GIFT-WRAPPED COURAGE

I love getting compliments.

I hate getting compliments.

I have a complicated love-hate relationship with compliments.

Ditto for accepting help. Even help I really need from people who really love me. Especially help I really need.

I’m not sure if it’s tied to insecurity, pride, or the constant suspicion that I’m just pretending to be a well-adjusted adult. So when you say something nice to me, or when you do something nice for me, I feel guilty for being such a fraud.

Because sometimes I yell at my kids. And buy myself a bag of candy I don’t need, which I then hide and don’t share with anyone. Because sometimes I roll my eyes when I should nod my head. And I really can’t stand Christian radio, at all, but I like listening to Eminem. Because sometimes I ignore my husband and the housework and homework and exercise when I know it’ll just make everything worse. And the other day I threw something across the room when the vacuum broke, right after giving my daughter a lecture about watching her temper, and I didn’t even feel bad about it.

But sometimes, I don’t do the lazy, selfish, short-sighted thing. And I actually get it right.

While all those nice things that you’ve done and said (and I’ve had a lot lately) might be hard to swallow at first, after I’ve had time to digest awhile, they nourish my best self. They make me stronger. Strong enough to do better. Strong enough to believe that I really am the better person you see. That maybe the real me, the me God designed me to be and is helping me become, is patient and loving and wise, and okay… imperfect, but totally cool enough to pull it off anyway.

So here’s my thanks to all the encouragers in my life; sometimes I’m uncomfortable in the face of your generosity and kindness, both the words and deeds, but you make me strong and I couldn’t do without you.

CHRISTIE HOOS

So Here's Us

Eryn-Faye Frans - The Essential Elements of Sex, Part 3

Sex is one of the most difficult topics to broach for most people in their relationships – but also one of the most important. In this segment with My New Day TV, Eryn-Faye Frans discusses different ways to get the conversation going.



ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®

ErynFaye.Com

ROMANCE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

It’s always been about the words for us.

Since I was first allowed to get calls from “a boy” and I reassured my parents that we were totally just friends anyway and somehow the hours sped by while we talked about everything and nothing, until my Mom would pick up the downstairs line and yell up the stairs to “GET OFF THE PHONE!”

Since those early days when we wrote long rambling notes on loose-leaf paper, doodling in the margins and folding them into elaborate shapes before handing them off to each other in between classes.

Since the poetry unit in English 20, when he took a 10% penalty rather than read his poem to the whole class, but printed it up, glued it to a giant red heart and gave it to me for Valentine’s Day.

It’s the words that made us friends in the first place. 

It’s the words that made us laugh until it hurt and console each other and get closer than anyone had ever been before.

We built our own world with those words.

And now they come with a 140 character limit. And a data bill at the end of the month. And an audience of friends and family and people we sort-of knew in elementary school who we haven’t seen in years.

Sure, there are times when I roll my eyes and glare at the iPad. “You’re with the REAL people now” I say. Then hastily tuck my iPhone back into my pocket, lest my hypocrisy come back to bite me on the ass. It can feel like a barrier; a virtual distraction in our already busy lives. Bound to happen when both Mom and Dad are social media junkies.

But I can’t imagine our relationship without it. Especially not now, when time is at a premium and life moves at warp speed (that’s really, really fast for you non-nerds). Every day we text and tweet and message and status update and comment and like, and yes, even blog our way to intimacy.

We build our own world with those words.

If you’ve never live-tweeted a date, then maybe you won’t understand. When something goes wrong, I text him. When something tickles my funny bone, I send a picture with a caption. When he can’t be there with us, he’s the first to like it on Facebook. When I want him to know how much I appreciate him, I tell the world (here and here and here).

If it weren’t for this, we’d be ships passing in the night. Instead, we end our days on opposite ends of the couch, with our feet tangled in the middle – sending me a link to that great blog he was talking about, pulling up the funny YouTube video on Apple TV for us to watch, and commenting on each other’s pages. Real and virtual romance inextricably entwined.

I used to doodle “G+C 4ever” on my binder covers, now I download cheesy gifs and emoticons to send him. The medium has changed, but not the message.

This is what flirting looks like in the digital age.

