they can communicate more effectively.
So think to yourself what is it that you do and if it is manipulative in any way, if it's you trying
to control that then we've got to come up with something new. We've got to come up with a
new plan. Another question to ask yourself is do I trust that this person actually wants to be
happy and does want to make me happy? Sometimes people do things without thinking, sometimes
they do things that annoy us or even can make us mad but they're really trying to help.
Do we trust that this person has good intentions because if we are villainizing the person, that's
going to damage our relationship. So we need to ask am I villainizing this person right now, am
I thinking of them as a person who just wants to make me mad or do they have a need that's not met?
Am I seeing the need, what is that need and how can I provide for that? Now here's a big question.
Do I feel love for this person daily? If you don't feel love for them, you've got to make a plan.
If the answer is no, I don't then you need to say to yourself what can I do
to help fill love for this person daily? Now for me I pray. If I don't feel love for a person, I go to
my room, I go into my closet, close the door, turn on the light too, close the door and I pray to ask God
to help me feel love for that person and I don't stop praying until I feel love for the person. He
loves everyone so I want a little bit of that love if I'm not feeling it. When you don't feel love
for that person, what do you do? Do you treat them any differently? Be completely honest about that
and then ask yourself what is my plan going to be to make sure that I increase my love
for that person daily. Finally do I take the other person's mistakes personally? If you are taking the
other person's mistakes personally, you will be disappointed in that person and you will detach
from that person? So what can you do to make sure that you don't take their mistakes personally?
Drop the subject. Make sure you just let things go. So the person did something that was mean or
unkind, talk to him about it and drop the subject. Do you trust yourself to talk about it calmly,
that's maybe a question you have to ask too? If the answer is no, you may need to learn to disagree
appropriately which is one of the skills I teach parents to teach children but it's actually just
an adult skill for life. Do you know how to disagree appropriately? If not, there are many
other videos on this channel that can teach you how to disagree appropriately. Part of disagreeing
appropriately is being calm and you need to be calm in order to strengthen the relationship.
When a person takes somebody else's behavior personally, that's when they're not calm. Whether
it's on the inside or the outside, people can feel it. It's loud even if you're not saying anything.
So how are you going to plan to get calm, that might be a key thing that helps your relationship
most. Have a calmness plan. So ask yourself what is my calmness plan? I have a calmness plan and I
would love to share that calmness plan with you in my calm parenting toolkit. I have a calm parenting
toolkit that I'm going to give you for free. If you click on the link in the description below, this
video you can have the calm parenting toolkit for free. The link is teach teachselfgov.com/
toolkit. If you click on that right now, you can have the 10 lessons
in the calm parenting toolkit for free. It's a starter kit to self government
and will help you find the calmness you need so that you can learn all of the other skills
like how to disagree appropriately and so that you can increase your bond to that other person
you really do love so much. So click on the link to that toolkit now and I'll see you there.