This is episode 299, and today is all about relationships. And I’ve got a big announcement that you’re going to want to hear about as well.

If you want to do things differently but need some help making it happen, then tune in for your weekly dose of coaching from me, Maisie Hill, Master Life Coach and author of Period Power. Welcome to The Maisie Hill Experience. 

Hello, folks. Welcome to the podcast. When this episode airs, it’ll be the end of September. Oh, my gosh. I don’t know about you, but it has been quite the month. It’s been an interesting one for me for all sorts of reasons. I’m not going to get into all the reasons, but one of them was that my son, Nelson, came home with one of those back-to-school colds, which he very kindly then passed on to me. Thankfully, though, he didn’t come down with it until the evening of the day that he sat the Kent Test.

So, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s an 11-plus exam that kids in this county can sit in their last year of primary school so that they can apply to the grammar schools, the local grammar schools. It’s a very archaic system that most of the UK got rid of decades ago—I think in the ’60s and ’70s. I didn’t sit it, ’cause where I grew up, we didn’t have it, and I didn’t even know it existed until he started going to school and everyone started chatting about it.

So, on the morning of the test, I have to tell you this, as I was saying goodbye to him, I was just thinking, what coaching do I want to just send him off with? And so I just said, “I believe in you.” And I just said, “You know, if you get stuck on a question, just tell yourself that you can figure it out.” Because that’s one of my favourite coaching techniques: anytime you’re struggling, just remind yourself, “I can figure this out.”

And so I gave that coaching to him, and to my complete surprise, he turned around and said to me, “Mum, I know all about growth mindset and fixed mindset. See you later!” And he just ran off with his mates, and I was just so surprised and delighted by that response. But I’m also just really grateful to myself that I gave myself a slow start to September in the run-up to him taking that test so that I could be around to help him to prepare and to help him be nicely regulated and things for it, because that was really important.

Okay, before we get into today’s episode, which is a very chunky one, I want to tell you about the Relationship Skills Workshop, which I am running this Saturday, the 3rd of October. It’s a live event. It’s completely free, and it’s going to run from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. UK time. If you can’t make it live, don’t worry about it. Still sign up, because everyone who signs up will get access to the recording.

And it’s for all of your relationships, okay? It’s not just about romantic ones and dating; it’s about your friends, your family, your colleagues, and complete strangers as well. We’ll be covering your relationship with yourself, things like your standards and boundaries in relationships, how to tend to them, how to say the thing, right? How to have challenging conversations, and go through ruptures and repairs, and how to take care of your emotions and be informed by your emotions without letting them run the show.

I can’t wait for this. I’ve been cooking this up all year. You can sign up at maisiehill.com/relationships, or if you’re already on my email list or following me on social media, just click the link in the emails or head to my profile on Instagram and sign up.

So, as the workshop is coming up, I wanted to dedicate this episode to the topic of relationships so that we can just get things in motion before we actually come together for the workshop. I coach on relationships a lot. My membership is all about building the skills of self-leadership, which, if you haven’t heard that phrase before, means being able to intentionally influence your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions so that you can achieve your personal and professional goals, and so that you can lead yourself through challenging situations.

And in all the years of coaching I’ve done, I can tell you that relationships are at the heart of all of that. So that means your relationship with yourself, your relationship with others—whether that’s your friend, colleague, parent, strangers. And inside the membership, a lot of the members do set seasonal goals that are directly about relationships, such as expressing your boundaries in your relationships or showing up as yourself when you’re dating. This summer, someone set a goal of enjoying their time with their kids more. So these are all examples of goals where a relationship or relationships is the focus of the goal.

But relationships come into every goal, even the ones that don’t look like they’re about relationships at all. So things like changing your career, writing a book, getting your first pull-up. Every single goal will involve you doing things differently, which means stopping doing some things, starting doing others. And when you do that, the people around you are going to have thoughts about that, and there’s going to need to be conversations, and there might be disagreements and misunderstandings, too. But even if we set aside self-leadership and your goals, there is no escaping relationships.

