Think for a moment of your life and marriage as a blank canvas ready to be painted. What will determine whether it is a masterpiece or a horrible mess? Is it the color of the paint? Is it the condition of the canvas? Or is it the skill, inspiration and visualization of the artist? Yes, it’s the skill, inspiration and visualization that will determine the masterpiece.

You are the artist of your marriage and the quality of relationship you have is up to you. Just like a successful business, career, health and family are not built overnight, a successful marriage is not the result of luck. Luck is “Labouring Under Correct Knowledge”. Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity, and the opportunity to build the marriage you want has always been there. However, just as an artist needs the right tools to paint his masterpiece, we need the right attitude and emotional tools to paint your marriage masterpiece one brush stroke at a time.

Therefore, here are 3 fundamentals that will form your marriage by design.

1) Desire

You’ve got to have desire! Desire has power in it! The desire to have a satisfying, lasting and loving marriage rather than ‘wishing’ creates emotional muscle. A passionate and intense desire to have a ’marriage masterpiece’ and to do whatever it takes to attain it is the foundation of every great relationship. There is an immense difference between wishing or hoping for something and desiring something. We all know people who say, “I’d like to have a better job” OR “I’d like to maybe lose some weight” OR “I wish I could improve my relationship”. But simply wishing to do something is extremely weak.

Wishing will not give you the marriage you want. But desiring a marriage that you can call a masterpiece, then scheduling definite ways and means to acquire it and backing those plans with persistence, patience, understanding and compassion has more power than simply wishing or hoping.

2) Commitment

Many people don’t understand the power commitment holds. It might surprise you to know that many people are never in the marriage. Some of the unhappiest couples that we work with who have been married for 20, 30, 40 years have not committed themselves fully to the relationship. Yes, they exist in their marriage and their physical existence is present, but psychologically and emotionally they checked out years ago.

To get the most out of your marriage you must be fully prepared to invest yourself in it. Many people through past hurts like divorce find it a challenge to do this. The seriousness of true commitment goes way beyond the realm of your own relationship. Unfortunately in this day and age many see relationships as a ‘try-before-you-buy arrangement’. If you don’t like what you’ve got, then you dispose of it.

At best, marriage is now seen as a flimsy and brittle promise that is easily broken. But, an important point to remember is there is more riding on the success of your relationship than just you and your spouse.

Remember your children and the effects you’re having on them. Research shows more children end up being terrified, alone, needy, and somewhat disadvantaged as they follow the example of their parents and peers and cause the cycle to start all over again. So, take ownership and responsibility and learn the skills necessary to build a successful marriage for your own happiness and your children’s.

3) Decision

You could say that decision is closely related to commitment. One of the reasons we see such a huge divorce rate is through a lack of commitment, but it also has much to do with a lack of decision. Decision in the true sense means to cut off from any possibility of failure.

The common solution to an unhappy marriage, the one chosen by over fifty percent of all couples, is to divorce and start all over again with a new and hopefully better mate. But the statistics have proven to be even worse for the people who decide to start over and re-marry. Look to this: we already know that over 50% of marriages fail, but did you know that over 60% of second marriages fail and over 70% of third marriages fail!

Out of 10 couples that decide to divorce,

• 7 of them admit it was a mistake 2 years later.
• 5 years later 5 have remarried and divorced again.
• 10 years later only 1 person claims to be happy.

Understand that when you take you with you, most of the challenges you experienced in ‘marriage number 1’ will arise in ‘marriage number 2’. So you need to resolve the challenges within yourself and create a way of relating with your spouse that enhances the level of intimacy you share on a daily basis.

Points to Ponder

This is not normally my thing, but I was reading Dear Abby and the headline caught my eye: “No longer plain, just plain angry.” Not Feeling Pretty in NJ writes that she experienced “Ugly Duckling Syndrome” as a child and was teased and rejected by her peers, especially boys. As she became an adult she says she blossomed into a good-looking young woman. Not Feeling Pretty in NJ says she gets a lot of attention from the boys now, and no matter what people say she stills feels plain and unattractive like when she was a little girl. As a result, NJ has developed a negative attitude that she says pushes people away. NJ says that people don’t like being around her once they get to know her because of her negative attitude. An acquaintance said to her, “You’re one of the prettiest girls I know, but your attitude is ugly.” NJ wants to know: What she can do to enhance her attitude without becoming conceited?

Well, I have written several articles about this, the Unworthy Syndrome, the Imposter Syndrome, being teased or losing at something at a young age that stays with you in life even though it was something most of us would have let go.

Well, I would say worrying about becoming conceited would be the last thing that NJ would have to be worried about.

She feels unworthy to be beautiful on the inside, no matter what the outside looks like. We are what we are on the outside, and you can even have plastic surgery, but you are still what you are on the inside.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz wrote the book Psycho-Cybernetics, where he talks about how as a plastic surgeon he performed surgery to make people look better, but found that after the surgery the people often felt the same about themselves. They couldn’t see themselves as different. So for as long as we see ourselves on the inside as being ugly, or not worthy, or have the feeling of an imposter inside us, we will have problems adjusting to the world around us.

Now all of us have these feelings to one degree or another from time to time, but it is how we keep or discard these feelings that makes the difference.

Many successful people feel that they don’t deserve the success that they have, that it was luck, or that someone else should be getting the reward and not them.

It can be quite amazing that we all have these fears that we don’t deserve what we have, and yet we still want more than we have. We don’t ever have what we want because we are not happy with ourselves. Contrary to what we may think, it is not because we don’t have what we want (often we do, if we look closely enough.)

I talk about having a positive attitude, and by positive attitude I don’t mean, “Yippee, life is good.” I am talking about feeling good about life, your life, instead of feeling bad about your life, which I call a negative attitude.

So you feel unworthy, your self-talk starts to tell you that you don’t deserve the things that you have, and so you start to lose things that you have- whether those things are relationships or feeling good about yourself, or even material things.

When your self-talk starts to tank, there goes your attitude about life, your life. You start to choose the wrong things, and change starts to occur that you don’t want to occur.

Here comes the downward spiral.

You don’t feel good about yourself, so why should anyone feel good about you?

Some of the most successful people feel they don’t deserve what they have.

And people that aren’t successful don’t see themselves as having what they want to have.

Use the Four Dynamics to give yourself the feeling that you deserve, that you are a winner. That you do deserve what you have. Success is not a four-letter word, it is a seven-letter word.

When that negative self-talk starts to creep in, you have to replace it with positive self-talk. It really is a conscious decision to start telling yourself the positive instead of the negative; it is your choice and this will affect your change.

And the best way to start to create positive self-talk is by developing character, values and goals as we share with you in the Four Dynamics.

Success starts and ends with you, but only if you know how. Give yourself the tools here.

Start your day off with positive self-talk to yourself, and be kind to yourself. By being kind to yourself you will be kind to others. Write down those positive goals that you want to accomplish and talk to yourself throughout the day about those things, instead of what goes wrong.

PS: Check out the recent Weekly Challenges as an introduction or to find a new success technique.