CHRISTIE HOOS

So Here's Us

BEDWORK 5: SIDE-BY-SIDE COMMUNICATION

Here is my radio interview with Susan Knight of Calgary’s up!97.7 FM this week:

One of my favourite researchers is Dr. Helen Fisher, a renowned anthropologist with Rutgers University who specializes in romantic love. (She gets to stick people in MRI machines and see what happens to their brains when they see pictures of their loved ones. How cool is that?!)  Back in 2008, she did a TED Talk on the different ways men and women communicate and bond. During this presentation, she said something profound that we all need to understand in our relationships:

Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. We swivel towards each other; we do what we call the anchoring gaze, and we talk. This is intimacy to women. I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face and cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words.

Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away. I think it comes from millions of years of standing behind that bush, sitting behind that bush, looking straight ahead trying to hit that buffalo in the head with a rock. I think for millions of years, men faced their enemies as they sat side by side with friends.

Many of the women I meet are desperate for, in fact sometimes they outright demand that their husbands look them in the eye when they are having a conversation. What they do not understand is that eye-to-eye contact is intuitively very aggressive for a guy. That is not where he functions best. He genuinely wants to have intimacy with his wife, but if eye-to-eye contact is the only acceptable path in her mind, she is setting him up to fail.

As your Bedwork this week, I want you to leverage this information and use it to build greater intimacy in your relationship. Have a conversation while you are side by side. You might want to go for a walk, a drive or even get on the phone together. Regardless of what you choose, limit your eye contact. Now here is your topic of conversation: Top Five Intimate Moments. Take a walk down memory lane and share – in as much detail as possible – your favorite times together.

Want more Bedwork? Check out my book The Essential Elements of Sex: 9 Secrets to a Lifetime of Intimacy.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®

ErynFaye.Com

BEDWORK 4: PRACTICE SEX

Bedwork 4: Practice Sex

Here is my radio interview with Susan Knight of Calgary’s up!97.7 FM this week:

Last week, after I had done a seminar on sexual intimacy, a man walked up to me and said, “When you told us that we could have ‘practice sex’ a huge weight rolled off my shoulders.” His words reflected what I see in so many, many people. We put enormous expectations on our sexual relationships. There have to be fireworks each and every time. Every encounter has to live up to the passion that we see onscreen at the movies. Sex has to be good. All. The. Time. There is very little room for “practice sex.”

But in order to really get good at sex (yes, it’s a skill set), you must practice. I don’t just mean have sex more often, although that can be helpful too. I mean you must have times in which you consciously lower your expectations of each other. In practice sex, the two of you decide you want to get more skilled in a particular area. Perhaps she has never had multiple orgasms before, and you want to see what it takes to get her there. Perhaps he would like oral sex as part of your foreplay, and you are completely intimidated by this concept. Perhaps you are bored silly of the same three positions you have been using for the past decade and want to learn something new. Perhaps you just want to slow down a bit and not sprint to the finish line.

Here is your Bedwork for this week: Set aside one time when you and your spouse agree that you are going to try out practice sex. By agreeing ahead of time, you ease the pressure of performance. This experience is all about enjoying each other, not perfection. Then, allow for “mistakes” and “mediocre” sex during this time. Remember, to get really good at sex, you have to go through the awkward learning stage. So be patient with each other and enjoy it as much as possible. It might not be the best in and of itself, but this experience is moving you towards the goal of a deeper, richer skill set together. And that’s when the fireworks happen.

 ERYN-FAYE FRANS

 Canada's Passion Coach ®

ErynFaye.com

BEDWORK 3: THANK YOU NOTE

Bedwork 3: Thank You Note

Here is my radio interview with Susan Knight of Calgary’s up!97.7 FM this week:

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, so this is the time when most people feel socially obligated to have warm fuzzies about their partner. Interestingly enough, research is now telling us that what we focus on grows, so you will have more of those warm fuzzies when you are paying attention to all the things that s/he does right rather than all the things that s/he is doingwrong.

Back in 1965, researchers studied and developed a concept now known as the Pygmalion Effect.[i] According to this phenomenon, a teacher who expects a certain student to do well in her class will give that student more feedback, smile at him more often, and nonverbally reinforce the expectation that this student will succeed. Often, these students go on to meet all expectations and rise to the top of their classes. It is, in essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nearly two decades later, Doctors Eden and Ravid tested the concept of the Pygmalion Effect in their Israeli Defense Forces’ experiment.[ii] Members of the Israeli military were brought into a command combat course for training. Four days before the training began, the researchers told the instructors that they had assessed each trainee and given them a “regular,” “high” or “unknown” command potential (CP). The instructors were to study all the soldiers’ files and their accompanying CP scores before classes began.

