Guest appearance by Juan Lee is the author of the book Love Made Simple a Guide to Inner Peace, Contentment and Success. Wan is also the founder of clearjourny.org, a charity organization with a mission to share the practical application of love with the world.
Below are some snippets from the episode. Enjoy!
We have learned so much, not only about ourselves, but each other. And at that time, we had to realize that we were putting something together, we were building something.
A good point that you made there, because I believe that people don’t realize that that’s exactly what we’re trying to do accomplish more together than we could possibly ever accomplish individually. And to know that, I think, is critical in building a real strong relationship is because it has those strengths that each of you have or each of us have. We’re able to do much more with the two of us having strengths, and in many cases, being able to offset each other’s weaknesses, in many cases, the other person’s strengths.
It’s real easy to put that example of maybe building the house together, but you’ve got to know what each other’s components are, what they’re bringing to the table. In any given relationship, people are going to have different components. And recognizing what your spouse’s or your partner’s relationship or abilities are is the work, to be honest with you, is the work. Because it’s something that I talk about in what I teach on love, is that until you can know yourself, you don’t know what you have to offer. And it’s till you know what you have to offer, nobody else knows what you have to offer. And so it’s that ability to be able to articulate that to one another so that when you enter into the relationship, you know exactly what it is they’re bringing.
If you’re looking for a plumber and you get electrician, that’s not going to help you in building your house. Maybe you got electrician, but you’re looking for a plumber right now, you need a plumber. And so it’s not that electrician is not needed, but maybe you all collectively know you need to go out and get electrician, but I need a plumber. That’s what I’m looking for. I want a plumber. And so that’s what basically the challenges is the work is that process of understanding what each other’s skill sets are, what their abilities are that they’re going to bring to the table so that we can build this relationship into something that’s different from us as an individual.
One of the things let’s go back. I’m going to share something with you. I did not think I was ever going to get married. Okay? I never thought I was going to get married because I had low self esteem. I didn’t have anything that would really identify who I was. My strengths now, as it relates to marriage now, because at that point, I had gone to the military, had come back, I had found out who I was, so to speak. But then I didn’t see myself as marriage material, so to speak. One of the things that I did was something that I did not very it wasn’t something very easy for me to do, and that was to articulate my learning disability. I spent many years trying to hide that, and it was when I realized and even when we got married, I realized that I could not hide this from her. And so I was very forthcoming with that information. It was like if we’re going to get into this, what you see and who I am is two totally different things. And I think many of us enter into relationships with a mask on and it takes for us to be able to pull that mass down and to allow the other person to see exactly who they are. And many times that doesn’t always happen. It comes out piece by piece as it pertains to challenges that come up in the relationship that you end up getting into some types of conflict and you really don’t even know that the conflict is something that you have no conscious knowledge of. It’s something that the other one is holding on to because they’re trying to hide it or present something that’s really not the case. But that was one of the things that I had to. And even in that process though, she was the one who helped me. And this is very ironic because she helped me find out and identify my learning disability. Because when we got married, I had a learning disability but it was not diagnosed. It wasn’t diagnosed. We got married when I was 33. It wasn’t diagnosed until I was 37. Wow. But I had been challenged, I had been struggling with not knowing, figuring out how to maneuver, not knowing that I had one. And she was the one and helped me, the one that helped me identify what it was that I was dealing with. And it really liberated me to a point where it began to allow me to see that it wasn’t something that I was not doing. It’s now something that I have to deal with and I know how to address.
You just hit one of the critical words in relationship and that’s ability to be vulnerable. That ability to be vulnerable will eliminate so many areas of conflict, at least on those things that you have knowledge of because you know them. See, there’s things that you don’t know that you don’t know it, but then there are these things that you know that you’re not sharing and those are the ones that you could be vulnerable and sharing those things that you know that will allow for a smoother process.
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