When to Give and When to Take in Your Relationship

We're going to talk about today: when to give and when to take and your relationships and this is also a lesson near and dear to my own heart because I wasn't very good at this to begin with and I learned how to get really good at it. If you're listening on the podcast and you are behind the scenes footage of my kids and me in this more natural setting, go to controlthefuture.tech/podcast, and that's where you can find my podcast. It's on iTunes and Stitcher, but you can see behind the scenes footage and get the freebies on the podcast and if you went the freebie for today and you're really gonna want it because this is some stuff that's kind of hard to learn and as I talk about, it's in all kinds of different transactions in our life that we're not sure on when to give and take. 

I have a worksheet for you that breaks it down and give you the information so you can break down the different transactions in your life and to find that, just go to controlthefuture.tech/give-take. Give-take so controlthefuture.tech/give-take. Now let's talk about relationships, whether it's in romantic partnerships, in business, or with your friend or your kids, and we're going to change the way you view about relationships for a moment, so why don't you to get out of the mindset that you've maybe have been in for most of your life, about relationships and get into a new mindset. We tend to view our relationships emotionally about how we're feeling, even if we're not very. 

Even if we're not in touch with our emotions, we tend to react in our relationships. If that person makes me angry, then I do this. If I feel loved and happy, I do this so we feel an emotion and then we act or react to it. But what I want to teach you today is how to be more proactive, proactive in your relationships. Okay? Now I'm all about emotions. One of my hashtags is Hashtag Hustle, love. I love emotions. I love studying emotions and learning how to use them for our benefit, and I especially love the positive emotions, but I want you to get out of the mindset of emotions today and get into the mindset of relationships give and take, peace being all about transactions, and I'm going to give you a little analogy to really get your mindset into how our relationships, all of them, romantic, business, family, friends, they're all about all these transactions that happen all the time. 

So here's a little example I want you to think of. Envision this. You're sitting in your house and the light bulb in your room goes out. You can't see. You need a new light bulb and you don't have one. You have to go buy a new light bulb, right? You have a need. You want something from someone else and you're willing to pay for it. Can you see the transaction going on in there? You don't want to pay a thousand dollars for a light bulb. You might pay $1 and if it's really, really important to you, you might pay more. If you really count on that light, like if your child or yourself has sensory issues, or you need that on to live, you might spend more for that light bulb. You might spend more for a special light for lighting like we do in my studio, in my tiny house, or you might spend more on a light bulb that stays on all the time that has a generator attached to it somehow. Maybe a solar powered light bulb or a special one that's been developed for sensory issues. One of my linkedin friends developed that. It's a really cool idea and you're going to be paying more for those light bulbs. You might pay $35 for that, or 20 bucks for those fancy light bulbs rather than just a dollar for a light bulb. So you're going to place a value on that need that you have, that transaction. That light bulb is going to be worth something to you and someone is going to provide that light bulb to you. You're going to give and take in that situation, placing value on your need and what the other person has to give. That's how I want you to envision your relationships for a moment as transactions where you have a need and you're willing to pay a certain amount for it to be met. Okay, so first you have a need. Next you are certain about how much you want to pay for it. So that's a little bit different in our mindset about all these transactions, in our relationships, there are many ways to pay for our needs to be met and get a drink of water. 
Each of us have a lot of resources or capital in our own bank accounts to give in exchange for getting something in return. An example of some resources you might have or some examples. Let's give you a few. Here are you are emotionally supportive or you're pretty or you're handsome or you're a good housekeeper. Maybe you support someone's goals and dreams or you have intellectual knowledge to give to them. You can train them or mentor them as parents. We certainly do that, right? There's other skills you can bring to the relationship, like time management or financial management, or you can have a baby for someone that's a big one that you might have in your resource bank, something to give. There are tons of things that we have in our own inventory of what we have to give and it can include money in relationships, business relationships. We give money and it's involved in all of our relationships. Really Parent, child, friends in some ways. Certainly in romantic partnerships. Many is a big one, so I want you to think about what you have to give. Now if you don't have a lot to give in your inventory, 
it's just a logistical thing. What I want you to do is you start developing those skills within yourself so you have more to give. You learn how to get a better job so you make more money. You work out and look better. Whatever it is, no one is perfect in every area, but if you look at this in a transactional way, it's your building up your own bank account of what you have to give in a relationship and like I said, the Freebie this week at control, the future.tech forward slash give, dash take will help you go through this inventory and then there's another one we're going to go through in a minute, 
right? 