So your experience of other people has the most profound effect on your life. Think about how much time you spend thinking about what so-and-so said, or what they didn’t say, or what their tone of voice implied, or their tone of text, what the look on their face meant, and how they behaved towards you, and how you’re interpreting that behaviour, and what you’re making it mean. My guess is that you think about these things a lot, and that’s before we get into what you said and what you did in that conversation.

So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be good at relationships, as we talk a lot about being good at relationships. But so often when that phrase is being used, what we mean by that is that you’re someone who gets on with everyone, and that people come to you with their problems, that you rarely fall out with anyone. So perhaps from the outside, it can seem that you’re, quote-unquote, “good at relationships.”

But actually, on the inside, you could have so many things unsaid that are just simmering underneath the surface. And when you’re around other people, they might not actually be experiencing the real you because you’ve got a bit of a mask on, or you’re self-silencing, or you’re just not experiencing authentic communication with them. You’re not expressing yourself with them. 

So it could also be true that whilst everyone does come to you with their problems, nobody knows about yours. Nobody really knows you. So I’ve been on this topic, thinking about the workshop, and as I’ve been driving around and things, about what does it mean to be good at relationships? Because we all want to be good in relationships. We aspire to be good at them. And it’s important that we do this, because when you don’t define what you mean by that, you’ll just head off in a certain direction in an attempt to improve things and just screw yourself over in the process.

So here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say that somewhere along the way, you have come to the conclusion that being good at relationships means not having conflict in them. So that’s the direction you head off in. And because of that, you get better at avoiding conflict, which could mean that you let comments go that actually bother you deeply, or you say “No worries” when it is a concern of yours, you are worried about it.

Maybe it kind of works in that nobody ends up being cross with you and you haven’t been snapping or yelling at anybody else. But going in that direction will then mean that you ignore your feelings and that you silence yourself. And they aren’t the skills that you need to become more practiced in. If you’re like me and most of my clients, they are the tendencies that you need to interrupt and replace with other skills.

And this matters even more when you’ve been socialised as female, because we’ve been fed ideas about relationships and our role in them since we were babies. And if you don’t name those ideas, you can end up striving for relationships that benefit and uphold the patriarchy.

So the picture of good at relationships that I was sold, and probably you were sold as well, is the version where we are accommodating and agreeable and low maintenance, and that we’re helpful and keep everyone else happy and smooth everything over. So relationships are often, in terms of how we’ve been socialised, about minimising ourselves and doing everything we can for others.

And this was me until some point in my 30s. I think until I had a kid, or around that time, because that’s when I really saw the extent of my socialization and the impact of the mental load. And then starting perimenopause has certainly accelerated that process. And that’s one of the huge gifts of perimenopause: you realise how your life has revolved around taking care of other people and catering to men. But what I want is for you to do this work long before your hormones do it for you, because then by the time you do hit perimenopause, you’ll already have these skills in place.

And one of the biggest misconceptions that I had about relationships was that a healthy relationship was one where you didn’t argue or fall out, probably because I didn’t have much modelled to me in the way of people falling out and then resolving it. So for me, arguing and conflict was something that there was just no coming back from, and only resulted in more tension, more disconnection, more rupture in the relationships. And along with that, I’d also soaked up all of the TV portrayals of happy couples who don’t argue, whose relationships were free of tension, as well as the very argumentative couples who represented unhealthy relationships. 

And over the years, this has really cost me a lot, because when I think about all the times I was upset or angry about something, and I just swallowed all of that up, I just sucked it up and went back to being nice and helpful and supportive, and I thought I was being good at relationships in doing that.

So whatever your socialisation has involved will also be showing up in your relationships: what your parents and other adults modelled to you, what your early friendships were like, your relationship with your parents and siblings, and how those dynamics show up in your romantic relationships and friendships, and even with your boss. 

So all the personal and professional experiences in relationships that you’ve had have resulted in your body being wired a certain way, your mindset has been wired that way, your behaviour has, too. But all of that can be changed, and the way to do that is through building skills in relationships, hence why I’m doing this workshop, hence why it’s free, and I want you all to come.

