I’m doing a webinar for the Association for Psychological Type-international’s eChapter on Tuesday, February 12 on Building Relationships. (You might still be able to register for that program.) As I prepared my handout and visuals, it occurred to me that coincidentally Valentine’s Day is this week! While Valentine’s Day is typically focused on romantic relationships, it is a good time for us to think about all of our relationships.

I am often asked, “What types work best as couples?” The answer to that question is, “It depends.” It depends on many other factors, including communication skills, and maturity as the most important. Research done by Petey Porter, one of the graduates of the MBTI® Certification program we used to conduct, yielded 3 factors that are most important in relationships:

1. Self-knowledge
2. Trust
3. Perspective taking

These are also the hallmarks of maturity and effective communication. As we mature, we usually gain a little more self-awareness, work through some of old issues that get in the way of trusting others, and increase our capacities for perspective taking. Well, what if we had a way to accelerate this kind of maturity and make it under our conscious control? We do. The Berens CORE™ Approach gives us several maps and guidelines to make this happen.

Centering, Opening, Relating, and Expanding give us a specific set of processes to increase our leadership, self-leadership, and relationship building capacities. When we first come into the world, we have only our own perspectives. Many of us go through live living mostly in a first person perspective. Oh, yes, we do get some enculturation that guides us in being considerate of others, but we still do that in the framework of our own perspectives. We are not even aware of seeing things only through our own lenses. And that is in part because we don’t have a language to understand and express those lenses or perspectives. This is the main value of a typology. With the CORE Approach, we use several typologies that can help us more completely understand ourselves and others. Once we see our own perspectives, we can then mindfully Center ourselves in those perspectives while still Opening to other perspectives. Then we can begin Relating to others by taking their perspectives, meeting them at their view of the world. And as we do this repeatedly, we find ourselves Expanding and growing in ways that are truly transformational, where we can see multiple perspectives.

All of this contributes to better relationships, not just our romantic ones. Why not join me in launching your journey through the CORE by signing up for the online workshops in The Communication Zone® Series? Hurry, they start Friday February 15 at 10 am Pacific Time. If you can’t attend, you will get the recording. You will also get a link to the free webinar recording and a discount of 5% for responding this post. Just enter the promo code Valentine. (Note, if you are an Interstrength Alumni or an APTi member, you get a 10% discount so contact me for your promo code)

Happy Valentines Day.

Linda