Unbeknownst to the instructors, these command potentials were not based on testing done on the soldiers, but instead randomly assigned. Roughly a third of the soldiers fell into each category of command potential. Soldiers in all three command potential groups were then evenly distributed amongst the classes and instructors.

In as little as a week, researchers noticed a difference between soldiers who had been designated with a high command potential and the others. They were at the top of their class, having rapidly excelled past the others. By the end of the training period, not only had they outperformed the other soldiers in their coursework and exercises, but they also reported they had a much more positive attitude towards future training, and evaluated their instructors much higher than the other soldiers.

This experiment showed that people rise or fall to the level of expectation around them. Whether you realize it or not, you send out nonverbal messages of anticipation to your colleagues, friends, children and even your spouse. They respond to these messages in how they behave around you.

If you are constantly expecting, perceiving and thinking of your spouse’s failure, you are going to see it. You will miss all the times your spouse does well because you will subconsciously toss out any exception to the rule and look for instances that confirm your belief of him/her. More importantly, your spouse will fail because s/he is not getting the subliminal reassurances that you expect her/him to succeed.

The great news is the Pygmalion Effect works both negatively and positively. You can change your levels of expectation with your spouse. When you begin to focus on the positive aspects of your relationship, this allows her space to change and grow. It allows him to be appreciated for his efforts. It allows her to respond warmly to you. The fact you have shifted your attention to the successful encourages him to keep up the good work.

So here’s your Bedwork for the week: Catch your spouse doing three things right this week. It might be in the way that he parents the kids, the tireless effort she puts forth to keep all the schedules organized, the fact that he takes the garbage out or her refusal to let you leave without a hug and a kiss. Look for three things that you appreciate about your spouse and thenwrite him/her a thank you note for those things. Express your appreciation for all the little things you noticed this week. That will deepen the closeness between the two of you and get you well on your way to having a fabulous Valentine’s Day!

Want more Bedwork? Get my book The Essential Elements of Sex today.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®

Eryn-Faye.com

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^[i] The original experiment was conducted in 1965, and the two researchers wrote a book on their findings in 1968 (updated in 1992). See Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1992). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development, 2nd ed. New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.

[ii] Eden, D. (1992). “Leadership and Expectations: Pygmalion Effects and Other Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Organizations.” Leadership Quarterly, 3(4): 271-305.

The Petraeus Affair: The Attractiveness of Holly Petraeus & Paula Broadwell

  

Once again, the extramarital affair of a beloved public figure has come to light. Since the resignation of General David Petraeus, the talking heads have been blathering up a storm. Their conversation has been further fueled by emerging details that make the unfolding story seem nothing short of a soap opera. (Jimmy Kimmel did a good job of breaking it down here.)

I have clients who are recovering from affairs, so I kept my eye on the story and listened to other people about their perspectives. At a coffee shop recently, I overheard three women having a conversation about the affair. (When I heard what they were talking about, yes, I eavesdropped.) After discussing the newest, juiciest details of the story, one woman said, “But have you seen his wife?” Pictures of Holly Petraeus have been splashed all over the world, and while commentators have been deliberate to speak in only glowingly terms about her, the side-by-side comparison with Paula Broadwell has been blatant. In one photo, for example, the wife and mistress are even captured in the same frame with red circles drawn around their heads.

Then yesterday, Pat Robertson weighed in on the subject on his TV show. After saying “I don’t think [Petraeus] is a devious human being,” Robertson listed Petraeus’ brilliant accomplishments. He then turned his attention to Broadwell and itemized why he thought she was so attractive. Robertson completed his analysis of the situation by saying “The man’s off in a foreign land and he’s lonely and here’s a good-looking lady throwing herself at him. I mean, he’s a man.”

While you might be tempted to go on a rant about Robertson (for the moment, I am going to side-step the “he’s a man” comment), he did what normal, every-day people have been doing privately. Without knowing the details of the situation, he painted a picture of a hot seductress chasing after a brilliant man. The woman at the coffee shop underscored the stereotype that a “frumpy” wife cannot compete with a hot seductress. On the airwaves and over coffee conversations, people from different backgrounds and genders reduced the affair to one factor: how the women looked.

