Encouraging Your Partner Improves Your Relationship

The act of encouragement is a true gift. When you encourage your partner, you lend your support to his or her struggles to prevail against life's difficulties and to grow. You communicate caring and belief in the other person's character and ability.

Used sufficiently, encouragement does wonders for morale in most relationships. Why then isn't it more widely practiced?

Perhaps encouragement isn't practiced much because it demands generosity. Encouraging your partner consists in experiencing that person as separate from yourself and as having goals and challenges that are his or her own — ones perhaps that you do not share, but that you support, nevertheless, because they matter to your partner and your partner's welfare matters to you.

It follows that encouragement is difficult for people who feel threatened by their partner's achievement, perhaps because they feel inadequate or because they are most comfortable relating competitively to another person, rather than supportively.
Also, because encouragement is so blatantly positive, it represents a threatening departure from familiar behavior in relationships in which excessive criticism, sarcasm and other forms of negative attention are the norm.

Encouragement is a form of nurture. To encourage your partner requires that you be sufficiently attentive and caring to see that he or she could use support. Encouragement also requires believing that your support matters and, so to speak, having the heart for it: When you encourage, you don't give advice (which comes from the head); you give "heart" in the form of warmth and belief in the other person's ability to prevail. (Encouragement is most needed, remember, when people feel dis-heartened.)

Because encouragement only works when it is received, there must also be someone on the taking end who needs encouragement and is willing to accept it.

Do you think of yourself as a growing person with goals who could use encouragement? Do you see yourself as worthy to receive and willing to take whatever encouragement you can get and use it to the fullest? If so, accept your partner's encouragement in a good spirit, so that he or she finds enjoyment in giving it. If not, consider — will you continue to tolerate living a directionless life without goals, feeling unworthy, even of your partner's faith in you?

Asking for the encouragement that you need also helps, as in — "I am tempted to quit this night course; it is so hard going. But I want to change jobs, and I need the course. Please encourage me, when you see me falter." When partners ask each other for encouragement, they acknowledge their interdependence and affirm the value that each receives from the other's support.

Realistically, you can't get there from here on someone else's support alone, however. You must also be willing to encourage yourself — like the tired jogger who tells himself as he runs — you're doing wonderfully well; just one more hill, and you're home.

Self-encouragement may seem as alien as asking someone else for support. Remember, however, that, if you are like most of us, you discourage yourself plenty with negative, defeatist self-talk; so why not try the opposite for a change?

The statement that encouragement is a nurturing act applies as much to the acceptance of encouragement as it does to the giving of it. Each of us has a little kid inside who, at times, feels overwhelmed and wants to quit. This inner child responds well to encouragement — whether that encouragement comes from ourselves or from someone else.

Essentially, when we give encouragement, we acknowledge the inner child in the other person and empathize with his or her plight or need. When we accept encouragement from someone else and when we encourage ourselves, we also acknowledge in a caring way the sometimes faltering child inside us.

Here are some questions to pursue, both alone and with your partner, if you decide to invite the power of mutual encouragement into your relationship:

What are challenges we each face, with which we could use encouragement? What goals for personal growth could we support in each other? How would each of us like to be encouraged to change in our relationship? What forms of encouragement — e.g., listening, holding, pep talks — do we really appreciate from each other? In short, since we're together, how can we help each other grow?

Click here for a print friendly version of this article.

Copyright © 2005 Dr. David E. Sanford All rights reserved.
marriagesupport.com