3 Simple Steps To "Sealing The Deal" In A Relationship

For many of us, finding and sustaining long-term love can be difficult. Heck, sometimes it can seem downright impossible. But in Dr. Diana Kirschner's new book, Sealing The Deal: The Love Mentor's Guide to Lasting Love, this impossibility becomes possible with her tried and tested program for lasting love.

A love mentor, psychologist and YourTango Expert, Dr. Diana combines her personal and work experiences to create a guide for those of us who are looking for or are already in love. She offers tips, statistics and real-life examples of mentees she's worked with in the past. Sealing The Deal also offers exercises that help readers better comprehend themselves and what they want out of love. Why Can't I Find A Relationship?

Here are three essential love lessons we learned from Sealing The Deal: 

1. Get Out of Your Own Way. The first step to finding lasting love is to retrain and rewire our brains. In order to do this, we must first make a commitment goal. It can be anything from "Create great self-esteem, deservedness and self love" to "Commit to moving in together or getting engaged." These commitment goals are similar to affirmations. In the book, Dr. Diana provides research that shows "positive affirmations have been used to lower stress and anxiety levels and boost social confidence."

Another step in getting out of one's own way is silencing "killer beliefs"—those hidden negative beliefs that tend to shape the most important parts of our lives without us being truly aware that they are doing so. These include thoughts like "There are no good men," or "True love doesn't exist." When we deny our killer beliefs, we tend to project them onto our partners, which in turns causes us to withdraw or push away. As Dr. Diana points out, there are no perfect partners, no fairy-tale. meant-to-be relationships that just travel on autopilot straight to eternal nirvana. We have to work for them—and that work begins within ourselves.

In order to manage killer beliefs, Dr. Diana recommends creating "a specific love intention to set you in motion toward creating a particular set of circumstances that we call a lasting love relationship,"—and to do so with a love mentor. A love mentor could be a close friend or a professional coach who serves to help the love intention be realized. It's a love mentor, Dr. Diana tells the reader, that saved her years ago from turning away from her soul mate, her husband of more than 25 years. The YourTango Love Life Makeover Series With Dr. Diana [VIDEOS]

2. Know The 7 "Real" Laws of Attraction. Despite what we've heard, the "real" laws of attraction include having fun together, being receptive, appreciating and validating your partner, making yourself beautiful in your (and his) eyes, having an ongoing affair with your partner, giving him space and keeping drama to a minimum. For those of us already in a relationship, reviewing these laws can help rekindle and grow deeper in love rather than further apart. For those of us not in a relationship, these laws help to determine if an eligible love interest is or isn't Mr. Right.

But what if who you thought was Mr. Right is having commitment issues? Thanks to Dr. Diana, we learn that men have eight common fears of commitment inlcuding fear of rejection and fear of being found out. These fears were instilled before we came along and may be a result of a difficult childhood. A man's fear of rejection means he's afraid a woman will lose interest and leave him. As a result of this preconceived notion, he has a hard time having honest, straight talk and avoids conflict. A man who is afraid of being found out is a man who may have been abused when he was younger or has a handicapped relative that he doesn't want his lady to know about. As a result, he'll push her away because he's afraid she'll learn about his "unmanly secrets."

If our partner has a commitment fear, we learn, there are actually ways we can help him overcome it.

3. Have "The Talk" at the Right Time. One of the main concepts Dr. Diana promotes is discovering one's "diamond self," which is, as she explains, our most dynamic, most self-loving and passionate identity. Securing our diamond self means we are grounded in self-love, and being on this path helps us to be self-affirming, confident and free from fear and self-doubt. Not only that, but we can inspire our partner's diamond self, too. This secured sense of self helps stop us from pushing away opportunities for love and embrace them instead.

Once we're "anchored in self-identity," we're ready to have "the talk" in our relationship. But when is the right time? Dr. Diana believes the average time for a couple to move from dating to a committed relationship is nine months to three years. If this is done prematurely, it can backfire. Dr. Diana provides thirteen common mistakes that make "the talk" backfire like complaining about the relationship or collapsing into thoughts of your unworthiness. It's important to realize that a relationship moving from casual to committed won't just spark one talk, it'll spark several. To ensure our partners will listen, we need to have the right talk for the right stage of our relationship. It should be a natural progression, not something that's too soon or forced.

Dr. Diana provides tips on how to have the right talk, how to go about moving in together and how to talk about marriage. Her entire lasting love program is rooted in this idea of one's diamond self—because how can we ever really love and understand another if we don't love and understand ourselves? How YourTango Expert Dr. Diana Kirschner Led Me To True Love