Landmark Forum Leader Insights

A relationship is a grand conversation

By Nancy Zapolski, PhD

We sometimes think that the circumstances in our relationships keep our relationships from being great. (If only she…, if only he…, etc.) But it’s not the content, it’s the way we hold the content and the stand we take for workability that determine the quality and power of our relationships.

Power, fulfillment, and satisfaction happen if we take our various complaints, or things that we think don’t work, and promise to produce what’s missing—not as an insufficiency, but a possibility for something. Promising to produce what’s missing leaves us at risk. If it’s not risky, if it’s a sure thing, if it’s predictable, then what we’ll be left with is something trivial. Courage is required to set aside our judgments, characterizations, and opinions and create our relationship being powerful again.

Being related is a grand conversation—it’s living in a possibility, and if it’s a possibility, it’s inherently risky.And it’s in risking ourselves, in revealing ourselves to one another and to those closest to us, that we become ourselves.