So, back to defining what being good at relationships means. I’m basing what I’m about to tell you on all the coaching I’ve ever done on relationships, which is a lot, as well as my own experiences, which is also a lot. In case you’re wondering, that involves two failed marriages, a five-year relationship that I should have got out of at the two-year mark, but didn’t have enough respect for myself to do so, my current—I think we’re at 13 years—13-year relationship.

Oh, my gosh, have you seen those videos on social media where—the ones I’ve seen have all been straight couples—so where a woman is recording a video and her boyfriend is in the background, and she’s talking to the camera about some kind of topic, but then she just refers to him as “my current boyfriend,” implying there’s going to be future ones? I’ve just, I have enjoyed watching the reactions to those.

Anyway, I have learned a lot from all of those relationships as well as my current one, as well as my friendships, working relationships, too, and certainly through the lens of understanding about being autistic, because most of my relationships, most of my life, I, of course, was autistic, but didn’t know.

Okay, so here’s what I’ve come up with. I’ve got seven points. Let’s start off strong with number one: you’re in a good relationship with yourself, and you don’t need other people to fill the gaps in that relationship with yourself. Your relationship with yourself is your primary relationship. It’s the one relationship that you are in 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the entirety of your life. That means that you can leave a marriage, you can leave your job, but you cannot leave you. And it’s the one relationship that every other relationship is influenced by, whether you realise it or not.

Let’s say you go out to a party, or a work do, coffee with a friend, something like that, but then on your journey home, you start replaying what happened. And you start thinking, “Well, why did I say that? They must think I’m an idiot. I talked too much. I didn’t ask enough about her life. I didn’t show enough initiative. I spoke too much. I didn’t speak enough. Why am I like this? I’m this, I’m that, blah, blah, blah.” The onslaught just continues, so that by the time you get home, you’ve lost sight of all the positives of the interaction that you had, not to mention what your experience of it was like, and instead, you’ve just come up with a long list about how shit you are.

If you heard someone talking to a friend of yours like that, I’m sure you’d tell them where to go. But talking to yourself like that is somehow acceptable. Well, it’s not acceptable, but that’s what a lot of your internal voices are like. So next time that you are on your way home from something, I want you to pay attention to what you say to yourself about how it went and about how you behaved there.

And this matters for all your other relationships, because when your relationship with yourself isn’t great, what ends up happening is you need other people to balance out those critical inner thoughts that you have about yourself. You need texts from other people letting you know how great you are and what a lovely time they had with you, because you’re not thinking about how great you are. You’re thinking about how crap you are, and you need other people to counteract that.

And when you need other people’s approval to feel okay about yourself, it means that you can’t afford to disagree with them, or to say no, or to let them see anything about you that could potentially put them off liking you. So that relationship you have with yourself decides how authentic, how honest you can be with everyone else. 

So that’s number one. Number two is that you can say the thing. As in, instead of self-silencing, you can speak up and express yourself, and that you can be okay with other people expressing themselves without you adding an entire narrative to it and making it mean all sorts of horrible things about you. 

Think about all the arguments that you’ve had in your head when you’ve been trying to fall asleep, the statements that you have pictured yourself saying that you have rehearsed in your head, but then never spoken out loud. And listen, rehearsing things can be useful, but it needs to result in you then actually saying it out loud. And the more you get used to saying things and having these conversations, the less rehearsing you need to do anyway.

This is one of the biggest themes that I help people figure out through coaching. It is my life’s work, as in for me personally, speaking up and saying things when it feels uncomfortable or when I worry about getting in trouble and being told off, because those things still happen to me. It’s ongoing work. I just have a process and the skills to coach myself through them. That’s the difference.

So it’s my continued personal work, and I’ve come to realise that it is a huge part of my professional work. I don’t think a coaching call goes by where we don’t touch on communication in relationships. And I often give my clients examples of how to say things, which has been an interesting one for me to sit with and reflect on and make an active decision about, because coaching isn’t about telling people what to do. Coaching is about helping you to access your own wisdom and figure out what you want to do. So my job as your coach is to facilitate you figuring that out.