The more you had to give, the more balanced you'll have in your relationships. Even if you are a giver and you give a lot, it's a good idea to have more capital by developing yourself more. Right? Okay. Now the next step I want you to do is to take an inventory of the needs that you have that you want met. 
Okay? 
It's not either or. It's both. Remember, we're interdependent. You have needs that you need met and I want you to make an inventory of the needs that you have met and I want you to validate them. Sometimes we try to talk ourselves out of our own needs. We have needs. We have once. It's not just basic living. We have wants and desires and dreams and goals. I want you to validate those and I want you to go get those needs met. As much as we'd love to be an island unto ourselves, we are interdependent. Even the hermit that lives in the mountains in Idaho, someone developed some of the food, some the tools of that that guy needed and he's interdependent on them. It's a give and take and we have to play by the rules of the game of this life. That's the way it is to be human and so the better we get good at this, the better our lives are going to be. 
So in business it's easier to see how this works. We have a list of skills, we have a list of experience, we have training, we have certifications, we put them on our resume and that's what we have to bring to the table, and then there's an ad the employer puts out and he's willing to pay this much these hours, these basic things. So that transaction on the surface looks easier. In our romantic relationships, we make a list of what we want and we make a list of what we're trying to get from the other person and what they have, so you can break it down to very transactional here, but I'll tell you even in that work relationship you're going to get in that job and you the job description and what they expected from you is not the whole picture. It's going to be a random number. 
I could assign it to 10 percent of the picture and when you get into that romantic relationship, those things that you wanted and the things that you thought the person would give to you, you can't even conceive in your mind all the other pieces that are going to come with this and your job. You might have a sick child that was nowhere in the job description or any of it, but you're going to have that need come up. Certainly in romantic relationships and certainly when we have a child, we don't know what we're getting into. There's so many transactions have given. Take all day, every day that we can't expect. What if you are very compatible with someone and they get sick? That's going to change the balance, so we're going to talk about all of this and how to navigate these transactions throughout the day. Now, if you want more on this, even more than the Freebie I'm giving you, you want to join my class, retrain your brain, and you can learn more about it at control the future.tech/forward/retrain brain. 
Check it out because this is where I'm really going to teach you this stuff and give you the opportunity to practice with me so that's control the future.tech forward slash, retrain. Bring. It's a good class. I've worked hard on it and it's, it's really awesome to see people's lives change and I love to be able to interact with you and to really work on this stuff together. So that's how you're going to start taking this inventory of give and take what you have to give, what you need. That's the first step. You're going to get clear as clear as you can on those things, but what happens when things come up that you've never thought of before? Okay, you have that baby and you didn't realize she wants you to never, ever do anything for yourself ever again and just catered to her, but that's impossible. 
So even with a little baby who you want to give everything to, there are transactions that happen, and even with that baby, you need to learn when to given when to take, okay, I'm going to help you get very clear on what you're going to bring to the table and what you need from the other person. Because even with that baby, you're going to need things from the other little person. That little person can't be a baby forever and sit in that crib. You're going to need that, Babe. You're going to need that baby to give you 15 minutes alone. Sometimes you're going to need that baby to learn how to pick up after themselves. There's transactions all the time and what I want you to understand is if you're giving too much or giving too little and that's why you came to this class. 
I know, I know. I know. That's why you're here, so first of all, you're going to practice on getting clear on what it is you want and what it is that you bring to the table, and now we're gonna work on the transactions that happen every day. They get the relationship off balance when one is giving in, one is taking. All right? All right. Again, I'm going to remind you. I want you to take every emotion off the table and just look at this logically. Think of the person that came to mind when you signed up for this episode. When you started listening, you are compelled to listen because there's a certain relationship. There may be more than one, but narrow it down to one right now and think, what does your gut tell you? Are you giving too much or you're giving too little and that relationship. Okay, what are you thinking here? And there's no right or wrong answer in every relationship. This happens. So first of all, we're going now with that in your mind, we're going to talk about taking about the other person giving to us. You have some things you need. You're clear on that. Now, this is how you take. 