I am deeply disturbed by this type of oversimplification. It devalues women – not just these two women, but all women. Robertson’s reflections made no mention of Broadwell’s accomplishments or what the strain of working overseas might have done to her marriage. The women sipping their lattes made no mention of the years Holly Petraeus spent raising the kids on her own or fighting on behalf of other military families in financial trouble. But when we support and participate in a culture that focuses exclusively on how women appear, we all lose. It creates an impossible standard: in order to stay unmarred by the pain of an affair, you have to be attractive, but not too attractive.

Engaging in this depiction does not stem the tide of infidelity because it does not accurately reflect the reasons why people have affairs. Many men have affairs with women who are less attractive than their wives…because how these women look is not the temptation. Noel Biderman, owner of the cheating service Ashley Madison, has been quoted as saying, “If you sat down with 20 people who’d had an affair and said, rate the person you had an affair with ‘better looking’ or ‘worse looking’ than your partner, almost 90 percent will say worse. You can build a profile right now of an unattractive woman, overweight, whatever, she’ll still have a dozen men interested in meeting her.”

As long as we reduce an affair to the way the women involved looked, we will remain vulnerable of having one ourselves. Men, if you think that only a marathon runner with great arms will tempt you away from your wife, then you are going to get blindsided by the plain looking woman who works in accounting and can listen with empathy to your stories. Women, if you think your husband is only in danger from a woman who has a DD chest, you will be stunned with it turns out the “frumpy” woman knows how to love him better than you.

Let’s stop the oversimplification and take a long look at our own relationships. Let’s start having candid conversations with our spouses about what we, as individuals, find tempting. Let’s find out what draws our eyes, bodies and hearts away from our spouses. Rather than making assumptions about the causes of infidelity, the information we glean through these conversations will actually reduce the risk of us straying.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®

http://www.erynfaye.com

FAILURE DOESN'T EQUAL SUCCESS … BUT IT CAN GET YOU THERE!

Last week, my daughter bombed a math test. Flunked. Failed. In a big and mighty way. So big, in fact, that the teacher called me into the classroom to show me the test.

Later, when Riley and I were talking about it, she began to tear up.


“Are you saying that I made a bad grade?” she asked as her lower lip quivered.


I hesitated for a beat and then said, “Yes, Baby Girl, you made a bad grade.”


A lot of parents would be horrified with me. I can hear them saying, “What?! You don’t use the term bad when talking to a child!” I could hear them complain that I was going to scar my child or permanently damage her self esteem.
In our society today, we have become so concerned with the emotions of our children that we will lie, cheat and steal to keep them from feeling badly. The theory goes that if we can organize a world where they feel safe and secure and loved and comfortable all the time, then surely they will become confident adults.


The problem with this approach is that it simply doesn’t work. An obese child who is told that she is fine just the way she is will still grow up with be an adult with chronic health problems. A child whose bullying behaviour is overlooked because he is having problems at home that are not his fault will not learn how to care for those around him. A child who thinks that a failed grade is actually good will never learn how to succeed.


And so I let my daughter feel the full weight of failure.


And then I gave her the tools to succeed.

“You see, Riley, a bad grade tells us two things: 1) You don’t understand the material and/or 2) You did not practice enough before the test. However, both of these things are fixable. We can make sure you learn the material and give you lots of practice so that when you will not make this grade again.”

The rest of the weekend, we worked hard. It was obvious that Riley was missing the foundational pieces to the concepts and so we made sure she got them. Then we built on the foundation until she was grasping math which was much more difficult than the concepts on the test.

She got it. She grew confident. She asked to practice so she could show us what she had learned. And she learned how to turn failure into success, a life lesson that is exponentially more important than a math grade.

Many of the couples I meet struggle even admitting that there is failure in their relationship. They dance around the subject, trying to project an image that is perfect. They hope that I don’t ask any questions that might poke that delicate exterior and expose it for what it truly is.

But, just like Riley, if we do not take an honest appraisal of our work and if we do not acknowledge places where we fail, we will never be able to move past failure to success. Admitting you have a problem, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, is the first step to a new life. The brilliance of taking this first step is that you can make changes, fix the problems and move to a place of health and true happiness.