But when it comes to communicating and having challenging conversations, my personal and professional opinion is that it’s important to model examples of what that communication can be like, because if you haven’t had that type of communication modelled to you by your parents or your peers, then how the hell are you meant to know how to do it? How are you going to know what it can sound like, what it can feel like? I think it’s a really useful starting point to hear an example of what you could say and how you could say it, that you can then take and build on yourself so that what you say takes the form and tone that you want it to.

So that’s where I kind of do away with what I’m meant to do professionally in favour of doing what I have seen to help my clients. And it’s certainly helped me as well, because that used to be me years and years ago. I would be asking my coach, “Yeah, but how do I say that? What do I say?” Because it was just, it was like speaking another language. I needed to hear someone else speak it in order for me to learn how to say it. 

And saying the thing also includes asking for what you need very clearly. That means not hinting, not saying that you’re fine and then sulking when they don’t pick up on the undertone of what you were really saying. This is about asking clearly and explicitly. And part of being able to ask someone for something is being able to hear a no without making that mean that you shouldn’t have asked in the first place, or that you don’t deserve the help, or that you should be better at something. A no is just an answer to your request. That’s all it is. It doesn’t determine whether you’re allowed to want or need something, or that the other person doesn’t care about you.

Remember what I said earlier about everyone coming to you with their problems while nobody knows about yours? This is where that comes from. Letting yourself be seen includes letting people help you, and it means receiving a compliment instead of batting it away or playing it down in some way. 

And then there’s the other side of this, which is that other people get to express themselves, too. And this is where our brains love to go wild and come up with all sorts of dramatic meaning. There is a difference between someone you’re dating saying that they need an evening to themselves, and then the thoughts that you add to that about how they’re going off you and that you’re not interesting or attractive enough to them for them to want to spend time with you.

Or another example of this could be that you send a message to a friend, and they just reply with one word—maybe it’s like just “Okay”—because maybe that’s all that was needed, or maybe they were scrambling to reply just as they were going into a meeting, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t leave you hanging. But instead of considering that, you’re busy thinking of the possible ways that you have pissed her off or let her down. So what’s happening here is that your mind has just filled a gap with the worst thing it could find, which is what our minds are prone to doing if we let them. You don’t actually know that she’s being off with you. There could be all sorts of other reasons for that. And this is about being able to stay curious about who the other person is and what’s going on for them, rather than who you want them to be or what you imagine is going on in their life. 

But that doesn’t mean that in staying curious with them and acknowledging that stuff can be going on with them, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have standards and boundaries. So number three on my list of what it means to be good at relationships is that you have boundaries and standards. So yes, other people get to be themselves, but that doesn’t mean that you put up with behaviour that is harmful to you or unacceptable to you.

Now, I love a woman with strong boundaries. I highly recommend that you have them in your life. And boundaries can be misunderstood and misused. When it comes to relationships, a lot of online conversation is about using boundaries in relationships to end the relationship, which, of course, there are times and places where that is appropriate. But I’m more interested in boundaries in relationships so that the relationship can continue. I would love for us all to collectively come back to the idea that having boundaries is a way of tending to your relationships so that you can experience connection with others and continue in the relationship. That’s going to involve being aware of your own boundaries and tending to them. It also involves respecting other people’s.

And inherent in all of this is the ability to talk about them, because otherwise, we just go through life expecting other people to know what our standards and boundaries are. And I know that to you, these things are very obvious, and you might imagine that the things that are boundaries for you are just common sense and that other people surely get them. But not everyone is you. Their experience and perspective of the world is different to yours.

I spent so much of my life being annoyed at other people for not being able to read my mind, right? They should just know, this is common sense. I shouldn’t have to be spelling it out. But notice where you’re annoyed with someone for breaking a rule that they just have no idea even exists. When you can let go of that expectation, everything shifts within yourself and within the relationship. I can’t tell you how much freer I have felt since I stopped expecting these things of others.

