Today renowned Wall Street analyst Tim Kellis has stopped by on his virtual book tour as my guest blogger. But he’s not going to talk about business. Instead, he shares a lesson about making relationships work that he learned in the business world. The experience he gained as a Wall Street analyst provided an excellent backdrop for becoming an expert on relationships, and resulted in his relationship book, Equality: The Quest for the Happy Marriage. Today he shares a lesson about complacency.

Complacency. Complacency is the curse of success, and failure. We learned this lesson the hard way on Wall Street during the boom of the late 90s. This lesson is a very personal one for me as well. I got into Wall Street because of my love of trying to figure out where stock prices were going. I started with an initial investment of $7,000 in 1993 and grew my portfolio to $12.5 million by the height of the market in 2000.

But I grew complacent about the real valuation of stocks, like most on Wall Street, so when the market begun to crumble in late 2000 I complacently sat by thinking that stock prices would rebound, like they did so many times during the 20 year bull market. But they didn’t, and my portfolio crashed back to earth. Boy that was painful.

The same thing happens in negative relationships. We go into relationships with all of the optimism of success, particularly those that lead to marriage. We get married believing that our marriages will last a lifetime.
And then, with negative relationships, problems begin to develop. Something happens where conflicts lead to arguments where both are bewildered about what to do.

We begin by trying to resolve them, but when they lead to nothing but more anger and arguments we grow complacent believing that somehow they will be resolved.

So we sit back, eventually not even addressing the issues that cause us problems. We think to ourselves that somehow they will get fixed, but we dare not bring them up, for fear of the repercussions.

And we become DoorMats in our own loving relationships. One of the most important elements of a successful relationship is the discovery of our own internal happiness, happiness that is not a result of our wealth or good looks, or our belief in the lack of. This requires the courage to pick yourself up by your boot straps and take on the challenge of addressing whatever causes you troubles in your relationship.

This requires that you do not become a DoorMat in your own relationship and believe in yourself. Why not discard your complacent approach to your regressive relationship and do something about it?

Check out Tim Kellis’ website at www.happyrelationships.com or his blog at www.questforthehappyrelationship.blogspot.com

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