You need more sleep, for example, or a cleaner house or intimacy. If it's a romantic partner, you need them to make more money to bring to the household. You have these needs and you're clear on them. Guess what, my friend? It's up to you to ask them for it. You've got to ask for it. You can't assume that the other person is as kind hearted and as generous as you are. You have to ask for what you need, whether it's that baby, that boss, your romantic partner, your best friend. You have to ask for what you need. If you want to get really good on how to ask for what you need, I will put it in my show notes, the link to the episode I did on how to ask for anything you want because there are certain skills involved in asking. You have to know when to be more intense with your requests and the big granddaddy of them all is how to understand positive reinforcement because that's what motivates human behavior is a reward and I teach you in that episode how to do all that and in my retrain your brain class, we go into a lot of depth on all of these skills because there's two pieces to this. 
There's retraining our brain and there's the skills and I want you to understand how to motivate someone to do something for you without the fear of losing the relationship. And this piece is really, really key right now. Let me get a drink because I'm talking really fast and there's a lot of information here and that's why I want you to get the Freebie so you can really sit down and understand all this stuff. Think about how afraid you are of losing a relationship and what I want you to know, his relationships are not as fragile as you think. There are some exceptions to this, but so often we're so afraid of losing a relationship that we don't ask and we don't take. 
This is for two general reasons. Number one is we're insecure and we don't have self confidence in ourselves and we don't have the skills to ask and the other reason is because some people are really good at asking or they're really manipulative or they're really good at shutting you down. When you ask and making you, making you feel guilty about it, so either we're insecure or they're good at asking, and so those two reasons right there will stop you from asking, okay, but I'm telling you, even in both of those scenarios, the relationship is not as fragile as you think, and that's what I want you to practice this week. I want you to practice just practice for a week. It's probably not going to be a make or break on your relationship. There are some exceptions to this rule, but practice for one week, not being afraid to lose your relationship, whether it's with your boss or whomever. Practice asking. Okay. That's a little practice. 
Okay. 
All right. Um, let's see. Okay. Now trying to think of what I wanted to tell you next. I think that's good for this bit. That's a little summary of how you take, but here's the piece. I didn't want to tell you about this. If your answer was you feel like you're taking too much, I want you to think about two pieces of this. There are two reasons I want you to think about why you might be taking too much, taking too much. One, you're just actually. There's three reasons. One is you're just used to taking, you feel entitled and you just take too much and it's destroying your relationships. Ultimately you'll know if that's you or if you don't get some input from someone that you trust the other be you feel like you're taking too much from a particular person just because they can't keep giving it to you. 
They just can't. They can't give it to you. So you're requesting too much from them, then they can really give, and then there's a reason that you've probably never thought about in this, in that is sometimes when we feel like we're taking too much. I really want you to hear this. It's because you're violating your own value system. You don't want to take that much. What you really want is to be able to give those things to yourself. You really want to be more independent, and this is a piece about equality in a relationship that I want you to understand, and that is that sometimes in our relationships you can't ask for more. You can't ask for more in your relationship because that person has more authority than you think about a boss who gives you money. They're going to have more authority than you, so there's certain things you can't ask them for because they have the leverage. 
If you're financially or emotionally dependent on someone, let me tell you, sister or brother, they have leverage on you. The way to equalize that relationship is for you to get more financially independent. Might take awhile. If you're a teenager and you don't want to do what your parents say, it's gonna take you all not to be financially independent, but you need to work on that because they're going to have the leverage there. If you're emotionally dependent on someone, if you're dependent on someone to soothe your emotions, then you're very dependent on them to do that. The only way to level that playing field is for you to learn how to take care of your own emotions. This will help you be more independent like that stuff to think about. All right, so let me go to the next one in my new. There's only one last bit that I really want to talk to you about today and this is a really important piece and again, if you want the notes, go to control the future.tech forward slash gift Dash. Take one last piece that's really important. I want you to think about some of the most needy people will make you feel like they have the leverage over you. 
So we talked about leverage, right? Some of them will make you feel like they have
the leverage over you, right? So remember, those are some of the most needy people and there's like a little babble kind of word for it and that is there a controlling. They have a need to control you and in doing that they will make you try to feel bad or incompetent so they can control you, right? They're going to try to make you feel bad. They're going to try to make you feel like you owe them more than you can give. Are you feel like giving or you want to give. It's up to you to get clear on who you are and not let anyone ever take you off course of what you want to give. Right? That's a really important piece and I hope you got that. If you have any questions, email us at team@controlthefuture.tech and I'll see you next week with a little behind the scenes on how this works behind the camera in our tiny house. Okay. Thanks for joining us everyone. I would love to hear your comments. All right, see you later. Bye.