But I do also wish that I’d known how to have standards and boundaries in my 20s. I was in a five-year relationship, should have only been a two-year relationship, because I discovered something about him that still, to this day, makes my stomach drop anytime I think about it. It like just, “Ugh.” You know when you find something out about what someone’s been up to that is just shocking and awful and just like shaking with adrenaline from it? That’s what happened. And so, even though I could recognise at the time that how he was behaving wasn’t okay for me, I also loved him, and I think I was just so desperate to be loved, plus I really wanted to be successful at relationships, so for all sorts of not-so-great reasons, I just wanted to make it work.

So off we trotted to couples therapy, and the therapist actually said to me, “He’s behaving this way because your job is very motherly, which is putting him off you in terms of sexual attraction and desire, so he’s seeking it out with others,” because this was when I was doing a lot of fertility and birth work as an acupuncturist and as a birth doula.

It’s just occurred to me, it’s really interesting how I was able to have a standard with the therapist and just said, like, “There’s no way I’m going back to therapy with that therapist.” But I wasn’t able to do that in the relationship. I hadn’t clocked that until just now. 

Anyway, it turns out he had a lot of his own stuff going on, which certainly doesn’t excuse his behaviour, but on hearing about that, it did mean that then I just leapt into fix-it mode. “I can fix him. I can heal him.” I can’t remember what actually happened for me to eventually call it off, but I finally did, years later. And I learned so much through that experience, and that meant that when something similar happened in a subsequent relationship—told you I’ve got lots of stories, lots of lessons—I was able to recognise it and respond to it a lot quicker. Still not quite to the degree that I would have liked to, had I known how to, had I had the skills that I now have, but this is how we learn. But my motive here is to save you from it. You don’t need that.

Number four is that you take responsibility for yourself, including your feelings, which means that you don’t blame the other person and that you don’t take on their feelings as your responsibility. Again, this has radically changed my life. I wish I’d been taught this earlier. But your feelings are a source of information. They are giving you clues that there is something that you need to pay attention to. So when you feel anger, that could be showing you that a line has been crossed. But what you do with that anger is your responsibility. How you behave when you’re angry is your responsibility. 

Taking responsibility for your feelings also means not handing them over for someone else to fix. So that whole “You made me feel,” that’s the thing that really trips us up in relationships. Because when your feelings are someone else’s fault, then feeling better is also dependent on that other person. And what ends up happening is you’re just waiting for them to change and behave a certain way before you can feel better.

So that can sound like, “Well, you know, if he’d just apologise, I would be able to move on,” or, “I can’t relax until they do this or that.” And I just don’t think it’s a good idea that you put your emotional well-being in the hands of someone else. But that doesn’t take away from the whole standards and boundaries thing.

The other side of this is that their feelings aren’t your job either. So if someone’s disappointed or upset and your whole body just wants to leap in and fix it immediately, that’s something to get curious about. Think about how much energy you currently put into micromanaging other people’s emotions. Being able to let other people experience emotion is one of the most useful relationship skills there is, because it’s what makes speaking up possible. It means that you can say something and that the other person can feel disappointed or annoyed, and that can be okay for you. I’m not going to say it’s going to feel great for you, but you can accept that they’re feeling that way. And like all of these points, it goes both ways. You can be disappointed in someone without withdrawing, going cold, giving them the silent treatment until they magically figure out what they’ve done wrong. Oh, my gosh, this takes me back to my 20s. 

All right, moving on to number five, which is that being good at relationships means that you can disagree and you can hear criticism without collapsing, or going on the attack, or just needing to get the hell out of there. You can go through a rupture knowing that you can also repair it.

Remember when I said that I used to think a healthy relationship was one with no arguing? This is another one that I had to learn, because a relationship with no ruptures, no fallout, isn’t necessarily a healthy one. I was convinced it was, but that’s not true, because when there’s no fallouts ever, when there’s no disagreements, it usually means at least one person is swallowing a lot of stuff and not talking about it. And that trust in relationships comes from knowing that when things go wrong, when mistakes are made, when there’s miscommunication and things like that, that you will find your way back to each other and be able to come back into a place of connection.

