Relationship Essentials: Skills to Feel Heard, Fight Fair, and Set Boundaries in All Areas of Life

(Paperback)

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Description

Build life-enhancing relationships, restore damaged ones, and prevent communication breakdowns before they happenUsing real-world examples, illustrations from their own lives, and a research-based approach, dynamic daughter-mother duo Lauren Reitsema and Joneen Mackenzie guide you through familiar relationship situations. Their suggestions can be used with your partner, coworkers, children, extended family members, and friends. Drawing from their experience teaching thousands through The Center for Relationship Education, they introduce practical, easy-to-use strategies that will help you communicate more effectively and work through relationship challenges with confidence. When applied in any area of your life, these tools can have seemingly miraculous love- and life-enhancing results.

Reviews

. . . a pitch-perfect guide . . .
Publishers Weekly

Strong, healthy, positive relationships are an important foundation of human flourishing. But cultivating such relationships takes wisdom and skill. Relationship Essentials offers practical guidance, delivered in an engaging and down-to-earth style, for developing the satisfying relationships necessary for a vibrant, generative life. Highly recommended!
Matthew T. Lee, director of empirical research at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program

Relationship Essentials is the essential guide to crucial relationship skills that are needed in every important relationship. You will apply what you learn here to your relationships with family, friends, and coworkers. Practical and user-friendly, this book will significantly raise your relationship IQ.
Ron L. Deal, therapist, speaker, and bestselling coauthor of Building Love Together in Blended Families (with Dr. Gary Chapman) and author of The Smart Stepfamily

When couples come for counseling, they are frequently explicit with their request: I need tools to build a stronger relationship. Relationship Essentials responds to this request in a comprehensive way by providing ways to respectfully draw effective boundaries and other skills that are essential to the creation of meaningful relationships. Consider this book a practice manual for taking any or all of your relationships to a higher level.
Linda Bloom, LCSW, coauthor of 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married

If there was ever a time when people were dying to feel known, seen, and heard, it is now. Relationship Essentials provides the tools that can lead people to healthy, rich relationships. Thank you, Lauren and Joneen, for this gift!
Julie Baumgardner, senior director of WinShape Marriage

Relationships form the foundation of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Relationship Essentials is an extremely helpful guide to enhancing relationships and dramatically improving communication. It offers practical and effective methods to heal, deepen, and enrich relationships so that you can attain your highest quality of life.
Dan Willis, police captain (ret.) and author of Bulletproof Spirit: The First Responders Essential Resource for Protecting and Healing Mind and Heart

Relationship Essentials is a wise and practical guide to living and working with others. Its a fun, easy read yet amazingly comprehensive with tips and tools that range from difficult topics like conflict and boundaries to everyday habits like gratitude and respect.
Susan Campbell, PhD, author of Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil

Author Bio

Lauren Reitsema serves on the executive leadership team at CRE (Center for Relationship Education). The author of In Their Shoes, she regularly speaks to youths, adults, and corporate teams. Joneen Mackenzie, an RN and former 1st Lt. in the USAF Nurse Corps, founded CRE, which has certified more than 15,000 educators in its REAL Essentials relationship skills curricula. She participates in national public health standards policy through numerous board memberships. The authors live in Colorado.