What do you have in your relationship that is not working?   What is failing?

Once you have taken an inventory, begin to make changes. Need some help? You can book your coaching session with me today.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS

CANADA'S PASSION COACH ®

ErynFaye.com

CONVERSATION STARTERS WITH TEENS ABOUT DATING

I was talking to a 14 year old almost-man while volunteering at a camp last week. He was specifically asking me for advice about how he could ask a girl at camp to be his girlfriend. Part of my insides were jumping up and down for joy that he felt comfortable enough with me to ask for help. The other part of my insides were cringing at the thought of his young mind completely distracted by girls.

Although I’ve been a volunteer with teenagers for awhile now, I still have a hard time steering through conversations about dating. It’s hard to know when to say what. When to give advice and when to ask questions. When to warn them and when to get excited for/with them.

With this almost-man, I missed an opportunity. I got frustrated with his fixation on getting this girl to be his girlfriend and told him we were going to stop talking about it. His response? “Well I just won’t talk about it with you.” Bummer. Next time I will be ready with a few more questions and a little insight. 

Here are a few of my favorite conversation starters I’ve used with teenagers:

• Describe the perfect date. 
• What are the top 5 qualities you are looking for in a girlfriend/boyfriend?
• What do you think is the purpose of dating?
• How do you define love?

How do you guide conversations with teenagers/college students/young adults/friends about their dating life?

LINDSAY HALE

lkayephoto.wordpress.com

BIKINIS FOR 7 YEAR OLDS!?!?

I am the mother of a six-year-old and despite the subject matter that I speak about, write about and research for my day job, we are extremely conservative at home. Just the other day, my daughter chastised me for using the “D” word. It’s probably not what you think…I had commented that something was “dumb”.  And, for the record, the word “stupid” might as well be cussing in our household.

When it comes to my own profession, I also realize the prudence in speaking openly about sexual questions that come up. A few have with Riley…although not as many as I was expecting by this age. When she does broach the subject, I ask for clarity on what it is she is trying to learn and why, so that I can answer the question simply and truthfully but not answer too much. (There’s the old joke of the Dad who went into a lengthy explanation about sex to his child who asked “what’s sex”, only to find out that the child had been told by his mother that “dinner would be ready in a few “secs”.) I try to balance healthy candor about the subject of sexuality with the fact that we hold pretty conservative values as a family.

So, I was horrified to learn that Abercrombie & Fitch has just marketed a bikini for 7-year-old girls with a PUSH UP TOP.



Really????  Seriously!?!  Are you kidding me!!???

We are facing an epidemic of little girls growing up believing that their bodies are inadequate because of the ridiculous amount of media pressure to be a perpetual size 0, and yet they want to send a message to our 7-year-olds that their pre-pubescent chests are inadequate? It’s ludicrous.

But, as CNN’s LZ Granderson points out, companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch would not sell such items if there were not parents who buy them. Companies have increasingly pushed the boundaries on what is and what is not appropriate for teens and children for years, and have been allowed a ridiculous amount of latitude from parents. As parents, it is our duty to make sure that our children wear items that reflect a healthy amount of self-respect rather than just what is the latest fashion. As Granderson says,

I don’t care how popular Lil’ Wayne is, my son knows I would break both of his legs long before I would allow him to walk out of the house with his pants falling off his butt. Such a stance doesn’t always makes me popular — and the house does get tense from time to time — but I’m his father, not his friend.

Thank you, LZ for making the point that is so often lost on my peers. We did not give birth to children so that we could have life-long buddies. When we chose to produce off-spring, we were making a decision to train these little beings how to love themselves and how love others. Decisions that fall within these parameters do not necessarily make us popular with our children, but they do make us good parents.

Because of my job, I get asked all the time how to talk to kids about sex.  There are lots of opinions on that subject – when to start, how much to share, what’s age appropriate information.  But I don’t even have to broach any of those points to get to the basic premise here: Talking to your kids about sex includes how you let them dress – or how you choose to dress them.

That’s my take-away for this blog post.  But in the interest of fairness, I should say that Abercrombie & Fitch have agreed to remove the term “push up” from the title in favour of the less incendiary “striped triangle”, but have continued selling the padded bikinis.

What are you thoughts?

ERYN-FAYE FRANS
Canada's Passion Coach ®
erynfaye.com