The thing is that when things do get tense, which they do, our stress responses are activated and they drive our behaviour: first is attack, it’s like or the defensiveness and, “Well, what about the time that you did this? I remember on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. eight years ago, you did this.” So just be like, got a stockpile of rebuttals that you’re ready to fire off before they’ve even finished saying whatever it is that they’re going to say. And then another stress response is collapse or freeze, where you just might not say anything, or just agree with them and be like, “You’re right. I’m a terrible person. I’m sorry,” or just not saying anything.

When Paul and I first got together, I used to just totally freeze and dissociate anytime he said something that was slightly challenging for me. And I’m not talking about rous here or yelling, I just mean slight disagreements, but that was so unsettling for me that we’d be trying to discuss things, and I’d just literally forget what we were talking about. He would have been saying something 20 seconds ago, and I couldn’t keep a hold of what we were talking about. So then I’d ask him, “What were we talking about? What did you just say? What are we falling out about here?” And then, very understandably, he would then think that I just wasn’t even listening to him. So you can imagine how well that pattern was going for us, but we figured it out. We got there.

And then, of course, there’s fleeing, where you just want to run away from the conversation, and maybe you actually run away from it, or start looking at other living situations so you don’t have to live with this person, if we’re talking about those kind of relationships. So being able to have a challenging conversation and hear what someone else is saying about you, and to remain in the conversation without those stress responses hijacking you, is also a skill that comes with practice.

So is giving someone else feedback, rather than saving it up and stockpiling it for so long that when it finally comes out, it’s like you’re just ambushing them. And then it’s like a, “Well, you always,” and, “You never do this,” and you’ve just got the back catalogue to refer to of when they did exactly those things. But disagreeing with someone also doesn’t have to mean disconnecting.

You can think that your sister is wrong about something and still love her to bits and have a really meaningful conversation. Other people can disagree with you, and you don’t have to invest your energy in winning them around. So the closeness that so many of you are wanting in relationships doesn’t have to depend on everyone agreeing with each other. That’s really important.

Okay, rolling on to number six, which is that you can make mistakes and give yourself grace, and you can let people be wrong about you, and you can give the other person grace, too, and accept that you might be wrong about them. Because as you work on your relationships, you are going to get things wrong. Of course you are. You will snap, you will forget things, you will say the clumsy thing, you won’t speak up, you’ll say things at the worst possible moment. Mistakes in relationships are guaranteed. What matters is what happens after.

If every mistake you make sends you into a shame spiral, you’ll either avoid getting close to people or you’ll never admit that you might have got something wrong, because admitting it is just going to be proof that you’re awful. So when we have grace, that’s what allows us to say, “I got that wrong,” and to be able to mean it, and love yourself through that experience.

Grace also means understanding that other people will make mistakes, too. They will also be wrong about you, and despite your best intentions and clear communication, some people will still take what you say and do and completely misunderstand you. That’s going to happen. It’s about having the skills to navigate that, and sometimes navigating it is going to mean that you explain yourself once, and if they’re determined not to believe you and to keep their existing thoughts about you, then you got to let them be wrong. You don’t have to keep defending yourself until they agree with you. I did a whole episode on this years ago. I can’t remember which one it is, but it’s a good one. Feel free to dig that one out. But letting people be wrong about you is still one of the most freeing things that you can practice.

But as I mentioned, there’s a flip side, which is that you might be the one who’s got it wrong. And remember, your mind loves a negative or worst-case scenario where you’ll just leap to all sorts of things, like, “He’s had enough of me. She’s annoyed with me. They didn’t invite me ’cause they don’t like me.” And all of these thoughts can feel so convincing to the point where they just feel factual. But before you act on those so-called facts, make sure that you have paid attention to where you might have made an assumption, or two, or three.

