Psychology Says If You Master These 7 Skills, You'll Find 'Your Person' Within A Year
How to accomplish your biggest relationship goal: Finding your soulmate.
jeffbergen | Canva If lasting love has eluded you, leaving you wondering how to find your soulmate, perhaps it's time to take a new approach. Even if you're ready for a serious relationship, finding your soulmate isn't easy.
Whatever pattern you appear to be stuck in — emotionally unavailable men, fear of intimacy, or the "friend zone" — is just a symptom of a strategy you learned at a very young age. Well, guess what? You can learn new strategies!
If you master these seven skills, you'll find your person within a year:
1. Release your limiting beliefs about love
Juan Pablo Serrano / Pexels
Your beliefs about love are mostly formed during early childhood, research from 2015 found. How you learned to receive love in your family of origin, the strategies you developed to feel loved and safe, and the emotional patterns you developed to cope all make up your system for love as an adult.
Discover these limiting beliefs and release the ones that no longer serve you to reach your goal.
Identify your mental and emotional patterns, and stretch outside your comfort zone to experience new ways of moving through strife and conflict. Adjust your behavior to align with the results you want to experience and release everything else.
Do you believe that the only way to get love is to sacrifice what you want and defer to your partner? That you have to let go of your independence and freedom to be in a lifetime partnership?
Maybe you think that if you work hard to prove that you are worth loving, your partner will reward you with the love you desire.
Or, perhaps you believe that you aren’t worth loving and often find yourself in relationships with unavailable partners. These core beliefs aren’t the truth. You are inherently lovable and are deserving of love exactly as you are, right now, today!
You don’t have to prove it, earn it, or protect yourself from people who will take advantage of you. You only have to know that love is your birthright.
2. Get in touch with your inner child
George Shervashidze / Pexels
You’ve probably abandoned that little kid inside of you over the years. Maybe that child wasn’t loved the way they needed to be, and so they got quiet. And now as an adult, you hardly even notice that kid.
This happens because of the conflict between what you needed to feel loved as a child and the way your parents were capable of giving you their love. You may have been raised by people who loved you dearly but were not capable of showing love in a way that you could see and experience.
This dichotomy between the way you were loved and the way you needed to be loved created a wound, found 2016 research, but as an adult, you have the opportunity to re-parent your inner child and heal these wounds from your youth.
Take your inner child on a weekly date to discover what she needs from you. Inner Child Dates are one of the most powerful healing tools for reconnecting with yourself and bringing you back to a state of wholeness.
Set aside two to three hours a week and ask your inner child what would bring her joy. It's your job as an adult to make sure that you have all the materials you need for your Inner Child Date.
Let your inner child express herself without any judgment from you.
Be careful that you don’t cancel your Inner Child Dates because you could re-create the feeling of disappointment and abandonment that you felt as a child. These dates should be the most important thing on your calendar.
3. Practice forgiveness
Douglas Lima / Pexels
It’s likely you and your past romantic partners have made mistakes. Part of being human is making mistakes.
But holding onto them will block you from your soulmate. Forgive the past, but don’t forget the lessons.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you excuse the behavior, or that what happened was okay. What it does mean is that you release your anger and hurt to move forward in your life. Research found that the ability to forgive a partner is strongly linked to increased relationship satisfaction.
You can find compassion for the people who hurt you and forgive them. This doesn’t mean that you allow them back into your life. You can take it on a case-by-case basis.
You can also understand what caused your hurtful behavior and forgive yourself. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t strive to do better and become a better person Forgiveness is a way of giving yourself and others grace for being human.
There's a saying that "Hurt people hurt people." Forgiving the people who have hurt you allows you to release the energetic emotional attachment to that person and the event.
4. Learn to communicate authentically
Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels
It's difficult to get what you want in your relationships if you don’t know how to ask for what you want. Your soulmate will not come with mind-reading powers and an intuitive understanding of what you need.
You intuitively know that your soulmate is the person who is capable of loving you for who you are. But to be loved for who you are, you have to show up authentically.
Authentic communication requires you to speak how you feel. It requires you to ask for what you want. It also requires you to take responsibility for what is yours. One study from 2016 even found that strong communication predicts marital success.
You are only responsible for 50 percent of your interactions with others. But you are 100 percent responsible for your 50 percent. No one "makes" you do anything.
You may feel triggered by another person’s behavior. But that trigger is yours.
When you communicate authentically and take responsibility for your triggers, then you can create a deep, intimate connection with your soulmate.
This is how you create the feeling you desire of being with a person who understands you and gets you. It may always feel like a risk to be authentic and so you must practice it.
5. Get clear on what you really want
Anastasia Shuraeva / Pexels
When it comes to love, most adults are crystal clear on what they don't want. They don’t want to be cheated on, ghosted, treated with disrespect, or lied to. What you want is not the opposite of what you don't want.
Manifestation is the process of getting clear on what you want, creating a picture of it in your mind, and taking the steps necessary to bring it to life.
If you're focused on what you don’t want, then you will continue to manifest what you don’t want. What you focus on grows, so choose wisely.
Get clear on how your soulmate relationship will function. What is the dynamic that you desire between the two of you? How will you know that he loves you?
When you create a clear picture of your soulmate relationship, then it will begin to feel possible and probable that you can create it. If you can’t see it, then you don’t know what steps to take to get there.
6. Cultivate discernment through the dating process
RDNE Stock project / Pexels
Dating is mostly seen as something that you have to do to meet your soulmate. Most people stop dating as soon as they meet someone they are attracted to, have some things in common with, and jump into a committed relationship. This is Dating Backwards.
The person you’ve met is a stranger. Never put your lovability in the hands of a stranger.
And why give a stranger the benefit of the doubt? Slow down the dating process, use it as a tool to cultivate discernment, and don’t get physical or commit quickly. One 2010 study found the longer a couple waited to be intimate, the better their relationship was after marriage.
When you take your time through the dating process, you begin to discover more about yourself and your strategies for finding love. You also want to take time to discover the person you're dating, along with what their values are.
Chemistry and compatibility are important in a relationship, but having shared values is the glue that holds your relationship together over time.
You only discover what someone values by spending time with them. They may say that family is important to them, only to discover he doesn’t spend time with his family at all. This behavior tells you what's truly important to them, and whether or not the two of you are in alignment.
You cannot have a conversation in hypotheticals to discover what a person values. These things are discovered over time as you see and experience how a person spends their resources. Where they put their energy, time, and money will reveal what is truly important to them.
7. Be the person you need to be to attract who you desire
Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels
Like attracts like. You'll want to focus on becoming the person you need to be to attract the type of person you desire.
You see, you meet your soulmate on your path to your highest and best self. It's this journey of personal and spiritual growth that attracts someone who meets you at your level. If you want to know how to find your soulmate, then become your soulmate.
Love yourself. Treat yourself with compassion and kindness. Forgive yourself when you make mistakes.
You don’t get love from another person — you share the love with another person. It's the love you have for yourself that you see reflected to you in your beloved’s eyes.
Being perfect or doing things perfectly is not what having long-lasting love is all about. You’ll never be perfect, but you'll be the perfect match for someone.
The journey to your soulmate is the most rewarding journey you will ever make. Break the patterns that have become blocks to the lasting love you desire, so you can spend your life with your soulmate by your side.
Orna and Matthew Walters are dating coaches and founders of Creating Love On Purpose with a holistic approach to transforming hidden blocks to love, and the authors of Getting It Right This Time.