Coaching practices for How to Support Your Partner

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Support Your Partner, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My partner says all the sweet words, but I’m drowning in everything I’m carrying and nobody’s lifting any of it off me
• My partner does so much for me and around the house, but what I’m quietly starving for is just to hear it out loud
• My partner is going through a huge change right now
• There’s one thing I’m really trying to become, and I wish my partner would just trust I can
• I figure my partner just knows I’m in this and committed, so I almost never actually say it out loud anymore

Practices that may help

1. Acts of service
   Show love by doing things that ease your partner’s load — chores, errands, follow-through.
   The Five Love Languages, Honestly
2. Words of affirmation
   Express care through spoken or written appreciation, encouragement, and explicit affection.
   The Five Love Languages, Honestly
3. Update your love map after major life changes
   When life shifts, assume your map is outdated and ask new questions.
   Love Maps: Knowing Your Partner's Inner World
4. Explicitly asking your partner to treat you as your ideal self
   Name one quality of your ideal self and ask your partner to treat you as if you already have it.
   The Michelangelo Phenomenon: How Partners Sculpt Each Other
5. Give regular assurances of commitment
   Explicitly remind your partner of your love, commitment, and investment in the relationship.
   Relationship Maintenance Behaviors
6. Create and protect the couple bubble
   Agree that you each put the relationship above any third party, including family of origin.
   Secure-Functioning Relationships
7. Establish a daily specific appreciation practice
   Name one concrete, genuine thing you appreciate about your partner every day.
   The Magic Relationship Ratio: Gottman's 5-to-1 Principle
8. Behavioral confirmation audit: how are you treating your partner?
   Regularly examine whether your daily behavior toward your partner confirms their ideal self or their non-ideal self.
   The Michelangelo Phenomenon: How Partners Sculpt Each Other
9. Choose and co-create secure relationships
   Move toward partners and dynamics that reward openness, and build security together.
   Attachment Theory, Made Usable
10. Open with appreciation before anything else
    Start by naming one genuine thing your partner did this week that you valued.
    The Relationship Check-In: A Structured Practice for Staying Connected

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