And giving other people grace means giving them the same benefit of the doubt that you would want them to give to you. Maybe the other person was tired, maybe they were distracted, maybe something else is going on for them that’s really impacting them, maybe the invite went to your old email address, or maybe you’ll find out that something did go wrong. And then you’ve got a rupture on your hands, but because you’ve built your relationship skills, you know what to do when those happen.

Okay, my final point, number seven, is that you let yourself change and you let other people change, too. So that means that you evolve as a person, other people evolve, and your relationships will evolve, too. Relationships that only work if nobody changes will always reach a breaking point. And this point is particularly important, because typically what happens is that when you start working on all the other points I’ve mentioned, you will become a different version of yourself in your relationships. So instead of silencing yourself all the time, you’ll start speaking up. You’ll have standards and boundaries. You’ll be taking responsibility for yourself, but not being overly responsible for others. You’ll stop trying to fix and heal and make everything okay for everyone else. And you will be more honest in your relationships.

And when you do all of that, you’ll be different, which means other people will have a different experience of you. That is going to impact your relationships in great ways, in challenging ways, in all the ways. And the people in your life are going to change, too. Whether it’s similar things changing for them, could also be something like your friend just gets really into running or horse riding and then talks about nothing else, or maybe your partner will want something different from what they told you they wanted when you first got together, or maybe they want to go back on a decision that you’ve made together. Being good at relationships means letting them become who they are becoming, rather than constraining them to who they used to be. And that’s not always straightforward. Some of that is the mess of relationships, but you can figure that out.

So to recap, here’s what I think it means to be good at relationships, by the way: usually when I record an episode like this, it’s always like two days later, I’ll just be doing the dishes or something, and I think, “Oh, there’s all these other points I wanted to include.” But you know what? I can always do a part two.

But to recap: Number one was that you’re in a good relationship with yourself. Two, you can say the thing and let other people say what they need to say as well. Three, you have standards and boundaries, and you respect other people’s. Four, you take responsibility for yourself, for your feelings, and your behaviour, and you don’t take on the responsibility that belongs to other people. Five, that you can disagree and hear criticism and go through a rupture knowing you can repair it. Six, that you give yourself grace and you give it to other people, too. And seven, that you let yourself change and you let other people evolve, too. 

I would love to know which one of these feels most challenging to you, because that’s going to be your starting point for doing this work. But also, if you’ve got points that you would add to this, I’ve given you a great starting point to consider what you think being good at relationships means, but of course, you will have your own version of that.

And remember that every single one of the things I’ve mentioned today is a skill, and none of us are born knowing how to do these things. Some of us might have been taught them and been exposed to them, had it modelled to us, but a lot of us were taught the complete opposite, which is exactly why I’m running the Relationship Skills Workshop this Saturday, the 3rd of October 2026, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. UK time. It’s live, it’s free for now. The price is going to be going up to £147, so do sign up now. If you can’t make it live, everyone who signs up will get access to the recording whilst it’s available. It’s going to be permanently available inside the membership, those of you who are in there.

I’ll be teaching the skills that you can use in all of your relationships, not just romantic ones. This is going to apply to your friendships, your professional relationships, all of them, okay? The ones in your family as well. We have got holiday season is apparently upon us. I got the shock of my life when I saw mince pies on sale in mid-September, but it did make me think, yeah, this is the time to be doing this work. Because if we work on relationships now, then you’ve got plenty of practice before it’s the holidays and you’re visiting family, or dealing with stuff at work, or having conversations with your friends or partner.

So sign up at maisiehill.com/relationships. If you’re already on my email list, all you need to do is click one of the links in the emails, and we will send you all the details. If you’re in Powerful, you don’t need to sign up; it’s part of your membership. But the links are everywhere: my social media, the website, et cetera. I cannot wait for this. I will see you there on Saturday. Have a great week. 

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, Powerful, where you get my best resources and all the coaching you need to transform your inner and outer life. Sign up to the waitlist at maisiehill.com/powerful, and I’ll see you in the community.